websnapr is a screenshot service that lets you post screenshots to your by simply referencing the image url in your content. The image above is a websnapr screenshot.

After you register for a developer key, you will be able to provide access to up to 250,000 screenshots every 30 days. Each screenshot includes some text in the bottom right corner reading, "powered by websnapr." For higher volume usage or white labeled service, you can pay for a premium account.

Thanks, Victor.

Apture is a new web service that allows you to provide contextual links using an AJAX layer to display content from sites such as wikipedia. So when you see the little icons next to terms (like the AJAX and Wikipedia links) you can click those links to view content from Wikipedia. Nice.

Mollom public beta launches today. This is the web services developed by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen that works to prevent comment and contact form spam. It's been running on this site and konigi for the past several months and works a charm. Check it out.

The new iPaper interface for documents hosted on Scribd is pretty awesome. Their FAQ describes what's different about iPaper:

Unlike traditional document formats, iPaper is viewed inside a Web browser and doesn't require additional software to view it. At 100 KB the iPaper application is about 1/1000th the size of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software, making it an incredibly fast way to view documents. Despite the tiny size, iPaper integrates Scribd’s social features, like emailing and embedding. iPaper' security system allows content owners to protect their work without clumsy DRM solutions. iPaper also builds on the rich features of PDF, including full text search, copy/paste functionality, view modes, and zoom.

I moved all of the presentations found in my Publications section over to Scribd. There's an example below. Click the square icon in the upper right corner to expand iPaper to full browser size. From there you'll get access to all of the following features in the top control bar:

• link to the original document on Scribd
• email a link to the document
• copy the embed code or permalink
• view document info
• print
• view document in list, book or slide mode
• zoom
• previous/next navigation
• switch from thumbnail view to full page view
• search the text in the document
• select text

Scribd also allows document owners to share the revenue from Adsense clicks that it places between slides/pages of your document. This works better when the slides are embedded at large sizes or when viewed in full screen, where the Adsense text is legible.

Scribd's Flash player is really turning out to be a versatile application, with the ability to serve up most document formats and with an excellent set of user controllable features in the embedded player. Slideshare has some catching up to do.

Google announced their Custom Search Engine Beta. Like the similar Rollyo service, Google CSE allows you to specify the sites you want searched. You can also tell the CSE to search the entire Google index, but give weight to those sites. It also gives you the option of excluding sites. You can also use patterns to specify parts of sites, e.g. to filter out urls including certain words.

There is an option to include the search form and results in your own site. To see that in action check out this job search page on my site.

One of the nicer features is refinement labels. This allows you to tag sites with a descriptive label that can be used to refine results. If, for example, you label sites in your set using facets, e.g. subject, type, etc., then those can be used to narrow the result set.

You can see the CSE I'm playing with for UX-related sites to see how this works (e.g. search for "sparklines"):

Or try this search of some of the newish niche web design/development job sites:

I've made these CSEs open so anyone can contribute to them by adding other UX-related sites to the list. I've also set the CSEs to limit to the sites specified. I tried with the option to search all of Google, but I noticed a little noise because many of the results were outside of the UX scope. It's simple enough, I suppose, to expand the search by clicking the "Web" radio.

I'm not sure how much I'll actually use this. I stopped using Rollyo after playing with it for a few days. But the added refinement functionalities make this service a bit more useful to me.

Got email today about The Amazon Affiliates aStore Beta, which will let affiliates create quick and dirty stores using Amazon's inventory. Their design tool lets you select featured products and then use keywords to add categories of products. Then you can modify the colors and point people to the store or serve in an iframe.

Here's the nice design interface. Looks a bit like a wireframe.

I'd been thinking about separating my cycling blog and events calendar from urlgreyhot, so I quickly threw together a cycling aStore to see how it works. Check it out at LOVE+SPROCKETS.

Pretty quick. Took me about an hour to throw that together.

I like the sound of Amazon's new S3 Simple Storage Service. I'm thinking this could be like a small/med business or consumer version of Akamai's Media Delivery service. With Amazon's model, you pay for what you use -- the amount of storage and bandwidth -- and you get access to Amazon's storage facilities, which should give you world class delivery speed and uptime.

Large business sites often use a service like Akamai's to handle the delivery of Media because the company can help offload the server demand for large bandwidth-consuming media, thus making sites load quicker. The "Akamized" site can then focus on delivery of content while Akamai's beefy and super fast servers fill in the media. The Amazon S3 service can be a boon to popular independent sites that are delivering rich media including audio and video, e.g. podcasts and streamcasts and you only pay for what you use. Very good stuff if you become popular and your little web host doesn't give you the bandwidth, storage and delivery you may need.