Perfect if you want that American touch, or if you just want something beautiful and mesmerizing to look at. Download the wallpaper here.

Take me home, country roads… Check it out here.

Great theme if you’re into things of the more psychedelic nature. This HD wallpaper is available in many different sizes – take a look at it here.

This one is the obvious choice for all the Mac-lovers out there. Pimp your Mac with a Mac… Double the fun!

This photo makes me feel very Zen, a big plus when you have a stressful day at work. You’ll find this wallpaper here.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is one of my all-time favorites and it’s not only because of its great content (although it’s excellent) but because of its great design. It’s mainly black and white with some colors popping out here and there. The best thing is of course its typography. I don’t know any other website that’s been as successful as The New Yorker when it comes to transforming a certain typography into being part of their brand.

Let it Bleed

There is just something about this site that’s so very appealing. I’m usually not a big fan of dark websites but if it’s done properly there’s nothing better. Well, perhaps there is – let’s just agree that this is a beautiful site that’s truly inspiring.

Favorite Website Awards

The FWA website is pure heaven when it comes to finding inspiration. Take a look at the “Site of the day”, “Site of the month” and so on… You get the idea. This is the Oscars of web design and it’s probably the best site to visit if you’re having a slow day at work.

So, that’s it. Three websites should do the trick. Still not inspired? Have a cup of coffee and a long walk. Still not inspired?!?!? Hope is over for you…

Super Bowl is as you all know just around the corner, 7th of Feb to be exact, and it will of course be interesting to see who wins between New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts but I know that many people are looking forward to see the ads in-between the game (how often does one look forward to the ads?!!?) as well. The Super Bowl ads are known for being super expensive and also, often, very funny.

This year we will get to see ads by for example Frito-Lay’s Doritos (who topped last year’s USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter), Mars Chocolate, Homeaway Inc, Diamond Foods and of course GoDaddy (for the sixth year in a row). We recently published an article about the GoDaddy girls and say what you want about their ads; they always manage to create a certain buzz (in lack of a better word). It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with this year…

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.

The good news about this software is that it has a 30 day free trial, and unlike many other pieces out there, it is an actual full trial without any of the “This Feature is Only for Registered Products” or whatever. Installation is pretty straight forward and then the configuration process starts up. Of the monitoring services I have tried out, this one had one of the easier to follow configuration processes and it only takes a few minutes. Once this is finished, the program will populate with details from the server. At this point, those few minutes of work pay off with loads of info (some of which is vital , others may not be of any interest to you).

The server monitor has tons of features to it and can monitor a lot of different things. Here is a list of some of the things it can be used to monitor:
• Event Logs
• CPU, Memory, Network Usage
• Disk Space
• Running Services
• Log Files
• Server and room temperature
• SNMP Object Values
• Running Processes
• Ping Response Time
• Directory Quotas
• Changed files and directories
• FTP Servers
• POP,IMAP and SMTP mail servers
• Web Page content and load times
• TCP port response
• Citrix Monitoring
• And additional resources through user scripts
As many of you likely noticed, we have recently implemented a redesign on our site (at the same time we shifted CMS). So a few of these areas were particularly interesting to check out as I had not done so since things went live.
The page for content and load times is quite nice. In here you enter a specific page you want monitored and it will track the load times over a period of time and allow for the data to be made into a graphical representation. Load times are always of the utmost importance to us, as it is to all site owners, so it is nice to be able to take a look at this data and see how it compares to earlier designs on that page to see what the average response time is. Similarly, the ping response tool was also one of interest to me. It was a pretty straightforward tool with only a few options in it, but it does allow you to schedule a ping test and to graph out the data. The interface feels very familiar and is easy to navigate. Overall the specific tools were very easy to use and their site offers information on how to configure each one if you cannot figure it out on your own.

If you decide to use to register the solution for permanent use, the costs are reasonable. It can be registered for one server at $49, but for larger scale operations can be bought in packages to allow for up to 20 servers to be monitored from a single location. Enterprise licenses are also available if that is of interest to your needs. Before doing any of that though, check out their site and give the software a trial for 30 days.

Not that long ago the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) released a report about the evolution of e-commerce and the online shopping habits of Europeans in 2008. Around 80% of all Internet users bought a product or service online in 2008. This figure was 40% in 2004. There has hence been a 100% increase in just four years all over Europe. Each user has in average shopped for 747€, during the first six months, which means a total sum of 1.3 billion Euros.

The products that people buy are 1. Travel tickets (54%) 2. vacation trips (42%) 3. books (40%) 4. concert tickets (38%) 5. clothes (33%). Out of these online shoppers do 59% consider the brands own websites to be a good resource for information on products, and a majority of people think that search engines is a greater source for information rather than personal recommendations.

This means that we in average trust the Internet more than we trust word-of-mouth. And keep in mind that word-of-mouth is the marketing technique that as good as all experts have proclaimed as the best marketing method these latest years. Maybe the new direction is not that strange either. On the Internet you are able to read hundreds of reviews on a single product. Your friend might be wrong about something but can a hundred people be mistaking?

