Nowadays, it’s not enough for most people to keep their photos to themselves. There are many ways to store your photos and exhibit them for the whole world to see. This led to the popularity of photo sharing sites, which let you organize your photos, make them private or public, show them to groups, email them to friends and family, or allow them to come up in searches. By tagging your photos, someone looking for red boats at seas could find your shot of just that. Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Shutterfly, Picasa and Webshots are only a few of these sites. Snap some images and upload them today.

Foodies unite! The web has proved a boon for gourmets (and gourmands) everywhere. With a virtually unlimited number of recipes in websites and even more on blogs, the web is a cook’s heaven. There are food sites, product manufacturers’ sites and trade association sites with searchable databases recipes. Start with the big ones such as allrecipes.com, foodnetwork.com and epicurious.com, which should be enough for most people. Occasionally, there are videos and how-tos that are much more helpful than plain text. If you still can’t get enough of chefs and test kitchens, try subscribing to video podcasts which have regular shows that show you how it’s done in 15 minutes or less. You’ll be amazed by what you can learn in under three minutes.

Viral videos or popular art form? You’ve seen them before–mashups of videos, images and sounds in new and totally unexpected ways, giving life to content that’s fresh and innovative. Nobody can stop you from making them yourself and sharing your creations to the world. Totalrecut.com provides you with the tools and know-how you need to get into remix culture. Forget the restrictions, scare tactics and issues meant to harass creative individuals. Show the world what you can do, learn about copyright issues and join contests. Let’s make the world a safe place for remixing and spread remix culture. The future depends on it.

There are still many people who do not have Internet at home or in the office. But whether or not you have online access anytime, much of the Internet remains unexplored. What newbies do not understand is that there is more to the Net than webmail and surfing. But how do you get started? Watch The Common Craft Show. “Explanations in Plain English”, creators the LeFevers call it. Using “paperworks” and simple language, the videos familiarize the viewer with different things you can access and do online, such as social media, podcasting, twitter, wikis and blogs. Click here for the videos on blip.tv and here for YouTube.

On September 20 and 21, the Convention Center in Las Vegas will play host to the 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo, the first and only industry-wide event on blogging with the largest blogging conference and trade show filled with seminars and talks from prominent figures in the industry. For bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and new media and social media people, this is the place to meet suppliers and developers, learn how to monetize, promote your blog and build your brand. Marketers, and Media and PR practitioners should also take advantage of the blogging phenomenon and find out how bloggers can bring in business.

Blogger or not, Technorati matters to you. Its authority on everything on the web is hard to question, what with over 112 million blogs on its watchlist. It tracks hyperlinks and gauges popularity according to these. For bloggers, Technorati is useful in looking for trackbacks and links from other sites and blogs through Blog Reactions, Rank and Authority. For the non-blogger, Technorati also has its uses. You can find out the top 100 blogs by fans and by authority. In addition, you can see the listings of the top YouTube videos, movies on IMDB, news item, and music, DVD, games and books on Amazon in the last 48 hours.

Get more from Google through two of their services. First, lend a hand and test-drive Google Experimental, which could just change how the world searches for information. Sign up for one experiment and say what you think of them. There are three running at the moment: Keyboard shortcuts, Keyword suggestions, and Alternate views for search results. The last one has three cool components–view additional info, on a timeline, or on a map. Students will love these.

Google Hot Trends lists the top searches daily; Google Trends lets you search for trends. The latter shows the cities, regions, languages, and trend histories of the trend keywords. It also retrieves news items and graphs searches according to period and region.

Automatic Clearing House (ACH) networks process three kinds of electronic payments: Direct Deposit, Direct Payment and check conversion. You’ve probably encountered these processes in online banking or your employer. Direct Deposit can be used for payroll, expense reimbursements, pension and dividend payments, among others. When you sign up, you can authorize a company to deposit directly to your account at a financial institution. Direct Payments are ideal for mortgage loans, insurance premiums, credit card bills and other regular payments.Check conversion is electronic check processing. With these transactions, you save time, you save paper, and save on late fees, not to mention go to your bank less often. To understand how the system works, visit electronicpayments.org.

The web is constantly changing, never static. If you ever find yourself nostalgic for the web of old or simply feel like looking at previous incarnations of websites, you’re in luck. The Wayback Machine archives 85 billion web pages from 1996 to the recent past. That’s 2 petabytes (or 2 million gigabytes) of data, more than the amount of text in the Library of Congress! All you need is to enter the URL into the textbox and the archived pages will come up. Not all sites are available, though. Password protected sites and those that have excluded themselves from crawls will not appear.

Maybe we spoke too soon last month on the post about Yahoo! and Google. Thanks to Lifehacker and Squidoo, we found out that there are a host of other cool things you can do with Google. You can use Google as a calculator using the characters + – * / to add, substract, multiply and divide. Type n% of n to get percentages and n^n to raise to a power. (Don’t forget to replace n with a number!) You can search for movie reviews at http://www.google.com/movies or create a custom search engine at http://www.google.com/coop/. If you need to know the weather, just type in weather:”areacode” and you’ll get a four-day forecast. Perform currency conversion, check flight status, and stock quotes by inputting just what you need. Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., U.K. and Canada by adding your city and zip code with what you’re looking for. This is one smart search engine.