China Removes Website Restrictions For Olympics

China recently removed some of the Website Blocking Restrictions, so that users from all around the world who come to China for the Olympic season can enjoy all their favorite websites. Major Video sharing and networking websites that were previously banned would be available now for the Olympic season. This relaxation is temporary and the original state would be restored shortly after the Olympics.

Though the blocking is lifted, content that was blocked earlier and those materials that matter the socio-economics of China will remain behind bars. Still this relaxation could mean a memory of the good old days for the Chinese in general and the newbie’s would get a chance to discover new sites. Happy Olympics!

Related:

Access Blocked Websites Using This Hack

Google Is Constantly Updating Orkut Secretly... Here are the Available Updates

Google always surprises its users and I think that makes Google special. When they launched Gmail they did not give any news about its launch date. So it was a surprise when users could have One full GB of storage space ( At that time a Hotmail account had 8 MB storage ). And Google did that launch on April Fools Day ( April 1 ). Do you know what Google usually does on April 1st..? They cheat its users. Last year Google cheated by promising a free internet access system through the water network of the toilets. But in 2004 they offered Gmail which many of the uses thought was a fake offering, but that created lots of speak about Google and ofcourse Gmail.It increased the word of mouth popularity for Gmail.

And back to the matter, Google is maintaining that level of secrecy to updates made in Orkut too. Gmail had not updated orkut for a very long time. But now they are doing it almost every week. I was amased when one day a new notification window came up, telling me that I had a new scrap. That was an update to Orkut. Then one day Updates from other users started coming on the Orkut home page.. oops another update. And one day I visited the settings page. Hey there was another bunch of updates there which I had not noticed. And I am sure many of you would have noticed these updates and would have wondered why Orkut did not tell me about this update.

I think Orkut needs to tell its users of major updates on the Profile Home page just like the way they give security tips they can add another bar to display updates when they are present. Then all the users can take advantage of the new features.

Some of the new additions are :
* A Notification Window that pops up when you get a new scrap
* Updates From Friends displayed on your Home page.
* Now you can hide the birthday reminders on the Homepage
* You can hide your updates
* You can hide profile vistis ( you wont be shown in their ' Recent visitors ' coloumn )
* You can set the visibility of your scrapbook, videos and photos, testimonals and feeds. You can limit the visibility to your friends alone
* You can show/hide your Orkut information in Google search

See your settings page to get hold of these updates. And yesterday, it was my mother's birthday. Its a nice thing that her birthday fell on the valentines day. She is my valentine for ever. lol

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Orkut Scrapbook is More Like a Junk Mail Folder

One Good thing about scrapbook in orkut was that each and every message was personal unlike the forwards that we recieve in our inbox. Each message was one-to-one. But with the advancement of third party tools like powerscrap and all, once can now send common scrap to all friends with just a few clicks. And this is taking the beauty of Orkut scrapbook away.

These days my scrapbook looks  much like a junk mail folder. And to add to that there are many new viruses in there that sends the same message to all our contacts without our knowldge.

I dont know any ways to get rid of the problem, but if anyone reading this knows one please tell me ok.Maybe one way is to warn the spamming friends and delete them if they persist spamming. And if someone from google is reading this please not that if you leave this unchecked, people will loose all the intrest and stop orkutting. And that is something you dont want..right..?

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Draw Hearts In Your Orkut Scraps... See this tip

If you are a bit crazy 'bout Orkut then here is something for you.
To draw hearts in Orkut use this in your scrap...

&#9829

To color your hearts use the color tag like this...

[red] &#9829 [/red]    

Replace the color tag [red] with a colour of your choice. The Colours available are...
aqua, blue, fuchsia, gold, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, orange, pink, purple, red,silver, teal, violet, yellow.

Related Posts :
* Formatting In Orkut : Add Creativity to your Scraps
* MillionClues in Orkut
* Frauds in Orkut

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Orkut Changed the 'Submit' Button to 'Post Scrap' Button

Till recently we had a 'Submit button' in Orkut. But Google have now changed this button to a 'Post Scrap' Button.

Earlier they had experimented with this button but then the page wouldn't Refresh after the submittion of each Scrap. Just the data would be sent. This was really useful especially for those with a slow internet connection, but it did not work properly. So at times we couldn't know whether the scrap was posted or not.

Now the change is just in the name...
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Related Posts :
* Bring RSS or Atom Feeds Direclty to your Profile in to Orkut

MillionClues in Orkut

The Official Orkut community of MillionClues was created on 17th May 2007.

This community is intended for interaction between my blog readers. I dont intend to post fresh articles there but repostings of most favorite articles may be found at regular intervals. I think its a better way to make polls and get user feedback.

After-all, its nice to be together at some place on earth..rgiht..?

