A mind map is a graphical representation of words or ideas that are linked around a central theme. Putting down your ideas on a mind map really helps to concentrate your efforts to ensure you stay focus. But while mind maps are generally helpful, assembling one on your computer may require a map of its own.

Instead of figuring out how to put one together yourself, text2mindmap has developed a site where you can enter in your ideas in an outline format and Text2mindmap will generate a fully interactive map. You can move the segments of the map around to see how each word or idea is connected to another.

The site is in beta and configuration options are limited to font, color and sizing. What would be nice for future updates, is the ability to download your map to some sort of self contained application that will allow you to retain all the interactive aspects of the map instead of the static image download option currently available.

If you ever had the dream of being the editor of your own magazine but lacked the experience, network and the monetary investments to get it off the ground don't give up yet. MagCloud hopes that with its services you can be the next publishing mogul.

While currently in beta, MagCloud claims that the process is easy enough.

• Create your magazine according to their specifications and upload it to their servers.
• Order a proof to verify that the magazine is how you want it.
• Set your price and publish it.

The concept is similar to that of CafePress which allows you to set the price for your own custom printed t-shirt with no investment on your part. While we haven't seen an actual physical copy of MagCloud's work, the ability to print your own magazine is tempting.

If you're a subscriber to Amazon's Web Services then you know how important it is to make sure your data is not only safe but accessible at all times. And while Amazon provides a site dedicated to advising you of the status of their network, what if you wanted to know if the issue was with a particular service or if the sky was indeed falling.

CloudStatus hopes to provide just that. Instead of just globally monitoring Amazon's services, CloudStatus deploys their Hyperic HQ agents inside and outside Amazon's clouds to help determine if the slow down you may be experiencing is due to the entire infrastructure going down or just to a particular service.

In addition, CloudStatus also provides matrices so you can see how each of Amazon's services have performed over time. This is particular useful to those that are considering making the jump to cloud computing and want to base their decision off empirical data instead of marketing propaganda.

Instructional videos or online reviews can sometimes be difficult to follow. Depending on watch you're watching it might be nice to have a second video displaying additional information that would aid in the presentation. Viddix may have found the answer to this in the form of their iPanel.

Once you've uploaded your video to the website, you'll need to add cuepoints. These cuepoints allow you to add text, links, photos, html pages, charts or other media rich files that your viewers can read and interact with. Viddix also provides cuepoint presets to ease the production of your video.

From start to finish, the production concept is straight forward and the average user shouldn't have many issues with producing their own videos.

While still in beta, we find the concept very useful, especially since we've started taking guitar lessons.

Ever wish that Derek Zoolander had decided to open a night school? Or maybe opened a secondary school, so that once those kids that couldn't read good or do other stuff too well got better at it, they could go on to learn to do other things? What if Zoolander teamed up with the University of Phoenix, and offered online courses?

Your prayers have been answered, sort of. Gramlee is an online service for grammar checking and proofreading (and yes, there are definitely differences between the two). The idea behind Gramlee is fairly simple. You just cut and paste your writing into the Gramlee submission form, supply your email address, and an editor (yes, a live person) will proofread it for you and make revisions.

There's no word on what the Gramlee submission form does with smart quotes, but they do seem to heavily recommend a text editor (like Notepad) for document creation. There's no reason why you couldn't use Word, but we're having a lot of fun imagining editors using some colorful language when they get certain document formats.

To get you hooked, the first hundred words are free. You can buy additional words (up to 2,625) for varying amounts, or email a longer document for a price quote. Turn around time is allegedly about twenty-four hours on most documents.

The disclaimer here is that we didn't submit a piece to Gramlee. The "Examples" page shows some nicely edited pieces, complete with red ink mark ups. It would be endlessly cool if documents were revised with the revisions somehow marked. We fear they aren't marked, and that makes our linguistic spidey-senses tingle. So if you use the service, proofread the proofreaders, please. Even people who write good well make mistakes.

And of course, we needn't tell you that it's really not a good thing to submit your term paper to Gramlee for editing, right? Um. Right?

[Thanks for the tip, Mark!]

Omnisio is a free web-based video editor that lets you snip and paste videos from YouTube, Google Video, and blip.tv, with support for more sites coming soon. The site is similar to online photo-editing sites like FotoFlexer, but applies the same idea to video. You don't need any desktop software other than a sturdy online browser with Flash support.

The three sites still provide for a very large library to choose from, and you could always add your own videos to a YouTube account should you need some extra content. We can see Omnisio being very useful for all types presentations -- professional or student related -- in which the subject is heavily documented on those video sites (what subject isn't heavily documented on YouTube?).

We can also see the online video-editing service spawning a whole new breed of online-content-remixers, which traditionally take funny and interesting videos, pictures, etc. to turn them into into (what's supposed to be) funnier but fairly stupid creations that usually make fun of the subject and gain mass notoriety. Thank you, Omnisio, for helping us clutter the Internet with even more Star Wars Kid edits.

So, your octogenarian parents or grandparents may not be clued in to Facebook, or Myspace but, a new player in the field is hoping to capitalize on just that segment of the market. Grandparents.com, launching in fall, promises to provide grandkid friendly activities, travel ideas, expert tips on grand-parenting and a social networking component which allows granpap and nana to share experiences with others.

Currently the site offers a frequent newsletter to entice would be subscribers to stay in touch while the polish is applied to the final product.

Oh brother. AllofMp3 is notorious; Chased by governments and the music business alike, it struggled on longer than anyone could have predicted. It seems the saga of the now dead site isn't entirely over, as a Russian court has just told Visa that their decision to end the merchant contract held by the rouge mp3 site was against Russian law.

