There are times when we all need to come together and do whatever we can to help people that are under distress. Just recently we saw how an entire country got affected, in the most horrible way, by an earthquake. Thankfully people all over the world have raised millions of dollars that, of course, can’t make up for all the human losses but it can still improve the quality of life for the people in Haiti. With a death toll at about 200,000 and with yet another 1.5 million people homeless they really need all the help they can get. It makes me happy to see that some web host’s have decided to help out as well. Hostgator has donated $100,000, GoDaddy $500,000 and SingleHop has contributed with $10,000. I hope to see more web hosting providers making contributions to help out the one’s affected in Haiti.

This Tuesday Google threatened to shut down all of their operations in the People’s Republic of China. The reason is that they discovered a very advanced cyber attack against Chinese human rights activists.

According to Google, Chinese “cyber spies” hit the company, along with at least 20 other companies whose identity has not been revealed. The purpose of the attack apparently was to gain access to email accounts belonging to activists all over the world.

The company said that they now are looking over their business in China and that they’ve made the decision to no longer filter search results in China.

Many bloggers claim that Google’s filter in China already is long gone, or at least that it’s gotten a lot softer. When searching for the Tiananmen Square while in China you apparently get a much broader set of results than you used to.

China is still to respond to the threats made by Google. The Chinese authorities are “looking for more information” regarding the alleged attacks, according to a Chinese official.

What can one make out of all this? It’s difficult since Google once in a time agreed to allow very strange censorships, at least according to me, in China but I think it’s a good thing that they now finally decided to take a stand against pointless ruling by “Big Brother”. What do you say? What’s the best thing Google can do now?

What is Blog Action Day? BAD started in 2007 by Collis and Cyan from the Envato network. This year they turned over their efforts to something bigger with Change.org.
BAD is the day for bloggers all over the world to discuss the year’s topic: Climate Change. How YOU can help? Write about climate change and how it affects you, your community, and even your environment. Do you have ideas to share or even eco friendly products to promote? Do it now! Tell everyone why you think this a huge issue.
Later today Iwearyourshirt will post a video about BAD and WHS so we hope you come by later!

Microsoft and Yahoo recently released details regarding a web search and advertising revenues alliance, all according to Reuters.

The alliance is going to be complex (as expected when dealing with two giants) but the companies will for example split the revenues coming from online advertising and Yahoo will use Microsoft’s search engine Bing on their sites. Yahoo will be the company in charge of managing the revenues from the advertising on a global scale.

“Through this partnership with Yahoo we will be able to create innovative search functions, add value to our clients as well as providing consumers with an alternative to a market that is dominated by one single company”, says Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer obviously refers to Google, who is getting increasingly dominating on the search engine market. With this alliance Yahoo and Microsoft are stepping up their position in the battle against their enemy Google.

The alliance can lead to around 500 million dollars in increased revenues per year, according to a press release in Reuters.

“This deal means a lot for Yahoo, for our users and for the industry as a whole. I believe that it creates opportunities for a new era of innovation and development on the Internet”, says Carol Bartz, Chief Executive at Yahoo.

The contract will tie the two companies together for a period of ten years. This arrangement was preceded by an 18 months long attempt from Microsoft to get Yahoo to join them in the battle against Google. I for one am looking forward to see how all of this will present itself in the future. Beating Google is not the easiest of tasks.

The next big thing to look out for seems to be Google Wave, a soon to be released real-time communication platform which has been under construction for about two years now. When the platform hits the public is difficult to say so I guess that we just have to settle with “sometime later this year”. With every new release from the major web companies follows a heap of info, tending to make it all a bit overwhelming. To clarify what Google Wave is all about I thought that it was about time that I wrote a little something about it.

As mentioned is Google Wave a real-time communication platform and it combines everything from email, social networking (for example FaceBook), instant messaging and wikis. In other words: you will get access to all of this and much more through a one in-browser client. Want to share files with your friends and colleagues at work? Yes, you guessed right – Google Wave is a tool that can help you with this. Some of the features that are included are: drag and drop file sharing, wiki functionality, real-time, embeddability on your blog or website, playback and natural language which means that the wave corrects your language.

