Google turns over goverment information to the public.

How long before this becomes a disaster for Google or the the Gov't?It is a common misnomer that "everything is available on the web." You'll also here people say that the answer to any question is just a Google search away. Neither of these ideas are true, but hopefully over time they'll become more and more the reality. Today came news that we're one baby step closer to that reality.



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Person.com: Web 2.0 Personals

Ok, I have to admit that as a Married man, I don't have much use for a personals website. So, in reviewing Person.com, I find it a little hard to really envision myself using it. For the sake of the review, I'll try and put myself in a single persons shoes for a bit.

Person.com dubs itself "Person.com - webcams, chat, personals" so lets take a look at that.

Webcams. First thing I notice is the most popular one on the list is a female in her underthings. Not exactly the best thing to see if your thinking it's a real personals site. More of a Adult friend finder wanna be if that's what is gonna be advertised. In the first 10 webcams, 5 of them are in a less than fully dressed status.

Chat. You've got to register to chat, and I don't need my wife finding out I have an account on some personals page so I didn't register. But really... with chat rooms with names like sexitis and the like, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out what's happening there.

Personals. You get the standard "I am a ? seeking a ?" search box leading to the standard list of search hits. You get the added bits of a picture and some of the stats, but again, you get the feeling that it's more of a sex market than a relationship market.

Overall, it's a bit of a Adult sex personals site than a true match.com or the like. Fine if that's what your looking for, but really, does it have to be that obvious? I guess you get what you pay for. Sign ups are free.

this has been a paid review through the payperpost program

How Wal-Mart's TV Prices Crushed Rivals

Now, it is becoming apparent that Wal-Mart's calculated decision to break the $1,000 barrier for flat-panel TVs triggered a disastrous financial meltdown among some consumer-electronics retailers over the past four months.And I can't feel sorry for them. If Wal-Mart can get the price down there, then they could too. It's just a matter of how much dead weight in their system that needs to be trimmed. Don't fault Wal-Mart for good business sense.



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Bid4Prizes: Reversed auctions

Have you ever wished that you could find a really, really good deal on eBay but just can't find one? Now, bid4prizes has come up with a much better way to win what you want. You pick your prize and make a "bid" for the item. The lowest unique bid wins the item. The key word there is unique. If you and 30 other people bid $0.01, you don't win. The guy down the street that bid $2.36 wins.

So, there's gotta be a catch right? Yeah, I guess so. The site is ad supported so you have to look at ads all day long. Your other option is to pay $9.99 a month for unlimited bids with no ads. Not a bad deal if you can win a prize every couple of months or so.

At the moment, there is a Scion, an iPhone, and a 50" tv up for auction. Not too bad for prizes. I'd love to see something really big. Think boats, houses, planes. Well, I dunno how any of that would work, but it'd be cool. A house perhaps. Or rather the materials for it's construction? My first bid would be 914 cents. Why? I dunno. Seems odd enough to have a chance at being unique.

It's a pretty genius idea. And a really cool concept. It seems to be on it's way to being a great site and a really good stop for many of us uncontrollable web addicts.

Learn to professionally slice in CSS with this 9 page full-featured guide!

A concise, 9 page full-featured guide for anybody who is interested in becoming a CSS web designer, CSS Slicing Guide teaches you how to take a layout straight out of Photoshop, or infact any graphics program, and turn it into fully standards compliant XHTML and CSS with superfast loadtimes. Check it out!Awesomely worth the look. Could make it super easy to learn as well.



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Trade Futures, Exchanges and Forex

Do you invest? I do. Mostly in stocks, bonds and mutual funds. I've even dabbled a little in a couple of oddball investments, but as yet, I haven't tried the exchanges. Things like commodities, foreign exchange, and options always seemed a little bit out of my league.

Maybe it was because I just didn't have enough experience with the stuff to feel comfortable getting my feet wet. Maybe it was more about not knowing what I was doing and not thinking there was any profit to be made in those areas.

What it boils down to is that those areas of investment are the black sheep of the investment world. When people think investments, they automatically think stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, and savings accounts. Why? Because they are the "easiest" to understand. The most common.

Now, if you want to trade in global futures there is a website or two that will help you out. The global futures Exchange & Trading Co has lots and lots of research tools and information that is designed to get you started on the right foot and to keep you going until you know what your doing and see the amazing potential for profit in trading futures, commodities, and forex.

