When you upload a document to Scribd (which accepts almost all popular formats like OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and more), it’s automatically converted to .doc, .pdf, and .txt – and it comes with a converted-to-audio MP3 version as well. But most importantly – it’s a hell of a lot more convenient for your readers.

While you can embed a self-hosted video in your blog and have it streamed to your readers with little to no effort, inline and all, it’s a lot more complicated (rather, impossible) to embed a binary-encoded text file in a post or article. With Scribd, you can instantly embed a document like this:

That’s (our good friend) Andre Da Costa’s recently-published Windows Vista Quick Start Guide originally uploaded to Scribd as a PDF. Previously, it required having Acrobat Reader (or an alternative) installed, a couple of minutes to download, and a lot of RAM to boot. Not “easy” to say the least. You should read it, it’s quite interesting :)

Even better, you can just click a button and have it sent to you in the format you choose. Quite handy! You can also click in the textbox at the top of the embedded document and search for text.

Scribd has lots of little nifty features each of which doesn’t seem like much, but in our opinion, at the end of the day all those little features add up and can blow your mind – and reduce your hosting costs, too.

Bottom line: Scrbd is one Web 2.0 services you don’t have to be “on the bandwagon” to use and love; it’s just one of those things that make sense no matter what way you look at it.

Most people are content with things the way they are: after all, it’s for a good cause! Go ahead and exploit humans, we agree, if the end result brings as much benefit and knowledge to the world as Wikipedia did and does. However, earlier this year, Wikipedia did a couple of things that created an outrage in the online community, by banning contributing sources to Wikipedia from getting the credit they deserve.

Now Wales is at it again, this time though, it’s not the greater good that’ll be benefiting: Jimmy Wales is now using end-users to bring in the cash!

Wikia is Wale’s for-profit company, now focusing on a “different kind of search.” Today we found out what “different” means: instead of doing the web-crawling and indexing on Wikia’s servers, Wales wants end users to do the crawling for him!

Yep, you read that right. Wales just bought Grub, the distributed web-crawler. and intends to use it (and the internet connections and CPUs of end-users) to power his for-profit corporation. Users could be doing something useful with their hard-earned CPU cycles, electricity, and internet connections such as finding a cure for cancer or even aiding the search for alien life, Wales wants users to focus on making him more money.

Google, Microsoft, AOL, AltaVista, Yahoo! and thousands more have something in common, can you guess what it is? That’s right! They all pay for their crawlers, power bill, servers, and everything else! So why does Wales think he gets to exploit billions of computers around the web for no reason other than to make him money?

Hopefully the majority of the world’s denizens will realize this is a ruse and scam and not fall for it; after all, everyone’s power and internet bills are already too high to take an even bigger hit just so Wales can have more money. For-profit corporations don’t EVER get to exploit the general population and their PCs, it’s just not fair!

Compare [url=http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP]Windows XP dual-boot guide[/url] to XP dboot — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which is easier, quicker, and simpler to use. But of course, your readers have no idea what “dboot guide” is or where they can find it – that’s where the “bad word filters” come in.

Most forums, blogs, wikis, and just about any other “web platform engines” have a plugin, module, or admin center feature to enable the filtering of swear words and their ilk. Simply create a new entry that replaces a quick and easy-to-remember “keyword” with a fully-formatted link of your choice. You can replace “qwerty” with “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or (much more usefully) replace things like “gsearch ” with “http://www.google.com/search?q=” which lets you type things like “gsearch EasyBCD” and have them automagically replaced with the appropriate link.

You can use this to boost productivity (by speeding up the process of finding, posting, and formatting links) and to increase SEO (by converting keywords to internal links to the respective pages). For instance, replacing all instances of “NeoSmart Technologies” with NeoSmart Technologies:[sourcecode language='java']NeoSmart Technologies[/sourcecode]

Best of all, some web scripts preserve the original text and reformat it on the fly (verses permanently changing the text to the replacement), so that if the URI should ever change (and it shouldn’t, ever), the text also auto-magically changes with it. For instance, if your homepage moved from neosmart.net to neosmart.com, all you’d have to do is open that bad-word filter entry and change it to point to neosmart.com instead, and all “shortcut keywords” you ever entered will also be relpaced… Talk about efficient!

Ask.com always sucked. From when Jeeves the butler was still young and had a spring to his step, their results were never on-par with MSN, Yahoo, or fledgeling Google. They preyed on the new-comers to the web, giving them a corny man in a pinstriped suit and coattails bobbing on their screen, pointing them in the direction all the time. Ask claims their new algorithm is awesome – God only knows how much money went into the advertisement campaign alone.

We’re sorry to break it to you though: Ask.com’s search results are just as terrible – if not worse – than they ever were.

We went to Ask.com (now Butler-free!), and were rather surprised. It looks slightly better, that wasn’t it. The problem was, we couldn’t get a single meaningful search result back!

Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and everyone else has the official download location for EasyBCD as the number 1 result. And why shouldn’t they; it’s where all the EasyBCD links point to anyhow! Not only did an Ask.com search for EasyBCD not turn up the official download site in first place, it didn’t turn it up at all! Not only that, but the first result wasn’t even to NeoSmart Technologies – it was a review by Jason Olson (of Microsoft) way back when EasyBCD was first released. He even links to the official download page there! What about second place though?

Nope, not even there! That one is a download link to EasyBCD 1.2 – from ages ago as well. And yes, you guessed it, it links to NeoSmart Technologies as well. 3rd place? NeoSmart Technologies at last! But don’t get your hopes up, it’s a link to the homepage which never – not once – linked to EasyBCD.

The rest of the results are just as ridiculously off-topic or inapplicable – including dozens of spam entries from splogs across the web – the kind that don’t get any incoming links from anywhere!

Ask.com may have done away with the Butler and his moustache, but they haven’t done anything to be worthy of even a fraction of the attention their false advertising got them. Their site is still clunky (who still uses frames in search results nowadays!?) and their algorithm….. it just sucks. 

Earlier today, Slashdot featured a story on EarthLink’s “random” dropping of email messages. We just concluded a test of our own, and we find the results may not be as random as they seem. In fact, the results point directly to a big spider of sorts, sitting in the middle of all the tubes and picking what goes through and what doesn’t.

According to EarthLink themselves, “EarthLink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail.” But what they don’t mention is, it isn’t random. As a matter of fact, our tests lead us to believe that EarthLink is indeed prioritizing not only message delivery time but also whether the messages ever get there or not.

We sent out 20 email messages from a EarthLink account, and discovered that 100% of them reached an @Gmail.com email, 30% reached a no-name domain, and 100% of them reached an @Yahoo.com email. This could of course be a coincidence, but at a time like this, we don’t think so.

When a system is under load, generally speaking it (attempts to) deliver messages in the order they were received, and they either go through or they don’t. What makes EarthLink’s results a bit more interesting is, the messages that went through and those that didn’t have absolutely nothing to do with the physical network routes:

EarthLink’s mail servers are hosted in New York; Gmail’s are hosted in Mountain View, CA; Yahoo’s servers are in Redwood City, CA; and our no-name servers are in Chicago. Technically speaking, packets sent from New York should arrive in Chicago before they do all the way on the other end of the continent. But of course, our no-name server isn’t on any high-politics list, nor is it loaded with money.

If “dumb” networks existed, then the packets would have most certainly made it to our server before they reached Gmail’s or Yahoo’s all the way in California. Unless, of course, net-neutrality is no longer just a concept or idea for the future, but something applicable in the here-and-now. If the big names in computing are prioritizing one-another’s networks to such an extent, we’re in trouble.