Tatraplan

Looking for a way to spice up your blogs little bit? Check this out (careful, explicite language courtesy of Joe Pesci):

The PQDVD.com came up with an application that makes your photos talk.

Here are the features of this application:
- Create animated characters from any photo you want.
- Easy to use. With simple mouse clicks, the animation can be generated in a few seconds.
- Only one picture is needed to construct a realistic 3D face for animation
- Animate any human or animal photos, paintings, drawings or even sketchs.
- Automatically match lip movement with voice.
- Support any spoken languges: English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
- Create your talking photo album, live avatars on blogs, funny greeting card, pets talk show, etc.

They plan to sell this software for $59.90, but you can grab yours free if you blog about it before Xmas.

What else there is to do on Sunday afternoon than getting yourself a nice car ? Of course to get yourself a really expensive one. This is the one I got myself:

OK, I did not buy it :-), it is a bit beyond my limits at the moment. But customizing a car like for myself was quite good fun.

You can try it yourself at Bugatti Configurator. The site lets you to selct you exterior and interior colours and if you like what you see you can even order the Veyron as you configured it

I really wonder why the guys behind a really entertaining blog decided to play nasty and treat other felow bloggers at the Entrecard like a piece of trash … Perhaps it is their strategy to get even more attention and traffic and milk, who knows. But I must say that the Mooooo people were the last I would expect this kind of behaviour to come from.

Entrecard is a great concept that seems to be working well. More on that later perhaps. But The Cow’s idea is clearly different form the majority (that does make him unique). He accepts about half of the ad requests - so far OK. As his blog is popular his slot is almost always full and at least a week of waiting for the ad to display on his blog is necessary. All that time the advertiser’s credits are tied up. Then moments before the ad is supposed to start running, the Cow rejects the ad, inviting you to try again - at much higher credit price … This he does to about 89% of the ads previously approved …

Here is the screenshot from his Entrecard Profile Page:

So if anyone plans to use the Entrecard credits to buy an ad the Cow’s Moo blog, be prepared to get rejected at the last moment.

The European Parliament is a very colorful institution. Just check this video. I love the way Silvio Berlusconi (media magnate, AC Milan owner and former Italian Prime Minister) picks a cookie out of his nose and flushes it down with an espresso … So classy

The Tatra 603, the classic luxury car for the communist elites, has been brought back to life. Well at least as a concept car.

Faurecia, the second largest automotive supplier in Europe, with 60,000 employees in 28 countries and annual sales of $15 billion in 2006, build a concept car for the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show.

The used the Tatra 603 car to house their beautiful interior and called the concept Faurecia Premium Attitude.

Tatra 603, successor of the Tatraplan, was produced from early 50s until 1975. Tatra 603 was an amazingly looking car for its. It was almost entirely hand built, fitted with powerful air-cooled V8 rear engine. This six seater provided the communist officials’ bottoms with smooth rides, in case of Fidel Castro even with custom fitted airconditioning.

Here is how the old Tatra 603 looks when fitted with state of the art interior. There are no words on possible production of this beauty, so enjoy at least these photos:

Read the rest

I usually book my flight tickets the old fashioned way, through the travel agent. I often have complicated itineraries and that does not go too well with the online booking services. Hotels however I most of the time book online. Some time I use the hotel sites directly, sometime I go for the online travel booking websites. My next trip is to Singapore, so I checked few sites to see how their hotel offers compare with Hotel Reservations. Actually it was the other way I wanted to check how the Hotel Reservations compared with some of the sites I usually use.

Frankly Hotel Reservations did not do too bad.

The first plus was that instead of complicated clicks on menus to select the destination from offered list I could simply type the name of city in the box. I typed it in, chose the dates. Then came the second positive - very quick display of the results. I think it depends a lot on the speed of the internet connection, but I could see the results of the search in less than five seconds.

What interested me most were of course the prices. They are not exactly groundbreaking but still very competitive. As I was comparing sites from different countries and prices displayed in different currencies, there were some hotels where Hotel Reservations looked slightly more expnsive, but I am talking about few cents and dollars only. On most ocassions however their prices were same or slightly cheaper.

