Google has a cool feature: an app, Follow Your World, that allows you to track satellite images of locations you specify within Google Maps and Google Earth. Each time Google updates its satellite and aerial imagery for the areas you’ve selected, it’ll send you a notification letting you know about the new info.

The feature’s been around since January; today, it’s expanding into 43 additional languages, from Arabic to Estonian, Serbian to Vietnamese. And while the app is a nifty thing overall — you could use it, say, to track changes in the neighborhood you grew up in, or on your college campus, or at the town you’ll be vacationing in this winter — the feature also provides potentially useful data for reporters. (Particularly in combination with Google Earth’s Historical Imagery showcase, which lets you compare satellite images as they’ve changed over time.) Think of, say, reporting on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project. Or following the effects of the Gulf oil spill. Or visualizing the destruction and reconstruction that followed Haiti’s devastating earthquake.

“Whether journalists are covering their local communities or global events, aerial imagery often plays an essential role in shaping and sharing their stories,” Sean Carlson, manager of news industry relations at Google, told me in an email. “You might think of this feature like a Google Alert for the places that are important to you.”

But don’t expect your inbox to be flooded with updates. As the FAQ notes:

Imagery updates in any particular area can take months and even years. We’re continuously working to make this time span shorter, but we can’t guarantee a specific timeline for an update. Whenever we update your interested area, we’ll send you a notification email.

Create a custom Manga type Twitter profile pic

"This is crazy simple. Load up the page, start typing. Change the URL if you’d like, add a password too, share with others or reference the URL on other devices (including iPad)."

"OffiSync Supercharges Microsoft Office, enabling users to significantly improve the way they create, collaborate and share their documents by integrating Microsoft Office with Google Docs, and Google Apps."

"At Aviary, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to powerful creation tools. We therefore chose our company mission to be We make creation accessible to everyone."

shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.

When extending WordPress functionality for your existing site, you can find dozen of plugins that can help you add-on features without the hassle of changing to another platform. All you have to do is to find the right plugin(s) that you need and install it into WordPress. With the combination of plugins, hacks and creativity, WordPress has been often used in different unique and unconventional ways.

SketchBox is a new – multifunctional yet uncluttered – Sticky Notes Manager for your Mac Desktop.

ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the "hyper fast video and audio encoder" (http://ffmpeg.sf.net/), mpeg2enc the open-source mpeg-2 encoder and multiplexer (http://mjpeg.sf.net/MacOS/) and mencoder the mpeg-4 encoder with subtitles support (http://sf.net/projects/mplayerosx).

Fast, bloat-free bookmarking with a spare user interface.

Recently moved my Wordpress blog to a tumblr account while I was removing a hosting account, wrote this script to do the transfer for me using Wordpress' Export feature and Tumblr's API.

You can change the upload date of your photos (you can also change the “taken on” date of your photos in the same fashion).

we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.

One of the better panorama stitchers for Mac but is it worth $25, I don't know.

Conversationlist is a Twitter list of the people that you talk to (and about) on Twitter. The list is automatically updated daily, so that it always reflects the people that you are paying attention to right now. If you @reply (or @mention) someone, they're added to your list. If you stop talking to that person, they drop off your list.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Readibility is a simple too that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable and consistent by removing all the clutter around what you are reading.

The Nest Unclutterer allows you to review a list of accounts that meet your user-specified criteria before any blocking or unfollowing occurs.

Store and manage your manuals in your free online filing cabinet

Delete associated files when you uninstall an application from your Mac

Opting out of a network does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean that the network from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your Web preferences and usage patterns.

RT @adbert: RT @soniamarras: 99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications

We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem

To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.

Microsoft has over 150 FREE Windows XP, Windows Vista & Office Programs available for download -- finding them all is extremely difficult . . . until now

Our technology allows users to easily "embed" pictures, logos, and videos within their videos.

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

GNU Octave provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab.

Be the first to know who's twittering about you, your products, your company, or your website! TweetBeep.com gives you twitter alerts by email when a tweet matches your search!

It is possible to work out the "closeness" of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article.

This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

Inhale the Web

To find Free Wi-Fi near you enter your address

Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.

Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. Sounds interesting but I'll wait for it to get out of alpha.

@Pogue Use this site next time Cost $0.20 for 6 passport-sized photos

Since May 2007, we’ve been bringing you resources and tools to be more productive on the web. Due to popular demand, we’ve brought all these lists together into one gigantic meta-list

Google has finally added the long-awaited search box to their popular web-based RSS reader, Google Reader. Now you can search across all of your subscribed feeds as a whole, or more granularly across tags or even individual subscriptions.

Start-up App created in 10.5 hours.

Free online video converter. Convert and download videos from YouTube, Google Video or directly from .FLV file. Play it on your PC, Mobile, iPod, PSP and enjoy!

If you hate those web2.0-ish names and are looking for a domain name that isn't taken yet