The price barrier to investing has also been lowered, as global futures lets customers open accounts with as little as $250. That's a pretty good drop from the $1000 or more that most places will make you start with. It's just enough to give you leeway to play around without losing your shirt if it's not your "cup of tea."

this has been a paid posting through the payperpost program

“Help me, my mom is my blog’s only reader!”-By Darren Rowse

Great inside track on blog readership building and also inspired by a question that I asked. Just a little bit flattering I suppose. And a great new link to my main blog.



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Feisty Fawn has stable read/write NTFS drivers

Are you a Windows user trying out Feisty Fawn? Point and click to access your Windows files within Ubuntu in under a minute. It's about time they had some decent NTFS drivers to load windows files with. One more step towards a linux dominated market...



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Mortgage Lowdown, a blog on Mortgages

With the huge rise in real estate and house flipping and the like, mortgage information all of a sudden was something that nobody could get enough of. Now, with the impending decline of the housing market, we still need to get our mortgage information fix. Maybe more so now than before.

So, if you're looking for info on mortgages, stop on in to the Mortgage Lowdown blog. It's a great site about mortgages and home ownership. They've been around since mid 2006 and have kept a pretty steady flow of info coming out. Their post frequency is a little low, but with such a pinpointed niche blog, it might be something that is more of a result of the niche than because of lack of ambition. In any case, what information is there is good.

Also, check out the Carnival of home improvement posts as they have some great pointers and links to even more great home information.

Design wise, there's a whole lot of text on a rather bland template. If it were me, I'd cut it back so that only about 3-5 posts show on the front page and seriously enhance my navigation with categories and popular posts. The template could use some sprucing up and as it would seem to be a blogger blog hosted on their domain, they may not have much ability to change. I know I don't here.

Overall, a pretty good blog. A good start, with potential.

This has been a paid review through the payperpost program.

Can you sell gold and silver on eBay for a profit?

This guy sure thinks so. He claims a 30% profit margin and above depending on the price of gold. Buy low, sell high. That's my motto!



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Sling your music to your iPhone with Sling Media

Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian said on Tuesday that he has spoken to Apple about his company's ambition to stream iTunes music and video to the upcoming iPhone. It's unclear, however, what Apple thinks of the plan.



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Hello dear, I found this diskette that you were so frantically looking for

Ah, a fun play on magnets and floppy disks. That and the newbie-ness of someone who doesn't know computers. A pretty powerful magnet though to hold all that up and still stay. Not like the magnets on my fridge. Of course, I don't have any floppy disks anymore...



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Blog Review: Payday Loan Lowdown

Payday loans are generally a thing you want to avoid. While there may be some very extreme situation where they could serve a use, they are very, very few and far between.

Payday loans' rates can be completely outrageous. Unless you have absolutely no other option but to use one, avoid them. In 9 out of 10 cases, they will hurt your situation in the long run even though they seem like a quick fix now.

That all being said, if you want some low down information on payday loans, what better place than a payday loan blog? PayDay Loan Lowdown has plenty of great articles on Payday loans. They cover both the positive and the negative side of the PayDay Loan coin and really lay out a lot of information for you to read and digest.

The blog has been around since May of last year and has kept going strong. Their writing is decent but borders on extremely dry at times. Of course, their topic probably doesn't help with that at all. The blog design was a little hard on my eyes. Of course, being a blogger blog like this one, I know there aren't much to select from as far as templates go. But design is one of the most important parts of the equation in getting and keeping readers.

Again, try to avoid PayDay Loans, but if you must, educate yourself first. And in educating yourself, make a stop at PayDay Loan Lowdown. It shouldn't be your only source of information, but it certainly can be one of them.

this has been a paid review through the payperpost program.

90% of People Believe Personal Finance Should a Required Part of School

The logic behind teaching children and teenagers about personal finance is pretty obvious. Just think of all of the finance cliches that you’ve heard: start investing as early as you can, the most important factor in investing is time, don’t get into credit card debt, etc. - all things that are best to learn sooner rather than later.Count me as being one of those 90%!



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Great resource for Debt Consolidation news

In my writing of A Penny Saved, I do quite a bit of research and have found a resource on debt consolidation news and debt news in general. It also seems to be a great resource for personal finance articles.

The design of the blog is easy on the eyes and gentle to read. Perhaps that stems from it's simple design. One large column for the content left of center and a smaller column on the right for navigation and outlinks. One other thing you'll notice is a stunning lack of advertisements. As you'll notice on my sites, I believe in a little ad revenue now and again, but if you make the choice to not have any, that's yours to make.

