Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

This morning started with the girls waking me to say my parrot had escaped while they were feeding it. After a look around the yard I went inside to print flyers while they went to the park to look. Jadeen came running back 2 minutes later to say they found him in a tree in the park. 15 Minutes of climbing a tree that had branches that couldn't support my weight and kept breaking I was at the top of the tree where the reluctant escapee was clinging on. I snapped the top of the tree and drew him down toward me. Getting him inside my shirt I then climbed / fell because branches broke back down to the bottom. I have cuts and scrapes all over me and bird is safely locked away once more.

Jude then said – clear this mess away. When the wife says that you need to listen. So I stared clearing away all the boxes I had stacked in the school room where I had temporarily camped while building hers and my new PCs. My new super duper computer is mostly running OK now, the odd lock up is an issue. While clearing away boxes I got distracted into sorting out motherboard driver and other cds I had on my desk return. Then I found an old CD with NASA space images on it, so I handed this to Miranda to copy to our wallpaper archive. While doing that I noticed the filing boxes that are stacked beside her desk hadn’t been pushed back from the other day when I was chasing a wild mouse and that there was a very large very dead blue crayfish down there. It had escaped from my large fish tank. Seeing as the camera batteries were charging we bagged it and put it in the freezer for some macro photography another day.

I have just been informed that I have baby fish. The convicts in the tank the crayfish escaped from have lots of fry.

Oh and last night we had baby dragons hatch out as well as more laid. You can order and buy dragons (if you are in Australia) from Jude’s website www.rasita.biz.

I might get some work done today.

I went to the Microsoft Innovate day for ISV (independent software vendors) yesterday.

We had a great look at a number of key new technologies in the web and application space.

Specifically, Silverlight, Azure, Expression Blend, Windows 7 and the whole concept of cloud computing.

One of the awesome new things in Windows 7 is the ability to add a VHD as a volume, and make it bootable. It will boot with only a very tiny overhead, making VHDs that require lots of RAM accessible on machines that couldn’t previously handle them. Awesome! That’s the killer app for me, but there’s also lots of eye candy – and very useful eye  candy too, the use of vector graphics makes scrolling and zooming way faster and much better. Search goes another notch higher from the already awesome offering inside Vista. Search is one of the killer apps for Vista over XP by the way.

I was able to network with the boys from Microsoft afterwards, having a drink and a chat with these fine people, Christian Longstaff, Michael Kordahi, Andrew Coates, and Doug, Joel, Bronwen and John. Was a great day – full of learning, humour and general passion for the technology and software being developed with one great purpose, to help people. And I scored 2 free t-shirts!

Here’s some pics.

And Angus Logan poked his head in but went and hid in a cubicle.

Time to unload the browser again. And I have some great stuff for you all this week. Starting with some geek humour as well as some new toys and news.

Geeks are Sexy post a YouTube video of the Big Bang Theory and Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, their use of the extended version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Check it out!

HP has suddenly become an Excel Tips website! These three pages were linked in their last newsletter.

• Go chart crazy with Excel 2007
• Excel tip: make printing easier
• Excel tip: Data entry made easy with AutoFill

Some great news on the Windows Live front.

First of all A note about Hotmail, SkyDrive and Photos storage space from LiveSide advising that there is now a massive 50GB o free space online available to you as follows: