I do very much enjoy grabbing cool images that I find during my travels on the webs and throwing them up on my desktop as wallpaper. For web workers and Internet fiends, it would probably be shocking to know how often you are actually staring at the often “negative space” of your desktop while hunting around for files, firing up/powering down your computer, and so on.

Recently I stumbled across a great and easy way to find cool desktop backgrounds that perfectly fit the size of your monitor:

1) Go to Google Image Search

2) Click Advanced Image Search

3) Search for something cool in the “Find Results” fields at top
I love cool shots of cities, particularly my homeland of New York, so I put in New York City as an example

4) Use My Desktop Size
Now, this is where things get kickass. Look underneath Find Results for the row that says Exact Size. In the right column, you’ll see fields for width and height. To the right of that you’ll see a link called “Use my desktop size.” Click that and your desktop dimensions are auto-inserted (mine is 1440×900).

5) Click Google Search
And presto! You have a bunch of amazing shots that are available to put up as desktop wallpaper and spruce up the visuals on your online day a little bit

6) Desktop Wallpaper
Have no idea what desktop wallpaper means? Click on the image you like after completing Step 5. Then click “view full image” (this doesn’t always work so you may need to select another image if this happens). Right click on the full size image and choose “set as desktop wallpaper” (note that Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature). Then minimize all of your browser windows and applications and behold the artistic wonders.

But let’s be honest: for most bloggers – even the serious ones – the online realm is going to be the primary source for most stories, with the blogger himself or herself adding additional perspective, commentary, analysis, and so forth using their own experience and research and writing skills.

Which brings us to Techdirt writer Mike Masnick’s tale. He answers a fair question – can bloggers publish opinions on the Internet without contacting companies that they’re writing about first? – with an affirmative yes.

I recently wrote a short post about something that was apparently happening with YouTube and soon after received an angry email from a PR person at the company first scolding me for not contacting Google PR first and then demanding that I insert some PR babble paragraph that said nothing that addressed the key questions raised in the post in "response." This made no sense to me. If I got something factually wrong, I have no problem having someone point out what was in error, but demanding that I first contact them and then include a meaningless statement is ridiculous.

I’m fully with Mike on this one. The possibility of the Google or YouTube PR department bothering to respond to the average blogger (and you tell me how you would even go about trying to contact a human being at Google about a blog post!) seems astronomically small.

Making demands to add an update to a blog post with PR gibberish sounds like downright cyberbullying to me (did I just make up that term? Sounds like something you’d hear on the local news in 2006 with regard to MySpace*)
And doesn’t Google have the ability to do what any blogger might do when they’re not happy with a blog post? They can write a reaction post themselves. And I’d think they have a none too small amount of online influence to make themselves heard.

* Apparently I did not coin the word cyberbullying.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Let the bloggers have their voice:

* All Things Digital: YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

* Mashable: Certainly, this is a big issue. If, for the same price, I could own a show via iTunes as opposed to stream it via YouTube, I’d choose iTunes every time. On the other hand, if I could watch it on YouTube for less, I’d likely go there, as I only want to watch most shows once. Whether or not a middle ground can be reached will likely determine if this service will ever come to fruition.

* VentureBeat: Google already streams some TV content free on YouTube, but it doesn’t carry current shows the way the successful Hulu does. Lately, YouTube traffic has been flattening, while Hulu shot up 50 percent in October.

* bub.blicio.us: Now, the reason I will occasionally buy shows from iTunes is that I then have the freedom to watch them on my phone, my iPod, my TV, or my laptop. I can watch the show on an airplane because it’s local to my device. Personally, I hate the idea of paying $1.99 for streaming content. So until they figure things out, I’ll definitely stick to free Hulu for the television that I miss and downloading episodes from iTunes for television on the go.

* technovia: No doubt that Google’s cheerleaders will be racing to claim that this is a daring move, and certainly doesn’t try and impose any kind of artificial scarcity like that nasty old-fashioned Mr Murdoch is trying to do for news. After all, it’s hard to find TV shows for free on the Internet, right?

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Meanwhile, prolific and respected blogger Steven Hodson laments just today that “indie bloggers” do not have a bright future due to the saturated blogospheric marketplace, writing that, “As nice as it might be to dream of making a living as an independent blogger the chances of actually being able to pull it off are negligible.” Hodson notes that whereas at one time there were opportunities to dominate niches and sub-niches, those days are now over due in part to large group blogs that churn out posts day and night.