Overall, you won't find any shortage of articles to read as there is very nearly a years worth of archives and each month of them is filled with great news, tidbits and insight. If you're looking for a great resource to learn about debt consolidation, personal finance, and general debt, this is certainly one blog that should be on your list.

I was paid for this post via PayPerPost.

Hide your Games, Porn, and Digg with the Tap of your Foot!

The scene: You're at work, browsing pictures of Jessica Alba. Your boss walks into your office. What do you do? Instead of frantically trying to close your windows, just tap your foot, and bam! The window disappears instantly, leaving no trace whatsoever, not even an icon in the taskbar. This has to be one of the coolest gadget/gizmo items I've seen recently. Beats the heck out of the "Boss Shortcut" that hides the window...



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Feature Rich Sales Lead Management

If you follow any sort of SEO/Internet Marketing news, you know that one of the key cornerstones is Sales Lead management. If you've ever tried to do a little Sales Lead generation and management, you know that both can be fairly expensive.

AIMPromote has taken some of the expense out of the equation with their Sales Lead Management product. It's a full featured customer relationship management software that does just about anything you could want it to do.

No matter what level of subscription you buy from them, all of the features are available. The only thing that is limited or changes is the volume of usage you have available. Why's that important? Because it scales. It scales to small businesses that only need a couple of hundred contacts and it scales to full enterprise use with thousands of contacts.

Add to that the low pricing structure and you've got one heck of a Lead Management software. You certainly need to go take a look at it's features and compare it to what you're using. You just might find a way to sneak in that extra bit of advertising into the budget after the money you'll save.

This has been a paid post from the PayPerPost network.

Political Parties are Destroying America!

Rather than form our own opinions about important issues based on careful study of facts and opinions, we all too often allow politicians, political pundits, and cable news windbags to define what we stand for. We as Americans are far more alike than different, yet by polarizing us into two "sides", political parties stand to benefit....



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Vote for your favorite blog!!!

Everybody knows what the Grammys, Emmys and People's Choice awards are. But did you know that there are Blog awards too? There's the Bloggies and now there's the Blogger's Choice Awards.

Awards like the Blogger's Choice Awards give us all an opportunity to choose our favorite blogs and bloggers and give them some of the recognition that we feel that they deserve. In fact, if you'd like to nominate this blog or any of my other blogs, feel free. I won't mind. Promise. Probably wouldn't get many votes anyways, but it'd still be fun.

The Blogger's choice awards have plenty of different categories to choose from and nominate into. From the "Best Animal Blogger" to "Hottest Mommy Blogger" and even "Worst blog of all time" there's a spot for everything.

Anybody can nominate and vote in all of the categories. Votes are tallied in real-time so you can watch as they climb for your favorites. Votes are being accepted until May 22 and will be announced on June 2 at PostieCon in Orlando. The results will be posted on the site shortly after the ceremony.

I personally haven't voted yet because I just don't think the word is getting out enough. Any awards for best food blog that has a top 3 consisting of Vegan blogs just isn't right. But we can change all that. We can spread the word and get more and more people to vote for their favorite blogs. More people voting means more votes for the best of the best. Unless you like vegan food that is. If that's the case, I'm sorry. Maybe if you had taste buds you could stand the real food?

I see the perennial top blog Dooce has made an appearance in several of the categories. Even in the Hottest mommy blogger category. Not sure I think she really belongs on that list. Not that she's an ugly woman, just not the hottest one I know. Course, I don't read that many mommy bloggers either.

There are a few other picks that seem to be products of the lack of traffic. WilWheaton.typepad.com is at the top or near the top in several categories. He's got a lot of followers/readers that are obviously pretty loyal. Not sure if he asked for votes or not, but if he didn't he could win in landslides if he did.

And while we're on the subject, how does Fark.com get to the top of the list for the "Best Blog about Stuff"? Fark doesn't exactly strike me as a stuff blog. More of a news/parody/political blog really. Blogs like Engadget or Crunch Gear or NotCot.org are the real stuff blogs. But who am I to argue I guess. Can't say as I know everything. Not yet anyways. Give me a few days... ;)

Go vote for the best blog

Study: In Nude Photos, Men Look at Faces First

You might expect men and women to look at sexual photographs differently. But a new study unexpectedly found that men are more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body.



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A Firefox Bankcard! How cool is that?

My bank offered the possibility to use my own image on my bankcard. You could order it through a web interface, so I uploaded the Firefox logo onto mine and picked up the card a few days later from the bank. See the result...Pretty damn sweet. Not sure I'd want the firefox logo, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.



