Whats so cool about .CM extension? Well apparently many people when typing in a regular url often mistype .com as .cm (leaving out the “o” in the middle). And any typical domain cybersquatter will know what this means! Millions of people are mistyping .com and if you own some of the major branded domain names with the .CM extension then you can really make a fortune out of it by plainly serving ads on those pages or free traffic by redirecting them to your primary domain.

I personally don’t think buying existing branded .CM version of the domains for traffic is a good idea. As after some time those big brands will come after you with lawsuits and you will eventually have to giveaway your domain name. However it might be perfect for you if you are looking for a very brand able domain name for your new start up or web project

Where and How to Register .CM Domain

Namejet.com is taking a pre-order of .CM domain absolutely Free of charge via this web form:
http://www.namejet.com/Pages/promos/preorder.aspx.

The process is very simple. Simply fill out the forms and pre-orders the domains that you would want to grab. If you are the only bidder, NameJet will not charge you any additional fees and your 2-yr registration fee will be charged by your domain name provider. However if there is more than one bidder then there is going to be a closed auction via email and the highest bidder will get hold of the domain. Domains sold via auction will be charged an additional fee of $350.

Frequently Asked Questions - .CM Domain Registration

What is .CM? Why should I register a .CM?
.CM is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cameroon. The .CM registry has previously only allowed registrations under .CO.CM, .COM.CM and .NET.CM, meaning this is your chance to register a second level .CM domain name. Although best known for being just one letter and keystroke away from a few of the most highly recognizable domains, .CM provides many potential benefits:

• Secure natural traffic to your site
• Expand your domain portfolio with available and highly valuable domains
• Protect your brand to avoid any misleading uses of your name
• Help battle poverty in Africa – each domain sold will contribute to multiple initiatives to grow the African market and end poverty

Can anyone register a .CM name?
Yes! There are no residency requirements for .CM names. You can live anywhere in the world and register a .CM domain.

When can I submit my Pre-Order?

The .CM Pre-Order Landrush is open for the general public to submit Pre-Orders now through Friday, July 31st. The general public can register .CM domains starting Saturday, August 1st, 2009 on a first come, first served basis for those names that were not pre-ordered during the Landrush period.

Protect your Brand/Business names by pre ordering the .CM extension of your domain name(s)!

The Fan Box is very easy to install and just takes a few simple steps to fully integrate it with your existing website. If you are a facebook fan page administrator, you should be able to get the Fan box widget running on your page by copying only four lines of JavaScript.

How to Add a Facebook Fan Widget on your Website

To install the Facebook fan widget, first login to your facebook account and go to your facebook Page - there you should see “Add Fan Box to your site” right underneath your Page’s profile picture. Each Fan Box includes the Become a Fan button. You can customize the Fan Box to include additional features including the stream of recent posts as well as a list of fans. The Fan Box can integrate tightly into your website - it takes a minimum of 200px width and 64px height for the button, and 554px height with all features included. You can read more detailed instructions on the Facebook Developer Wiki.

Here are some examples of different uses of the Facebook Fan Box:

• Threadless is currently using the Fan Box to feature the videos and posts they make to their Facebook fans.
• Newsweek has nicely integrated the Fan Box to encourage readers to become a fan and get news updates through Facebook.
• Coca-Cola’s Fan Box integration encourages Coca-Cola customers to become fans on Facebook.

So don’t wait up, go and install your Facebook Fanbox widget on your website today and get more facebook fans and free exposure to your fan page.

What others are saying about Facebook Fan Page?

Facebook Releases New “Fan Box” Widget to Turn Website Visitors into Facebook Fans - Inside Facebook

Facebook Fan Box Widget Links Celeb Sites, Pages - AppScout

Facebook wants you to become a fan with the new “Fan Box” - Webbyist

Facebook Introduces The Fan Box. Take That, MySpace. - Techcrunch

Get more updates about Facebook Fan widget from Techmeme.

The site revealed many fascinating insights and disruptive ideas of some of the web’s most visionary and influential big thinkers into the future of network communications, highlighting where technology and communication may be taking us in the near future.

This big initiative from Nokia brought together some of the industry technologists, experts, university professors, venture capitalists and bloggers for an on-going conversation on a variety of topics including cloud computing, global social issues, new application areas such as genetics and social networking etc. A complete list of topics can be found here.

Blogger Robert Scoble (scobleizer.com), who himself started a similar project called Building43 not long ago, said in a video interview that refinement of search-capability, being done by himself and others to monitor trends in the aggregation of real-time social Web data, will make it possible for individuals to obtain a stream of desired information based on personal preferences. Scoble believes this development will have similar game-changing implications for users of social media applications such as Facebook.

New extremely powerful tools are coming out enabling you to build specific, advanced searches that can help you identify patterns of usage and review what people are saying around a specific topic,” said Scoble. “I feel something is just about to happen that will make it possible for you to tell this world, I’m interested in “X” and have a stream of “X” come at you.

Social Search Will Revolutionize Society’s Access to Information

Do you have an Idea to share? Head over to Nokia’s Ideas Project and share your big idea with the whole world. The editors’ favorites will receive a free Nokia N95 phone!