So if I was to make the decision with whom to book based on price, it would not make much difference which one of my favourite online booking sites I would use, not much difference there. But the Hotel Reservations site is in my eyes very user friendly,  eliminating some annoying steps I have to take on most of the other sites, and because of that I go with them.

Oh, and if you are on lower budget, definitelly check out their Vacation Rentals section. There are some sweet deals on offer for many worldwide destinations.

Hotel Reservations also offers flight and vacation packages bookings. These I did not really explore. As I said above, I am an old fashioned air ticket buyer and also I very seldom buy holiday package. I usually package the holidays myself :-)

Sphere is a very useful service for bloggers and one not talked about as much as some social bookmarking sites. What it does is it allows people to discover what bloggers have to say about the topics in the news and other blogs. I found out about them when my other blog started to receive hits from big news sites and I wondered why …  The reason was the Sphere powered “From The Blogs” footer below the news articles displaying blog posts related to the article You can see it on CNN site for example.

Not all the news sites  provide this but if you want to see what bloggers think about given topic, you can Sphere the aricle yourself. Here is what happens if you Spehere the article using Sphere Related Content Bookmarklet:

Original article:

After Sphere It!

Sphere will display links to blog posts that are related to the original news article. It is great way to discover new blogs and read opinions of bloggers on the news published by the serious news sites. The more we bloggers use this or similar services (if there are others) the more exposure also our own blogs will hopefully get.

You also can also install the Sphere Related Content Widget on your blog. Sphere has the plugin for Wordpress and supports also other blogging platforms. By installing the widget on your blog you give some exposure to other bloggers who blog about topics similar to yours. So it depends on you whether you want to send the traffic to other bloggers or not. I am trying it out here to see what happens

And if you are wondering, no, this is not a paid review, I simply think this is a great service for bloggers.

Wow, over one month since my last post here. It has been a pretty hectic month but what had to be done has been done and I back here. Not that I did not blog, but my other blog took all the time I had in the crazy month of October. In the meantime, cool place for bloggers went live few days back.

As one of it’s authors says:

“These days not only are you competing with other bloggers but also Joomla, PhpNuke, PostNuke and traditional websites and not even mentioning traditional media like CNN.com and MSNBC.com.
Many of nights I would think wouldn’t it be great if there was a place just like this but just for bloggers where it would be bloggers against the world. And this is how Bloggingzoom came about.”

It is a Digg style environment but only for blogger content to be submitted. Unlike some other sites, Bloggingzoom does not punish you for sumbitting your own contents. They actually encourage you to submit your own contents.

So finally there is a place where bloggers are free to submit all the new stuff they have written and published. I did my bit already and submitted several articles from my F1Wolf blog, and I did receive some traffic. If the traffic is coming already after only few days of Bloggingzoom being alive, it looks likely it may develop into great marketing tool for the bloggers in a short time.

The site is quite easy to navigate and articles are easy to submit. The only little annoyance is that you actually have to use at least 350 characters to describe the post you are zooming. But on the other, if are trying to promote your post, you should be able to come out with 350 characters describing it

So if you haven’t done it yet, take your posts and submit them to Bloggingzoom. But remember - do not expect to get zoomed by others, if you do not zoom others yourself ! Of course, you do not have to do that, you can just submit your story and wait for people to read it. But at the same time you can not expect spike in your traffic if everybody else is doing exactly the same thing you are.

While I still insist, that Deal Dot Com should do more homework to make sure, that the deals they are offering really are the deals, it looks like in the now famous Marketing Graphics Pro case they did just that. My previous post accusing them and promoting somebody else has now been removed. The best explanation of the whole story comes probably from John Chow, read it here.

It may be a good idea for Deal Dot Com to state some information about the product authors and their selling and pricing policy on their site and thus identify the potential unauthorized resellers. Otherwise this whole story can be repeated any time.

While you are reading the post on John Chow dot com, you may as well try to save the guy. He is in desperate struggle to win a competition with Shoemoney and actually cries out for help. Imagine that - the Mogul ask the little people for help. How cool is that So go in and help the guy, subscribe to his RSS feed