If you’ve ever wished celebrities like actress Demi Moore or tween-star Justin Bieber would follow you on Twitter, now’s your chance — but you’ll have to cough up some cash for the privilege.
EBay Inc. is hosting a charity auction called TwitChange, through which people can bid to have celebrities follow them, retweet their posts or tweet their username on Twitter for three months.
Money raised from the auction, which runs through Saturday, will go to aHomeInHaiti.org and its efforts to rebuild the Miriam Center, which is based in Haiti and houses special-needs children.
More than 180 celebrities are involved in the auction, ranging from Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine to actor Zachary Levi.
As of late Monday, Dana White, president of mixed-martial arts group Ultimate Fighting Championship, was in the lead with $15,600 after 86 bids. Levi, who plays a computer nerd implanted with spy secrets on NBC show “Chuck,” was behind him with $14,900 raised.
Both auctions offer to follow the winner on Twitter for at least 90 days, repost one of the winner’s own postings and broadcast the winner’s username to the celebrity’s list of Twitter followers.
There were also plenty of celebrity Twitter opportunities below $100: A listing for comedian, talk-show host and actor George Lopez to retweet a message from the winner was going for $38 after 19 bids. A listing for rapper Snoop Dogg to do the same rose to $67.55 after 7 bids.
Happy Birthday Google, which turns 12 years old on 27 September 2010. The California-based company was first incorporated as a privately held corporation on 27 September 1998.
To mark the occasion, users of Google’s home search page are met with a Wayne Thiebaud cake, reproduced by permission of VAGA, Visual Artists and Galleries Association. Most of Thiebaud’s cakes were painted in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although Thiebaud is associated with the Pop art movement due to his interest in objects of mass culture, his work is earlier than Andy Warhol.
This blog is built using WordPress – and I am in love WordPress.
In actual fact, my heart runs THAT pitter-patter just thinking about it, I might EVEN MARRY WordPress.
And HERE are 10 REASONS WHY.
Reason 1: Google loves WordPress.
Google sends its bots over to my blog within 15 minutes of a new post being published. Since everyone I’ve ever met loves Google, and Google loves WordPress, it makes sense that the world should love WordPress too.
Reason 2: WordPress is FREE.
You can download it, plus a choice of themes, plus a whole heap of plugins for nothing, NADA, ZIP, ZERO. Because we all love WordPress, there is an active development community that keep creating new free plugins for you to choose from. There are also some fantastic paid themes (such as Thesis and Woo) as well as plugins you might have to fork out for.
Reason 3: Ten Squillion Web Developers
know WordPress (give or take a few thousand either way). This means you can shop around for a great price on getting your blog set up (although I should put in a plug for the brilliant, amazing work done by Chris in this particular blog).
Well, all gals need to frock up and change their look from time to time.
How else does any self-respecting chick ward off the boredom of the same old thing?
Of course, I’m no exception, and there has been a momentous decision made regarding the future of this blog (drumroll please).
Over the next few days, we’re moving to a brand new, hot theme for this wordpress blog.
Hoorah! A brand new look!
Now, try as I might to get all the housekeeping done before we move across (yep, I’m been spring cleaning this blog for the last few days and I’m worn out from it), I’m going to apologise upfront if you find the space is a bit of a mess while we’re on the move.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy the new look once any or all the kinks are ironed out.
A NEW York man attempted to get round his drunk driving ban by riding his lawn mower to the store to buy beer, NY cops revealed yesterday.
Barry Foster’s bid for alcohol ended in disaster, however, as the hapless boozer passed out behind the controls off his machine as he made his way home, reported the Times Herald Record.
The 53 year old man was found slumped over his lawn mower not far from his home on Saturday, after sheriff’s say he drove it while drunk to the store to buy beer, but had on his way back passed out.
He appeared drunk and was already known to deputies since his car drivers licence had been recently been suspended following a drink driving arrest in August.
Paramedics took Foster to Catskill Regional Medical Center in Harris where he was admitted. He faces additional charges after he is released from hospital, deputies say. Continue Reading
Eight-year veteran David Ku, senior vice president of advertising products, and a key player in its search marketing platform, is the latest in a string of execs to leave the global giant as it attempts to reinvent itself under Chief Executive Carol Bartz.
Amongst other execs calling it quits have been Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh (April 2010), advertising sales boss Joanne Bradford (March 2010) and Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen in 2009.
In other news, Yahoo! will revamp its search pages to include more visual content, a move the company hopes will engage more of its users.
The move encompasses improvements to search, mail and advertising, as market share continues to fall, with Bing recently overtaking Yahoo! in search, meaning the laggard fell to third place.
The Internet giant will also integrate news, as well as search and conversational trends, moves that could be directed at blunting the impact of popular sites like Twitter Inc.
We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn’t. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.
David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users’ accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, Wash. office.
He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company by parents. Continue Reading
The firm says that it’s taken the App Store just 2.2 years to shift the same number of items as the iTunes store managed in five. It reckons that by the end of 2010, total downloads for each are likely to hit around 13 billion.
This is despite the fact that the total number of apps available is far smaller at around a quarter of a million. This is way below the 12 million songs available on iTunes – although one mustn’t forget that many, unlinke songs, are free.
“If the current download rate is maintained (17 million apps/day) and if the pricing of $0.29 per app is preserved, then $1.8 billion will have been spent on iOS apps this year,” says Asymco. Continue Reading
Google has rekindle its love for speedy Web searches with Google Instant, a new version of the search engine that displays results as you type.
When typing a search query with Google Instant, results appear after the first letter is entered, and they update as the user types. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, said results are actually delivered “before you type,” because Google Instant predicts and automatically completes search terms.
According to Google, a typical searcher spends nine seconds entering a query, and 15 seconds searching for answers. Google hopes to shave two to five seconds per search using Google Instant as each keystroke triggers a predictive search which eventually will display the target of your ferreting. Watch this video to learn the basics.