Does the next generation of blogging stars need to look to video blogging and technology such as skippable ads in order to scratch out a living? Or is it still possible to become a big time blogger the “old fashioned” way by writing high quality posts every day, linking out and networking, and building reputation and influence in one’s field?

(this piece originally appeared on Technorati)

Google’s logo has morphed into crop circles today… pretty cool!

Facebook + FriendFeed vs. iGoogle: the next great social networking battle?

Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous

I’ve been ruminating lately over the brilliant possibilities of Google Reader, particularly in connection with its “shared + note” feature and its integration with services like FriendFeed. Feedback has been great and it’s very high on my list to check out Feedly, “a more social and magazine-like start page,” as a result.

Therefore, I was taken with Louis’ first prediction from 2008. Even though he claims he was “wrong” in his prediction, I see fascinating possibilities in the following:

I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it’s largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.

I had never considered aggregating the combined shared items on Google Reader across-the-board and doing something interesting with the data, like turning it into a Techmeme of sorts, as Louis posits. A “FriendFeed-meets-Techmeme” solution would be very intriguing realm to dive into, using “shared + note” threads as a way to seed conversations across clusters of popular stories in real time.

In a sense, FriendFeed does manage to capture some of this activity now by seeding threads, but “forces” by nature of its service “new voting” on the FriendFeed side. Looks like I’m still very much enamored of the potential for further Google Reader and FriendFeed integration!

* Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Comedy launches

Back in June, I speculated that the future of content may come in the form of a Cavalcade. It’ll likely take some time to see how the unique partnership with Google AdSense pans out, but in the meantime, we can check out the Family Guy creator’s latest:

* Google AdSense and Google Analytics get together

Speaking of AdSense, the popular advertising service’s stats have been integrated with Google Analytics. This is great news for web publishers who use both… oh whom there are many of many. ProBlogger points out that we’ll be able to see things like “which traffic sources generate the highest income”.

* Those wacky Microsoft ads

Ah, the comedy of nothingness comes to Microsoft ads. The latest round features Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates staked out in the home of “normal people” with the idea that they are attempting to understand how the non-billionaire set get along day-to-day. The result is… well, interesting. Check it:

* Cuil bills signs of still being ill

It’s not good-ish when a major search engine launch is plagued by poor results for simple queries. Now, only six weeks or so out from its ambitious public debut, Cuil’s VP Product Louis Monier has resigned.

* Twitter is just starting to tip over into the mainstream

Twitter is getting piped in on route to Mars, for one. I’m also seeing it hyped up on CNN throughout the day. So Twitter is starting to broach some realm of the mainstream, even if it’s still meandering amongst its geeky borderlands.

But the buzz can only get you so far.

So it was such that I felt mildly compelled to check out Cuil, a new search engine hailed as a potential rival to the almighty Google. The New York Times, for example, glowingly hails Cuil as “a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.”

Let us say that that’s setting the bar… pretty high.

My first experience with Cuil was that the homepage failed to load after a full minute. The second attempt yielded an actual front page. I typed in a search term or two, decided that Google was pretty much superior at this point, and left it at that.

Here’s a smattering of early reviews:

* The Inquirer: “Cuil’s first day in the search engine playground turned out to be a disaster.”

* Webware: “Google challenger Cuil launched last night in blaze of glory. And it went down in a ball of flames. Immediately after launch, the criticism started to pile on: results were incomplete, weird, and missing.”

* RexBlog: “Cuil is not going to be a go-to source for people who want to find information about other people — or themselves.”

Let’s assume that Cuil quickly gets its performance issues stabilized. Okay, great. They then claim to have a kajillion (my term, mind) web pages indexed and ready to roll. Awesome.

A major problem from the first is that it’s not delivering simple search results in a way that the searcher would expect. For example, searching for “online media cultist” will get you to some archived pages of Online Media Cultist but the main site URL is not listed on the first page of search results. Not good. In other cases, instead of delivering the front page of a site, the Wikipedia page is delivered as a top search result instead.

Further, the three column design for search results is interesting but not very easy to scan through. For better or worse, Google has trained us in what we want search engines to be.

Now, searching for something very generic, like “new york city,” will yield more interesting results, as well as tabs that will take you all kinds of related information, such as NYC hotels, ballet, and the subway system. This leads me to believe that Cuil is sort of going after Mahalo’s guide pages, except with more of an automated approach.

The great thing about the web is that you have the opportunity to keep hacking away at your product until you get it right… or run out of funding!

When the buzz dies down, it will be interesting to see if Cuil can manage to stay on anyone’s radar.