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Any Video Converter is a program that will take a large number of video formats and convert them to MPEG-4 for playing on portable devices such a Video iPod or PSP.

Long Time Lost has a fairly clever system for helping to track down people you’ve lost contact with.

Essentially, the site creates a public page for the person you’re looking for like this. Then if/when the person you’re looking for Google’s his or her own name, hopefully the page will show up relatively high in the rankings and the person will visit the page and respond.

There would seem to be a number of problems with his approach. The first is the huge likelihood of name duplication. For example, if someone out there has lost touch with a different Brian Carnell (and there are several people who share my name), they’re going to have a hard time ever having that bubble anywhere near the top of the Google results for that name (since I pretty much own the first few hundred results).

Second, even without the name duplication, it seems unlikely the LongTimeLost.Com page is going to have a very high page rank. Anyone who has ever had to try to find someone using Google has probably noticed that most of the results you tend to get are from genealogy sites which have high page ranks for someone who died 150 years ago with the same name as the person you’re looking for.

Especially given how scary easy it is to use to track down people through online databases (albeit at a small cost), this would seem to have a limited chance at success. But then I could be completely wrong. It would be interesting if the site would publish simple stats of # of people who have clicked on the # of people in the database vs. the number who have clicked on the “hey, that’s me” link.

Regardless, a creative use of Google.

RiffTrax sells downloadable DVD commentaries written and performed by Michael Nelson of MSTK:3000 fame along with a few others.

There are a bunch for sci-fi films, such as “The Matrix” or “Star Wars” and some for films that are as bad as anything spoofed by MSTK:3000. For example, nothing could ever convince me to sit through another viewing of Reign of Fire.

The cost is fairly reasonable — $1.99 to $3.99 per commentary — assuming they’re actually funny.