open source

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

Stefanos Karagos | December 11, 2006

NewsCloud began in 2004 as CommonBits, a community directory for distributing political videos via BitTorrent.
It evolved into CommonTimes, a social network for news and was rebranded as NewsCloud.com in May 2006.
NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist and free-lance journalist and co-founded by Garrett Moon, a computer science student at Western Washington University.

Before some days they released the code for NewsCloud to the open source community under a GPL license.

The NewsCloud platform is written in PHP and MySQL.
One of the interesting things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine helping to fully customize the look and feel of the final result.

For more info you can visit the NewsCloud Blog, the related Wiki and the files repository on Sourceforge.

The competition is very strong between the open source CMSs and the crucial point is, who has the stronger developers community...

Weekend goodies #002

Stefanos Karagos | December 2, 2006

[1]

Any Video Converter is an All-in-One video converting tool with easy-to-use graphical interface, fast converting speed and excellent video quality.
It allows you to effortlessly convert video files between every format, for FREE!

It can convert almost all video formats including DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI to MPEG-4 movie format for iPod/PSP or other portable video device, MP4 player or smart phone. It also supports any user defined video file formats as the output.
If you play with video files this application is a must.

[2]

GreatNews RSS reader. The last years I use RSS feeds to get informed almost about.. anything :-)
This saves me time [that i don't have...] and gives me the whole picture of any aspect of my interests, in seconds.
The latest discovery is the superb and very fast GreatNews RSS reader.
It's FREE and its features are more that other commercial alternatives!
Some great features: Full page reading, Categorize news articles with labels, Channel Statistics, Auto-discovery, Track Comment function, BlogThis function, 100% Unicode support, create Search Channels and more!
Yes, it worths a try!

[3]

Thinkature brings the richness of in-person, visual communication to the web by placing instant messaging inside a visual workspace.

Use it as a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new.
A very promising and useful online tool.

[4]

30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows.
Title says everything:-) Some FREE gems in a good organized list.