Oosah is a Web application which offers its users a complete suite of tools to store digital files on the Web, including pictures, videos, MP3s, and slideshows. I first came across Oosah when it launched its blog back in June this year. Along these few months, Oosah has steadily improved its features, from 2GB (Gigabyte) of storage space increased to 1TB (Terabyte), i.e. 1024 Gigabytes, and also increased the maximum upload file size limit from 200MB per video, 50MB per image, 9MB per mp3 to 250MB per video, 50MB per image, and 50MB per mp3.

From the file storage space that Oosah offered to every single one of its users, I can’t stop thinking about how generously this online storage provider. For a new user, after you signing up for this service, you’ll amazed by its range of features. You are allowed to connect some external services such as Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, and from these services, you can start to “import” the pictures or videos and all of these files will eventually by default be stored in the Oosah “cloud.” Perhaps you also can access this Oosah through its mobile site, i.e. the iPhone and iPod Touch Edition, and manage your Oosah account from a tiny phone or iPod Touch remotely, or play songs. Though this might sounds a bit like extending your storage capacity of your mobile device, but with this Oosah, it has turned your iPhone into a de facto model for a mobile desktop.

Oosah is a Web application that primarily use Adobe Flash to render its full functionality. Of course, with Flash, users are expected some sort of loading delay if they compare Flash with other technologies such as JavaScript. However, this is not the main limitation if you find out that you can’t upload documents or any executable such as software, since Oosah differentiates itself as a digital media hosting provider, not a general hosting provider that cover all kinds of users’ stuff.

Many of the Oosah’s features are common to other online storage providers such as drag-n-drop capabilities, the use of keyboard commands in the Oosah file system, tags follow with the media as you drag-n-drop the file, but with the one-click “Widget” button, it allowed a user to create her own multimedia presentation by simply drag-n-drop the photos, music, audio files or videos available in the file manager, and then combining it all. To make it become an attractive slideshow, the option of “skin” or border, or the transition effects are available for the users to choose for. Moreover, a user can share her presentation slideshow to the public by embedding it onto the blogs, or MySpace page, or even burn it to CD or DVD formats. However, there is a restriction for users to share the music or audio files as Oosah respect for copyrights and note that Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected files are not accepted by Oosah.

There are numerous file storage applications on the Web; like Dropbox, the one I did profiled not long ago, Box.net, etc. However, there is a file storage application that tend to work in a different approach from the rest of them called Wonderfile.net; You also can access it from the Wonderfile.com in the meantime.

What sets this Wonderfile.net apart is the use of the libraries instead of folders in storing users’ data. Upon you sign in to their service, you’re entitled to a free account with two (2) Libraries, 10MB maximum file size and 1GB of storage space. Clearly, the product line of this startup is based on value-based pricing: a pricing model which fundamentally set a product at different prices for different types of consumers, according to how much a consumer willing to pay for the service. Unfortunately, for the free account, SSL feature is not available. In other words, it also means that the files or data stored in the free account will be unsecured. To upgrade the free account to a premium one, there are several options such as Professional, Workgroup, Enterprise, and Global account for one to choose for.

Apparently, Wonderfile.net is functioning like most of the file storage applications on the Web. You are allowed to upload file, add tags or categories, share files, in addition to some notable features such as file preview, add a revision or add a note have been built-in to the file system. Besides to uploading a file, you also can upload an URL link, or a content that you wish to share with your friends. These features notwithstanding, make use of your library is also attended by significant challenges which is the file permission. You either can make the files visible to the public, or turn the private button on in your file setting. For the premium accounts, you even can set the person who can access to your account with several user permissions such as read, write, revise, share and administer.

To know more about Wonderfile.net, there is a “Tour” page and several tutorial videos are reside there. For the developers, there is a Developer Connection in which you’ll find the SDK and code examples, and it is nice page if you want to learn how to develop and deploy your code directly into the Wonderfile system.

With that so many social media or social networking sites amass on the Web, it’s not surprising one will come out with an idea to track the conversation. It is Samepoint, a newly launched conversational search engine that want to do well in this field.

Samepoint, launched in early September this month, has introduced itself as a search engine with a different approach from the conventional search engines such as Google or Yahoo!, by allowing its users to track and monitor conversations on the Web. In particular, the site’s domain name Samepoint was derived from its core competency, an unique technology that helped to track conversations across many social media sites, and all the search results typically are the conversations with an uniquely defined point. In other words, all the conversations being tracked are based on a common point, or the same point, as this search engine defined it as the “Discussion Point.”

