Every now and then, mainly when I am away from the office during some type of holiday, I like to make a generic blog post because of my distance from real news and my reluctance to turn to twitter when I’m looking after my little one. That’s why I go generic, because if I get dragged away from my keyboard for 10 mins, or several hours, I wont have lost my place.

That’s where lists come in, because I have already written this list, it’s currently sat at the bottom of the post and just needs some filling.

Let me start by saying this isn’t an exhaustive list, nor is it one which will work for everyone, it’s just the 5 things I do from time to time to get a bit more traffic to this site. We’re not talking about long term traffic here either, we’re talking about getting traffic in really quick, so within a day or two. The problem with this approach is that the traffic will disapear as quickly as it came.

Advertise

This is the only option on my list which may leave you out of pocket. For a quick injection of traffic, get an adsense or adbrite account and advertise what you do. Set you PPC as low as you want, because although you may not be on the top of every link group just being there will get you some traffic and unless you are selling something (not just showing adverts) it will very quickly become a losing battle. Never EVER buy traffic, people who click on advertising links are more likely to stay on your site for a click or two, ut if you buy traffic all you are getting is views of your homepage - people close popups without looking so the rule here is make them click and they will read.

Give something away

A couple of months ago I gave away a 3 month Xbox live Gold Card. The card cost me £14.99, and I ran the post with extra advertising. There were 4 high paying ads on the same page as the giveaway, and you had to click through the homepage (with 3 ads) to get to the signup form. This means that I had 7 ad views per interested person, and although I only had 20-30 submissions, 140,000 people visited the form, which means I garnered 980,000 Real person ad views. Now, lets say, each ad was running at $0.05 CPM, that’s $49 - £14.99 - so I very quickly built traffic and made some money out of it.

Comment bait

This is something I’ve never done, but have seen it done with some success in friends blogs You simply write a post which is totally out of keeping with what you believe, and what your readers believe, causing so much outrage that people feel compelled to comment. For this you need some traffic, but as soon as people start commenting more will come. It’s really amazing how much people online want to argue.

Get on Digg

It’s pretty hard to get on the front page of Digg, but if you do (it’s something like 50 diggs in 24 hours) but if you do (by writing an informative, fun or otherwise useful post) you’ll find a massive increase in traffic. Known as the Digg effect, unless you have a good webhost you may find your account breaks their servers under the strain of thousands of simultaneous users. The upside to this, is at least you’ll know you need to change hosts

Make a list

If there is one thing the internet likes more than an argument, it’s a list. Make a unique, funny or useful list, that isn’t just plaguarised, and the traffic will come. Mainly from search engines it’s true, but you never know - Digg may take a liking to you.

Finally launched, and labelled XXL Broadband, the fastest speeds available in the UK are once again with Virgin media.

Be warned though, it’s not cheap. For Virgin Media Phone customers (Size M) its an additional £35 a month, and for those only taking the Broadband be prepared to shell out £51 a month.

I think I may be sticking with XL for the time being then.

Microsoft have released Windows Vista and 2008 Server Service Pack 2 Beta today, as one file services both operating systems.

More info and a link to download can be found below

Here’s your chance to take part in one of Microsoft’s traditions: The Customer Preview Program, where you can play an integral part in our development process. Check out the Customer Preview Program (CPP) for Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. This is a traditional service pack release containing all cumulative security updates available since the Windows Vista SP1 release in March 2008; however, either Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 is a prerequisite for installing this service pack. What makes the Windows Vista SP2 release unique is that it is a single service pack for both client and server operating systems. Since the code base for Windows Vista is shared with Windows Server 2008, a single update can be deployed across your full infrastructure.

Bopaboo is a new startup company which allows you to upload your MP3 files and, if you’re American at least, excercise your right of first sale.

This service allows you to set your own prices, but of course takes its own cut. How they prevent you from selling multiple copies of the same song has yet to be seen, as has whether the service will be alive much longer than a week.

Personally I feel this is simply baiting the music industry into taking action, how it was decided that this service is a good idea I just don’t know. You’d have hoped that those starting up websites such as this would have thought about all future legal possibilities - but it seems in this case that all those in charge of the site are after is a quick buck. If anything this service is doing more harm to the case of DRM free music than anything else.

