Want to find out what the latest trends are in electronic gadgets, pop culture, business, or anything else? See something you think will become a trend? Trendhunter – tracking and reporting trends – always interesting and bizarre.

I really like this site, as you probably know, it will definitely keep you up to date on everything, including simply weird ‘trends’ like watching cheese mature. One of the things that I like most about it is that it features a lot of content but all of it is screened and therefore your are likely to find more relevant content than you would at Digg, for example.

However, I like it best because it actively recruits trend-hunters. Yes, anyone can submit a ‘trend’ which may then be listed at trendhunter. Not only is this good for the ego, but it also sends some traffic your way. Earlier this week, I submitted this post (Predicting the Next Billionaires) to trendhunter and it was approved – and is now listed in “this week’s hottest trends”. While the incoming traffic I got from trendhunter isn’t a lot, it is welcome all the same. As trendhunter gets more popular, I expect it to be able to drive much more traffic to its trend-hunters’ sites or blogs.
I think it’s only a matter of time before trendhunter becomes widely popular as it truly is a cool site. Become a trendhunter today, don’t miss out on yet another gravy train.

The people over at trendhunter should, however, work on their servers as www.trendhunter.com is currently unavailable. UPDATE: problem fixed.

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In Lakeview (New Orleans), a neighborhood devastated by the breach of the 17th St. Canal AFTER Hurricane Katrina, our grassroots recovery group is using Google Spreadsheets to track the progress of neighborhood recovery of over 7400 homes. Read Full Story.

My own cousin in Mississippi runs a small fishing fly business. His dad left it, the family business, to him. The only problem is that my cousin is only 17 years old and doesn’t have any family in Mississippi. Friends are cool but for some things, you can only trust family. So my other cousins and I help him out. We help him prepare letters, quotations and all manner of correspondence. Having studied a bit of accounting, I specifically hep out with the accounts. I’m not anywhere close to Mississippi so helping the guy out has been quite challenging. Dealing with email attachments generally pisses me off. see, I have a slow computer which can get (and is) crashed very easily. Downloading Yahoo! attachments seems to do that, every time. Besides, none of us is a trained writer so the letters have to be authored, edited, and re-edited by 3 to 4 guys half way round the world from each other. Something as simple as helping out my cousin and friend used to be pure hell and somewhat costly. Until we discovered Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

It’s no Ms Office as far as extensive word processing features go, but I love it all the same. Take the tour, you will too. Besides, do you ever even use half of Ms Word’s features? Google Docs and Spreadsheet is the future: Do your work online, store it online and have it accessible from anywhere in the world. The coolest thing, however, is the ability to invite people to collaborate in your work. For my cousin, I write the first draft, then my other cousin in England looks at it and improves on it (if he can, hehe) then finally the guy in Mississippi applies the finishing touches. Neat, huh?

There’s nothing to download; you access your documents and spreadsheets from any computer with an Internet connection and a standard browser. And it’s free.

Some people say that Google Docs and Spreadsheet is too basic and not ‘feature rich’. I think such people are probably trying to compare it to Ms Office. No, it’s not Ms Office! Don’t compare. Just because it different doesn’t mean it’s not good. Personally, I like it that they didn’t set out to copy MS Word and Excel (I am definitely ABM ). Obviously, Google Docs does require a little getting used to but all in all, it’s wonderfully simple, beautifully crafted, and quite a lifesaver.

If you want an online office suite with a little more firepower, try thinkfree. It’s basically an Ms Office clone, but online.

By the way, this post was written using Google Docs. I also published it without signing into Blogger. 🙂 I did have to insert the label later, though.

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Ever thought that you need to split yourself into two so that you can be in two places at one time? How about wishing you could stay online longer…like 24/7? In that case, it may be time for you to get a cybertwin.

Meet MyCybertwin, an early version of software that let’s people create and customize a virtual personality that can chat with others while they are offline. The software can be embedded on blogs, dating sites or social sites like myspace (or anywhere else, really, since it’s as easy as cutting and pasting code). The best thing about it: it can log in and impersonate you on msn (windows live instant messenger).

What can you do with this? Well, now you’re friends-that-don’t-sleep can talk to you as long as they want to. Seriously, though, webmasters and bloggers will want a cybertwin so that people can learn about them when they are away. Companies will want them so that they can learn more about customers without direct conversations. Or you can create a totally new you, different from everything you stand for in real life, like Mike Arrington(of TechCrunch) did here. (Read the full Story.)

Talk to my cybertwin here. (No there’s no evil version of Kayliz.)

Did you hear about the recent earthquake in Mexico? Where did you get the news? CNN? Guess where I got the news! I got the news on a twitter link which led me to an Ustream live video where a blogger was interviewing a Mexico-based blogger concerning the earthquake. I have to admit, that’s pretty cool – as cool as it gets. Trying to figure out what I’m going on about? Here’s the low-down:

The earthquake hit Mexico. Local(Mexico – based) twitterers started twittering about it. Indeed, the earthquake was first reported on twitter. Before long, a Mexico City blogger was connected to the Ustream chat. Chris Pirillo requested his Skype ID for a video chat. More people tuned into the live A/V stream, more people re-twittered the link, more people became active in the Ustream chat room, and the whole thing went viral.

