Google URL Shortener, aptly named Goo.gl, has been available for use for almost a year, and it finally has its own website. In the past, you could only use it through the Google Toolbar, or through specific Google products such as Feedburner, News, Blogger and Picasa. Now you can get all your Google URL shortening needs done on their recently launched webpage.

Google went about things in a somewhat back-to-front fashion, launching the service itself before the website. Now, with the new website, you can get access to statistics on all URLs you’ve shortened using Goo.gl, provided you’re logged into your account. These stats include traffic, referrers and visitor profiles.

As far as features are concerned, that’s pretty much all you’re going to get. Google have chosen to focus instead on stability, security and speed. According to their blog, their priorities are uptime and spam detection. They’ve also managed to double the speed of the service since its launch, and want to keep it that way.

There are a few unofficial browser add-ons already available to use with Goo.gl, like Chrome’s goo.gl URL Shortener and Firefox’s goo.gl lite, and Google will be releasing the Goo.gl API in the future, making it easy to incorporate their URL shortener in other third party applications.

Via Lifehacker

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Before 1983, visiting a host on a network required typing in its IP address. Fortunately, the domain name system (DNS) was invented to allow numerical IP addresses to be identified with domain names. So now, instead of having to remember a long sequence of numbers like 74.125.67.104, you only have to remember Google.com. The definition of a domain extension is the top-level part of a domain name, like .com or .net.

It’s easy to forget that each domain extension is intended to be used for a specific purpose when everyone is using .com for whatever they please. But you might be surprised to find out that a lot of domain extensions have registration restrictions and are still used for their intended purposes.

Or maybe you want to find out which unique domain extensions are unrestricted and can be used along with your killer domain name to make your website stand out. Let’s take a look at the history of domain extensions, which ones are restricted and which ones aren’t, and what specific use each is intended for.

History of Domain Extensions

In 1984, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established the first six domain extensions: .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net.  Shortly after, the first two-character country code domain extensions (like .uk and .us) were established. In 1988, .int was also introduced.

It wasn’t until after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created in 1998 that any new domain extensions (besides country code extensions) came into use. ICANN has an agreement with the United States Department of Commerce and now operates IANA.

After an application period, seven new domain extensions were introduced in 2000: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro. Throughout 2005 and 2007, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel, .travel, and .asia were also established.

New domain extensions are sure to come. Just last month, the first ‘internationalized’ domain extensions were established. These internationalized domain extensions are the first to not use Latin characters (three of them use Arabic characters and one uses Cyrillic).

Read on to find out the different categories that domain extensions are grouped under and the specific uses for all of the domain extensions mentioned above.

Types of Domain Extensions

There are two main types of domain extensions: country code and generic (which is further subdivided into sponsored and unsponsored).

Country code extensions are two-character domain extensions for countries, sovereign states, and territories. Many country code extensions have second-level subdomains, like the .co in .co.uk.

Generic domain extensions include all of the other domain extensions, like .com, .edu, and .biz. Sponsored extensions, like .aero, .coop, and .museum, are managed by an organization that is in charge of the policies regarding their registration. Unsponsored extensions are simply managed by ICANN.

All domain extensions are also either restricted or unrestricted. To register a domain name with a restricted domain extension, you have to meet certain requirements. For example, only accredited educational institutions are eligible to register a domain with a .edu extension. Many country code domain extensions are also restricted and can only be registered by citizens or residents of the country that the extension refers to.

Unrestricted domain extensions, like .com, .org, and .net, can be registered by anyone. Some country code domain extensions are unrestricted, which has resulted in the registration of ‘domain hacks’ that create a word using the domain extension. Del.icio.us, for example, uses the United States country code .us to form the word ‘delicious.’

A List of Specific Uses

Here is an alphabetical list of all generic domain extensions and their specific uses.

.aero – Used in the aviation industry.

.asia – Used in Asia.

.biz – Used by businesses.

.cat – Used for Catalan-language websites.

.com – Intended for use by commercial entities, but it is unrestricted.

.coop – Used by cooperatives.

.edu – Used by post-secondary educational institutions.

.gov – Used by United States government entities.

.info – Intended for use by ‘informative’ websites, but it is unrestricted.

.int – Used by international, treaty-based organizations.

.jobs – Used by websites dealing with employment.

.mil – Used by the United States military.

.mobi – Used by websites optimized for access on mobile devices.

.museum – Used by museums.

.name – Used by individuals.

.net – Intended for network infrastructure use, but it is unrestricted.

.org – Intended for use by organizations, but it is unrestricted.