Via

Hey, you’ve got a mobile phone right? And I see you use operator xyz! To top it all off, you live near here also - that’s just great. I’d like £50 from you please.

I hear that someone used a mobile phone, near here on operator xyz to download porn. I’m only asking for £50 so that I can cover the costs of finding proof that it was you if I need to. Oh, and don’t bother denying it, or we’ll up the cost - take you to court (for watching in public) and tell the whole world you watch porn on your mobile - if it turns out you don’t, who’s going to care, you’ve already been tarred with the dodgy brush.

I think you’ll all agree, that sexy piece of fiction (I should get a job on Eastenders I reckon) above is typical of blackmail - so why when a company does the same is it not extortion?

Say this company discovers someone downloading a film, lets call it Furmy Ackers, but they weren’t quite sure who it was downloading this piece of movie going art. They know who the ISP was, and know where about’s in the country the user was (as they have the IP), and luckily for them the ISP has given them the names and addresses of pretty much every user in the area of the download. So what happenes when Davenport Lyons send out hundreds of letters saying that users’ have downloaded porn, and unless they stump up £500 to cover the costs of actually making sure they’ll be taken to court? Do they get hit for extorion? Well of course not…

Well, not yet at least. The Register is reporting that Which? has decided that this form of tomfoolery is not on:

 

Lawyers for the consumer rights lobby Which? have filed an official complaint to the body that regulates solicitors over Davenport Lyons’ campaign of letters alleging illegal filesharing.

For several months Davenport Lyons has been sending letters to individuals accusing them of pirating videogames via peer-to-peer networks, and demanding £500 on behalf of rights holders. The London-based law firm recently branched out into threats on behalf of producers of hardcore gay porn.

 

We’ll obviously keep you abreast of all the current news in relation to this story.

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It seems as though I can’t catch a break with my hosting. Years ago I used a small UK firm to host my sites, they were perfect for what I needed at the time but moved accross to oneandone.co.uk when my needs became a little more than they could handle. I wont name that company here because I’m pretty sure they’re currently not as good as they once were, but I was very happy with the time I spent there.

Oneandone were good for about a year, and then I moved from shared hosting to a virtual server. The server I was on apparently wasn’t very good, giving me 2-3 hours of downtime every day. Customer services were OK, but everytime I had my sites moved from one server to another (one which could stay up an entire day) some other CS rep would move everything back - it was as if one hand didn’t quite know what the other was doing. The problem for me here was that I was paying £50 a month for this hosting, and it was doing me no favours.

So I moved.

I moved to UK2.net, which as anyone following me on twitter (@cymru2000), will know has been causing some major problems.

The first major issue I had was right after sign-up - it took them days to configure their DNS, mainly because they only update their records once a day (I think this has now changed, in fairness). After getting everything up and running, and the site functional again, my account got suspended.

Not even a week after moving to them I got suspended, and this is where my issue with UK2 lies more than anywhere else, they don’t tell you that you’ve been suspended - you have to tell them - but you cannot access anything to do with your account in the meantime. 12 hours after suspension, for using more than 5% CPU in an undefined time, and with no way of monitoring useage myself, I got my account back - but they had broken the DNS on another 2 of my domains, so back to CS to fix it. Credit to them, this DNS issue was fixed in super quick time, but it shouldn’t have really happened in the first place.

Everything is fine for about a month, and then suddenly I can’t access my sites from work. Emails and tickets back and forth between CS an myself ensue, with CS blaming my net connection until I told them I could TOR to it from the same location, to which thy told me I risked being banned for using “hackers tools”. It turns out, after 2 weeks of no access from work, that they had infact banned my IP address as it had been accessing the site too frequently. This was not a good sign, as if they banned me from my own site for sitting here most of the day not doing much, then what chance does google reader have?

This is the point at which I started researching new providers, before UK2 could take my sites down anymore.

