Saw details of this yesterday. It’s a bit like a social networking site, but one where you exchange information about the software you run on your PC. Naturally, I’m giving it a try.

After setting yourself up a profile, you have to download a small piece of software that monitors your program usage – nothing about what you’re doing with them (so no need to worry about stolen passwords, etc), but simply that they’re being launched.

You can then sign into the Wakoopa website, review your software and see what else people are using.

The site isn’t as straight-forward as I’d like and I’m confused over what you can do with other users. I’d like to be able to see other users that have similiar tastes and see what else they’re using. Maybe I can do this, but as yet I haven’t found out how.

I’ll stick with it, have a play and report back in a future post. Meantime, I’ve added a Blog badge to the side which shows my current top 10 most-used programs (most of these are start-up programs, hence why they’re appearing) and you can view my profile at any time.

Update, 23/12/2007 – I’ve left the service. It simply didn’t give me anything. More software recommendations from other users would have been useful.

On a never-ending quest to find useful “extras” for my Blogs and websites, I looked into Tag Clouds earlier this week. You’ll probably have seen them on swanky Web 2.0 sites – groups of seemingly random words of different font sizes. You click on a word to read more on the subject.

These tag clouds are picking words from news feeds and the like, and the words are weighted depending on their use, hence the font sizes.

A quick search of Google immediately showed a free service for bloggers and website owners… ZoomClouds.

Setting up was easy – simply supplying a news feed and a few titles. From here, ZoomClouds goes away and creates the appropriate tags. The site suggests this should take mere seconds, but I found this not to be the case. I left them for a few hours before returning.

At this stage you can now create your design – how the tags will be displayed, including choices of colours, tagcloud width, number of tags, etc. All very easy, and you can even allow your design to be made public for others to use.

They supply the code which you can add to your website and Blog.

This is where I came across my second problem. What they show you your Tag Cloud should look like is not what they’re then looking like on the Blog/website. I first put one on the BMTG site and the colours were limited – you get to choose 4, but it only seemed to be showing 2. After a bit of digging on the ZoomClouds site, I came across a way to make the colours random, which gave a much better result. However, my second Tag Cloud, which I put on my Blog, showed a limited range of font sizes. Now, both of these may be due to a lack of range between the various words, so as most are equally weighted they’re the same size and colour. But just in case I’ve contacted ZoomClouds and posed them this question. I’ll post back when I get a reply.

Anyway, they still look pretty good, and the information they provide is rather handy.

Update 24/01/2008 – Now that I’ve switched to using WordPress, which has built-in tag cloud facilities, I don’t use ZoomCloud.

Here’s something that get Matt Fry salivating… my definitive guide to making Windows XP look cool. Or like Vista (depending how you see it). And it’s all free.

Here are my recommendations for what you need to download…

Zune theme
I mentioned in a previous post – it’s a black and orange colour theme for Windows.

Vista cursor
Read the supplied read me file for installation instructions.

Vista Wallpapers
Lots of official and un-official Vista wallpapers. I use WallMaster to cycle through mine.

Vista Sounds
Hmm, I have them installed on my PC but can’t find where I got them from… will upload them and put a link on my Blog when they’re ready.

Sidebar
After looking at various sidebars, the Google version ended up as my favourite, mainly due to the large number of gadgets available for it.

Alt/Tab Replacement
Microsoft provide a great Alt/Tab replacement as a PowerToy, although it’s not as good as Vistas Flip 3D. Oh well, you can’t have everything.

But, if you want to flip your windows about in 3D, try Madotate – personally I didn’t get on with it. Anyway, there’s no installer with it, so after unzipping it, run install.reg (this will add a registry entry) and then run madotate.exe to kick it off. A system tray icon will appear – from here you can change settings, etc. You will also notice that your current focused window has a new button at the top – click on this to make the window go all-3D.

And that’s it for now – if you can suggest anything further, please let me know.