Ever wonder how many news stories or blogs mention your company or products? Did you see the latest announcement from your chief competitor? Keeping track of news update can be hard at times, especially with the many resources on the web nowadays. You certainly don’t want to visit hundreds of web sites or waste time doing search queries. Look no further, as there is Clip&Copy now.

Clip&Copy is a free news alert, press clipping and media monitoring service. It delivers clips and full text articles with the rights to make copies, post on a web site, or use the content in other ways, via the iCopyright system. The news that matters to you is delivered to your desktop each day. Clip&Copy and iCopyright are services of Data Depth Corporation. Data Depth’s award-winning technology is used by online publishers to market and license their content. You get story headlines and abstracts on the topics you define, such as your company name, your product name, and your competitor’s name. Perhaps you want to track news about your industry or hobbies? Whether it is “Health Care,” or “Classic Cars,” Clip&Copy not only finds and delivers articles to your desktop, it also allows you to make copies and redistribute the stories to others. Sign up is free, quick and easy — simply enter your name, email address and account password. Your news clips will arrive by email each morning.

Clip&Copy delivers story headlines and abstracts from the leading wire services — The Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters — and from hundreds of online newspapers, magazines and trade journals. New publications are added each week.

Recently, WorldTechLogic has been posting about some great niche social networking services on the net, and the list keeps getting bigger and bigger. With the previous MyNoteIT, Stu.Dicio.Us and Famster, now there’s a new service which is targeted specifically for Illustrators. The service is called AmateurIllustrator.

Although named “amateur”, the site is not restricted to “beginner” illustrators only, but also seasoned pros. AmateurIllustrator is named ‘amateur illustrator’ because the word “amateur” means “to do something because you love doing it“. This goes to show you that the name has no pretentions at all. ALL illustrators who are total beginners, as well as seasoned pros, are welcomed to visit and use AmateurIllustrator.

AmateurIllustrator is a social networking made specifically for illustrators, amateurs and seasoned pros alike, to showcase their arts. It was launched on August 19, 2006, and it aims to be a portal for all things art, providing an easy to use personal AND public gallery where you can share your creations and masterpieces with the world, an articles section with tutorials and how-to guides, interviews with seasoned pros, regular illustration news, illustrations of the week, a forum to share your thoughts and blabs, contests and much more.

AmateurIllustrator was started in the summer of 2006 by two illustration students at the University of Lincoln (in the East Midlands of England). It is 100% totally FREE of charge so that anyone from anywhere in the world and of any skill level can take part in creating a great place to go for illustrators. With the great design and nice interface (and lots of potential), we are sure that AmateurIllustrator will become bigger in the future.

On Thursday night, August 17, 2006, YouTube went down on planned maintenance. However, to our surprise, they had a few minor changes to their services. The YouTube Blog describes these changes in details, and one new feature that is definitely worth mentioning is the availability of “Custom Channel URLs”.

YouTube’s Custom Channel URLs’ naming system is similar to that found on the MySpace. With YouTube, you can create your own customized channel url which will be simply “youtube.com/name“. The “name” in “youtube/name” can be your username, or whatever names you want to add there (with the exception of other’s usernames or inappropriate words).

Another update is in the “My Account” page. YouTube has added a dropdown menu of several quick links to your most important things from the “My Account” link in the upper right hand corner. Aside from that, the YouTube Blog also mentioned some minor “cosmetics” change to pretty up some little things here and there on YouTube. An example is the new buttons in embeds and at the end of a video.

Fortunately, that’s not all, according to the YouTube Blog. YouTube is preparing some new features on their site, which will launch in due time.

Be sure to check out WorldTechLogic for more updates in the future!

Recently, Google has won an exclusive deal of becoming the exclusive provider to provide general Web search, site search, and vertical-type searches for MySpace.com and the majority of sites run by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. online division.

The integration of Google’s search and advertising services into MySpace.com and the other Web sites will start in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The deal also stated that Google has the responsibility to generate a revenue-sharing payments of at least $900 million in total to Fox Interactive Media between the beginning of 2007’s first quarter and the end of 2010’s second quarter. In turn, Fox Interactive Media must provide Google with various traffic and other goals set aside by the deal.

Before the deal, MySpace.com used Yahoo’s search engine with sponsored search ads from its network. With Google’s system proven to be more accurate and flexible than Yahoo’s, there was a high probability that News Corp. had been noticing and trying to strike a broader, more profitable deal with Google.