I probably do not need to tell you just how popular Twitter is right now. Everyone from your next door neighbor to us here at WebHostingSearch have our very own Twitter account… You are probably also twittering everyday about things that you find funny or interesting. The boom of various social media apps, such as MySpace, FaceBook and now Twitter, has lead to many feeling anonymous, even though it should be the other way around. We are now more open for interaction than ever before but when it gets too crowded it is always more difficult getting noticed.

There are however people coming up with solutions to make a site pop out and this is what developer Kevin Sherman has done with Bubble Tweet. Twitter is as we all know text-based but with Bubble Tweet you will be able to add your own videos. The service is free and it is very easy to use. Every Bubble Tweet gets its own URL and a count is kept on how many people that are visiting each Bubble Tweet. So, if you want to step out of the anonymity and put a face to your Twitter account I can highly recommend you checking out this fun little tool.

Traditional marketing has become a thing of the past as it simply does not get noticed by the intended market. Many of the majors companies are now putting much of their effort on releasing so called viral videos. These videos do not have to be especially related with the company and their products. Their main purpose is to create a buzz among a community of people and there are quite a few videos that have managed in doing so. Being a sucker for top lists myself I had to create a list with, what I believe to be, the eleven best viral videos of all time.

11. Sheep creating beautiful art

One of the most recent examples of a great viral video comes from Samsung. Instead of showing their products, in this case LED TVs, the traditional way they decided to make some sheep do the work for them. The result is mind-blowing and I do not care whether it is true or fake. I simply get amazed each and every time I see this ingenious video and I am not the only one since it already has millions of views.

10. Hypnotizing bouncing balls

This commercial for Sony Bravia has to be accounted as one of the most successful viral videos of all time. Releasing thousands of bouncing balls down the streets of San Francisco might sound like a terrible idea but it proved to be exactly the opposite. It was almost difficult to understand whether it was a commercial or a music video for Jose Gonzales, who is singing, and the song Crosses. Never before has color been portrayed in a more beautiful way and the video takes full advantage of the oh so important combination – visual and audio.

9. The egg hatching man

This is perhaps not a viral video in its true sense but it still needs to be mentioned in this top list since it was a way of thinking viral. The Swedish clothing store Playground did not want to things the usual way so they decided to see if it was possible to hatch an egg with the help of one of their down jackets. The result was a small chicken and coverage in magazines and TV news all over Sweden. Commercial at its best!

8. Mac doing it the drunken way

Mac has always been cutting-edge when it comes to their design but with Ellen Feis they also managed to create an ad that blogs all over the world was buzzing about. No computers are shown in the ad – there is just Ellen Feis talking drunkenly about how a PC messed up her paper. Simple and sweet in its own way…

7. Wassup

The Budweiser ad “Wassup” has to be counted as one of the first examples of a successful “modern” viral video. Never before had a commercial caused such a stir as this did. There are no facts about how good their beer is – instead we see a couple of friends screaming Wassup!!! to each other. This is somewhat of a milestone among commercials.

6. A very big ad

The beer company Carlton Draught always likes to go over the top with their commercials and this one good example of that. The fact that it is so very strange makes it stand out and become perfect material for a viral video. I have never drunk the beer but still I can not get it out of my head – that must be accounted as a good viral video.

5. Macintosh 1984

The Budweiser ad is one of the great modern viral commercials but Apple’s Macintosh 1984 ad is one of the very first examples ever. It is a rather creepy commercial but nevertheless was it the most talked about ad at its time and it is still one those videos that people can not resist to mention when discussing viral videos.

4. The T-Mobile dance

The T-Mobile commercial is one of the most impressive and astonishing viral videos I have ever seen. For two and half minutes the Liverpool train station is turned into one of the biggest dance floors the world has ever seen. With over 11 million views on Youtube T-Mobile has to be more than pleased with the outcome of this video.

3. The german coast guard

Germans are not the easiest people to joke about but Berlitz managed to come up with a seriously funny commercial known as the “German Coast Guard”. The mispronunciation, and interpretation, of “sinking” and “thinking” is hilarious and got millions of people searching and talking about this video making it as viral as it possibly can be.

2. Touch of gold

Over 50 million views globally make this one of the greatest viral videos ever made. Soccer star extraordinaire Ronaldinho gets a pair of Golden Legend Nike shoes and hits the crossbar four times, without the ball ever touching the ground. This is impressive in so many ways that I do not know where to begin – both his performance and the number of views make me go, huh?! How is this possible?!

1. Dove evolution

This commercial has already become an instant classic. In only 1:14 you will get to see how easy it is to fix up and do a complete makeover. The girl in this commercial goes from a pretty girl to being photoshopped into looking like a supermodel with the text “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted” showing up. Publicity stunt or not – it proved to be the right way to go since millions of people have seen the ad on Youtube. There have also been parodies made which must be the ultimate proof of it being a successful viral video.

Sometimes you just need some inspiration to move forward. One of the things that inspire me is artists – may it be a musical artist or a painter. However, I recently stumbled upon this great artist that creates portraits of fallen stars out of recycled cassettes tape. If you like this one, please make sure to check out “Ghost in the Machine” on Flickr.

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