AI-powered podcast

If you have a website with an RSS-feed on it, you're just 2 clicks away from converting your feed into a podcast. Odiogo is a cool service that "reads your feed aloud", making a podcast from it. The quality is surprisingly good (check out the demo).

Why would you need it? Cause it's another way of promoting your blog/website: create a podcast, submit it to podcast-directories and get traffic and a backlink.

Some podcast directories:
Podcast.com
Podcast.net
Podcastalley
PodcastPickle
PodcastDirectory
Odeo

P.S. Don't have an RSS-feed yet? Try our RSS Feed Creator software.

Test your website in different browsers

BrowserShots makes screenshots of your website in different browsers, even in exotic ones, like the Konqueror browser for Linux.

Photo Picker

A cool web-service that every web-designer was waiting for: the Flickr Color Picker. You set the background color and it picks some "relevant" photos from Flickr.

Google Apps for Jitbit

Yesterday we have moved our company email to Google Apps.

Basically it works like this: by simply editing the MX-records for your domain name, you can have Google servers handle all your emails. Moreover, all your employees can access their email via a GMail-like web-interface. It's a pretty nice solution for small businesses: you don't have to maintain your own email-infrastructure or rely on your hosting provider for email accounts and services.

Here's my two cents why a mISV should consider moving it's email to Google Apps:

• Delivery. If your website sends serial numbers automatically after order completion, using an SMTP interface (which Google handles perfectly, by the way), most likely your customers sometimes complain that these emails get spam-filtered. Not with Google. Their servers almost never get listed in spam blacklists. Unlike your hosting provider's.
• Reliable. Google servers can handle VERY high traffic levels and offer almost 100% uptime. Unlike your hosting provider.
• Spam-free. GMail offers one of the best spam-filtering on the market (for instance, it filters more than 400 spam-messages for Jitbit Software every day). Unlike your hosting provider.

Email is not the only service provided by Google Apps. After you create an account for all your employees, you can create and share documents with Google Docs, manage shared events in Google Calendar, chat with your team in Google Talk and create web pages in Page Creator. And the best part - it's all free of charge.

So, Google Apps is just great for a small business. But enough with the pros. Here are some cons:

• No file sharing. It would be great to be able to upload and share all file types, not just office documents. That's why I like Microsoft Live SkyDrive better.
• No to-do lists. If you want me to move all our office work to Google Apps, give me a collaborative ToDo.
• Privacy. This is a big one. Storing intellectual property and financial data on a third-party datacenter is risky. And even if you're OK with it, you customers might not be.
• Google Docs? No thanks. Personally, I think that all these online text and graphic editors have no future for one simple reason - no clipboard. When our designer creates a screenshot for a product he presses "Alt + PrintScreen", then switches to Photoshop and presses "Ctrl + V". That's it. Two keystrokes. Making a document on the web is weird.

Finalizing: Google's email service is just great. Love it. But online office applications are still in their infancy.