Which Are the New Seven Wonders of the World?

Forget about the Great Pyramid or the Hanging Gardens. Now the top of the Seven Wonders of the World contains The Great Wall of China, Rome’s Colosseum, India’s Taj Mahal and also three architectural masterworks from Latin America (Peru’s Machu Picchu, Brazil’s Statue of Christ Redeemer and Mexico’s Chichen Itza pyramid) plus Jordan’s Petra.

The new top is the result of a global poll released on Saturday

based on about 100 million votes by the Internet and cellphone text messages and conducted by the nonprofit organization New7Wonders. The nominees were 14 and the losers are the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island in the Pacific, the Statue of Liberty, the Acropolis, Russia’s Kremlin and Australia’s Sydney Opera House.

The only surviving structure of the former seven wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids of Giza, kept their status and were added to the new seven after Egyptian officials expressed this was a disgrace they had to compete.

The poll was started in 1999 by the Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber and initially there were about 200 nominations, but the list was shortened to the 21 most-voted by the beginning of 2006. Organizers have recognized there was no foolproof method of impeding people from voting just once for their option.

The announcement of the New Seven Wonders of the World was made on a stadium in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, in front of an audience of 50,000. The most unusual moment of the ceremony was marked by a Peruvian in national costume raising Macchu Picchu’s award to the sky and bowing to the audience with his hands clasped.

The Colosseum, the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal and Petra have been in the leading position since January, while the Statue of Christ Redeemer got a votes boom recently. Other losers of the contest were Cambodia’s Angkor, Spain’s Alhambra, Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, Japan’s Kiyomizu Temple, Russia’s Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle, Britain’s Stonehenge and Mali’s Timbuktu.

New7Wonders has as the main goal to boost cultural diversity by helping, preserving and restoring monuments. It is funded through private donations and selling broadcasting rights. The former seven wonders were concentrated in the Mediterranean and Middle East and was made by ancient Greeks like Antipater of Sidon (2nd century B.C.): the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria.

(source: www.softpedia.com)

5 Reasons You Should Use A Blog

It is becoming more common but the big question I get when talking to people is “Why use a blog?”.
Off the top of my head I can think of 5 major reasons.

A blog is:

Easy to update
Easy to get started
Liked by the search engines
Creating feeds automatically
Allows people to interact with you

Before I start let me take just a minute to define the term blog. The following is quoted from Dr. Mani one of the earliest marketers to embrace blogs.
“A blog is short for “web log” a sort of online personal diary where “anyone” can reveal his/her innermost thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, ambitions, fears, hopes – you get the meaning.

Yes, it’s a website. With one small difference. It lists posts ordered by date in a personal journal format, and is easier to create than a website – just involves typing into a form and pushing the PUBLISH button”

The ease of push button publishing of most blog platforms make them one of the easiest web sites to update. On most platforms you don’t need to know HTML though it does help. If you can create a word document you can update a blog.

They are extremely easy to get started. Blogger and Word Press both can be started without much more than creating an account and clicking a few choices. Now there are huge advantages to hosting your blog on your own domain. But even there if you have cpanel hosting with Fantastico it is an almost fill in the blank process to get started. No great technical skills needed.

Search engines like blogs. They are usually updated regularly because it is easy. Compare the type and push a button to update of the average blog platform to creating an HTML page uploading it either through the cpanel or FTP. Much easier so it happens much more often. Blogs tend to have fresher content.

The search engines also like the RSS feeds that are created. Properly used feeds can allow you to generate links from other authoritative sites such as Technorati, Feedburner and others. These high PR sites create backlinks to your site which will make the search engines rate you higher. People can easily subscribe to your feed and know when you have updated your site through various RSS readers.

Finally, the biggest advantage is that blogs can be interactive. Most blog platforms allow your reader to comment on what you have written.

This does two very good things for you. You get additional updated content (which the search engines like) and you get feedback on what you have written.

Google Stares Down Microsoft And Wins

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to Vista in response to a complaint by Google alleging that Vista’s inbuilt search functionality competed unfairly with Google Desktop Search.
According to a NY Times report, Google’s complaint was made confidentially in line with rules established as part of a previous settlement over anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft. The settlement between state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft will avert the prospect of litigation over the matter.
The changes Microsoft will make to Vista have not yet been made public.
It’s an interesting case. Microsoft has a long history of anti-competitive behaviour however in recent years the company has been a far better corporate citizen, in large part due to the terms imposed on it by previous settlements. On the surface it seems a little strange that Microsoft could be in this position; Vista’s search capabilities really do nothing more than deliver decent search functionality out of the box for Windows. Search functionality has been available in some form or another in ever version of Windows since Windows 95, the difference being that previously those search capabilities have been substandard compared to offerings from Google and Yahoo with their own respective desktop search programs. Whatever the actual details of the case may be (and we may never know) it’s a win for Google. For Microsoft, questions remain: is this simply a case of Microsoft waiting to fight another day, or is the company now seriously spooked by both the threat of anti-competitive litigation and Google? It’s certainly very un-Microsoft like to simply settle without a fight.