About a month ago I started moving the hosting of BlueNosedDog to MediaTemple.net. They seem to have a fantastic track record, and although they have some rocky downtime’s they are at least honest about it and get your sites moved to more stable hosting as they can. I finished the move about 2 weeks ago, and (for this site at least) have only been using UK2.net for the DNS and mail. Last week, moving to MediaTeple seemed to pay off, fo no reason whatsoever I started receiving hundreds of hits a minute to one particular post, and although I use a lot of caching here SQL was still taking up more CPU than I’m allowed, luckily MediaTemple allow for this up to twice a month, and scaled my databases onto a dedicated host bringing 5 minutes downtime overall - but leaving my site useable - I was very very pleased.

But that didn’t last too long.

One of my other sites allows people to sign up and post their own content, with little more than an email confirmation. It gets spammed quite often, but I clear it up everyday and have banned over 3,000 users in the last month. It turns out that someone has complained about this domain to UK2, who suspended my account again. Now this shouldn’t be a problem, but along with suspending the account they reset the DNS on this site and susended it also! Several late night calls into CS have brought this site back, but there’s no news on the other, and since my account is yet again suspended there is nothing I can do about it.

There is a moral to this story, and it’s either, do your homework, or you get what you pay for. I’d very much recommend you read all the terms and conditions with any host you sign up with, as if they turn out to be anything like UK2’s, you may find your new shiny host can arbitrarily suspend you - AND give you not notice of it.

Although I’ve been venting my spleen recently at YouTube, it looks like they may have just implemented a change for the better.

On those few videos which don’t have bars down either side, and which used to have “watch in high quality” links, YouTube has changed the links to “watch Hi-Def”.

Now I haven’t had the chance to see whether it truly is a hi-def image, but I’ve got to admit the quality took even me by surprise.

More of the same please YouTube, and I may stop using your competitors.

Not content with making it’s onsite video’s fugly, by adding black bars to non widescreen uploads YouTube are at it again, this time adding a ludicrously useful (ummm?) search bar to the top of off-site embedded videos.

Many are of the opinion this is Googles way of getting even more data off its users for its main business (selling you ads). They may be right there, but again the calls are coming in pointing out that YouTubes better quality competitors, DailyMotion and Vimeo f.ex don’t do this sort of crap.

Sorry for getting a little angy, but youtube isn’s what it once was.

We thought that we should tell you , because Amazon don’t seem to be, but Amazon UK has now launched the same MP3 service that our friends over the pond have been getting the benefits of for the last few months. Singles start at 59p, albums at £3 and there are over 3,000,000 tracks available right now. Oh and did we mention they’re DRM free MP3’s encoded at 256kbps - and that Amazon allow you to download directly into your iTunes library. Sexy eh?

The very impressive startup, animoto, has just launched a new Christmas themed link n their website which allows you to turn your animated picture slideshows into Christmassy animated picture slideshows. It does this by giving you a choice of backgrounds and intro / outro sequences. You still need to come up with the relevent imagery and music though.

For those that don’t know, animoto is a little site which was funded by amazon (for an undisclosed fee) which creates clever little animations out of your pictures. It makes montages so easy and professional looking that it’s almost worth the $30 a year fee. See below for both a demonstration of the site (which is permanently in my favourites) along with the new Christmas skinning.

http://animoto.com/play/LwttyHU4ME8mqFN5LUtp8g/greetings/holidays2008

Raven Zachary over at radar.oreilly.com reports something of a milestone for Apple which I didn’t even know they were close to hitting.  AppShopper and 148Apps, 2 services which track the App Store, have totted up over 10,000 individual apps for sale. Now the actual number currently up for sale is a little lower than this due to dicontinued products, and those which were pulled for various reasons, but it’s still a pretty high number given how long the service has been alive.

Techcrunch have also covered this story in much more detail

A new government database kicks off production in the next month or so. It will detail names and addresses, schools immediate adult contacts and more basic data for all children in the UK. That’s 11 million children, and it’s going to cost us, the taxpayer, £240 Million. Thats a total cost per head of just over £21.8 Million. That’s a pretty damn big number.