.pro – Used by licensed professionals, including those in the legal, accounting, and medical professions.

.tel – Used to store and publish contact information.

.travel – Used by entities in the travel industry.

Conclusion

New domain extensions are constantly being proposed and debated. Many want more geography-based domain extensions like .asia. To that end, domain extensions like .london, .nyc, and .quebec have been proposed.

There has also been widespread support for the domain extension .kids, which would be used by websites designed for children. Contrarily, the .xxx domain extension has just recently been approved after years of debate, and it’s intended to be used by adult entertainment websites in the near future. What domain extensions do you want to see in the future?

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Like most things, making a decision on which web hosting company to choose can be tough. With all the companies out there each promising to have 99% uptime, unlimited resources, and knowledgeable support, there has to be a way to cut through the jargon and make an informed decision. Right?

This guide will help you make that decision by showing you how to compare apples to apples. By understanding what hosting companies mean by what they say, you’ll be able to decide which hosting company and package best suits your needs.

1. Price

This is the aspect most of us will look at first when choosing a hosting provider; however, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. When you see price differences it’s helpful to remember the old maxim that we get what we pay for. Jumping on the cheapest offer you see isn’t necessarily the best idea, especially if you rely on your site to make money. Things like non-outsourced support and quality hardware cost money, and a hosting company that charges $1.99 per month likely won’t offer these features. Take a closer look at the features that each host provides, and THEN compare prices.

Further reference(s):

• HostMonk – A site with comprehensive list of hosting companies and their packages. Use this site to compare prices of almost any web hosting companies’ hosting packages.
• WebHostNinja – Another good site for web hoting price comparison.

2. Area of Focus / Specialties

It’s a fact that not all web hosts are right for all different kinds of customers. Some offer great shared plans but don’t have solutions that are good for growing businesses, while others have great enterprise solutions but aren’t the right fit for someone with a small recipe blog. Look into a company’s specialty or area of expertise before you buy, and go with one that understands your particular needs as a customer. You can find reviews and recommendations on the Web, and many of these will talk about a particular company’s strengths and weaknesses.

3. Tech Specs / Limitations

Take a good, honest look at your site and figure out what you want it to do. If you’re hoping to host a blog, an e-commerce site, rich content, and videos, then you shouldn’t go with the cheapest hosting package you can find. A cheap hosting plan probably won’t have the RAM, processing power, and disk space to serve all these needs, and you’ll spend more time dealing with downtime or load issues than you would like. Look to see what you are getting with the cheap host and what features are included in the cost. Do they charge for additional domains, support, backups, etc.. Call them. Ask questions. Tell them what you envision your site’s needs to be. Just don’t take it for granted that they take your site as seriously as you do.

4. Tech Support

In most people’s opinions, this is the big one. When my site, for some unknown reason, goes down, can I call up and get a real, live person on the phone? And, more than that, can they find out what’s wrong and fix it, or at least tell me what I need to do to get my site back online? Before going with a host look into their reputation for customer support. See what kinds of different ways you can contact them when you need support – email, toll-free phone, chat, and so on. Are they staffed 24/7? Do they outsource support?

You’ll find that, like in price and technical specifications, all hosts are not equal. Some hang their hat on their support crew, and some view customer support as an afterthought. Steer clear of the latter.

5. Features / Add-Ons

This area of consideration comes down to the following question – What makes this hosting company special? What extra incentive do they provide to make hosting your site with them just a touch more attractive? Whether it’s multiple data centers, energy-saving practices, or additional features such as regular data backups or free domain privacy, hosting companies often offer more than just servers. If you see one that offers something you need or find important, that can be a good indicator that you should look into using that company.

6. Hardware

You might have to do a bit of reading (or question-asking) to get to the bottom of this one. What kind of machines does your hosting company use? Are they top-of-the-line, out-of-the-box new machines, or are they cobbled together from what might be spare parts and chicken wire? If the hosting company doesn’t say what kind of servers they use, you’ll want to ask, since hardware can affect the performance of both their servers and your site.

Further reference(s):

• Key factors in selecting Web hosting hardware

7. Customer Reviews / Satisfaction / Reputation

This is one of those factors that you’ll have to get a little creative to get the real story on. Do a Google Blog search for a particular hosting company, or look them up on Twitter – whatever you have to do to see what their current (or former) customers are saying about them. Are they easy to contact for support? What’s the average time it takes to respond to a ticket? When they find a problem with a site, what’s their course of action? This is one of the great things about social media – ask a question about a company, and you’re more likely than not to get a few answers.

