Just wanted to drop a quick note to let you guys know I'm giving away two HP notebooks and a cool Timbuk2 laptop bag on my dad blog. The giveaway runs September 2-6, 2009. Here are the prizes:

• HP DV6 Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo P7350, 4GB RAM, 16" screen (1366 x 768 pixels), 500GB SATA HDD, BluRay LightScribe DVD drive – specs may be different than the one I reviewed)
• HP Mini 110 Netbook (Intel Atom 270, 1GB RAM, 10.1" display (1024 x 576 pixels), 160GB SATA HDD, 6 cell battery – specs may be different than the one I reviewed)
• Timbuk2 Laptop Bag (the notebook bag may be different than the one I reviewed)
• Syncables Software (for syncing files across multiple computers)

I guess I must have been in the Batcave too long. I just found out last week that Pluck was discontinuing its RSS reader. So, if you have one those "Subscribe to Feed with Pluck" link, you should remove it. Here's a blurb from their web site:

All consumer RSS reader services to be discontinued on January 5, 2007

All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line.

Over the next two months, you will have the opportunity to export your RSS feed subscriptions to other RSS readers of your choosing. Please visit the RSS reader support pages for details on how to export your subscriptions and bookmarks for use in other readers.

You have until 1/5/2007 to export your data, after which our servers will be turned off and your data will be deleted. Note that the Pluck RSS readers are not supported for use on the new releases of IE (version 7) and FireFox (version 2).

I was going to put up a Christmas photo, but then I read Darren's post about looking back on the year and making predictions about the future. I think the photo below sums up both the past year and the upcoming year.

This past year (and earlier), the blogosphere has become a giant experiment on monetization. As bloggers (including me), we are constantly looking for ways to monetize everything we write, every item we review, every video and podcast we produce, and every photo we take. And every month, a new company forms to help us monetize this, that, and the other thing. Is this what blogging has become?

As for the future, I see more of the same next year. However, I expect more and more companies will focus on monetizing videos (including free video editing tools) and content for wireless devices. Monetization will continue to drive the web in our future. Even though I'm not entirely thrilled with this, I don't think monetization is necessarily a bad thing. Do you?

I had another bad day with my web hosting company this morning. The six sites I have hosted with them all went down for about two hours. This is the second time in less than a week my sites went offline. Something is going on. I'm actually tempted to move my sites, but I worked with other hosts in the past and they all have problems at one time or another.

A high price doesn't necessarily mean the web host is immune to outages. One company I worked at had its site hosted with a company that owns part of the Internet backbone (a lot of hosting companies use their backbone to connect to the Internet). I think the company was paying $100 a month for a shared hosting plan (too much in my opinion). Guess what? Once, our site was down for almost two days! My current host charges less $6 a month and my sites have never been down for more than a couple of hours. However, when they do go down, it is very annoying.

I have realized something though. I may have too many eggs in one basket. I really shouldn't have six sites hosted with one company. I really should spread them around to other web hosting companies. That way if one host has a problem, they don't bring down all of my sites. However, it is a major hassle to move so I'm not quite ready to move any of them yet. But I thought I should update a list of web hosts I compiled last year. It's located below. Keep in mind for the hosts that have "no" under WordPress, that doesn't mean they don't have WordPress installed. It just means I couldn't find any info about it on their site. Even if they don't have WordPress, that doesn't mean you can't download it yourself and install it.

Note: The monthly rate is for annual plans. Also, most hosts don't charge a setup fee for annual plan, except for One World ($15).

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