When users type in and run any keyword search on the Samepoint search bar, the search results shown typically are the unique Web pages found in some popular sites such as Digg, WordPress.com, Twitter, LiveJournal, Pownce, Yelp, just to name a few. Each Web page will have its own set of comments and different kind of sources, click on it will bring users to some other Web pages with the same tags or categories used. It seemed that Samepoint is applying a kind of technology to track the comments posted on these popular social media sites, and from the comments, they’ll discover and identify the common point, or the same point from those comments that made by the comment authors. Thus, this saves users time since many of us are not bother to read the comments that we really do not want to know, and at the same time, Samepoint is trying to scan all the comments for the users and bring them together to a “Single point of Conversation.”

To gain insight into the current conversations on the Web, simply rely on keywords search is not enough. For this purpose, Samepoint has improve its search capabilities to the “username” and the “location” search. Users can type in any blogger name and check her reputation in the blogosphere, or enter the city name and waiting for some localized results about a particular city.

From the search results, I found that while Samepoint is tracking and monitoring the conversations, however the conversations on the Web are becoming wane once Samepoint is compress the comments into a sentence of one, or two words, not more than five.

The other day I came across a new micro blogging tool that designed purposely for the use of classroom. It is called Edmodo which is specifically launched in the early of this September, and trying to make explicit the important aspects of the communication between teachers and students.

Since it is served as a tool that facilitate and improve the communication as well as process of teaching between teachers and students, you probably aware that it is an usual practice that teacher chose to create the group and material for study and then left to the students the responsibility for joining the aforesaid group. Assume that you’re a teacher, the moment you sign in and create a group, you can use the special code of the group you created and send it to your students. Students then join the group using the code you’ve given out and start to fill-up her own personal information.

In fact, I’ve acted as a student and join one the groups available on Edmodo. It’s a bit look like a WebCT/Blackboard (except that you won’t find the University logo), whereas a student, you can find the study resources for a particular course, albeit that the main founding purpose of Edmodo is always emphasizing on micro blogging, i.e. the Twitter effect particularly. For the student’s Edmodo page, it is a three (3) columns page where students can find her avatar, locker (for files saving purpose), groups she joined in the let-hand sidebar. The main column, i.e. the column stands in the middle is the classroom timeline, all the relevant updates pertaining to the group including posts and replies are listed there. Also, there is box for students to post a note, share an URL link, or attach a file. But teachers will have an extra option to post alert, assignment, and event. In the right-hand panel, all the recent alerts, assignments, or events can be found there. In addition, students can set a special setting if they’d like to receive the email notifications whenever there are new alerts, notes, files, etc. posted on the Edmodo platform.

Edmodo is known as the Twitter for the classroom. This is largely attributed to its strong favoritism of the micro blogging feature in its platform which allowed students or the teachers to “post” the latest updates along the classroom courses progress. The platform’s choice of micro blogging design stemmed, in most part, I think, from the worldwide success of Twitter. As I am a Program Coordinator for the Postgraduate programs such as MBA and Doctorate program in the past, could this Edmodo helped solve the most difficult pegagogical problems a course faced, it’s still very early for me to comment on it. However, it certainly help to provide a platform for keeping the students talking when there are case discussion on the run.

To know more about how Edmodo is actually work, you can also watch a video clip that I’ve embedded in the below.

I love programming very much. It’s rare in my country of birth because I did not own a computer science degree and yet a guy who isn’t think that programming is too hard. Maybe I should use the word “scripting” instead of programming because it will makes the word “scripting” sounds like an art and less imposing as well.

For those people who think scripting (programming) are too hard, or they’ve been bogged down when writing large scripts, Stack Overflow offered a fun way for one to look at this art. On the main page, Stack Overflow introduced itself as a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers - regardless of platform or language. And users will find most of the questions and answers related to scripting (programming), albeit that some questions are originally tend to be fun such as “What is the worst code you’ve ever written,” “When did you know it was time to leave your job,” “What is your funniest end user story,” etc. as perceived in my first glance.

Currently, there are 17,790 questions posted on the site, at the time of my writing. Most of them are related to the use of programming languages, and all questions are properly organized with the number of votes, answers, and views. Besides, all the essential content are classified logically so that when users are searching the questions based on newest, hot, week, month, or tags, they can select the tabs and questions will be appeared accordingly. Moreover, users are encouraged to sign-up for an account because this will allows them to edit anything, this include questions that posted to the site, in addition to collect karma, in the form of receiving badges.

In overall, Stack Overflow is a scripting (programming) Q&A Web site, however, this site has performed best at its most important job by providing valuable content with the user goals of wikis, blogs, forums, and Digg/Reddit.