Just like the recently added support for reviewing other non-Gmail mailboxes from your loved Gmail interface, Google is slowly allowing old Blogger users to switch to the brand new Blogger beta. So, if you are amongst the chosen ones, congrats! You'll see a small blue box in the sidebar of your sideboard, ready to help you through the whole process. And if not, well, you can always start a new blog from scratch and later on, merge this account with your original Blogger account.

The first important change is that, from now on, you'll be using your Google account to enter Blogger. It seems that more and more services (e-mail, blog, chat, RSS feeds, web analytics, docs...) are getting integrated under this single account, until finally one day everything will be google-ized...

Now, back the point. The new Blogger Beta allows users to change their templates even more easily, without the hassle of HTML. The blog's layout, in fact, can be modified by simply dragging and dropping elements on the editor interface. It also includes the long-awaited categories (labels) to organize posts more efficiently. Also, the dashboard has been redesigned to ease blog managing and maintenance.

Beside all these exciting new features, chances are that somewhere in the near future Blogger will produce RSS enclosures and also allow direct video uploading to blogs, as a result, I reckon, of Google's recently acquired toy.

Some years ago, working environments were completely different: smaller, more familiar, with a kind of charming air surrounding desks, water coolers and meeting rooms. Internal communication was just a question of leaving your place and joining the quick chat beside the water cooler for just five minutes, before going back to your daily tasks.

However, things have changed quickly over the last few years. Companies have grown really fast, not only in financial terms, but also in number of workers. New people join the staff everyday and it's harder to make new friends. Those five-minute breaks begin to be scarcer, until one day there's not a single one during a whole working day.

When communication reaches a non-existence level, you know it's time for a change. Most office managers reject the idea of using traditional instant messaging tools such as MSN or Yahoo, mostly because workers end up chatting with friends outside the office instead of answering the dud from accounting. This is why local network based IM applications like Neos have become a more popular solution: they allow workers to exchange messages, files, even media streams... without the temptations of the outer world.

Ever felt the need to urgently share what you were recording on your webcam? Well, the quickest way to do so was saving the video file, logging on to your account in Youtube, filling in a small form, waiting for the video to be uploaded... did we say quickest?

Now Youtube offers a really quick way to share what your eye your webcam sees with the rest of the world. It's called Quick Capture and allows you to record video and save it directly to Youtube's servers, avoiding the tricky, in-between process.

All you have to do is log on to your account, head to the Quick Capture webpage, write a title and small description for your video and click Record. Flash technology will take over your webcam, recording and saving on the fly everything you focus on.

'Power users' may complain about the lack of editing tools but Quick Capture is a nice option for novice video uploaders who don't feel like messing with video-editing software.

Time flies, especially when Christmas is approaching. So, if you don't want to miss a single day in this countdown to family meals, lovely gifts and snow blizzards (where available) take a look at this Advent Calendar powered by Nintendo.

Far from being the typical cardboard calendar ready to hang on the wall, this online Calendar features a Flash-based platform game level for each day between December 1st and December 24th. Your mission consists on collecting all the 24 ice crystal stars spread along each level. If you manage to gather all the 576 stars of the whole calendar, you will unlock a special bonus download.

There are also hidden game files in each level for you to find. Take them to the Lab and you'll receive a nice reward.

RSS feeds have become a fashionable way to stay tuned about anything that happens all around the world. The Internet offers constantly updated information which requires lots of time to be read and assimilated. This is why it's always a good idea to get a summary of the latest headlines with just a single click, instead of having to visit a dozen different websites.

Despite the fact that you may already have a favorite RSS reader, we'd like to show you another possibility to access your daily RSS dose, which is graciously hidden inside Adobe Reader 8, the most recent update of the classic PDF viewer.

This is what you have to do: click the View menu and then choose Review Tracker. In the Subscriptions window that appears, click the RSS button on the left toolbar and then click the Subscribe button to add a feed. Voilà! RSS feeds powered by Acrobat. It doesn't offer many features, but still may be a convenient option for PDF lovers.