I hereby invite all my readers to this Community....[ Click Here ]

Join MillionClues Community in Orkut

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Formatting In Orkut : Add Creativity to your Scraps

This is going to benefit you if you are a Orkut user and do not know how to format your scraps. Have you seen a button in Orkut that reads " Formatting Tips". This appears just to the right of the text field of every scrap book, in between "Reset" and "Submit".

Click on this button and a window will tell you how to format your scraps [ A Screenshot is added here ].


* To write in a purticular colour do this...
To write in red write like this .. [red] Hello... your text goes here.. [/red]. When you submit this the text will appear in red in the scapbook and everything within square brackets will disappear.
The Colours available are...aqua, blue, fuchsia, gold, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, orange, pink, purple, red,silver, teal, violet, yellow

* To add and emoticon write the emoticon equivalent with in square brackets like... [:)] or [:(] .. and submit them. This will appear as emoticon in the scrapbook...

* To add a link, type the link within the link tags....like..[link]www.millionclues.blogspot.com[/link] to get like.... www.millionclues.blogspot.com.. and...[link=www.millionclues.blogspot.com] MillionClues [/link] to get like... MillionClues[www.millionclues.blogspot.com]
But links given without these tags also work. Then Orkut does random word verificatiion to make sure that there is no spamming...

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Warning ! There are lots of Frauds in Orkut

Every community will have lots of frauds. Cheating someone is real fun for some people. What they do in Orkut is .. they get the photos from other peoples profiles and create new profiles with same name. That way they can easily cheat people. The loss is for the origional owner of the profile.

Lets call the origional owner of the profile as Mr. x. The fraud might say to the friends of x that x is creating a new profile and will try to get personal information from the friend of x. This is very dangerous.

To stop this the users can declare to his/her friends that you have only one profile. Actually such a declaration led to this post. I got a similar declaration from one of my friend who was a victim of such fraudulent activity. And I would advice that every user must limit to a single profile. If you are creating a secong one tell your friends through personal email that you are doing that.

Its really hard to detect such faudulent activity online. Precaution is the best thing. Do not reveal personal or potential information online unless you know that the connection is secure.

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How to Go Directly To The ScrapBook In Orkut after Login...

Logging in to orkut takes you to your home page. To go to the scrap book one has to click on scrap book. The scrap book loads by displaying the latest 10 scraps so if you have to see 30 scraps you have to select 'show 30 scraps' from the drop down menu..

All this can be done in a single step.
First go to you scrap book. Select 'show 30 scraps' (or as required ). Now BookMark this page on your browser.You are done. Next time to log in to orkut take this page from your book marks. Orkut will first ask you to log in. After you have given you login information you will be directly taken to your scrap book with 30 scraps on the display.
Its the small things that make life beautiful.
Good Luck!
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Have you seen the Google Doodles ?

Google is very creative ! Creativity extends even upto the logos of Google. To commemorate a very special event Google uses a cutomised and artistic logo. If you happen to visit Google.com on that day you can see that special logo. This customised logos built to commemorate a special event is often called as Doodle.

For eg : Last year (2006) on Louis Braille's ( The man who created Braille - The print language of the blind !. He is the one who brought light into the minds of millions of blind people worldwide ) Birthday on January 4 Google was written in braille.

Google uses such logos to grab the attention of its users to the special event. As google.com is a neat and clean website a minute change is easily noted.

To see the logos for yourself vist the following places ! You can see logos that they have used, right from their start in 1999 !
Official logos : http://www.google.com/stickers.html
Fan Logos : http://www.google.com/customlogos.html
Holiday Logos : http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html

Have a nice time
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Inviting all your Gmail Contacts To Orkut

Eventhough Orkut and Gmail are from the same 'server' of Google, they didnot provide any provision to invite the gmail contacts to orkut as the provision in the Google talk to invite gmail contacts. But orkut do provide an option to invite multiple friends. Here is a simple way by which you can add your gmail contacts.

Method 1:
If you wish to invite all your gmail contacts, open gmail and go to your contacts. There you have an option to export the contacts. Export the contacts and you will get a file with all your contact information. Save that file to local disc and open it with notepad. In the friends section or orkut there is an area where you can invite friends ( on the left hand side of orkut window ). Below the box to enter the friend's email address, there is a link to 'invite multiple friends'. Click that and you will get a text area to enter all the e-mail addresses. Copy and paste the contents from the previously exported contacts file there. You will also have to do the random word verification so as to make sure that you are a human being. That's it.

Method 2:
If you do not wish to invite all your friends but only a selected few, open gmail and go to your contacts. Select those contacts whom you wish to invite and click compose button ( on top row ). This will open the mail composer with the selected contacts in the 'to' section. Copy those address from the 'to' section and paste it in the same text area as mentioned in method one.

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