Now that I am using Vista for several months, I got used to the sidebar gadgets quite fast. It's nice to have those small applications within reach and visible instantly. I thought it would be nice to play with gadget-development a little bit and found that no real configurable webcam gadgets were available yet so that would be a fun little project to experiment with. I found it is very easy to create these gadgets, as they are just tiny HTML-pages with some Javascript functionality. After developing a first version of my Webcam gadget I uploaded it to the Microsoft Live Gallery and within a week I got an email that it was actually published! It's nice to see that people actually want to view a webcam directly in their Vista sidebar, I know that I'd appreciate the functionality, but I was not sure if other people would like it as well.
If you use Vista and like to view a webcam of your choice in your sidebar, then you could view the Windows Live Gallery (category Miscellaneous) and download my webcam gadget. It is attached to this blog-post as well. In the settings-flyout you can define a live stream that you'd like to view, or an image-feed that gets refreshed at regular intervals. Any comments about the gadget are welcome ofcourse and if you like it, don't forget to rate 5 stars!
There are a lot of sites describing how you could improve your Google Pagerank. They usually don't add any real new information besides "Make sure you are being linked to", "Use proper META-tags", "Make sure all interesting keywords are used in your TITLE-tags and in the BODY of your documents". But here's a site that finally describes the real keytopics in Search Engine Optimization and how these factors are used to determine your PageRank.
Search Engine Ranking Factors V2
BTW: I personally think Windows Live Search crawls and indexes my sites a lot faster and much more complete then Google does but still I've noticed that Google just is used a lot more often. Let's hope that changes soon. :)