As Chris puts it, “Dozens of people were talking to one another in real-time, while watching me speaking with a man in another country about an event that was unfolding quicker than could be covered by traditional media outlets.” (Read the rest of his account by clicking here)

What say you? New media rules, doesn’t it?

That said, this week’s cool sites are:

Ustream.tv – This is like a youtube of web-cams. It is a free platform that let’s anyone broadcast anything live, and for free, to the whole internet. Basically, now you can make your own justin.tv (see below). Ustream is a service that let’s anyone create their own 24/7 live web-cam show.

Twitter – A site that answers the question, “What are you doing?” The answer may very well be something spectacular or mundane like, “Oh, I’m filing my nails.” Twitter let’s you tell the whole world what you are doing RIGHT NOW.

LiveOffice Free Conferencing – “LiveOffice FreeConferencing sets the standard for innovative and reliable conference calling. It’s quick and easy to set up and manage, and free to use anytime—there’s absolutely no catch! Setup a free conference calling account now and instantly receive dial-in information with your conference call number and access code. You can invite as many as 250 attendees to your free conference call. Invite as many as 250 attendees to your free conference call session!” (from site)

Justin.tv – Watch as Justin lifecasts his life 24/7. As he says, “I am broadcasting live video of my life 24/7 to the internet. I started Justin.tv because I thought it would awesome for people to see what it was like to be Justin. I convinced three of my friends (Emmett, Michael, and Kyle) to join me out in San Francisco. Now, we’re starting a company to make broadcasting live video on the web easy.”

Go ahead, sign up for your twitter, ustream, and liveconferencing accounts and let’s change the world. I don’t think the old-skool media will recover from this new trend, do you? Then again, isn’t all this a bit too much? Now everyone with a computer and an internet connection can track his/her whole life and put it on the web. I’m not sure whether that’s an entirely good thing.

Now, to bust Some jargon:

Twitterers – people who use twitter.
Twittering – the act of using twitter.
lifecasting – broadcasting your life. Remember jennicam?

I have a rusty old laptop. It is old but it has served me so well over the years that I cannot bear the thought of losing it. Therefore, I still use it from time to time. The problem is, it cannot optimally run much of today’s software. That’s fine – I can do my work and homework on the PC – but what really gets to me is that my trusty rusty laptop does not run modern browsers, even Firefox, very well. It takes a whole 15 seconds just to start Firefox. Now this is a problem because whenever I’m on the laptop I’m looking mostly to kill time and nothing beats surfing the web at killing time. I wish there was a way to enjoy the net on my old laptop. Fortunately, there is.

“The only solution is to use browsers which don’t support all the Web standards, but are much faster and require less system resources. Such programs usually don’t serve CSS, JavaScript, or more complicated HTML elements. Nevertheless, they render most pages correctly and can be successfully used in everyday work. Of course, you can’t avoid situations in which you are forced to use Mozilla (or a similar browser).

Weak computing power isn’t the only factor in favor of lightweight browsers. Others include: individual preferences, the graphics environment being used (some of the mentioned browsers don’t need X), and operating system configuration. Lightweight Web browsers are useful and important.” (from site)

That’s a quote from Freshmeat where they review four light-weight browsers. Click here to read the rest of the review(with links to the browsers). If you just want the links to the browsers, here they are:

• Links
• Dillo
• Amaya
• w3m

Happy downloading! (They’re all free.)

BegForPost. This is simply an awesome site. I love the idea behind it. From site:”You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of traffic to propel your product/service into viral bliss? Don’t pay off bloggers to promote your startup, beg! Getting started is quick and easy. Fill out the form below, sit back, and wait for Internet stardom. You’re almost there!

Ask A Hacker. “Any and all technical questions answered by a real computer hacker. This is the kind of thing we can bill hundreds an hour for, but you get it for free. What a steal! Send your techincal question to mailto://question@askahacker.com/. And don’t worry, we’re all white hats here. What, you don’t trust a random anonymous web site on the internet? Why not? If we wanted your intimate details, don’t you think we’d be offering you a free screen saver or something?” (From Site)
“The internet crosses national and legal boundaries world-wide. Your next door neighbor could hack a computer in China, use that to hack a computer in Nigeria, from there hack a computer in Russia, then take a trip through Saudi Arabia, go through Vietnam, Argentina, Norway, Egypt, Japan, Poland, and then from Poland finally strike at you.”

Obviously, if you need technical help, as a hacker. Why not?

Yahoo! Answers. You can pretty much get an answer on any question you want. It can also be used to some degree as a polling tool to get opinions on various subjects. Personally, I like to answer other people’s questions and it is kinda fun. I really like this site, you can get anything answered. Yes even your homework. The only problem is that the people who answer your questions are normal everyday people and hence the quality of the answers may not be all that you expect it to be. Still, its a really cool site from Yahoo! You won’t believe how addictive it is.

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You may have noticed that today’s cool sites all focus on getting your questions answered. Why did I do that. Well, I want to tell you of an interesting way of using such sites. If you blog, you sometimes want to write a post but your creative juices just aren’t flowing as they usually do – to get them flowing again, just go to a site like Yahoo Answers, ask an open ended question and you’ll be surprised at what you uncover – this may also be a great way to carry out some basic research for your posts (you know, to get an idea of what people think of what you have in mind).

Too bad Google Answers is no longer in operation. Finally, you may want to check out the Coolest Toilet EVER!!

PS – Comment here. You’ll get something in return.