Posts from — May 2008

Upstart Blogger is a very nice weblog owned by Ashley Morgan, a jazz trumpeter. Upstart Blogger is described as follows:

Upstart Blogger, successful blogging made simple, is your quickstart guide to creating, launching, maintaining, promoting, and profiting from a blog.

Very well, but what’s this got to do with anything? Well, Ashley Morgan is currently in a bit of a philanthropic mood, giving away a host of goodies in some exciting competitions. Entering many of these competitions requires linking to Upstart Blogger, so in some ways that is the purpose of this post — it’s possibly a tad selfish. But also, I’m sharing with you a few juicy opportunities — very considerate of me, don’t you think?

Anyway, Ashley is giving away five Apple iPhone mobile phones. The competition in which you can win the first snazzy moby is related to his new independent record label set up with two other musicians, Big Arena Records. As Mr. Morgan explains — in blog posts both on Big Arena Records itself and Upstart Blogger — to be in with a chance of winning the iPhone you must link to Big Arena Records and/or subscribe to the RSS feed, and be sure to tell Ashley that you have done so. I don’t see what’s stopping people from pretending to have subscribed to the RSS feed, but there you go. The other four iPhones will be given away later on, in the same way, only we’ll be required to subscribe/link to four of Ashley’s other blogs.

As well as the iPhones, you can win another piece of Apple gadgetry. There’s just one of them on offer this time, but the fact that it’s a MacBook Air makes up for that, big-time. Morgan ran another MacBook Air giveaway back in February, and I entered that too — of course I didn’t win, but perhaps it’ll be a case of second time lucky. I’ve as much chance as anyone — more, in fact, than those who don’t enter the competition as I am doing now by linking to Upstart Blogger.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Ashley has been given two domain names to give away! One of these is a premium five-letter .com domain name, attached to an established money-making WordPress showcase blog — to be won by linking to Upstart Blogger. The other is spamchow.com, and you can win it by commenting on the blog post advertising the competition and suggesting what you’d do with the domain name, rather than linking to the post.

Ashley Morgan is certainly going crazy, and it would appear to be infectious, becuase there are competitions also over at i Love Typography and Smashing Magazine. The typography blog is offering a copy of a nice font for completing a crossword, and Smashing Magazine will give you a camera for taking a photograph of a nice texture. I’m thinking about entering the latter with a snap of the flaky paint on the ceiling of our bathroom.

So, there you have it, tons of competitions for you to enter. Good luck! My fingers are crossed both for myself and for you.

Once upon a time, there was a service called Snap Shots. (It was originally called Snap Preview Anywhere, actually, and only changed its name to Snap Shots when some slightly more useful features — which I will get onto later — were added to it). If a website used Snap Shots, users would — when hovering their mouse pointers over an external link on that website — see a little thumbnail image of the website targeted by the link. A nice idea, don’t you think? A chance for website owners to easily get a preview of what they’ll see when clicking on links. That’s what many people thought, greeting the birth of Snap Shots ecstatically.

But it’s actually a bit of a silly idea. When people visit a website, they tend not to do so not because of what it looks like but because of what that website’s content is. And yet Snap Shots relied on people wanting to visit a website just because of what it looks like — and the fact of the matter is, most people don’t, if you forget about website design galleries.

Some people rightly grumbled that this was stupid. Snap realised this and added useful new features. For example, a link to a website with an RSS feed results in users being shown the latest articles in that RSS feed. Link to a YouTube video and users can watch the video in the Snap Shots floating bubble. Snap also introduced an advertising feature, allowing website owners (and Snap) to earn a bit of money — a less irritating version of those blasted IntelliTXT advertisements.

But people complained about this — turned off mostly by the advertising, and grumbling that the screenshots were accompanied by clutter and stuff. Services like websnapr sprouted up, offering pure thumbnails unaccompanied by the clutter but devoid of the useful features that Snap hastily added to their original service.

websnapr is a waste of time — it sets out to be “Snap Shots without the annoying bits” but it is in fact “Snap Shots without the useful bits” . Don’t bother with it, or the other Snap Shots alternatives. Even Snap Shots itself — the original, and the best — is a bit poo.