According to Techcrunch’s report, Twittorati pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is basically determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking. Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link’s site source Authority Ranking.

On the home page, they currently have 4 main section to show the most popular links that bloggers link to, the most popular photos, the most recent tweets by the top 100 bloggers and also the top 100 blogs with all the authors twitter profile. If you are looking to follow bloggers from the Internet’s most influential blogs then you should head over to this page.

The twitter feed on their home page, which shows the most recent tweets of the top 100 blogs can be sorted by authority as well as by most recent tweets. Clicking on the name of any of the top blogs in the sidebar nicely groups all the tweets from the authors of that particular blog.

Even though Twittorati is nothing ground breaking, but I think its a decent tool to keep your tabs on the tech industry. You can follow Twittorati on Twitter: http://twitter.com/twittoratinews

The official Google blog has announced earlier today that Google is coming up with a new operating system called “Google Chrome OS“.

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director writes:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

So it looks like all the previous speculation is indeed true! Lets look at whats the deal here - Google has been very successful on the web with their search engine and several other web properties and next they sort of tapped into the browser and mobile OS market withchrome browser and Android (Mobile OS). And now they will be competing head on head with software giant Microsoft in the OS market with Chrome OS!

Well I think everyone saw it coming, when Google released chrome they mentioned that its more than just a browser, its a platform where web applications can be built on. So basically the Chrome OS will eventually be something like a cloud based operating system and for people who mostly use computer for the internet will find this very fascinating.

Google Chrome OS will basically run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and Google is working hard with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market in 2010.

The software architecture is pretty straight forward, You can look at Chrome OS as the Google Chrome browser running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work with Chrome OS (as they are both the same platform) and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.

The best part about developing web applications is that they are pretty much platform independent, the apps that you develop will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving you as a developer the largest user base of any platform.

I’m really looking forward to this new Chrome OS. I really can’t wait to get my hands on one of the netbooks running Chrome.

What others are saying about Google Chrome OS:

Google vs. Microsoft: Net giant readies own operating system: USA Today

Google Says Yes to Launching An OS (Based on Chrome) - Louis Gray

Google targets Microsoft with new operating system - Gurdian.co.uk

Google plans Chrome-based Web operating system - CNet

Google to launch Operating System - Mashable!

Google OS Becomes Reality - ReadWriteWeb

Google announces Chrome OS - ZDnet

Google to Challenge Microsoft With Operating System (Update1) - Bloomberg

Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome - Techcrunch

Check the rest of the stories on Techmeme .

Whenever Google comes out with a product, you will notice that it is always in “BETA”. For many years Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and many other awesome google products has been under Beta.

Google’s VP of Search, Marissa Myers was once asked, about Google’s common practice of keeping everything in Beta. In her reply she mentioned that when it comes to software ‘beta’ basically refers to something that is incomplete or in other words ‘buggy’. But Google looks at the whole thing very differently; As the life cycle of the web services that Google comes up with is always evolving so they never consider it as the final product. At that time, I was wondering why don’t they put Google search under beta? It’s also always changing & improving every day!

Anyway it seems like Google has now finally decided to take off the Beta label from Gmail, along with 4 other major google products including - Google Docs, Calender & Gtalk.

Gmail has been in Beta for over 5 years, so why go out of Beta now? Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, said on reply that the beta tag “just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. Google basically sells a bundle of its applications, including Gmail, Calendar and Docs, to businesses via Google Apps. Businesses don’t like the idea of buying something that is not ‘complete’ (or in Beta).

So basically by lifting of the beta label, Google’s paying customers will be happy. But if you are a regular users who wants to see Gmail in beta forever, You can simply go to “Labs” under “Settings” and choose the “Back to Beta” option, which restores the little “beta” label to the logo. Funny isn’t it?

Bing Translator currently supports about 15 languages including - English, Dutch, French, Chinese, Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese Korean, Russian, Spanish and many more. If you have previously used any translation service like Google Translate, then you probably already know how to use it. Bing Translator has a very easy to use interface, just dump some text or a URL in the left hand box on the page and select the source language (auto-detect is default) and select the language that you wish your text/website to be translated to and finally click translate!

This neat thing about this particular translation tool is - if you are translating a website, bing automatically opens both the original and the translated page side by side in a frame. If you click on a particular section of the page it also highlights that portion of the page in the translated version. So in terms of usability, I personally find Bing Translator awesome. However Google Translate supports more languages at this point of time but I’m sure that Bing will catch up with them in no time.

So if you ever need any translation done try Bing Translator!

And trust me, it not easy to find the right web host for you. I remember back in 2008, I was pretty active in the social media sites like - Digg, Reddit & Stumble Upon. I have got my website in the front page and got massive traffic from all these site over and over again. But the first time it happened, I was not ‘ready’ to handle all the traffic and my site went down within the first 10 mins. The host I was working with back then didn’t even want to admit that they just can’t handle this much traffic for the price I was paying.

