Hi all,
    Just found this news while I was surfing Digg. A poor granda in New Zealand got the shock of her life when she found a condom in the happy meal gift pack she bought for her 7 year old granddaughter, from a McDonald’s restaurant.

    Foxnews reported this issue late yesterday.

The condom was discovered Tuesday night in a bag that came with Maia Whitaker’s meal, which her grandparents bought at a McDonald’s outlet in the city of Wellington.

Grandpa Rowan Hutch told The Dominion Post newspaper it was lucky his wife was first to look inside the small sports bag that came with the meal.

She was aghast when she found the green condom and its packet inside the bag, he said.
“I was pretty horrified really. The fact my granddaughter was going to look in the bag and find this thing. It would be difficult to explain, she’s only seven,” said Hutch.

The outlet quickly swapped the happy meal for a hamburger and pencil case. McDonald’s is investigating the find.

    Was this gift intended to make the receiver much more happier, along with the Happy Meal? I hope such horrific issues do not happen in future, or else, we’ll have a tough line of 7 year olds taking matters into their own hands!

Technorati Tags: condom, McDonalds, Happy meal

Hi all,
    I was looking through my site stats yet again today(after a period of 2 days)… As usual, the Blogging India stats were between 650-750 visitors daily (a bit low since I hadnt posted for a couple of days). But the BlogForPeace stats which were usually at 900-1000 daily had spiked up to 3200!!! AND I hadnt posted for a while too!

    What was going on? It took me just a second to visit my “Referrers” page, and found a Czech blog was linking to Blog For Peace. I’m not fretting. It was a PR7 blog with an Alexa of 465… Why was such a high profile blog linking to me? I decided to check it out…

    I had to work hard to drown a groan! They had done an article about a leaked Harry Potter book(weeks after I’d said that the leak was false, and that it was a fan fiction), and they had read the article on Blogging India about the “leaked” version.

    If you remember, I had posted the file on the hosting account for BlogForPeace, and so the Czechies thought that it was actually posted on BlogForPeace, ignorant of the fact that I was the author of both the blogs, and that I had posted it on my other account since it was fatter with lots more bandwidth available.

    Thus, about 2500 visitors thronged BlogForPeace to see what it was all about, and spent hours searching for “leaked Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows” on the site search… Poor dudes…

    Apparently, the Czech blog also linked to Dr. Mike’s Steak Dinner blog who also felt a slight pinch -  a rise in visitor count by about 1200. He posted a post about how “Harry Potter was controlling” his blog. Thankfully, his blog was hosted by WordPress, and thus he didn’t have to feel the bandwidth pinch…

    Such incidents make you wonder why a renown blog does such articles without proper research. Dear reader, if you are a blogger, this is a lesson to be learnt. Never do an article without proper research, or else people might start cursing you for nothing…

Technorati Tags: better blogging, harry potter, leaked, wasted bandwidth, stat hike

Technorati Tags: better blogging, harry potter, leaked, wasted bandwidth, stat hike

Hello all,
    Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that PayPerPost, the company which was the first in league to introduce payment for blog posts, acquired Zookoda, the blog to email system.

    Arrington said -

Controversial startup PayPerPost will announce the acquisition of Zookoda, an Australian blog-to-email service, tomorrow.

We wrote about Zookoda last year, and the company put the product up for sale last September. There were reportedly a number of offers for the service when it was originally put up for sale, but the asking price of US$500,000 was too rich to close a deal. Now, nearly seven months later, PayPerPost has stepped in to acquire the company. PayPerPost is not disclosing what they paid for Zookoda, although CEO Ted Murphy did tell me it was a cash deal.

PayPerPost previously announced the acquisition of Performancing only to back out of the deal a week later. Murphy assured me that the Zookoda acquisition won’t suffer the same fate.

PayPerPost says that Zookoda has 10,000 blog customers sending emails to 2.3 million people. Like the Performancing deal, PPP will want to market their core service to those 10,000 bloggers. Murphy tells me that they are also looking for new distribution channels for their content, and email is a natural fit. PPP bloggers will probably soon be seeing pitches to join the Zookoda service, perhaps with the promise of higher payouts when they post.

    Its funny to note how Arrington calls PayPerPost as the “controversial startup”. Ironically, it was he who made the maximum controversy when they started up

    Anyway, I can only wonder what PPP would want with a website like Zookoda. Indeed, PPP’s earlier trial at acquisition, with Performancing, had some meaning for their then intended segmentation, but right now, Zookoda seems like a meaningless acquisition for a company like PayPerPost.

    Arrington says that PPP will utilize their means to influence the 10,000+ bloggers who use Zookoda. But honestly, I think Ted Murphy, CEO of PayPerPost, has something much more vast under his sleeve.

    I’d tried Zookoda for BloggingIndia, and was quite unsatisfied with the service. It seemed to lack something… Maybe it was just a bit new to me, and the fact that with Zookoda, a blog lost all its importance.

Technorati Tags: payperpost, acquires, zookoda

Hi all,
    There are many BitTorrent clients which are malware supported. Three of them are Torrent101, Torrentq, and Bitroll. They are heavily advertised on BitTorrent sites. They lure newbies to downloading these clients, and mess up their systems.

    TorrentFreak, the famous torrents blog and community, envisaged a new means to fight these malware clients. They utilized Google Adwords campaigns to buy ad space on Bitroll, Torrentq and Torrent101 websites.

    These ads displayed “Malware warning - Just so you know, Torrent101 installs Malware”.

    Quite effective. These ads, in just 4 days, produced 20,000 views, and thousands of clickthroughs. Thus thousands were educated, and were saved from installing Malware.

    Its a very effective, and innovative means to fight off bad society. Now the question is, how many people will buy such ads in competing websites, and drive away traffic with false notes. I hope that such methods will be employed by more and more people to spread awareness, and raise the overall quality of the general web.

Technorati Tags: torrents, malicious, fought, adsense, google

Hey all,
    Did you see the brand new(OK fine, so I’m a day late in reporting it!) Google logo for World Earth Day? Somehow, the Google designers have gone out of their way, and done a totally new logo, rather than the logo modifications they used to do earlier…

    Nice, isnt it?

Technorati Tags: world earth day, google, logo