Further reference(s):

• LifeHacker readers’ favourite web hosting (list)
• Web Hosting Talk – one of the largest web hosting community on the net.
• Web Hosting Jury – reviews submitted by users themselves.

8. Email Features

This is one of those areas where you might not have considered asking your host for help. If you have a spam problem, then it may be because your hosting company doesn’t provide an adequate solution to stop it. Look into or ask about your provider’s spam solutions and general email practices. No matter what they say, email isn’t dead quite yet.

9. Control Panel / User Interface

Even if you’re the least tech-savvy person in the world, there are some things – installing WordPress, setting up email, setting up FTP accounts – you should be able to do without calling your hosting company’s support line. Does your provider use cPanel or Plesk to make updates and modifications easier, or do they use some clunky interface that no one can figure out? You’ll most likely be the one working with it, so if you can’t figure it out, then that’s going to be a problem.

Further reference(s):

• Try a cPanel Demo
• Try a Plesk Demo
• cPanel vs Plesk

10. Scalability / Room to Grow

Finally, an important thing to consider about your hosting provider (and the plan you choose) is whether or not they fit into your plans for the future. In other words, what you consider adequate hosting now might not meet your needs two years from now, once you start selling your wares online and getting some good traffic to your site.

Any web-based enterprise should have its eye on growth, so if a hosting company might have difficulty accommodating that growth it could pose an issue. Does the host have VPS or Dedicated Server solutions? Will they be able to easily upgrade your account? Transferring from one host to another takes valuable time and effort which could be avoided if the company can scale their solutions for growth. As with all these factors, do some research, get some opinions, and make an informed decision.

11. Bonus

Last but not least, we’d also like to share with you some useful resources that might be handy when it comes to web hosting.

• Ruby on Rails Hosting – A comparison of services that provide ROR hosting.
• Understand Cloud Hosting – ‘Cloud Hosting’ has been quite a buzz these days, but do you know what it means?
• 10 Solutions For Your Cloud Hosting Needs – Sitepoint and their fair share on cloud hosting needs.
• Who Is Hosting This – Find out who is hosting which website

(Via hongkiat.com.)

WordPress is the best all round blogging platform. You can use it for a simple online journal or to power huge websites such as our very own MakeUseOf.

I guess thats why so many bloggers trust it to get the job done on an everyday basis, as well as keep their site looking great with themes and widgets.

That being said, there are times when we need specific features and that’s where plugins come in. Many of us will use plugins to make our blog comparable with another service such as a social network or to improve server response time, but today I want to take a look at three cool WordPress plugins I use which just make blogging easier and more enjoyable.

Theme My LogIn

The WP login page hasn’t changed much since the platform was first released so it’s cool to be able to jazz it up with this plugin.

What it does is simple: it transforms your login page into a page of your blog when wp-admin redirects you to the login page. The login area is displayed where your post would normally be with the rest of your blog being the same. You can still use the normal login page by going directly to wp-login.php.

While this doesn’t make blogging any easier per se, it does give you a little bit of individuality and fun.

Future Calandar

This plugin will be of great benefit to those who post on their blogs every few days or so and like to keep their posting pattern regular. Obviously, if you own a bigger blog then some of the point is lost because all of the days will be highlighted but it might still be useful to you to decide which day a post would be best suited to.

It’s a basic plugin but one of my favorites. A small calandar will appear once the plugin is installed, to the right of your posting area. The days when you have post scheduled for the remainder of the month will be highlighted in green as seen above. The current day is highlighted and bolded.

I find this really handy when posting as I just have to glance at the calandar to check my frequency and to decide what day/date would be the best for the post to go live.

Photo Dropper

A picture is worth a thousand words and like most bloggers, I like to start off an article with a big, high-quality picture that really captures the theme of the article. The trouble is that when posting creative commons images you have to source the picture on a separate website such as Flickr and post an attribution link.

Photodropper however, creates a small icon in the post editor as shown. When clicked a search bar will appear. This enables you to search Flickr for CC images. When you click on one of the results and select the appropriate size (the largest being 500px), the image is placed in the post and an attractive link along with the Creative Commons logo is placed below.

I think this makes the post look very professional and also saves you a lot of hassle.

So there you have it. Three cool WordPress plugins to make your blogging life a little easier. Do you use any interesting plugin which helps you blog or just to liven things up?

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Saving something as a PDF file is a great way to preserve it for future reference or for sharing with others, without risking the site changing before you look at it again. PDFMyURL makes it easy to convert sites to PDF.

