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

The answer is the new DC power technology. With direct DC power to the servers or the option of applying a AC-to-DC converter solution, outrunning other AC powered dataventer solution, a company called Rackable Systems claims to have come up with a data center power solution that not only will increase system reliability but also decrease monthly power costs by up to 30%.

I just started reading about this and it seems that finally environmental thinking is beeing applied directly on datacenter systems. Full cargo centers of servers running 24/7, demanding loads of power supplies – it is in the datacenters that green web hosting really can be applied. Planting a tree or using some solar panels is just for show, to ride of the green hosting’s good name.

DC power is the future, as far as I can tell.

Here is you chance to show off your own website and get your well-deverved time in the spotlight.  To the weekly blogging here at WebHOstingSearch.com we are now adding a segment called Website of The Week! – a competition for all our loyal and awesome readers who we know master some of the greatest websites in th WWWorld.

Every week the competition takes on a new theme, starting today. This week, w.38, you will be competing over the title Best Pimped Out Blog - judging who has the most pimped out blog? Other themes that will follow is:

• w. 39 – Flyest Functions – rewarding the website with coolest and flyest functions!
• w.40  – Coolest Web Design – got user-friendly, outside the box, original type web design?
• w. 41 – Most Original Content – what is your site about?

Each weekly winner will be announced by the end of the week, Friday, in an exclusive Winner of The Week blog post. The winner will in addition to glory, fame (and a link to his/her site) get a custom-made certificate logo to show off on his/her website.

So compete now by simply commenting this blog post or any of the coming Weekly Winner – post, add your contact information, website URL, your current web host and which weekly theme you want to compete in.

Remember,  you can nominee any website you want! It doesn’t have to be yours!