Students Review Contest for MySQL & Glassfish

Sun Microsystems has announced a students review contest for MySQL and Glassfish, where students have to develop an application using MySQL and Glassfish. The project has to be part of the java.net website and a review has to be written on MySQL and Glasssfish.

The contest is useful for students who are learning to develop web application and will also help Sun if students get interested in these products. The contest has the following prizes to be won:

• A chance to win a grand prize of $500 in Visa debit card, and
• Five chances to win a prize of $250 in Visa debit card

Other than the prizes, students should also be interested in the contest because its a nice learning experience and students will also improve their writing skills by blogging. There is also a certificate that is given to all the winners and its good to show-off you accolades. I won the 2nd prize on the students reviews contest last time and it was an interesting contest to participate.

Chhandomay Mandal manages these student contests and he's very polite and always ready to help. Ask him questions here.

Blog About Windows Vista to Win Vista

Do you have a blog that primarily focuses on Windows Vista?? Do you write tips and tricks to improve Vista?? Do you love Vista and talk about its feature and usefulness on your blog?? Then here is an opportunity for you to win some prizes for your blog. WinVistaClub.com, in association with Windows Vista Magazine, is organizing a contest to recognize some of the best Windows Vista Blogs and Websites.

The Winner of the WinVistaClub Best Windows Vista Blog Contest 2008 will also get a Windows Vista Ultimate 32/64 bit DVD Box Pack, a Free 1 year license of ESET Smart Security Suite, a License of Magic Utilities, a License of MagicTweak, a one year subscription to the Windows Vista Magazine and a link for 3 months on the WinVistaClub HomePage.

You can find all the information about the contest here. I really haven’t come across many places on the blogosphere where people have talked good about Windows Vista. Obviously there are blogs that mention some tips and others from Vista developers who talk about new features and improvements, but there aren’t many good blogs that continuously blog about Vista. With all the rant about Vista over the interweb, that contest must be an interesting little idea to promote Vista.

The Tech Connection Of Web Celebrities

Lists are a human way to organize their lives. And so, Forbes (the guys who are known for their lists) have just put out another list for everyone to look at. And this time the list is about 25 most popular web celebrities. It is always interesting to look at lists, but this one is more interesting since it features a lot of tech guys and tech bloggers.

The Web Celeb 25

1. Perez Hilton (Mario Lavandeira)
2. Michael Arrington *
3. Mark Frauenfelder *
4. Seth Godin
5. Cory Doctorow *
6. Matt Drudge
7. Gina Trapani *
8. Mark Zuckerberg *
9. Harry Knowles
10. Robert Scoble *
11. Frank Warren
12. Om Malik *
13. Will Leitch
14. Jeff Jarvis
15. Kevin Rose *
16. Kathy Sierra *
17. Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) *
18. Markos Moulitsas
19. Xeni Jardin *
20. Ryan Block *
21. Glenn Reynolds
22. Pete Cashmore *
23. Steve Rubel
24. Heather Armstrong
25. Darren Rowse

You can read the list and some detail about the web celebrities on Forbes.com

If you look at the list, all the guys/gals I have put a * are bloggers or tech entrepreneurs. 13 out of 25 are writing about tech or own online tech related business. Although categorizing Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose related to tech isn't absolutely correct, but they are programmers and tech guys. The list just goes to show that geeks are still the internet's largest reader base and tech news/info is the biggest content on the web.

Technorati Launches Blogging Central

Technorati, the popular blogger's tool for indexing and ranking blogs has just launched a new service called "Blogger Central". Blogger Central is kind of an aggregrator service and talks about top tags, rising links of the day and some popular posts in the blogosphere.

Blogger Central is Technorati's attempt to focus back on its target audience of bloggers. Technorati has been slowly loosing its limelight due to other services which are doing better work than it. For example, Google's BlogSearch indexed faster than Technorati a few weeks back and people began searching for blogs on Google's page rather than Technorati. Even the wordpress guys changed the Dashboard, to get links from Google's BlogSearch and not Technorati. This might have been a big blow to Technorati as Wordpress is the most popular blogging tool.

Blogger Central is also in some ways similar to Techmeme's Web 2.0 discussion. The rising links for the day can allow a user to read those posts and then look at the reactions to that blog post from technorati's index. Blogger Central also displays "Blog Posts About Blogging", another popular and interesting thing that bloggers seem to read these days. Other things like "Top Blogs" and "Top Favourited Blogs" which were already there with Technorati have been brought to this page as well.

We will see in the coming days if Technorati can get back to the limelight, that it once had. Technorati lost its way sometime back due to slow indexing, incomplete indexing and incorrect search results. Those problems seem to have been corrected in the last month and now Technorati works a lot better and accurately. Goodluck to Technorati on this one...