Now, please, don’t get me wrong. I understand the benefits of multiple parties having access to the most up-to-date information on one of our most velnerable groups, and I think it’s important to do whatever needs to be done to help protect our childrens safety. As a father of a 15 month old I truly cannot understand the way people can harm their children - especially babies. I also recognise the arguments against such a database, it will mean that our health workers, social services, doctors, teachers and all that come into contact with our children have less time to do just that - come in contact with our children, this post however is not to discuss the merits of the system but the price which we as taxpayers have to pay for what adds up to little more than a contacts database.

I’d very much like to see the tendering process for this project, and why it was decided that £240 Million is good value for money. I’d like to see what we’re to get for that money and exactly where the money is going to end up. Getting the data into the database initially is going to cost quite a bit, I recognise that, but let’s have a look at how much this would have cost if we were to use an internet mentality over it.

The whole database has to be accessible UK wide, so the cheapest way of doing this would be over the internet. Dedicated hosting from a top provider would cost no more than £500 per month, I very much doubt that this system would need much more than that as it is a simple database after all - and you may have noticed I am in no way looking at the cheapest dedicated hosting you can buy. The software to run the database doesn’t need to be anything special, so let’s use MySQL - but cluster it, so thats an extra £100 a month. That should be able to handle the limited requests the 50,000 people with access to the system are likely to be loading it with. We can use the rest of LAMP to throw webpages at people, and since the £500 server is already clustered we’ll not need much else hardware or software wise. Now for the programming. This is a big project, so lets make sure we get it right, we could mess about with some Open Source software, make it do what we want, but it may be best to make up your own system. £1,000 a month for maintenance, and a one off of £120,000 should do it, I don’t believe that it should take more than 6 months to write the software and test it thoroughly.

So, what’s next? Well, we need to load up the existing data. 11 million children, so lets say 100 Million rows - gives us some room to play in. Let’s also give ourselves 4 months to get the data in, use the first 2 months of the software timescale to setup the database you see, that would mean we have to load up nearly 1.2 Million rows a day. Let’s also assume the worst case, all these rows need to be manually entered. Let’s employ 5,000 people to do it, that’s 230 ish rows per day per person. I’m going to pay those people £7.00 an hour, for 8 hours a day, because I’m nice and don’t think the minimum wage is enough. So that’s a £24 Million wage bill, plus £15k for the people running payroll, we’ll have 2 of them and another 20k per HR person (3 should do it).

What’s the total? £24.5 Million. Now since we’re a private company let’s double the figure, just in case, and we get £59 Million, well we may as well round it to £60 Million eh?

So, we could build a new national database, take 15,000 people and employ them for months during a recession and hit a tight 6 month deadline and still cost 1/4 of the amount being spent. The problem is though, £60 Million is so much less than the “best” other quote that we’re likely to now win the business for being too cheap… And that my friends is the real truth of this story, to win any government business you have to be prepared to rip the taxpayer off, because otherwise you’ll just be seen as a joke.

UK2.net has been on a capping spree again, apparently going over 5% usage at any point for any amount of time is really bad and results in your account being suspended. This wouldn’t be a problem if they were running nearly modern servers, but the fact is we only had 90 people active at the time.

We have moved hosts to MediaTemple.net. The switch has been pretty painless, took less than 2 hours. We are having some image cahing issues, which we’re working on now, but would really like to know about anything else not working at the moment.

I’ll give a full post soon, after the weekend maybe, detailing the reasons for the swap and hopefully letting you know how mt is getting on with BND :)

Today as i was surfing the net, i stumbled across a website listing all the very latest in tech gear. Apparantly the “Epoc Emotiv” is the future of all gaming technology. By this time you may be wondering, what’s so special about this? Two words. “Hands Free”.
The Epoc Emotiv is a headset that taps into the lobes of your brain, and allows you to move everything telekineticly.

The features of this that will be appearing in the first few Emotiv game titles will include the ability to manipulate and control objects by thought, weilg amazing superpowers just by thinking about them, creatures in games will react to your facial expressions and enviroments will change due to your emotional state. Can you imagine what it would be like if this was made for a game like Fable?

But the applications for this are not just for gaming, there is computing applications for this, imagine no more mouse or keyboard. This (BCI) could even be the key of giving speech to people that can’t who suffer from ALS.

