Perpetual Beta

I’m not sure how I didn’t know this, but this is now officially my favorite “take a screenshot of my browser contents” tip ever. The website aviary.com is an online photo editor, among a LOT of other things, that allows you to do basic photo editing online.

Well…they have a built in shortcut that if you simply add “aviary.com/” to the beginning of the URL that you wish to capture, and BOOM…it caps the site and auto opens in the aviary editor. So, so useful.

Example: http://aviary.com/http://www.jasongriffey.net

I’m going to be abusing the hell out of this.

Over on the ALA Techsource blog, I posted about my gadget gift choices for the holiday season, and I realized after posting it that I forgot a HUGE one for this year.

Somehow, it looks like retailers TJ Maxx and Marshalls have scooped the tech world with the cheapest price yet seen for the iPad … $399 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model, a full $100 cheaper than anywhere else. No real word on how long this will last, or how many each store is getting, but this is definitely going to be your best bet for a cheap iPad for the holidays. In-store only, I’m sure, but definitely worth some phone calls to stores in your area if you’re in the market.

Finally! Google Docs announces that it will roll out mobile editing capabilities over the next few days to users of Android devices running 2.2 or higher and iOS devices (including the iPad) running 3.0 or higher.

It’s been too long in coming, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that I’m going to use this like crazy. I start nearly every writing project on Google Docs these days, and this is going to make everything much easier to manage for my writing.

I posted yesterday on Pattern Recognition about a Long Bet that had been adjudicated on the topic of online video, and then today came across a post on the official YouTube blog about how quickly the amount of video that is uploaded to YouTube is growing. Back in March they reported that there were 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Incredibly, that number just keeps going up, and it’s now over 35 hours per minute.

As YouTube says in its post:

…2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Another way to think about it is: If three of the major U.S. networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.

Wow!

Barnes & Noble is clearing out their refurbished Nooks on Ebay … for $99! That gets you a 3G-capable Nook that still has a year warranty on it … it looks like the best deal that anyone has seen for a high-end eReader.

An absolutely crazy decision was announced today from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) meeting in the U.K., driven by the Publisher’s Association. From the article on The Bookseller

Last month I announced the first ever Perpetual Beta contest, with the winner receiving a copy of my newest book, Mobile Technologies & Libraries. After pouring over the entries, a final decision has been made, and the winner is:

LeecyB75 (real name forthcoming, if he/she chooses to share)! The search story in question was this one:

Congratulations! There may be other contests coming on Perpetual Beta in the future…keep reading!

Facebook announced two interesting new features today during a press conference: Groups and Downloads for your information. Groups are a type of self-organized private discussion, allowing you to quickly tag and gather friends separately from your larger friends lists. The most exciting news, for me at least, is that Facebook is going to implement a single-button download service, which will zip up all of your information: pictures, posts, etc…and allow you to download a file of them. That’s great news, and the first crack in the walled garden that gives people hope of being able to get all of their content if they wish to move to another service.

Have trouble finding out what Google is up to these days? Lose track of what they’ve launched recently? They just released one site where you can see a summary of all their new stuff, check it out:

Google New