Smart did a great job introducing bucket pricing of mobile internet data on their latest promo – Always On <amount>. If you’re used to time-based pricing (unlisurf) then you might get confused on what bucket pricing means. Contrary to the one we’re used to, time-based pricing gives you the ability to access the internet from a given time range no matter how much data you’ve consumed, once you’ve consumed the timeframe then you’ll not be able to access the internet. Bucket pricing on the other hand revolves in a different way, you will be given a bandwidth limit like 250mb and you can access the internet as long as you would not reached the 250mb mark.

 Though very innovative that smart implemented their Always On promo, I still felt robbed by the idea that it’s not working in a proper manner. Allow me to elaborate later as I have to display their pricing first. Here’s the table on what to expect on their bucket promo.

Now to register on the promo just text “ON  <amount>” then send to 2200. You’ll then receive the confirmation message that you can now use the service . It’s cool that smart implemented this one. It’s perfect if you’re not a heavy user and you only use the internet in checking/updating social networking sites.

My only gripes about this is that there’s still the expiration of service which sucks really bad. The fact that you purchased that certain amount of bandwidth gives you the entitlement that you own it. Expiration just kills the beauty of bucket pricing and limits your freedom to consume it fully.  Not to mention that they put a 2gb bandwidth use for the price of 995php. Only dumb users will use it, why not use the unli promo for 999/month then you don’t need to worry for the bandwidth use. Let’s see how globe will answer on this one (Globe Promos here)

The Impact is not that big if you’re going to ask me. But the message is clear, Google’s taking some steps on fighting piracy now that they started small simple steps on covering the traces to most prominent piracy hubs. Worst case happens  if they started altering their algorithm and start blocking sites serving pirated contents. That would be pretty devastating to small businesses here in the Philippines since I’ve seen massive pirated movies which sells like pancakes in the streets. Anyway that would be good for webmasters if you know what I mean…

If you are a web master you will definitely love this tool because it outperforms websitegrader in many ways. The time it takes to analyze a site is fast enough to not being pissed off and it gives lots of data which you can compare to your competitors.  The only thing that  does not work in their tool is their alexa rankings, it keeps on telling your rank as zero which is very odd. But overall the site analysis is the best, It gives Twitter,Friendfeed,Technorati,Digg and othe social media performance of your site. It also gives the total number of backlinks in Google and Yahoo’s perspective and your blog’s standing in it. It’s free to use so you can just analyze other sites till your fingers bleed. All I can say is that it’s the best tool available in website analysis right now so use the service and use it to maximize your advantage.

1.  Blogspot – This is my all time favorite in terms of free hosting. You can easily integrate your adsense code in your blog because of it’s easy interface. Managing and configuring the looks of the ads is very simple to do because of widgets. Just drag and drop and you can alter the position instantly.

2. Tumblr – Tumblr just like blogspot is also one of my favorite blogging platform.  Aside from quick posting and ease of use, You don’t need to worry anything. But putting adsense ads has some complexities behind it. Anyway it’s still a good blogging platform that allows adsense ads to run in your blog, Here’s a tutorial i digged out on how to add adsense codes in your blog. You need a little html/css background but it’s worth learning it.

3. I.ph – You probably do not know this blogging platform but I.ph is one heck of a blog. It runs using Calliope CMS and it’s one of the blogs that can rival blogger when it comes to user-friendliness. Adding adsense is very easy to and you don’t need to tweak any codes just to add one. You only need your publisher I.d. and you’re done.

4. Weebly – Weebly is not a blog but a site creator. It’s one that you call WYSIWYG site makers if you want to make professional looking websites. Although Weebly is a site creator you can also make a blog inside your site. Other than that you can make static pages and widgets. Adding adsense ads is also easy but the drawback is that you’ll be having  shared revenue to weebly.

5. Yola – Thesame as weebly, another site creator which is very similar to weebly’s feature.

6. Squidoo – Your pages are called Lens in which you can expand and customize. You cannot add adsense to your Squidoo lens but you can set it up in such a way that you and squidoo will share revenues with their ads. The share is 50/50 and traffic is really high if you have nice content.

7. Hubpages – Hubpages are really hot these days and people use it too advertise because of high traffic probability. The concept of hubpages are very similar to squidoo, the only difference is that your pages are called Hubs. Adding adsense code is done by yourself and it’s relatively easy but you have to understand that you and hubpages share adspace so you might see your adsense ads or hubpages’ own ads.

• Handles all RSS versions, ATOM 0.3 and 1.0, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
• Advanced threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded fashion. SharpReader detects and shows connections between items if they have same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage, or if an item has comments (for feeds supporting the <wfw:commentrss> standard).
• Group subscribed feeds into custom categories.
• Feed settings like refresh-rate and purge timeout can be set per feed or per category. Category-wide settings apply to all feeds in that category that are still set to “Default” for the setting in question.
• Dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds – just drag a link from your browser into SharpReader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top.
• Feedster integration to easily search weblogs and newssites for specific terms, and even subscribe to such a search to be notified of new results.
• Support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication.
• Reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding.
• Minimizes to the system-tray.
• Systray popup when new items arrive (can be disabled on a per-feed or per-category basis through the properties pane).
• Easy keyboard navigation to go the next or previous unread item.
• Import and export your subscriptions using OPML.
• Filter items.
• International Character-set support.
• HTTP Authentication support.