But anyway, later I sort of got around that and tweaked my blog to make sure that such downtime won’t come again. But few days later it happened again…and then again! I was really frustrated as I was putting in a lot of effort at that time to get all these traffic, but every day I have a downtime of over 30-45 mins!

Thats when I switched to a new host - Hostgator (well they aren’t exactly new to me, I have done business with them since 2004), however I never really stuck with them because at that time their servers were a bit expensive for me. The projects I was running at that time required me to have a dedicated server and so I was always looking around for a more affordable solution. One lesson that i learnt is, if you trust a particular web host you should stick with them regardless of what their ratings/reviews say or how much they charge. Now I have a Reseller account with HG and I am running all my sites there without any problem.

Anyway, I am a bit off topic here, the main question on the table today is how do you know when your website goes down? You can’t obviously monitor in 24/7, right? So how do you know that your website is still up and running when you are asleep at 3 in the morning?

Monitor your Website for Free with Pingdom

After all my troubled experience with many web hosting companies, I heard about Pingdom from Yoast. They had a free 14 day trial, so I signed up and from that day onwards I never had to worry about my website’s downtime! Pingdom automatically checks my website every 1 min to see if my website is up and running. If it fails to access my site for any reason (e.g. site is down), Pingdom automatically sends an email and also an SMS to my mobile phone! Their online dashboard is rich with statistics and graphs which tells you exactly how long your site was down with detailed time stamps. So if your web host claims that they give you 99.9% uptime, you should use Pingdom to find out whether their claim is actually true or not.

Pingdom was not free and it was a paid service. However if your website is important to you, I don’t think you would mind paying that small fee. But many bloggers and small scale website would have found the price point a bit expensive. But guess what the good news is?!

Pingdom is Available for Free

Yes! Now you can Signup for a Free Pingdom account and monitor 1 website with 20 Free SMS Credit. It just takes 2 mins to signup and you are done! After you signup, Pingdom will start monitoring your website and will tell you everytime it goes down! And with the 20 Free SMS credit, you will be informed even when you are not in front of your PC.

And if you run out of that 20 SMS, then you need to seriously consider getting a new webhost! I’d seriously recommend you to go to Hostgator - They have awesome support and near 100% uptime.

You can signup for just 1 cent ($0.01) for the first month and try out their awesome service! Use the Coupon Code - “404PAGE”.

And don’t forget to Signup for a Free Piangdom Account and make sure that your website or blog is running 24/7!

Limitation of the Free Pingdom Account

There is actually no real limitation of the Free Pingdom Account. Its not some sort of trial offer, your account is completely free but you will only be able to monitor one website or server. So if you run one website/blog then this account is perfectly suitable for your needs. If you need to track more than one site, then you may want to signup for their paid service. For your free pingdom account to be kept alive you will need to log in to the Pingdom control panel at least once every 90 days.

But not anymore! Google adsense for Feeds blog has recently blogged about this new feature that feedburner was supposedly working on for some time. Now if you log in to your feedburner account and go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding, you will be able to change the title of the email that feedburner sends on your behalf and that’s not all, you will now be able to insert the title of your last post in the subject line using their predefined variables.

How to Customize Feedburner Email Subject Line

Just follow the steps and you will be able to change your Feedburner email subject line in no time.

• Step 1 - Login to your Feedburner account.
• Step 2 - Go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding
• Step 3 - Under Email Subject/Title, write what you want your email subject line to be. For example, if you wish to insert the title of your last post you can use ${lastitemTitle}. So a nice title would be: Your Blog Name - ${lastitemTitle} (or any other way you prefer).
• Step 4 - If you have more than one post on a day, then you can also include additional information on the subject line. Check the option, “Change Subject when email has 2 or more…” and it will give you an additional field to refine your subject line.
  
  Examples
  Your Blog Name: ${latestItemTitle}
  Your Blog Name: “${latestItemTitle}” plus ${m} more
  Your Blog Name (in this message: ${n} new items)

So what are you waiting for? Check out Feedburner today and customize your feed email subject line!

Today Google has announced that they have added in some neat feature inside Google Blog Search. So I thought why not give them a quick run down..

1. RSS Subscription: If you are particularly interested about a topic you can now easily follow all the stories of that topic as they come along using your RSS Reader. In case you don’t use a RSS feed reader, Google is also providing an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle home page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. Now you can easily browse topics and dig into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow and so on. In my opinion this is definitely a nice addition and it should have been there a long back!

2. Hot Queries: Google Blog search now also displays the popular blog searches in a list called “Hot Queries”. It’s an easy way to quickly dive into the trending topics of conversation on the web. Bloggers should definitely keep an eye on this area as this gives a good pointer on what to write about.

3. Latest Posts: This new section sort of displays the new posts from popular blogs right at the Google blog search home page! Google hasn’t provided any criteria on how they select the “popular blogs”, but so far based on my observation I saw that it picks up posts from reputable blogs hosted everywhere (even from blogspot and typepad). So regardless of what blogging platform (free/paid/self hosted) you use, as long as Google thinks your blog has quality - its likely to be picked up.