As with most new hypes nowadays do Google Wave come with its own lingo. Yes, you will yet again have to learn a couple of terms if you want to be in the “it crowd”. A wave means a specific threaded conversation. A wavelet is part of the mentioned thread bit it is just a small part of the larger picture. A Blip is the smallest part of the conversation, being a single line of a conversation.

This was just a short walkthrough but other things that could be worth reading up on are wave gadgets, robots and wave embeds. If you have the time you can check out the video below. In my opinion is Google Wave one of the most exciting things happening on the web this year and I look forward to seeing it in all its glory when it gets released.

Just yesterday it was released – Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft. This is their attempt to become a serious contender and steal a piece of the pie from Google. The features are pretty much the same although they say that it delivers a much more functional experience, something that I to be perfectly honest have not noticed yet. But hey, it is only a couple of hours old, and it has quite a few good reviews, so maybe I should give it a proper try.

I for one am not all that impressed over the way it look. It is pretty much a wallpaper (and not a very interesting one I might add) with the same search function that we already know from Google and Yahoo. I am more into the minimalist design, but that has to do with personal taste. Who knows, you might love the way Bing looks. The search results that I get when I use Bing are pretty ok but not impressive enough to make me want to change search engine. Ok, Bing might have some growing pains (as all businesses do) in the beginning so I will most likely keep track of their progress to see how they evolve in the future. A little healthy competition is always a good element.

GoDaddy have always been known for making pretty controversial commercials that people either love or hate. I guess that they believe that all publicity is good publicity. However, being somewhat of innovators (if you can call them that) in the hosting industry they also sponsor the Andretti Green racing team in which Danica Patrick is a driver. Just the other day, Sunday the 24th of May to be exact, Danica managed to make history at the Indianapolis 500 with her third place finish, which is the best result for a woman ever in this race.

The commercials that Danica made for GoDaddy has, as it always is with their commercials, caused quite the stir beforehand and hence also boosted the traffic to their website. This event however proved to be even more successful for GoDaddy. During the broadcast of the race web traffic to GoDaddy.com spiked 163 percent and after the race traffic increased with an impressive 570 percent. GoDaddy themselves say that this traffic is due to a GoDaddy “tease” commercial before the race featuring Ms. Patrick encouraging people to log on to their website. Say whatever you want about their commercials but they sure know how to drive traffic… And oh, congratulations on being part of making history!

Check out the video above

There are a couple of drawbacks to the hard drive donation program. Once every two months a maintenance person will come and check the hard drive. But this is a small price to pay. You are earning money for doing nothing. Awesome, isn’t it? With any program, there’s always that tricky agreement termination. Timing is crucial; if someone signed up for hosting that uses a part of your hard drive you will have to wait until the end of the hosting plan period to get your property back. If you need the hard drive back right away, you can terminate the agreement after compensating the remaining period back to the hosting company.

The bigger the hard drive the more you earn. Simple as that. Plan sizes from mediatemple (mt) are as follows:
Tiny drive- 100GB- $10/month
Little drive- 200GB- $20/month
Big hard drive- 1000GB-

Think ahead if you want to buy a new PC and order one with extra disc space. I bet you already want to sign up as a “hosting donor” so here is the link. Don’t give away too much though and think before throwing out your old good for nothing PC, it may be worth something now.

Just finished an article on Obama’s announcement of the new energy and environment team this Monday. Secreatry of Energy nominee Dr. Steven Chu brings hope of a DC powering reform of the datacenter market, including all major hosting providers. As active director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Chu has been involved in research of alternative energy for a long time. And as LBNL just released a report in March regarding the Demonstration Project of a new DC Powering solution for future datacenter.

This is exciting stuff as a new government is formed and new ways for a greener US is being explored. May more energy-efficient datacenters and a green Internet be one of these ways?

Read the full story.

Gotta just spread the word on a current/upcoming hosting promotion here at Web Hosting Search. Thanksgiving just celebrated, Black Friday shopping spree just last week and Cyber Monday this week, the team at WHS thought of nothing better than to launch a sales campaigns giving discount on any hosting plan offered by hosting provider Web Hosting Buzz.

You’ll get $5.99 off  if you paste the code blackfriday into the coupon box when signing up to any Web Hosting Buzz hosting plan and $6.99 off if you paste the code cybermonday. How about that?

To get all the info go to the official Cyber Monday deals page!

Enjoy your dollars saved /Brian