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Do you find reading news boring? How about adding some flare to it? Well, MSNBC is trying exactly that.

MSNBC has launched new visual news reader called Spectra that makes reading news a lot more entertaining.

It’s a flash based reader that shows news in a 3D fashion. You can choose different channels (e.g top news, international, US, Iraq..etc) and add to your reading queue.

Spectra

This countdown (see left) was generated by this online tool. You can set any date, you can also choose background and text colors. Finally you can give it a descriptive name (eg. new year).

Once you press generate code, it will give you a flash code. You can then paste this code into your website/blog. I have noticed that there is a small advertisement text below the countdown. In my case it was about “payday loans”. I have removed it. Otherwise, I think it’s a great looking countdown.

www.justsayhi.com/bb/countdown

Ray at BlogPerfume.com informed me that he has developed a nice free tool called Feed Analysis v1.0 that can analyze your feedburner stats in a more visually appealing manner (see screenshots below). It will allow you to view number of RSS subscribers, daily hits, views, clicks, stats for the days of the week etc.

In order to use this tool, first you need to export your FeedBurner stats as a CSV file (see screenshot below).

Then go to www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/ and upload your file and press Generate Report button (see below)

After that, you will be displayed your report on the same page with different graphs and charts similar to the ones shown above.

PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. Graphs that are similar to those of Google Analytics.

To create your own graphs with your own data, all you need to do is, download PHP/SWF Charts and place charts.swf, charts.php, and charts_library anywhere on your web server.

You need to describe your data in the table form in your php file. For example table like this:

	2001	2002	2003	2004
Region A	5	10	30	63
Region B	100	20	65	55
Region C	56	21	5	90

should be described in your php file like this:

< ?php
include "charts.php";

//the chart's data
$chart [ 'chart_data' ] = array ( array ( "", "2001", "2002", "2003", "2004" ),
array ( "Region A", 5, 10, 30, 63 ),
array ( "Region B", 100, 20, 65, 55 ),
array ( "Region C", 56, 21, 5, 90 )
);

//send the new data to charts.swf
SendChartData ( $chart );

?>

which will create a graph like this:

You can also create other types of graphs, such as:

Line, Column, Stacked Column, Floating Column, 3D Column, Stacked 3D Column, Parallel 3D, Column, Pie, 3D Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Floating Bar, Area, Stacked Area, Candlestick, Scatter, and Polar. You can see samples for all of these at the PHP/SWF Charts Gallery page.

www.maani.us/charts/index.php

Remember the Polar Clock that I blogged here? Now the developer has introduced a screensaver version for Mac and Windows, very smart idea indeed.

I have downloaded and installed on my PC, it’s perfect! You can download it here. See online version here.

Go2Web2.0 is a Web2.0 sites directory that is done in Flash. It has tons and tons of Web2.0 sites. You can view the sites by tag, name, or keyword. www.go2web20.net