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Stone Hawk Rehabilitation: Natural cure to a unnatural problem

We've all seen the movies where they lock up the drug addicts. They tie them down and shoot them up with more drugs to get them off of the drugs they are addicted to. All it does is screw them up and they relapse within months of getting out.

That's not the way it works at Stone Hawk Narconon Drug Rehab program.

The drug rehab program at Narconon Stone Hawk instead uses a combination of proper nutrition and nutritional supplementation to help eliminate drug addiction and alcoholism. This program is not psychiatric, nor is it medical. Success is achieved through social education, which leads to a higher rate of drug rehabilitation success.

Using the proper nutrition and supplementation, they can then reset the bodies receptors that "need" the drug that they are addicted to. They no longer need to have that dirty little secret and can go about living their lives as a rehabilitated drug addict.

Sure, they still have to battle the demons every day, but they don't relapse nearly as often and it's a much more natural method to eliminating the need for the addiction.

This has been a paid post through the payperpost program.

Tom’s Hardware Sold for $15-$20 Million

If you ever wanted a good reason to start a hardware and tech review site, here it is:Tom’s Hardware Guide and its parent company TG Publishing have been sold to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed price. The deal will close later this month, said Omid Rahmat, CEO of Tom’s Publishing, in a letter to the Inquirer. The rumored price, however, is $15-$20 million.



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Looking for Coupon Codes?

If you're like me, you are constantly looking for a few extra ways to save a little cash. I don't mean an extra penny or two. I mean huge amounts of cash. If you're shopping online, you can't do much better than Coupon Chief for Coupon Codes.

I'm a big fan of their computer and software category as it can save me a ton of money. In particular, I like the HP Coupons and Deals. It always seems to have a ton of great deals and coupons that can save you tons. Right now there is a coupon code for $200 off a Notebook computer! There's also one for up to $259 off a new desktop computer if you're in that market instead of a Notebook.

Feel free to look around, there are over 1000 different merchants on the site and they all have some great coupon codes and discounts!

This has been a paid post through the PayPerPost program.

Awesome Furniture Inspired by Scrabble Game ( Photos )

A very interesting piece of furniture that allows you to make words and leave messages with the screen printed letter cushions. Check out the pictures !



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20 real answers to the 20 dumbest finance questions: Part 1

Ever ask a dumb personal finance question? Here are answers to the top 20 dumbest ones!



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PICTURES: Amazing Propaganda Posters

"Propaganda is a type of message aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda is often deliberately misleading, using logical fallacies, that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. The following list includes some of the more amazing propaganda posters..."



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Do Naked Ladies Turn Men On? Maybe...

"On the old Benny Hill Show, there was once a skit where two guys are lying in front of a beach change house. A woman, fully dressed, is lying in a deck chair in front of the beach house, and the two men are looking “up her dress.” Presently the woman gets up, goes in the change house, comes out in a very skimpy bikini..."This is a must read article. Really quite insightful and honest. Most of it rings true as what really goes on in this thing we call attraction.



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Time Inc. to end LIFE magazine but keep it online

Time Inc. said on Monday that it will stop publishing LIFE, the iconic photography magazine that has been featured as a weekly newspaper insert since 2004.That certainly didn't last long. But how long will Time Life magazine last?



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Anti-rape Device to Hit the Market

Anti-rape device created by South-African inventor Sonnet Ehlers is about to hit the market after a long time of waiting for patent verification. The female condom-like device called Rapex has fish-like teeth that attach to the penis.Ummm.... so you have to wear the thing all the time? I can see it being feasible in high risk areas like Africa, but don't count on it being popular in 1st world countries.



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Rosetta@Home Distributed Folding Coming to Xbox 360?

When asked about it on the project's message board, head scientist and developer David Baker said that "we have been discussing this idea with Microsoft quite a bit over the past several weeks; I will keep everybody posted."I think these programs are awesome. The PS3 already does this and it's added an immense amount of computing power to the @home projects.



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NFL exhibition in China canceled

The NFL exhibition game scheduled for China in August was canceled on Monday when officials decided instead to concentrate "global resources" on next October's regular-season game in London.I really dislike the idea of a regular season game overseas. Canada or Mexico I could see if there were teams in those countries, but overseas is silly.



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Awesome BSG Game, completely open-source, has released its demo

A mod for Freespace2, an awesome game, which took years to complete, Beyond the Red Line follows the Battlestar Pegasus. This free and opensource mod was made possible by the kind developers who released the source and said in the EULA that copies could be made for friends. Please support this community-driven game that is awesome.



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