Just the other day, my brother proudly displayed an Apple iTouch (8GB) he bought off the net. It cost him about US$260 and he let me touch it.

The surfing experience was amazing. It reminded me of the interface Tom Cruise used in Minority Report, except this one is in your hand and it is way prettier. It expands the contents of a screen beautifully and holding it, I couldn't help but feel I was in possession of a very advanced piece of technology. Alien-like even. And very shiny. Till my brother calmly asked for it back or else...

I spent the next 2 days surfing for an iTouch myself and told myself only the 16GB would do since 8GB could only store maybe 2 movies and some songs and photos and that's about it. Finally, I lay my hands on my laptop and sighed. After studying the specs, I couldn't justify the cost of it.

I already spent that same amount of money on the Nokia e61i, whose camera function fails miserably in comparison to my old Nokia 6280, and I was getting tired of shifting the phone in my hand every time I wanted to type anything. So what I have done is to use my 6280 as a phone and the e61i as a surfing device.

I could watch movies and the such on my laptop, which had a way better and bigger screen. Somehow watching a movie on such a tiny screen wouldn't quite be the same. Think watching a movie on an airplane screen vs your very own 35 inch screen.

So until the iPhone and the iTouch reaches a reasonable price, I won't be getting either. Functionally, you'd be better off getting the Nokia N95 8GB when the price drops under US$300.

Meanwhile, I wonder if my brother will mind me borrowing his iTouch for another test run... :p

Here's a cool find.

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Business hosting packages start from $21.95 with 25GB web space (more than enough for a regular corporate website unless you plan to add tons of videos), 999GB of bandwidth, 999 email accounts, and 999 subdomains.

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Technorati: business website hosting, personal website hosting

Now here's a spanking cool way of ranking search results: with the Sproose "user powered search", the users vote which sites are the best. To date I have only seen it used on the Horrorfind search engine but you know how we horror fans proliferate like zombies. Like delicious and other similar social networking sites, webmasters, bloggers, and publishers can install a remote voting button on their sites, upping the ante.

The interface is clean and straightforward like Google's and it loads up like a charm. The tagline: "User Improved Results" is real catchy and the enticement to all self-respecting web publishers is to shameless self-promote their own sites and those of their buddies.

The "why us" sales pitch is quick and dirty, and on the web, that is all that matters. They quickly differentiate themselves from "machine-calculated" search engines, so you can be sure you won't be receiving results which were paid for to the search engine itself, or even more evilly, artificially pumped up by various methods (not for discussion in this article). That is not to say this won't happen here, but remember, the keyword here is popularity.

Truly, it is worth test-running to see how far up you can push your site up to. And you'll definitely have a lot of fun doing it with your newfound web friends. Community is everything on the WWW.

Technorati: Sproose, user improved search results