University of Ulster video gaming lecturer Darryl Charles told CNN he was also uncertain whether Emotiv’s technology would take off.

“It’s a little bit harder to see. It’s quite a complex thing to force your thought on a television screen.”

However, Emotiv’s Le strongly defended the headset, saying it “works on a vast majority of people and can adapt to a wide variety of thought patterns. Emotiv has carried out tests with hundreds of people and so far we have had success on every single person,” Le said.

The website for this piece of amazing technology is www.emotiv.com, pre order one of these amazing things for the mere price of $299

After only 6 months, the latest version of Fedora has been released to the masses, offering a plethora of updates and upgrades there’s very little reason left to be stuck on an older version.

Areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security received the greatest updates. The new virtualization features include the ability to manage virtual hosts and storage remotely, which should appeal to network administrators with fragmented teams. “These features combine to make administration of remote hosts much easier, even in cases where direct physical access is limited or non-existent,” the Fedora Team said in a recent blog post on Red Hat’s Web site.

Users can now also share their Internet connection with others, and Fedora 10 can also start up faster, thanks to a new graphical boot system dubbed Plymouth .

Security improvements include the addition of SecTool, an auditing and detection kit.

Red Hat has also enhanced PackageKit, a software installation and updating system that debuted in Fedora 9 .

“In Fedora 10, PackageKit now detects when the user opens an audio or video media file, and offers to search for codecs used to play that file,” the Fedora Team said in a blog post. “With the user’s authorization, it searches all the software repositories configured on the Fedora 10 system, installs what is needed, and the media begins to play.” Down the road, this capability will be extended to areas like fonts and applications.

In addition, Fedora 10 has a revamped audio system that uses less power; support for “a vast array” of Webcams; improved printing capabilities; and “support for more hardware than any other operating system.”

If you’ve read this far then we also have a little something to let you into. As part of trials to increase traffic and to test the new Amazon Cloudfront CDN we’ll be hosting a mirror of the main ISO ditribution of Fedora 10, and in the future even more software. So, if you’d like to download the Live CD and Installation disk for Fedora 10 you may do so by clicking here. Just please let us know your download speeds in the comments, and how they compare to other sites.

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YouTube has decided that for the vast majority of us black bars are the next big thing. Thats right, not only do we have to put up with poor “high quality” compared to most other online video providers, but they have decided to make those videos widescreen.

For some this will be a bit of a boon. The sale of widescreen video cameras is accelerating for example, so all of those NOT uploading happy slapper videos from their mobile will be well serviced. Yet the cynical in me is screaming that there may be another reason for YouTube going widescreen. Now the home of some movies, and a growing number of promo videos (read ads) maybe YouTube going widescreen has more to do with advertising dollars than user needs.

Now I know that YouTube is massively popular, but the lack of “optional” widescreen and the proliferation of tacky advertising, alongside the lack of real “high quality” and no live streaming - and that’s before considering the attitude of most of the regular commentators - surely some, if not most, semi-serious video bloggers (f.ex) will be moving away from them and onto other platforms, such as blip.tv, justin.tv and my personal favourite mogulus.com?

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::Updated below:: Over the weekend some customers were reporting that their Sky + boxes were freezing and/or not letting them into the programme planner and therefore being unable to user the PVR to do and VR[ing?] leaving them simply p’d.

It seems as though sky knows about the problem though, as one subscriber was given the following advice after informing customer services of their issue:

• Put Sky+ box into standby
• Take out viewing card
• Power off at mains
• Power on (after 10-20 seconds)
• Press on button after 30 seconds or so.
• Planner then available
• Reinsert viewing card
• Wait for update to channels
• Planner still okay

Although this fix seems to be working for most users, some are saying that the problem comes back after only a few hours. We have called Sky for an official response and were told that more details on the issue would be presented later this afternoon.

We’ll keep you updated.

::Edit:: I know the picture used is of a SKY HD box, but it’s all I could find that was high enough res.

We regularly upgrade the software in Sky+ boxes as part of routine maintenance and product enhancements. All software is tested rigorously against each hardware type of the box before being downloaded to customers’ boxes.