Point PDFMyURL at a website URL and it will convert the site into a PDF document. Not only can you do a simple conversion just by plugging in a URL but you can also modify the PDF with a wide variety of flags—see the advanced menu for a full list—that let you set the page orientation and size, header information, print orientation, and more. PDFMyURL also has a bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar for easy access to the PDF creation service.

PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn’t watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Confused about how to use Google Wave, the new Google product that combines messaging, wiki-like features and group collaboration into a single app? You’re not alone.

To clear up the confusion, we recently published Google Wave: A Complete Guide, a feature-length article that explains Wave in plain English.

Now Gina Trapani and Adam Pash have gone a step further, releasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The book, which is available for free online, details all of Wave’s features – and some use cases – in 8 chapters. It’s a super-handy reference if you’re still stuck on how to get the most out of Wave. Recommended!

(Via Mashable!.)

If you’re both a Gmail and Google Voice user, you should be thrilled with the latest feature from Gmail Labs: The Google Voice Player feature embeds a voicemail player inside Gmail so you can listen to new messages directly inside Gmail.

To enable it, just hit up the Labs link in Gmail, find the Google Voice player in mail feature, click enable, and save your changes. Now not only can you read your transcribed voicemail from directly inside Gmail—you can listen to it, too. In fact, your message status will even sync to Google Voice, so if you’ve listened to it in Gmail, it’ll show as listened to in Google Voice, too. Handy.

(Via Lifehacker.)

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (’#’) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a ‘hashtag,’ and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies. In fact, hashtags were first popularized during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.

You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.

How to Utilize Existing Hashtags

Unfortunately, as hashtags have become more popular, they’ve also become a vehicle for spam. You should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, and you should never stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results. Proper etiquette dictates that you should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

So which tags should you participate in? That depends wholly on your business and your purpose for using Twitter. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to participate in the #robotpickuplines hashtag if you own a health club and use your Twitter account to offer customer service to members. But if you own a record shop, you’ll more than likely want to join in the #musicmonday hashtag, in which people tweet about what music they’re listening to and suggest other musically-inclined users to follow every Monday. Or if you own a restaurant, why not tweet out your specials or some recipes on #tastytuesday.

Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend?, a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business. Also, pay attention to tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. If it makes sense for your business to jump on board, compose tweets that are on topic and compatible with that hashtag.

How to Start Your Own Hashtags

Once you’ve figured out the tag itself, the next step is simple: start using it and promoting it. Make sure your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile and add something of value to the conversation. Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag via other social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter. Tweet out calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals (but don’t overdo it!). For example, let’s say you own a bookstore, and you’re running a Twitter contest to give out a gift card to your store. Your explanatory tweet might be something like, ‘What’s your favorite summer reading material? Tweet using #beachreads to win a $100 gift certificate to Al’s World of Books!’

How to Keep Track of Hashtags

Of course, now that you have people using your new hashtag, you need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the easiest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search. You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results. Monitter and TweetGrid are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.

You can also use the built-in search functionality of popular desktop clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, or set up alerts on business-oriented Twitter dashboards such as HootSuite or CoTweet.

(Via Mashable!.)

Take the work out of finding sites related to the one you’re browsing. SimilarSites is a user-ranked search engine designed to return a list of the most similar web sites.

Plug in a web site at SimilarSites or by using their Firefox extension SimilarWeb and you’re presented with a list of related web sites. For each site on the list you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. While our test searches returned fairly accurate results there were a few items in each search that definitely merited a thumbs down. In addition if you find a site in your search results that you’re interested in you can run a SimilarSites search on that site with a single click. If you’d like to find site suggestions by keyword instead of using an existing site as your source, check out previously reviewed Youlicit to find related web sites by keyword searches.

(Via Ian Scott.)

In one of the more intriguing surveys of recent weeks, website One News Page has found that over half of the people it surveyed will be replacing Google with Bing as their main search engine.

The news portal surveyed 1,000 people and found that 55 per cent of those who answered preferred to use Bing to search for things on the internet.

Even more unbelievable, 68 per cent of those surveyed actually liked the name Bing – they must really like Chandler from Friends – and 90 per cent said they would use the expression ‘to Bing it’.

Just Bing it!

‘Microsoft has a winner in Bing and in a couple of years it may be a force to be reckoned with,’ said Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, founder of One News Page.

‘Microsoft finds ways of entering late into mature markets and flexing its huge marketing muscles to grab substantial share.

‘My verdict is that Bing will give Google a good run for its money, and the resulting competition in the search engine market can only be a good thing.’

In other news, three out of three out of four TechRadar journalists will never say the expression ‘to Bing it’ without sniggering. And that is a fact.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)