Back in 1999 there was a company called AllAdvantage. They paid people to install a little toolbar in their web browser, which displayed little unobtrusive ads. Then, while you surfed the web, and probably ignored the ads, you earned a share of the money that those advertisers were paying. When tech crashed, AllAdvantage went out of business, but now the concept is reborn as AGLOCO. Sign up with the link below and earn money for doing absolutely nothing but surf the web. Convince others to sign up, and you can earn money for them surfing the web too. Not only that, but you can earn shares in the company. This just launched, the time to get in is now, before the market is saturated and all your contacts have already been referred by someone else.

It will be interesting to see how long this web site lasts. It's a free service that lets you call in sick, in advance. You record a message, tell it what time to make the call (they suggest 5am so that no one will actually answer the phone), and it makes the call for you.

Ok, problem: What happens if your boss is actually there at 5am? It could happen. Busted!

Not to mention the abuse possibilities. You could send a message from a payphone (so that it doesn't have your callerID), and have it send a crank call to anyone you want, at any time. Yeah, that would be against their terms, but you know people are going to

TripDiary.com (owned by the same parent company as the host of this blog and built using the same engine) is a new and very cool travel blog hosting service. In about 30 seconds (and that includes the time to register) you can create a "Trip Diary", and then post diary entries for all the cool stuff you did on your vacation.

You can include, of course, photos and even videos if you first upload them to YouTube, but the most interesting feature is the ability to specify on a road or satellite map the exact position of each diary entry. Then, at the top of the page, TripDiary automatically generates an interactive overview map showing all the locations you went to.

TripDiary has various other nice features too - you can "bookmark" other users as "friends", and then you get links to their diaries right from your personalized home page, plus send them instant messages and chat with them. You can also set your diaries (or even individual entries) so that only your "friends" can see them or comment on them.

So I'm trying out Google's new baby, web-based spreadsheets. It looks great, it works great, but aside from the obvious online collaboration aspect, it's got a long way to go before I'll be switching from Excel.