It means little for the already dead AllofMp3.com but, Visa's termination of that contract was likely a major contributing factor to the site's decline and fall. A spokesperson for Visa says they have no plans to appeal the ruling.

[via ZeroPaid]

For many of today's growing companies SalesForce.com is a part of life. Its suite of software tools are too well developed to ignore and too complex to recreate on your own. SalesForce likes this market position; they've fought hard to get it. In order to keep it they've begun to invest heavily in products and services that will allow them to "simply outclass" everyone else in the industry.

SalesForce SOA is a cutting edge example of this strategy. Announced today at the SalesForce Developer Conference, SOA uses their custom Apex programming language to let developers expose and consume web services within the SalesForce.com platform. I know, that doesn't sound exciting on its own. But maybe this will: Business Mashups.

So, what does SOA let you do? Nothing at the moment yet. It doesn't get rolled out as a developer preview until August. But the idea is pretty simple and easy to grasp. Basically it is a Yahoo Pipes style product for businesses. Only instead of consuming RSS feeds you are consuming business class web services such as those provided by Google Adwords and Amazon.com. Coupled with their rumored Google partnership, SOA shows SalesForce determination to keep and grow their market share.

As Adam Gross, SalesForce's VP of Developer Marketing puts it: "We've taken our inspiration from the rapid innovation the consumer internet has been experiencing and created our own set of similar business class products and services. Developers will be able to create products that mix and match web services and take advantage of SalesForce's scalable infrastructure and active user base."

Its time to get your Jang widget on! Jangl lets users communicate with anyone, without revealing what your mobile number is, or exchanging that number with anyone else. We covered its launch back in August. Now they are aiming at taking the widgets by storm.

This is officially the time for widgets. Little desktop bits aimed at making our beloved services more accessible. Jangl has entered the arena with a new website widget that will do just that. It comes in a few designer patterns that will suit anyone's tastes, including brushed steel, racing blue, bubble gum, graphite tattoo, and mustard bling. The Jangl phone widget allows website and blog readers a way to get your Jangl number, created right on the spot, without leaving your site. In true widget spirit, it can be embedded on most social networks, blogs and websites via a snippet of HTML.

Jangl was at the VON conference in San Jose this past week, and dropped some other interesting news. Not only will they be unleashing the Jangl service in Canada, Latin America and Europe in the next few weeks, but they are also looking at a releasing a way to txt over sms via a secure and private Jangl number. Great news from the Jangl camp. Hey team Jangl, is there any news on a desktop widget in the works?

Check out Michael Cerda's talk at VON after the jump...

UPDATE #2- Tim from Jangl let me know that the desktop widget will come along shortly – it's married to a whole new, bigger app they have planned for the near future.

UPDATE - Jangl is looking at releasing the txt over sms in about one month

Amazon recently released its fourth quarter results, and the fact that developers joining Amazon's web services grows over 55% each year struck struck Larry Dignan. I didn't think that this many developers were into this feature as I haven't heard too much about apps that have been created. We wrote about wrote about Amazons S3 service when it launched in March 2005. The service allows developers to use Amazon's data storage and transfer capabilities for free. There are monthly fees, however, for storing and transferring data, and it can only be accessed by API's. What can you use S3 for? DLS covered S3AjaxWiki, a wiki solely existing on the S3 service. We also gave props to a Python script creator who developed a way to back up Flickr photos.

If you want to add your name to the growing list of developers, or just check out some of the other neat applications people have created with the Amazon Web Services, there are tons of tutorials, tools and code samples. If you have anything to share, or if DLS readers have hooked up with the S3 service to create something interesting, please show off your skills in the comments.

Microsoft shocked me a bit with this one. If you use Microsoft's web service specifications (XML, SOAP, UDDI, etc), you don't even have to reference Microsoft or mention that what you're using is from them. They have stated that they won't enforce their patent. What? Microsoft not wanting credit for one of their ideas? That's cool. As a developer, there are plenty of restrictions and rules you have to follow when writing software, so this just makes it a bit easier, not having to add one more thing to your application. These web service specs are used in many contexts other than traditional desktop software, so it is a bit more complicated to add credit to each instance of the technology. It isn't so cut and dried. Imagine if you had to credit someone every time someone consumed a web service, it is doable (if you have to) but it's also a pain.

[Via InformationWeek]

This is pretty huge. Facebook, the #2 social networking site in the U.S., has released an open API that allows third-party developers to "make remote procedure calls to Facebook on behalf of a Facebook user." The current version of the REST API allows applications to get information about a Facebook user's profile, friends, photos, events, messages (but of course requires said user to be authenticated). The API is free to use with a "soft" limit of 10,000 requests per day, and the Facebook Developers site currently provides PHP5 and Java client libraries, though the API could be accessed with pretty much any language.

Update: Commenter George brought to our attention Facebook Friend Mapper, a very cool Facebook/Google Maps mash-up that demonstrates what's possible with the new Facebook API. Very cool.

If you're wondering what all the Ajax buzz is about, and where it's going, Dion Hinchcliffe has written a great article over at his blog entitled State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs. Hinchcliffe writes, "Because Ajax is a sincerely compelling synthesis of the ubiquitous features found in the most popular Internet browsers. Practitioners of Ajax get high-intensity user interaction, asynchronicity, web browser access to web services, platform neutrality, and the Ajax feature set can be delivered as a framework you don't have to create yourself. Individually, these items are very nice, but taken as a whole, working solution and you have something extremely special."

Via Slashdot.