Sounds like a mental thing to be saying, but there are some crazy (in the positive sense of the word, of course) people in this blogging world. Upstart Blogger found April to be a tough month due to some technical difficulties and as a result, is offering a free Macbook Air to one lucky person who links to the site. There are also five free iPhones up for grabs, with details coming soon.

If you’ve got a blog (or any other home on the web), you might as well have a go and link to the site - you’re reading the evidence that I’ve had a go!

It seems like every blog is mentioning the final jeopardy blog of late, but I thought I’d share the reason I’ve taken to visiting each day. For those of us outside of the US, it’s a little dose of the classic gameshow that we’d otherwise not get to see - and I like it.

Yesterday I was talking with Jessi about Craigslist and I remembered that a random stumble had taken me to a site which showed the office that Craigslist runs out of in San Francisco. It was quite different to your usual office space, looking more like someone’s house inside, so this evening I set about rediscovering the site in question. That site turned out to be Office Snapshots and as you can imagine, I then spent a fair while browsing through various pictures of other company offices.

Upon clicking on Twitter’s entry, there was an embedded video from a video podcast Robert Scoble did for PodTech, interviewing various people at Twitter on their roles and what Twitter is all about. Regular visitors will no doubt have noted that I use Twitter myself and make use of their API to display my twitters (twitterings?) on this site. However, the podcast showed that there is so much more to the app than I’d really investigated. They showed some interesting mashups that utilised twitter, my favourite of which was Twittervision. This harnesses the APIs of Twitter and Google Maps to show live updates to Twitter’s public timeline on a map of the world. It may not sound thrilling in writing, but it’s strangely mesmorising when you pay the site a visit.

So one conversation triggered a memory which led to a chain reaction of link after link after link. This got me to thinking - this is why I like the web. With all the amazing apps and e-commerce improvements and amazing communication possibilities that are (rightfully) gathering all the attention, it’s easy to take for granted the simplest concept behind the WWW - hyperlinking.

Check out Honda’s latest Direct Mail marketing idea: Plant this letter.

We printed the direct mail piece on specially made paper containing seeds that could be planted to grow flowers. When consumers planted the letter, it became a permanent (and lovely) part of their garden.

In terms of a green message, we went beyond “Carbon Neutral” and created an idea that would ultimately remove carbon from the atmosphere. Both the envelope and paper were 100% recycled, acid free and environmentally friendly. We even used green friendly inks.

Jason Kottke’s blog at kottke.org is ten years old today. If you don’t read it, it is my opinion that you probably should.

Given the way blogs come and go, or rather how just about anything on the web seems to have a limited lifespan, kudos to Kottke for making something with some longevity - here’s to another 10 years (and beyond…)