Google has a new logo today to celebrate the invention of the first laser.

Elmer runs into Michael Kovach in Starbucks, Michael bought iphone.com in 1993 and kept it until 2006 when he sold it to Apple.

Another hubby puts his cheating wife on Ebay

The BBC reports on a recent online aquisition:

Television company CBS has agreed to buy technology news and entertainment website CNET for about $1.75bn (£900m).

Today’s game is Stunt Plane, pretty cool.
Cool post over at iThinkMedia, are you a geek, well are you? Thanks Wendy.

An older friend of mine Ian, was recently in hospital for a major checkup. He was kept in for over a week
while his doctors did their stuff. He’s a bit of a car fanatic so to pass the time read many a car magazines from his hospital bed and saw an advert for a classic Rolls Royce. He was able to get enough info about the car from the advert and phoning the seller to feel comfortable buying it without seeing it, somwehat scary for a $40K purchase.

I next saw Ian two weeks ago at his grandson’s second birthday, the Roller got a lot of admiring stares in the pub car park. He’d only had the car a couple of weeks but you could tell it was his dream car and he’d made a wise purchase.

This afternoon it is Ian’s funeral, he passed away just over a week ago, another victim of the big C. His life had certainly been cut short but I think he’d had a good one though I’m sure he’d of liked to of done some more mileage in his Roller. It’s times like this that really hammer home to me how short and precious life is. Don’t live your dreams from your death bed, live them now.

Rest in peace Ian.

As Scott has already done a post today I’ll just drop a few links that I have sitting on my desk.

Amusing thread over at Digital Point showing peoples lifetime Adsense earnings.

Another site after your dollars as the million dollar home page, instead of buying pixels you buy words by the letter, simple but cool idea via Net Business Blog.

Adsense has a bit of a hiccup with reporting stats and the forum world panics like it’s the end of the world.

No game this week I’m afraid but if you’re after a bit of fun check out Gaj-It social Friday.

I’ve done a couple of posts highlighting the benefits of networking, especially in person. In this post I want to share a few ideas on finding networking opportunities.

• Attend trade shows and events related to your niche
  There are trade shows for just about everything, for me I visit Vegas each year for CES, various shows in London (Stuff Show, Ideal Home, various inventor events, etc).
• Attend expos related to your business model
  There are various expos for bloggers, affiliate marketeers, SEO, entrepeneurs and more. At these you’ll be able to learn from the speakers but even more from networking with other attendees.
• Contact other bloggers
  Many bloggers post about places they are due to visit, if you’re in the vicinity get in touch and see if they fancy a meetup, this is how I met Romanian super blogger Bobby Voicu, he got in touch with me when I said I was in London for the LG event.
• Local user groups
  Many towns and cities have usergroups for different interests, these often have a monthky physical meeting. One which I’m looking at joining is the Nottingham LUG (Linux User Group), ‘m not that familiar with Linux but as a number of my servers are running it I should be, so what better way to learn and get advice.
• Organise one your self
  If your blog/site has a decent audience or you’re an active forum poster you cpost the question and see who’s interested. I’ve done this a couple of times via Digital Point forums. ‘m still up for doing a Midlands one in the UK over the summer (if interested leave a comment).
• Press events
  Contact the press office of companies n your niche and ask to be sent any press releases. A lot of forward thinking companies throw events especially for bloggers, this is a cool way to meet the faces behind the products and other bloggers with the same interests as you.

This is the first blog post I’ve ever made whilst sitting the garden, so if you reckon I’ve missed anything please share in a comment.

With a daily readership of over 100,000 (RSS, email and web), Coolest Gadgets has far exceeded my expectations. CG has enabled me to quit my day job, travel worldwide and earn an income doing what I enjoy. Last year CG generated 6 figures, this year we’re on target to turnover ~$500K.

Coolest Gadgets has been running nearly 3 years. In that time we have gone from a one man blog to having a team of fantastic writers. Key elements for the success are:

• Persistence: It takes 6-12 months for a site to get going, in the early days it is hard to find motivation when you don’t have the traffic or income. Working hard then laid the foundations for future success, I remember sometimes not being in the mood to write but pushing myself to do so, I’m very pleased I did.
• Originality: the gadget niche is very crowded. We differentiated by writing about gadgets that hadn’t been covered elsewhere. This interested our readers and garnered links within our niche (helps SEO thus more new readers).
• Passion: being passionate about your subject makes it so much easier to blog (especially when you need that extra push), I kind of like gadgets
• Networking: Interacting with other bloggers and people in the industry is both fun and essential for building your blog.

There’s more I could write, but this contest has a word limit, if you want further info you can read the history of CG, I’ll also answer comments.

