Do you need a new coffee table?

This one ain't exactly cheap, but it will definitely impress any visitor, from casual mobile-user to alpha-geek: Microsoft built the “Surface” Hardware, an innovative touchscreen (which actually isn't a touchscreen but uses five cameras to track visual input) that allows for a unique user interface experience. But hardware is pretty boring with proper applications, and that's what this video is all about:

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Xsara, Diaries of a SEO Dog #9

Lately, Xsara has become quite fascinated with all the realtime podcasting buzz. “I've spent enough time as a listener, time to get my own show,” she told me recently:

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Synthasite offers $1.000 plus press coverage

best of synthasiteAnd all you have to do is use their free webpage editor, which rocks anyways. All pages made with synthasite are eligible for the competition, the results will be presented to the public on January 5th next year. But there's actually a lot more than just plain old money at stake: especially pro-bloggers dig all kinds of buzz for their persona/projects, so this sounds like a nice deal:

Winners will receive (a) a free SEO lesson, performed by SynthaSite CEO and SEO Expert Vinny Lingham, (b) $1000, (c) be featured in a SynthaSite press release, in the SynthaSite newsletter and posted to Vinny

Coldcut vs. TV Sheriff: Change gone come?

Coldcut and TV Sheriff“They're awfully hard to tell apart…” Turn up your subwoofers for this one! For their latest drum-and-bass powered assault dancefloor shakers Coldcut teamed up with America's notorious TV Sheriff: it's vivisection time aka: this one is great remix of the media frenzy that broke out over the final phase of the presidential elections:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Lz264wOAg[/youtube]

Xsara, Diaries of a SEO dog #8

In times of financial crisis, good advice is even more expensive than usual. Many dogs are frightened to lose all their fortune. Instead of just watching bones go down the drain, Xsara decides to take her fate into her own paws.

Xsara, Diaries of a SEO dog #8

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DJ Uppercut: The Attack of the Ninja

Even though music videos are not quite the booming genre, they seem to make their comeback online. While MTV and other television channels play less and less music vids, creative artists these days us the net as their primary distribution channel. Shane Lester did this outstanding short movie for DJ Uppercuts Attack of Ninja, a masterpiece of animation and style. Turn up the volume and go fullscreen!

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Blog Action Day 2k8: Against poverty

blog action day 2008Blog action day 2008 is fighting global poverty by raising collective awareness in the blogosphere: Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world

Pictures from Barcamp Vienna

Last weekend #bcv08 took place at HP headquarters in Vienna. The weekend was incredibly intense, special kudos go out to all the guys from Bratislava who came to join us. We're thinking about a bi-city barcamp, a (really slow) ship might make a great location. The two cities are so close, it's time to start connecting!

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Blogcatalog premium features rule supremely

…over any other blog catalogue. These guys offer very good value for very little money, considering the popularity of the site. Some of my blogs have been listed for quite a while now, and I like the looks and usability of my blog catalogue profile page. Instead of trying to spam as many irrelevant directories as possible, bloggers are much better off concentrating on a handful of important dirs, and bc is definitely one of them.

Today I became a “supporter”: for 6$ a month bc offers a pretty impressive range of feats: supports receive a special profile icon, geta beta access to all new features and surf a completely ad-free site. Any freeware adblocker can do that as well, but not if you're on a public computer.

I can almost hear your thoughts – nice, but why should I pay for this? Okay, here's the two killer features: first of all, donors are able to integrate their other social media profiles and leverage their catalogue presence by doing so. Currently only twitter is supported, but Digg, Delicious, last.fm and others communities will follow in the near future. And finally, here's the juicy part: bc offers increased visibility, or in their words:

As a premium member your blog will be prominently displayed on our homepage, helping you get the exposure your blog deserves!

There's also a weekly snapshot update (a recurring task that bc should do for every users anyways, as it's in their own interest) or you might wanna spend some more money: an additional business model enables users to rent sponsored category links, the prices vary depending on the demand, but start as low as 8$ per month. Recently, Jeremy did an interview with one of the bc founders on these listings and on their newly launched social search. The reason why the made their prices so cheap is that they hope to make a lot of people use the premium services – at least in my case that worked quite well. I think this longtail-business-model is a lot smarter than high-prize premium placements and it shows that a good longtail site (containing no pr0n) *can* indeed be monetized.

[youtube]JW9AHPAiAA0[/youtube]

If donating some money for enhanced exposure in the bigges US blog catalogue (we're talking pagerank 7 here) sound like a good deal to you, simple login and chose “donate” in the account-menu. No subscription fees, just chose the time span (starting form one month), pay via Paypal and you're all set.

New hardware: Ultimate Quadcore blogging power

QuadcoreYup, I did it: just bought ridiculously expensive new hardware. 4 Gigs of fast Ram, a quadcore, 1 TB harddisk memory… I bought all the parts at noon an assembled them today, currently I'm installing the OS and everthing is working fine. Turning so many crews was actually a lot of fun, I haven't done this in a while. At first I actually wanted to by a ready-to-run system, but including personal configuration I would have had to wait a week. The craving for new hardware simply was way to strong, so I took the old-fashioned road:

Quadcore Rechner

Since my computer is on most of the time, silent hardware is very important to me, which means: silent cases for all harddisk, super-silent coolers, passively cooled graphics adaptor, silent power supply and case. I was really amazed when I turned my new workstation on for the first time: the CD-ROM is by far the loudest moving part, amazing! This upgrade should make video editing a lot easier in the future.

PC Zusammenbau

I picked an Intel Quadcore 2,66MHz, 12 Megs of Cache on an Asus P5Q board and an Asus 8600 GT Silent graphics adaptor plus 4 Gigs of 800MHz Ram memory. Looking forward to writing my blog postings a lot faster in the future :mrgreen:

Xsara, SEO dog #7: The day after the pagerank update

Yup, there was a pagerank update this weekend which showed a couple of very interesting tendencies: Google is putting even more focus on the update cycles of a given page, gets stricter with domain pagerank but gives away a lot more juice for deeplinks. Incoming links are of course still the most important factor, but sadly Xsara has been relying too much on good reputation…

Xsara, diaries of a SEO dog #7

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