Nothing is more frustrating than planning a trip overseas only to remember that your passport is about to expire and you have to deal with the hassle of getting a new passport photo. Take no fear - http://www.epassportphoto.com will save you.

This is actually an ingenious idea - upload your photo (they tell you the requirements) and create a valid passport photo yourself without having to pay a ton of money to an inefficient middleman.

Google Bowling typically happens when you link bomb your site with too many similar links. For example, if you have a site about “purple widgets” you don’t want to have thousands of inbound links with the anchor text “purple widgets” - you should have some links that say “widgets,” “purple,” “nice widgets,” “new widgets,” “buy widgets,” etc.

By varying your anchor text you can build thousands of inbound links (over a period of time to avoid the over optimization penalty) without being heavily penalized by Google and any other engines that actually have relevancy filters.

I’m an SEO (search engine optimizer) so I do a lot of work from my home - more specifically, from my couch. For this reason I’m thinking of getting The Table Mate - check it out here - http://www.tvproducts4less.com/table-mate-2.html.

I think this is a great product because “laptops” are not really laptops anymore - most PC makers have started calling laptops “notebooks” to avoid a lawsuit when you burn your legs or sterilize yourself. The Table Mate gives you a safe, comfortable alternative that can easily be folded up and stored. Also, the company ships the product within a few days (which is awesome) and sells it for less than anything comparable out there.

Check out Towering Intellect for a site with some pretty cool random stuff. I know the owner of the site (Nate) and, though I wish he would write more, when he does write the site is quite entertaining.

Recently Nate wrote about a lawyer in a political case who made the statement that some incriminating emails were not “worth the paper they were written on…” - nice. Sounds like a pretty high-tech attorney.

OK, so you’ve been doing SEO for a couple of years now and now your ranking in some decent affiliate revenues every month so you’re looking for a place to spend it, right? Well, if you aren’t now then you will be soon

A couple of years ago I took a trip to Nassau in the Bahamas - see http://www.bahamas.com/ for more information. The Bahamas is great for snorkeling, SCUBA diving and pretty much anything that you dream of doing when you escape to a tropical paradise. One of my favorite things to do in the Bahamas is go to the Atlantis resort and check out the huge aquarium.

If you live in the US the Bahamas is a great vacation spot because it is fairly inexpensive to get to and travel time isn’t bad at all. Also I was able to find Wifi in my hotel and apparently the area has a good internet infrastructure so you can check your log files from the beach.

Some people are not aware of how common log file spam is so I wanted to give you a heads-up. You know how you check your log files 1K times/day since you’re an SEO? Well, take everything you read with a grain of salt - because of log file spam what you see is not always what you get.

Log file spam is basically people making it look like they are sending you a lot of traffic even though they aren’t to make you think they are an important advertiser. Some people will do this to try to sell you advertising later or hope that you send them some traffic in return. The best thing that you can do to fight log file spam is keep an eye on the quality of the traffic you are receiving from referring sources and only invest in advertising mediums that produce a positive ROI.

People blog for thousands of different reasons - some want to share information with others, some want to start a discussion, some want to simply share details about their lives, etc. One thing that many bloggers have in common, however, is that they would like to make some money with their blog - enter http://www.payperpost.com.

PayPerPost matches individual bloggers up with advertisers willing to pay for the bloggers to write product or service reviews. Some people have a big problem with this form of advertising because the blogosphere as seen as a pure medium, but I can’t help but think that monetization of personal blogs is inevitable. Obviously this opportunity is not right for everybody, but just as regular journalists are paid for their time and effort you, as a blogger, can also be compensated. PayPerPost is a unique concept and I plan to test it out over the next few months.

Are you looking for a way to backup your files without spending one red cent? Head on over to Mozy and sign up to get 2 GB of free data backup - done and done.

There has been a lot of conversation in the blogosphere lately about the sustainability of ad-supported models, but I don’t really care - as long as I’m getting free backup from a seemingly reputable company I can’t complain. Lifehacker has a pretty good review on Mozy and PC Magazine even did their own Mozy review.

They also have a paid option now where you can get 30GB of backup for $5/month and 60GB for $10 - not too shabby if you’re serious about backup.

So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past few days with http://www.pluggd.com and so far I have to say that I really like it. I have gotten really into podcasts lately because they allow me to find stuff that I really want to listen to that don’t necessarily have mass appeal. I am really interested in the internet marketing niche which I will never find quality information for on the regular radio.

My only problem with podcasts is that there are so many out there that it is hard to figure out which ones are quality and which ones aren’t - Pluggd lets me find podcasts and rank them by popularity which is usually a pretty good indication of how good the podcasts are. I also created a podcast playlist that updates everytime one of my podcasts is updated and I can share the playlist with my friends.

You don’t need an mp3 player to listen to your podcasts with Pluggd - you can stream them right over the internet. I highly recommend you check out this service if you’re interested in listening to niche content.