Three cool things that I've come across today through a Google ad on my blog. See below.
Though I was very tempted to click on the ad to see what it is all about, I didn't. I manually copied the URL and accessed the site which is Qumana.com

But it was worth that extra little effort. Moreover, as an added bonus Qumana's site listed two more interesting services/products -- Adgenta & Lektora

I have not yet played around a lot with all the three but they definitely look promising and in short here is what each of it does as per their site.

Qumana blog editor : Free blog publishing tool

Adgenta blog ads : Make money - Inserts ads in your blog posts

Lektora RSS reader : Free one click Blog reading (Windows/MacOS X/Linux)

Do check them out. They are all free anyways.

BTW, there currently seems to be a minor bug in Qumana but can be worked around as shown in the link below.

Workaround for MetaWebLog API or higher currently required to upload files using Qumana

Yahoo.com -- the "once upon a time" default portal for Internet users has partly been eclipsed ever since Google.com made a big bang. Lots of users then slowly migrated to give the top spot to Google.But all that is about to change with search.Yahoo.com & search.MSN.com now both delivering equally good or even better results compared to search.Google.comNow it is just matter of time before they start taking the lead in other spaces as well.Watch out Google!

Step up the prices?

Well, but that's not the actual mission of Stepup.com, which is yet another 2dot0 dot-com shopping services startup that helps retailers leverage the Internet to display their in-store products (available inventory). As per their website, StepUp’s mission is to expose local inventory information from retailers of all sizes to consumers wherever they are browsing products online.

I'm not sure how often the inventory is updated but when I quickly tried out their site to find a product, I've noticed that the listed prices of the product on StepUp's site are more than what is actually listed on the retailer's website. See the pic below. Click for a larger picture.
Isn't Stepup supposed to drive traffic to retailer's website and not away from their sites. If I were a real customer after looking at all the prices listed for the product on Stepup's website, I'd have given preference only for those listings that had the least price while infact other retailers might be offering a better deal.

Not sure if it is stale information, incorrect algorithm or Stepup's way of giving preferential treatment to some retailers but it just didn't look right to me.

Hey Stepup, don't step up the prices.

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Good Luck.