Google released a new version of Google Talk that introduces several more features

File transfer: You can share any type of file, any size and any number of times at faster speeds as Google Talk makes a direct connection to your friend’s computer whenever possible. You can also drag and drop one or more files directly onto a chat window.

When you drop photos smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window. The previews adjust to the size of your chat window, so just enlarge the window when you want to see more detail.

Voicemail: The feature I have always wanted, you can now leave voicemails for any of your Google Talk contacts when they don’t answer a call. You can even record voice notes and send them to anyone (even to people not running Google talk) by just adding their email address to your contact list .

Music status sharing: This is another cool feature. It let’s you show your friends what music you are currently listening to as your status message.

Download Google Talk

Adsense now tells us when we last logged in. Very helpful for those who check their accounts frequently.

via Problogger.net

My blog posts have been reblogged a few times in Splogs in the past and that too directly from my feeds. After switching to partial feeds, I never faced this problem until recently a few splogs like http://weblog-pla.net have started it again. This raised my curosity as to how they do this and that too automated.

After Googling for some time, I found two WordPress Plugins that these spammers use- Autoblog and FeedWordPress.

These are plugins that let you automatically post to your WordPress blog from an RSS, ATOM, or other XML feeds. You can preserve categories, give proper author attribution, do find and replace, caching, and publish in excerpts or full feeds! These plugins are dangerous as it can be used by Spammers to easily push high paying keywords into their blogs.

Posts are made automatically from other blog feeds and Adsense ads are placed on the splog too. After selecting a few blog feeds all that’s left for these spammers to do is collecting the money earned through Ads.

Here are some of the features of these plugins

• Automatic publishing
• Cronless cron jobs
• RSS .92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom support
• Multiple categories
• Optional source attribution
• Optional find and replace
• Optional excerpt republishing

Note: I highly recommend that you do not use these WordPress Plugins. Earning money through these methods is not safe and can get you banned by the Adsense team.

I decided to try OpenDNS after reading about it on both liewcf.com and paulstamatiou.com. And the result? Better speeds and improved security.

For those of you wondering what OpenDNS is, it is a free DNS service that makes your Internet experience safer, faster and smarter for you and everyone using your network.

OpenDNS has the following advantages

• it is safer: OpenDNS can identify and stop Phishing sites from trying to steal your personal information
• it is faster: OpenDNS server is faster because it has big cache and good network
• it is smarter: OpenDNS makes corrections for common spelling mistakes automatically, that means www.google.cm will be corrected to www.google.com and wordpress.og to wordpress.org.

OpenDNS service is free and makes money by serving advertisements on search results pages when you make unknown typos.

To start using OpenDNS you don’t need any software. Just head to it’s start page where you will be asked to select either your network device or operating system so that they can help you start the service.

One thing that troubles me is that OpenDNS does not work well with Onspeed for me

WP-phpMyAdmin is a plugin for WordPress that let’s you have access to phpMyAdmin from the Admin console in WordPress.

It is a very simple plugin to use. Follow the instructions for installing it and away you go! You don’t even have to go through the trouble of going through their setup script or creating their config file. Everything has been done for you and the settings from your WordPress setup will be passed over.

Some of the features have been removed or changed slightly for things to work and to maintain security. However you’ll find that most of the things you are used to are still available. Due to the changes that I made, you will only be able to access the phpMyAdmin console from within your WordPress admin console. Trying to link directly will bomb!

Installation

• upload the ‘wp-phpmyadmin’ folder to your plugins folder
• log into your Admin panel and activate the plugin
• goto the ‘Manage’ tab of your Admin console and you will find phpMyAdmin

I am sure this will be a useful plugin for those who regularly access phpMyAdmin.

Download WP-phpMyAdmin

Christine Davis has fixed a few bugs and released a new version of the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW). For those of you not familiar to UTW, it is a tagging plugin for WordPress designed to increase the functions for tagging posts and expanding site navigation through the creation of lists of tags.

UTW also provides ways of getting an overview of your tags through tag clouds and graphic representation such as a long tail graph and weighted bar arrangement. UTW can also be coaxed into linking to other tag-savvy websites such as del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.

I have put up the Technorati tags on this site using this plugin. Also check out my archives to see it’s Tag Cloud in action.

Download Ultimate Tag Warrior

The K2 team has finally released the long awaited stable release of K2. Version 0.9 has all the known bugs fixed and is therefore the latest stable release after r167.

I congratulate the K2 team for their hard work in the development of the best WordPress theme, K2. So go ahead, download K2 0.9 and discuss about it in the forums.

If you find any bugs or have any Feature suggestions file it to the issue tracker.

Download K2 v0.9

Quoter is a plugin for WordPress that allows users to quote a comment or a post in their comments just like in Forums. This plugin has been recently supported in K2 and I am beginning to see more and more blogs using it.

Comments can be quoted by clicking a link which pastes them in the comment form. You can also quote a post or any other part of text in a page, by selecting it and clicking a link.

Note: The plugin requires WordPress 2.0 or higher to work properly

Installation

• upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins/ folder
• activate the plugin from Admin Panel>Manage Plugins
• customize from Quoter submenu in Admin Panel>Options
• add Quoter functions in the comments.php of your theme

The three functions that you have to add are quoter_comment(), quoter_comment_server() and quoter_page().

More info on each of the function can be found in the Plugin’s homepage.

Download Quoter WordPress Plugin

I just read on PC World that Australian and New Zealand residents can get a Gmail account without invitation.

Although still in beta form, Google plans to release a final version once “strong internal metrics” are met.

“We’ll take Gmail out of beta once we feel we’ve met these metrics,” the spokesperson said. “However, users should know that Gmail is reliable and is quickly becoming more widely available. In fact, tens of millions of users around the world already depend on Gmail every day.

Wow, it would be so nice to see Gmail out of Beta stage. Almost all the products they release are in Beta.

wbQuiz is a WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to add a Quiz to your site. It was recently tested by Darren Rowse to conduct a quiz on ‘Are you a Problogger?’

Features

• As many questions as you like
• Three types of questions
1. Open
2. Multiple Choice - select one
3. Multiple Choice - select many
• Customizable
• Weighted scoring: different answers give different scores
• Multiple rankings, as many as you like

Installation is easy too. Just download and unzip plugin to your /wp-content/plugins directory and then activate wbQuiz from your Admin panel.

Download wbQuiz WordPress Plugin