Amatomu one of South Africa’s blog aggregators has just been taken out of Alpha phase to Beta.

I spotted this just a few minutes ago after checking some stats and suddenly getting a error page. Maybe this can contribute to the fact that my blogs have been losing some ranking due to the fact that the rss feeds haven’t been updating, some even behind with as much as 4 days.

Amatomu is not my favourite blog aggregator due to the fact that it has allot of issues with the site and at times speed is slow making pages load forever. Afrigator on the other hand has a more better algorithm for sorting blog ranks.

I must still investigate whats new in the Beta version of Amatomu, but now again the site has almost no response and giving database errors, this could be due to the fact that they are upgrading the system. Lets just hope for a better ranking algorithm to match that Afrigator has.

The Garden Route’s first fully serviced Data Center will be constructed and opened at Office Reliance in George during 2009!

This high tech facility will offer 24 x 7 operations, will make use of state of the art equipment and technology, and will offer fully redundant services. It will be capable of supplying localized services to the Garden Route, but will also offer outsourced services to national and international customers.

The Data Center will include the following core services:

• Hosting Center – hosting of shared servers, dedicated servers as well as virtual servers.The hosting centre will have fully redundant connectivity and power systems.

• Call Center – the call center will operate 24 x 7 and will service clients around the globe. Inbound as well as outbound calls will be accommodated, with highly configurable and customizable call handling.

• Business Process Outsourcing Center -The Data Center will be fully staffed and equipped to deal with all BPO requirements. Software testing and QA will be the first BPO project.

• Software Development Center – Dedicated software professionals will be on hand, dealing with specialized and customized software developments. A large government database development project is the first to go through the development center.

For more details on this ground breaking development please contact Imel at imel@officereliance.co.za

One of my favourite blogs is having a competition where they are giving away an all expenses paid spa treatment and overnight stay for 2.

Chris Mills owner of iMod is giving away a spa treatment and overnight stay for 2 at the Lanzerac Spa and Wellness Centre thanks to Health Spa Guru!

The prize:

VinAqua Decadence Ritual which includes the following:

Steam session
Grape seed body polish
90 minute nourishing massage
50 min anti ageing facial
A tea Ritual

This experience includes use of the facilities for the duration of stay, a glass of bubbly whilst enjoying the spa facilities, a free wine tasting and bed and breakfast at the Lanzerac Hotel.

To enter this competition visit iMod and follow the instructions.

The long awaited SEACOM cable will be flipping the on switch today.

After a setback about a month ago SEACOM had to postpone the launch of their 1.28Tbps undersea cable stretching from London to Cape Town by 28 days.

From today retail carriers will be able to utilise the $600-million, 15 000 km undersea fibre-optic cable system with equal and open access to affordable bandwidth

To celebrate the launch of SEACOM, Neotel and CISCO have invited stakeholders and the media to a live demonstration of the fibre optic cable.  Delegates will also be given the opportunity to test drive the SEACOM cable through provided Internet connections.

“SEACOM is turning on the switch for you to enjoy true broadband!” the companies said in a joint statement.

Great news for those Rugby lovers out there, Cape Town Tourism is giving away 4 pairs of rugby tickets for the WP vs Free State game this Friday 24 July 2009 at Newlands Rugby Stadium.

To enter simply send an email to fb@capetown.travel telling them what your favourite thing in Cape Town is, thats all it takes.

Good luck

Since I’m in the rock mood today here is a nifty application for those of us that loves to play guitar.

The norm usually is that you have to get you guitar tabs / chords from sites like www.ultimate-guitar.com and www.911tabs.com to play along to your favorite songs. Wouln’t it be cool to just see the tabs while you play your favourite song in winamp? Well now you can do just that.

A friend of mine recentry wrote this nifty web plugin for winamp called Pikkipowpow which enables you to view guitar tabs of the current playing song.

You’ll need WinAmp 5.5 or greater for this plugin to work.

1. In WinAmp op up the Media Library (Alt+L)
2. In the bar on the left, go to online services.
3. Type “pikkipowpow” in the searchbar and click “bookmark this plugin”.
4. While pikkipowpow is open in the media library, just play a song and the tab&chords will automatically display if found.
5. If not, you can click on “search guitartabs.cc” to quickly find it or you can add your own variation of the tab.

For more details or to just view the tabs in your browser visit Pikkipowpow

If you are like me you like some good home brewed rock, specially since I was raised in Bellville Rock City and since the early days attended the local rock concerts.

Cape Rocks sounds to me like a brand new rock fest hitting the Mother City and with a line-up of the likes of aKING and Verona Walls it sure can’t dissapoint. The Cape Rocks event will be taking place this weekend the 25th of July at The Assembly, a mere R40 gets you in to check out a line-up of bands including Pretty Dirty, TigerStrike, The Revelators, DJ String, aKING and Verona Walls.

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on July 20th, 1969. To celebrate this Google released Moon in Google Earth, which allows users to explore lunar images and lunar content all from the comfort of their own home.

Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer said: “Moon in Google Earth enables you to explore lunar imagery as well as informational content about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts, narrated tours and much more. I believe that this educational tool is a critical step into the future, a way to both develop the dreams of young people globally, and inspire new audacious goals.”

Other extra-terestrial layers include Sky, Mars and even an Ocean layer to be launched in February 2010 with the release of Google Earth 5.0

Moon in Google Earth details all of the Apollo landing missions, and offers lunar surface panoramas in Google’s Street View format. So far, there have been no privacy complaints.

Lets be honest, Internet Explorer 6 is certainly not very popular amongst the media/social networking giants of the Web 2.0 world.

First it was Digg that hinted at cutting support for the browser, and now it looks like Google’s YouTube is starting to phase out the browser also. The screenshot taken by a Internet Explorer 6 user pretty much concludes that the time for the browser is up.

Following the trend Digg is setting, it looks like YouTube will also prefer spending more time on optimizing their site for newer and better browsers rather than paying attention to the old Micsrosoft browser.

I totally agree with this move and wish allot of more sites would follow this trend.