Merry Christmas Eve everyone! Tonight Santa is coming to town and you can track his annual journey with Norad’s tracking system. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) has been tracking Santa for over 50 years and this year is no different.
However, now you can track Santa from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Earth/Maps. For further information you can read Brian McClendon’s, engineering director for Google Earth and Google Maps, article on tracking Santa.
A recent patent application by Microsoft shows that Microsoft is planning on developing games that would limit certain areas and competitions to healthy Americans. The players in-game avatars would reflect their own physique. Overweight players would be restricted unless they maintained a proper health records. The game would draw the information from digital medical records. How this will go I don’t know, but it seems like there may be lawsuits of some form against equal rights for all Americans. We shall see.
I have discovered four domain valuation tools in the last few months. Both calculate the value of a domain in very different ways leading to very different results. I tested both with my domain name http://shopthe.net. One came out to $700,000 while the other resulted in $100.
The first was Leapfish:
This gives a very generous estimate of a domain, obviously based on only popularity and not actual traffic, since I basically get none.
You can try their search for getting the value of your domain:
The other site is called Website Outlook:
This gives a much more modest and accurate result.
Search on Website Outlook. Enter your domain.
In addition there is another tool called Estibot. This offered the lowest price of all.
Estibot
Finally I tried a tool called Valuate, which gave me the second lowest appraisal.
Results:
| Valuation Tool |
Domain Value |
| Leapfish |
$774, 680 |
| Website Outlook |
$146 |
| Valuate |
$90 |
| Estibot |
$40 |
I bought this domain with hopes of reselling sometime down the road for a high price, but with all these varied results I don’t know what to believe. My guess would be that the last two are most accurate based on popularity, but you never know. I personally though http://shopthe.net is a popular name. I want to get a nice site on this domain, but thinking of original ideas for a shopping/affiliate market site is difficult. If anyone has any ideas drop a comment.
So which domain tool would you trust the most?
Yesterday my friends and I went to see Avatar (during the day since we’re on winter break from college and the high schooler’s are still in school). I must say that was some of the best CGI I have seen. Though the movie is long (nearly 3 hours) it really comes to life. The alien species are very well portrayed and very believable. They even have their own religion. I would highly recommend seeing this film this weekend (even though we are having one of the biggest snow storms ever in our area) though I do wish they would find a better way to view 3D. Having 20/20 vision really makes the polarized glasses irritating.
Google recently launched a tool to help you view your website in a new way, the way the majority of the people in the world view it. Their tool, Browser Size, shows web developers the percentage of web users who can see sections of their site without having to scroll. This is determined by monitor size as well as whether the browser is resized. So now web developers know if that visitors can actually see that ad or poll they posted there.
According to Google:
The data is generated based on the browser size of users who visit Google.com. Google says that it found that the install rate for Google Earth increased by a whopping 10% simply by moving it 100 pixels higher on the page.
Below is a screenshot of what this blog looks like on browser size.
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