On further note, Google also signed a video-distribution deal with MTV Networks on last Monday, August 7, 2006. In that deal, Google is to distribute ad-supported video content from Viacom International’s MTV Networks to Web sites in its extensive advertising network. This would probably be another area of collaboration between the companies, as Google can distribute its ad-supported content from MTV to targeted Website publishers via News Corp. network.

All and all, this should be interesting to watch!

Microsoft Corp. on June 26, 2006, announced a “try it before you buy it” program allowing people to take an online test-drive of the Microsoft Office 2007 system release. With the online test-drive, people can experience products directly for themselves to learn how the next release can help them better manage documents, organize their work and collaborate with others.

In just minutes, anyone with access to an Internet connection can try out the latest improvements to familiar Microsoft Office applications using sample data to demo editing documents, sending e-mail, and posting to Microsoft Office SharePoint® sites to illustrate real-time collaboration functionality. The system is set up not only with Microsoft Office client applications, but also with server offerings pre-populated with data to allow people to easily experience the new server functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.

This is the first online test-drive made available before the launch of a Microsoft Office 2007 release, and it features 18 product-specific tutorials with step-by-step instructions covering most Office system client products and servers, including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Project Server 2007.

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We’ve got an update today that Rminder has a full support for 37Signals’ amazing web-based organization product - Backpack. Now you can import both Backpack Reminders AND Backpack Calendar events. You can read our previous post for Rminder HERE, and our previous post about Backpack HERE.

Aside from that, Rminder has an interactive individual reminders such as, “Ken would like to invite you to Grace’s party at Spagos, press ‘1′ to confirm, press ‘2′ to decline, or press ‘3′ to connect to Ken now.”

Lastly, Rminder has a powerful API for delivering all types of scheduled voice content to individuals or groups. A self-help guru could send “self-esteem boosters” in his calming voice. A product vendor could notify her loyal customers of hot deals. A popular band could keep their dedicated fans in touch with their events. Even a daughter can send a reminder on how she love her dad and want him to quit on smoking! The possibility is endless!

Thanks to Jerry Fan for this update.

On August 1, 2006, Google Analytics Blog announces that Google Analytics can now track multiple subdomains and different parts of a website. Now, you can create profiles for your subdomains or any parts of your website. The default number of profiles have been increased from 5 to 10.

A website profile is essentially a set of rules that define the reports that you see. Generally, a website profile corresponds with a domain - you’ll have one profile per domain, so that you can view reports for each domain separately.

You can also use profiles to track subdomains separately, by setting up filters on the profile to return data only from that subdomain. Google Analytics has provided instructions on setting this up - please read this page on “How to track different subdomains in separate profiles“.

If you would like to track sections of a site, you can again create multiple profiles and use filters to return the applicable data. Please read this page on “How to track different parts of your websites separately“.

Profiles are also useful for controlling report access. As the types of reports available for a profile are defined with the profile’s settings, you may create two or more profiles for a domain, each with a different set of reports. Assigning users to the appropriate profile will ensure that they are viewing only those reports that apply to them. Please read this page on “How to restrict a user’s access to certain domains or reports”.

For Adwords accounts, however, you can only link 1 account to 1 Google Analytics account, so if you have multiple AdWords accounts (often for separate sites), please create a unique Google Analytics account for each AdWords account.

Currently, Google Analytics is offered by invitation only. You can request for a Google Analytics account HERE!

Lycos announces that their beta email service, Lycos Mail, now offers up to 3 GB of FREE storage and allows “unlimited” size of attachments to be sent and received. This move by Lycos makes the competition in email service a bit more interesting. Gmail currently has 2.75 GB of storage, Yahoo! at 1 GB, and Hotmail at 250 MB (for selected countries - way behind the others) and most limit attachments up to 10 MB.

The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days. This limit, however, will be removed should you choose the signup with the Lycos Mail Account Preservation Plan ($ 5.95 /year). Furthermore, for $ 19.95/year, Lycos Mail Plus Plan will get you a whopping 5 GB of storage + a POP3 Access.

Comparing to Gmail with its chat and other Google services integration features, Lycos Mail seems to be left behind. This remains to be seen in the future as Lycos Mail develops. Be sure to check out Lycos Mail with its FREE 3 GB storage and unlimited attachments sendings/receivings.