My friend, Trent, has been asking me to help him to look for a free script to build a blog aggregator. Being the lazy me, I have not done so. Luckily, this morning, I chanced upon a free blog aggregator host which allows us to either include our blog in an existing blog aggregator page of similar blogs, or to build our own.

I think that this is a great service whereby if you have one or two blogs, you could join the Feedcluster community, submitting your blog(s) to the correct community of blogs that are of the same niche as yours.

For myself and fellow bloggers who have tens of blogs, I personally have twenty, some active, some not so, FeedCluster.com Aggregator Hosting is great for me to host my own blog aggregator, showcasing only my own blogs.

Feedcluster is very flexible in the sense that we could totally customize it, or brand it if you will. Moreover, they provide us with various blog widgets that we could place on our blogs.

Building a blog aggregator is very simple because Feedcluster is very user-friendly. And with your aggregator live, other users could request for blog inclusion or removal. Users could also subscribe to the feed of the blog aggregator or embed it on their blogs.

Besides building a blog aggregator easily, it is also another way to expand the readership of our blogs.

I read with interest Facebook’s denial that they have plans to sell their huge database of user information, rebutting an article on The Sunday Telegraph. Frankly, whether Facebook did have plans to do so or will have plans to do so in the future, I wouldn’t be surprise. Haven’t we come across enough companies that were adamant that they would not be doing something only to do exactly the same thing later on under different circumstances?

In any case, signing up with Facebook or any other websites where they provide us with user agreement to read with fine lines so fine that many of us end up not bothering to read, do know that in any case, your personal information is already disclosed and compromised and they could do whatever they want.

If CIA, FBI or any government or security agency asks for this information, website operators are obligated by law to provide it. Remember the case of Yahoo! disclosing private user information to the Chinese Government?

When I first registered with Facebook, I read that they sometimes remove our profiles but then I have a friend with multiple profiles that he uses to level up his game characters and even though I told him that he risks getting his account banned, he said that Facebook would have to proof that he has violated their terms of use.

As far as I know, Facebook strives to create an online social community of real people using real names and profiles. Those who use nicknames or business names are deleted.

Well, the thing is, as long as our profile and data are in a public domain, we risk getting them deleted without prior notice. Just take a look at Yahoo! Profiles and AOL Hometown. They don’t need to give us a reason and no, they did not.

The only way to safeguard our data is by hosting it ourselves and that also we need to backup our files regularly. Our hosts won’t take responsibility.

P1 Wimax will be ending their five month long promotion this 1st February, 2009 and will follow that will the roll out of five new packages, three for home users and two for businesses.

I figure that those who have already signed up with Wimax during their five month long promotional drive since August, 2008, will have to choose at least one package to upgrade to.

I have no idea how much the cheapest home package would be but the modem itself is said to retail at RM999 and that is a subsidized price. So if you are planning to try out Wimax, go get your free Wimax modem latest by 1st February, 2009.

I understand from friends who are in Kuala Lumpur that Wimax resellers are all over the place so I guess that one could never go wrong going to LowYat Plaza.

Right now, only a few major cities have coverage; Ipoh is not one of these cities, unfortunately. Even so, a friend reported to me that despite enjoying strong signal where he is in Kuala Lumpur, Wimax was not only not as fast as he expected, it was worse than his 4MB Streamyx connection.

According to a report by Google, despite busting a spam mail syndication in November, 2008, the volume of spam mail increased significantly by 25% compared to 2007. They also mentioned that an unprotected email account would receive approximately 45,000 spam messages.

These emails are not merely spamming us with a message to sell a product or service but most of them are one form of phishing mail, virus, malware and other forms of attack. And we are only talking about these coming in via email. We, web users, still have to deal with unwanted messages via instant messengers, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks, and let’s not forget, spam messages on our mobile devices!

Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised with the increase in spam. I read that the tougher the economy is, the more spam will hit our mailbox. Spam is like the social crime in our neighbourhood, just that spam is easier to deal with, by just clicking the delete button.

Just a week after starting their exercise to clean up pornographic filth on the web and in the process shutting down more than one thousand pornographic websites, forums and blogs, where China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) also arrested more than forty people involved in the dissemination of adult content (I figure these are probably webmasters and owners of pornographic sites), China’s next move is to clean up adult mobile content.

I see China as this big brother controlling content on the web and mobile phones but I guess this is all for putting a halt to morale decay amongst the youth of China. I personally think that this is a good move forward but I am not sure how long they are able to keep this up.

While there will always be new pornographic sites set up to feed the hunger of the masses, web users in China could also surf to foreign pornographic sites using proxy sites. I am not sure if China would be able to catch people doing so. I am just pointing out that closing Chinese pornographic sites is not enough.

Just after announcing that they would be laying off approximately 5,000 people from their workforce, Microsoft announced that 1,400 people would have to go immediately. Compensation plans were not mentioned but it is said that over the 1.5 years that a total of 5,000 jobs will be cut, they still plan to employ a couple of thousand new people, probably at a lower pay.

In addition to this, Microsoft, like Yahoo! announced that they will be freezing pay increases (hahaha!) but at the same time, may increase payroll for some departments.

I think that if you are with Microsoft right now, you should expect too much, you know what I mean? One would be lucky to not be a part of statistics in the 5,000 layoff. While 5,000 is still a big number, it is just a third of the 15,000 lay offs rumoured since last year.

In any case, this recession is going to be long and hard for many of us.