Encrypt your email for security

Some companies have started scanning the emails of their employees for security purposes. Though this is for good, it can also hamper other innocuous things like unofficial emails to friends from your office email id. Mobrien is a software that helps you to encrypt your email message. What you need to do is go to their website, and after you obtain a temporary password, click on the 'Send out an encrypted email' button. You shall then be taken to a new window where you can send an encrypted email. The receiver shall receive instructions on how to read the encrypted email. So, all along the email remains encrypted. I understand this would most often serve only malicious purposes, but felt that with so many softwares emerging to serve email encryption, I should review atleast one of those I know about.

One-click automatic social bookmarking

If you notice my blog, I have a link for you to bookmark my blog above each of my blog entries. With so many social bookmarking tools available, it can sometimes get clumsy there, or I might fail to provide the, exact bookmarking tool that you, as a visitor use. Socializer is an alternative to this mess. Socializer, itself is not a bookmarking tool, but it serves as a middleman, and with one click helps to submit the blog to the entire gamut of online social bookmarking websites available. This shall help both the blogger in reducing the clumsiness of his website, as well as the reader, as it helps for universal bookmarking. PS: Sorry, I have not put it in myself. I shall do it soon :)

Online text summarizer

Often, you may have to come across lengthy text that you do not have the patience to go through in totality. It is here that summarizing tools come handy. Though some of the effective Text Summarizers require you to download the software (and the most effective ones need you to purchase them), there are quite a few online text summarizer softwares. Nling offers their online text summarizer. I found it pretty decent to use for minor purposes. In fact, most often it delivers the most important points. There is one general idea, and an option to choose how broader you want the summary to be, which is kinda good. The only problem I had was that you cannot enter a URL for the software to summarize. You shall have to inevitably copy and paste the text. But I understand that will only dilute the quality of the summary as the software mught find it difficult to distinguish the actual text from the sidebar content and stuff.

How to download YouTube, Metacafe and Google Videos

Well, copyright laws prevent YouTube and the other video sharing websites from explicitly providing a service for downloading the videos. This has led to a lot of additional sites to help download these videos. Though there are a few scripts like GreaseMonkey that can be of use, I thought another website that I found that was pretty much easy and quick as well. I made use of the service at YouTubex (notice the 'x' suffix). Here, simply copy and paste the URL of the video page of either YouTube, Google Video or Metacafe. And click on download. If required, give the file extension as .flv The video downloads just like any other file download from the internet. To view this file however, you need a flash movie viewer. I have VLC player installed on my computer. You can either use such a media player to view the movie, or you can convert the file with .flv extension to any of the standard format like .AVI or .MPEG using the FLV encoders.

Zamzar - Free file conversion

If you were looking to convert your file from one format to another, most probably you might have downloaded a software that does this specific conversion. Zamzar is a website that performs this for you online. While the website claims you never ever again have to install a file converting software again, it however seems to be a sham that Zamzar is an online file conversion tool. For one, the conversion is not made online. How Zamzar works is that you upload your file, choose the format you want it to be converted, enter the email address where you need the new format to be mailed, and then submit. This file is passed on to the Zamzar team, who convert in offline to the new format and then email the link where the new format is uploaded. This is hardly an online tool then. It is just that Zamzar does the thing offline instead of you doing it. 24 hours for a file conversion is a poor lead time to the process. And finally, it is not foolproof. What if your file is misused? Zamzar is free. This makes it a nice tool, if you simply want one of those rare file conversions of a not-so-important file. If not, I do not think you should be going for Zamzar.

Animated characters for your website

Have you come across websites where, as soon as you load the page, you have some animated character speaking to you about their services? If you want your own website to also have something of that sort, you can have it from SitePal. I pretty much guess it should be effective, though it can be highly irritating as well. I have myself muted my volume when I encountered websites with such talking characters sometimes. But then, the visitor atleast gets the message: that there is such and such a product, which is essential for the next stage of purchasing. And so will I buy it if I were a web marketer? I don't know. $10 a month looks like a pretty high sum for such a service, though if it is going to be really effective in increasing sales, I might be happy. A McAfee case study on the website claims that way atleast!