News highlights at one of the most popular sites on the web

• The ‘Drudge Report’ highlights some of the top stories from around the world in a basic & quick to read format
• Its got a HUGE readership: over 15 million hits in the past 24 hours!!! and over 4.5 BILLION hits in the past year

Cut and paste any part of your screen with Snippy (freeware)

• This tiny little freeware utility lets you cut and paste any part of your screen
• You can cut rectangle/squares, or do freehand cut and pasting
• You can cut with/without borders and define border thickness + colour
• V Cool 🙂

AWESOME flash video!! ‘Animator v’s animation II’ (Matrix’esque)

• Top ranked flash video of all time at ‘Newgrounds.com’! – this video is Very cool 🙂
• Click the link above, then click on the ‘Watch this movie’ icon to see it

Blogging for profit – get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Get rid of headaches, relax, and more with ‘Brainwave Generator’

• Free (limited version) program that lets you play computer generated sounds that are designed for e.g. getting rid of headaches (worked for me), relaxing, focusing attention etc
• You can also create your own tracks (the interface takes a bit of getting used to – let me know if you want any help on this)
• If you get the full version, you can download a ton of extra tracks that people have created themselves
• WARNING! – certain people shouldn’t use the program (see bottom of page) e.g. those with pacemakers
• You can read the background theory for the software here

BBC’s ‘ten things we didn’t know last week’

• The BBC do a weekly magazine item listing ’10 things we didn’t know last week – you can see the archive here
• Some examples… ‘Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell is the fourth bestselling book of the 20th Century, after the Bible, the Koran and Mao’s Little Red Book’
• ‘We each get a completely new skeleton every 10 years, because of cell renewal’
• ‘Spiralling obesity rates are forcing councils to upgrade their crematoria, to take wider coffins.’
• ‘It is cheaper to ship waste from London to Shenzen in China than it is to send it by road from London to Manchester.’

New Tolkien novel goes on sale – The Children of Hurin

• Tolkien’s son has completed a book from some of his dad(JRR Tolkien)’s manuscripts – see more at the BBC
• The book is on sale now

Very cute and funny kitten pics

• Some very funny/cute pics from ICanHasCheezburger
• In case you’ve never heard of the site (how?!?) – it seems to be top/almost top of the ‘today’s hottest blogs’ section at wordpress every day!

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Share big files with a ‘Box.net’ widget

• WordPress have just joined forces with Box.net to give us a cool widget to let people download big files
• You can see an example and learn more here

The rich getting richer on the back of the poor – sculpture pic

– Picture of a sculpture in Ringkobing (picture/sculpture says it all)

– BBC have a very relevant article about the richer getting even richer!?!?!

– There are lots of other cool/funny sculpture pics at the site e.g. Man at Work

People sharing their secrets anonymously by post card…

– VERY cool site where people send in postcards with their secrets written on the back
– Some are quite intense/adult in nature (you have been warned!)
– Cards are usually done in quite an arty way
– Site claims it is ‘the largest advertisement-free Blog on the Web’ (hit counter shows 74 million + visitors)

Concert Tickets… peer-to-peer style

*Click here for concert tickets site (StubHub)*
StubHub is a site that lets you buy and sell concert tickets (and sports/theatre tickets) online. Its a peer-to-peer style system a bit like e-bay (in fact was bought by E-Bay in Jan this year,) so you also get the security of a big company being involved in the buying/selling.

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! – you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO – there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ‘social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here 🙂 **

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” – this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?”

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Blog marketing – get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Its a small world – video

Very cool video about how small the world is. Not your normal kind of ‘its a small world’ – this video shows how small the earth is in comparison to other planets and stars (almost 100,000 views and 4 star rated at YouTube.)

The pleasure of finding things out

You can see this and other snippets from a Richard Feynman interview on the BBC Horizon Webiste. You can also see the full interview (in 6 parts) at YouTube. The sound’s out of sync with the picture, but the interview is still very good.

Online checkers with power-ups

Awesome 2 player web based ‘checkers’ game with tons of power ups and squares that can be raised and lowered (you’ll see what I mean.) This game could get to be VERY addictive 😀

Click here for the quick video tutorial.

To get started, enter a guest name, click ‘start’, then click on a few names in the opponents box and someone should give you a game fairly quickly.

Have you caught the latest bug?

‘Who is sick?’ is a site where users record their illnesses. The data gets plotted on a Google map so, for example, you can see if you’re the victim of the latest bug going around. There’s a bar chart showing whether reports of different types of sickness are growing or falling, various search functions and a discussion forum. The site’s still in its infancy but this could well be an interesting site to come back to once its been going for a while. Remember to ‘Digg’ it up if you like it 🙂

Online ‘Peer to peer’ style loans

There are at least 2 websites on the go at the moment that facilitate a ‘peer to peer’ style lending & borrowing system. The UK site is called Zopa, and the US site, Propser. ‘Prosper’ has had a whole host of positive press coverage, and Zopa also looks to have been highly rated, e.g. ‘What Investment’ magazine rated it product of the month in Aug ’06.

Does anyone have any experience of these sites?.. This seems like a great idea to me.

Funny cartoon of a typical internet argument

Very funny comic stip 🙂 – this is probably a familiar sight (in some form or another) to most people out there…

Funny comic strip – Bush and Nixon comparison

Check out this little funny… (not a full comic, just a little one pager)