We’re investigating reports from a small number of Sky+ customers whose boxes are experiencing problems following a recent software update. Although our investigation is continuing, the problem appears to be isolated to a small minority of owners of a particular type of box, which in turn represents about 5 per cent of all Sky+ boxes. After reviewing call centre data and customer feedback, it appears that in the vast majority of cases the boxes concerned have had their hard disk drive changed for a non-standard component.

While our investigation continues, we are reviewing whether to reverse the software update to provide a short-term fix for the affected boxes. We’ll consider longer-term steps once we’ve confirmed the scope of the problem.

Amazon Logo

Finally, after a couple month of beta, Amazon have launched their version of a Content Deliver Network, or CDN.

For those that don’t know, a CDN is a series of “edge” servers which host a copy of a central file and delivers the version of the file which is closest to the user which theoretically makes everything a little faster.

I works alongside S3, amazons storage network, with your S3 bucket holding the original file. This S3 bucket can be assigned an Amazon URL (123xyz.cloudfront.net) or you can CNAME from your own domain, and replicates through several edge locations basically caching your file for speedier delivery to your users.

The network has a couple of problems, unlike Limelight and the like, Cloudfront caches a copy of your file for an unspecified period of time, so isn’t useful for delivering content which changes often. It also has a limited number of edge locations, for now, meaning that - especially for those in the far east and Australia - the nearest location to you may not be much closer than the source.

For those in Europe and North America however, coverage is much better, meaning that for static files (such as the images in this post) someone in Germany will be receiving a different version of the file to sommeone in New York and different again to someone in San Francisco. This means that page load for all three of these users will be less than through the hosting this site is primarily on - good times.

The pricing is based on the now famous Amazon PAYG formula.

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee.

United States Edge Locations

Data Transfer
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.120 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.090 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.010 per 10,000 GET requests

European Edge Locations

Data Transfer
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.120 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.090 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET requests

Hong Kong Edge Locations

Data Transfer
$0.210 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.140 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET requests

Japan Edge Locations

Data Transfer
$0.221 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.168 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.147 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.137 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.013 per 10,000 GET requests

We charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the edge location where your content is served. Usage tiers for data transfer are measured separately for each geographic region. The prices above are exclusive of applicable taxes, fees, or similar governmental changes, if any exists, except as otherwise noted.

Origin Server
Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. You will be charged separately at regular rates for Amazon S3 usage, including “origin fetches” - data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations.

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Instead of fighting a losing battle, the Monty Python team have decided to not only compete with the thousands of fans that upload their videos, but to do so on their terms. Monty Python have launched their own youtube channel, which features high quality versions of all their shows and sketches with the hope that these unlimited assets (which everyone seems to be sharing anyway) may lead to sales of their DVDs and other items from PythonLine, their online shop.

Now the Python guys can explain a lot better than I can, so give the following a quick watch.

Just a quick note to let you know that you only have around a day until the start of our next live video show, so get your questions, comments and opinions in now to studio@bluenoseddog.co.uk, wayne@bluenoseddog.co.uk or phone in one UK - 0203 239 9472 or NA - (914) 410-6799.

[fergcorp_cdt]

So, do you love Tech? Do you feel as though you can communicate that love well? Why not prove it by freelancing at BlueNosedDog.co.uk.

We’re currently looking for blog authors and video contributers to join the team and we’re willing to pay. Because these are two very distinct roles there are two very distinct ways of submitting your content.

If you wish to write for the blog, just sign up. It’s really that simple. When you have signed up, you are automatically given the rights to submit content, which will be reviewed before being published. If your content is published you will be paid $1.50, but in the near future that will be $1.50 plus a little extra per 1,000 page views (we’ll work out what that extra is when we work out how much we make). The content doesn’t have to be exclusive, but it does have to be your own work, all payments will be made via paypal at the end of the month so please use a paypal friendly email address when signing up. You will not get paid for content which isn’t yours or for content which isn’t published.

Every now and then we will have a theme we’ll ask you to report on, for both post and videos, but these will be communicated ahead of time - otherwise the big bad world of technology is your canvas.

As part of Mozilla Corporation
’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox 2.0.0.18 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads

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