Cool Stuff from Yahoo!

OK, I think I'm back. Hope everybody had/are having a good Christmas, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Yule, Kwanzaa, Summer/Winter Solstice, Festivus, or whatever you happen to be into. We sure did.

In addition to the shopping, the eating, the hanging out with the kids, the eating, the giving/giving/opening of presents, and the eating, I've also made a point of spending a lot less time in front of the computer these last few weeks. And it's been fabulous!

But now that I'm back, there are a few things I thought I'd blog about in case anybody's interested.

First of all, I read today that Yahoo! is streaming TV shows now. You can watch two, commercial-free episodes of Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother. Here's the link to the CBS Comedy Bowl at Yahoo! I think you may have to be in the US or North American or something because I got a message that said the shows weren't available in my region. Bummer. :(

And speaking of Yahoo!, it looks like Yahoo! Domains is offering domain names for $2.99/yr. Sweet deal! You can get .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us domains, and they'll park it for free until you get a website organized for it. Cheap domain names at Yahoo!

And for one more (and the last in this entry, I promise) thing from Yahoo! is the Yahoo! Widget Engine. Download it (available for WinXP, Win2000, and Mac OS X 10.3 or newer) and you can add all sorts of groovy widgets to your desktop. Clocks, games, weather reports, news feeds, search tools, and more. There are literally thousands of widgets available. And they're free! So far I'm just using the analog clock and the picture frame that are included with the Widget Engine, but I've got a feeling it won't be long before I've added a lot more! Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0

SiteAdvisor -- Testing the Web

I just read about SiteAdvisor.com at Joho the Blog, and I'll be very interested in checking it out when it launches. From what I've read so far, both at Joho and at SiteAdvisor's blog, it looks like this service could be cool for all web surfers, but especially cool for anybody involved in 'Get Paid' programs.

In a nutshell, SiteAdvisor has a bunch of spiders crawling the web, downloading software, signing up for things, etc. Then they run the software on 'virtual' computers to see if it does anything nasty -- viruses, spyware, adware, behavioral targeting code, or whatever. They also create new email addresses for everything so they can track what kind of SPAM they get, etc. Then they rate each site with red, yellow, or green alerts and make that info available to anybody that's interested.

You can read more about it at Joho the Blog -- SiteAdvisor - Flagging the Danger Zones.

The site should launch some time in early 2006, and I'm going to sign up as soon as it's live! Edited to add: Sweet! They're accepting "preview version testers", so I just signed up! Oh, oh! Pick me! Pick me!

Mucho coolio.

Would you like to learn Spanish for Beginners? Or take a class about the history of New York City? Learn about herbal medicine? Or maybe join a reading group to discuss a book like The City of Falling Angels -- with the author, John Berent himself, leading the group?

If so, you should check out Barnes & Noble University. They offer all these classes, and more, for free.

Paid to Read Payments -- Week 4 November 2005

Quite a few payments came through this week, so the month ended up reasonably well.

Random-PTCs $1.11
DonkeyMails $0.98
AdPaid $5.00
Total $7.09
Monthly Total $19.84

With Random-PTCs, I've averaged a payment about every 2 1/2 weeks since mid-July, and I usually only have to wait a day or two after requesting payment to find it in my PayPal account.

That's my second payment from DonkeyMails -- but it's the second payment in a month, so I'm optimistic about this program. I just started playing around a bit with the Paid-to-Promote part of it, so if that works out, the Donkey might be sending some more payments my way real soon.

This was my first payment from Adpaid, and I received it in a matter of hours, just as I've heard many others say. It's taken a while to get to the $5 minimum -- over 6 months -- but then I haven't been particularly active with this one. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't like the format of the emails. I dunno. But I'm going to try to give it a bit more attention and see if I can earn enough for the next payment a little faster.

I've also got $11.73 in my Amazon Mechanical Turk account, with another $1 or so in pending HITs. My current personal daily best is now 164 approved HITs for $3.28. Nearly enough to make up for the $13.16 I spent at Amazon this week -- on a set of dungeon dice because my son wants me to teach him how to play D&D (We're gonna totally geek out as soon as they get here!).

How to Lead a Business in the 21st Century

Normally these kinds of articles don't catch my eye, but for whatever reasons, this one did. It's about Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, and I haven't finished it yet, but what I've read so far has been good. And interesting.

Here's the link to the Fortune article -- Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove.

Cool Site -- Store Your MP3 Files Online

MP3Tunes.com is offering Oboe, a personal music locker. There's a free version with limited functionality, and a premium service that costs $39.95 a year. For the money, you get unlimited online storage for your music files (mp3, mp4, m4a, m4p, aac, wma, ogg, aif, aiff, midi file formats are supported) and playlists.

You can also sync all your PCc, MP3 players and other devices. Or you can stream your music from the web at 128k (56k for free accounts).

My MP3 collection isn't big enough to need an online music locker -- yet. I'm still more of a CD guy myself. My compromise with the 21st century is that I burn my MP3s to CD. I don't have an iPod or any other dedicated MP3 player, but I do keep an SD card with music on it that I can pop into my iPaq PDA.

But for people with big MP3 collections, this service looks like a winner.

Brought to the world by Michael Robertson, the guy who brought us MP3.com, the Linspire OS, the SIPphone VoIP phone company, and CompareSoft, a software development and publishing company. Talk about an underachiever. Heh.

Make Money Online -- Get Paid $25 For Opening an Online Bank Account

Another quickie. Join HSBCDirect.com (minimum $1 deposit) and they'll add an additional $25 to your account.

The bonus will be deposited approximately 45 days after you open the account. And there are no monthly fees. Plus you earn 4% APY on your balance!

Here's the link: HSBCDirect.com Online Savings Account with $25 Bonus. The Promo Code is 'start'.

Save Money Online -- $2.99 .info Domains at Registerfly.com

Just a quick note for anybody thinking about buying a domain or three. Registerfly.com has a special deal going on .info domains for $2.99. That's HOT!

YackPack -- Is This Something People Want?

After a bit of blogbouncing from angiemckaig.com to Cameron Moll's Authentic Boredom, I ended up at YackPack.com.

YackPack let's people create groups (packs) and leave voice messages for each other. So it's kinda like email, but louder. I haven't tried it yet, but after watching the demo video, it looks pretty easy -- create a pack, click on the faces of the people you want to leave a message for, record your message and send. They get an email notification, login at YackPack, and click to listen to their messages.

I have to admit I haven't really embraced the whole 'talking on the Net' thing. For a while, I was using one of those little Logitech cameras and Netmeeting to have video chats with friends and family, but it was mostly a pain. And I don't use Skype or any other VoIP service -- my ISP has a service that let's me use my regular phone to make calls to the US cheaper than any VoIP service I've come across so far.

I purposely bought a headset with a mic just in case I wanted to give any of these things a try, but so far I haven't done it. No voice messages, no Netmeetings, no Skype calls, no podcasts, and no Yacks.

But maybe for other people, this is something they'd like to give a try?