A free Wordpress theme has recently been released by Brian at Revolution who make really nice high end blog themes, this free one is available in 2 or 3 column layout.

MySpace.co.uk has been returned to it’s original owner with the original domain dispute being overturned.

Google announces VisualRank as it’s tool in precision image search.

Great article by Aaron Wall, What is a #1 ranking in Google worth.

Al’s running a simple competition with a cool prize.

It’s great doing what you enjoy, but will you make money out of it. Chris Guillebeau has asked a collection of blogging stars to find out.

All you need to know about running PPC campaigns .

Today’s game is Go Mad: The Escape, it starts to really get harder at level 5.

Today’s post was going to be about finding networking events to attend, however I got a call late Tuesday asking if I’d like to speak to Microsoft’s Search team about some new features they are rolling out into UK Live Search, so I thought it would be more timely to post about that. On the networking side of things I only got the call due to somebody I spoke to at a launch party a few weeks ago .

The conference call was meant to last 20 minutes but ending up stretching to 40 and I still only got chance to ask a couple of questions. One thing I found with all of the search team members they were exceedingly enthusiastic and committed to the product, Microsoft have been developing their search technologies for 4 years now and feel they are making inwards into the SE market.

There are various new features rolling, some are already available whilst others will be rolled out over the coming weeks
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Timing seems to be playing a large part in the success and failure of a lot of what I am trying just now, not just luck but it’s pretty apparent that with a bit of thought you can improve chances of success when selling and save money when buying.

As mentioned previously there is a huge industry that revolves around domains expiring and being caught, this is a double edged sword, on the one hand these people can catch domains and pay £5/$10 for a domain that they then want to sell for a huge mark-up which is fair enough. When you buy domains you are always going to be paying a huge multiple of what the owner bought it for and that really plays no part in its valuation, everyone has to make a living.

On the plus side there are quite a few people who make a full time living catching/buying & selling domain names. This means that near the end of the week or month you can grab a bargain, some domainers have to sell to raise money for their bills so staying alert and catching a bargain is all part of the fun. When bills have to be paid sometimes good domains can go for lower prices especially when the domain has just been caught - I have picked up a few freshly caught domains at remarkable prices.

Companies seem to be more receptive to sales nearer the end of the month when buying from them, for example domain dealers like BuyDomains.com seem easier to deal with nearer the end of the month with more chance of getting money off the asking price. Conversely when trying to sell something companies seem more receptive to discussions at the start of the month, perhaps this is all simply down to budgets and targets, which is fine - but if you have one stab at making contact with a company to make a purchase or sale make sure you think carefully and time it well, catching a company at the wrong time could hamper a deal worth thousands.

Something as simple as trying to contact a company with a nice unused generic domain name during their end of year audit can get you a quick no, a month later after they had passed the flurry of work that goes into wrapping up a years books may have led to a different answer.

I honestly think timing has had a much bigger impact in my successes and failures than I realise and it’s something I am giving more time and thought to when going about my business.

Last week I wrote about the benefits of networking in person, in today’s post I want to share the general format of press event for bloggers. The event I went to on Friday, was for the release of the new LG Secret mobile phone (read my review of the LG Secret).

The event was held in one of the suites at Mayfair Hotel in London, I was going to stay in the same hotel until finding the prices started at over $600 a night, so maybe not (though funnily enough at the place I did stay (Mayfair Millenium) I got upgraded to a $1,200 a night suite which wasn’t that special considering the price (which there is no way I’d ever of paid)).

The format the blogger event followed was pretty standard from my experience: (more…)

Quick favor to ask, I’ve finally finished off and installed a new theme on Coolest Gadgets and I’m after feedback, be it positive or negative. One of the aims of the theme is to make it less Adsense heavy and provide more space for traditional branding advertising.

Using all UPPERCASE in your title tag may look spammy but has good results in organic searches according to Connected Internet.

Adsense now lets you decline placement targeted ads using the new Ad Review Center, this is also cool just to see who is advertising on your site.

Cool post by SparkPluggin Wendy on how not to use social media.

The broadband crunch gets discussed on MSN

An ‘exabyte’ is a lot of data. It is 1.074 billion gigabytes of data, to be exact. It would take 14 million laptops like mine to store an exabyte. Two exabytes equals the total volume of information generated back in 1999. Today, the internet is handling one exabyte of data every single hour.

According to Blogstorm the iphone is almost sold out in the UK with a new 3G version due later this year.

Check out this unusual list of domain names owned by Google like GoogleReligion.com

This weeks game is also my favourite food, Papa’s Pizzeria.