With Christmas around the corner, and a season of festive blogging ahead of us, as I stare at the screen with my dirty lenses, I’m beginning to wonder if a new set of lenses and frames mightn’t be the answer to my squinting at the screen. It was something I was first aware of driving on the A9 to Inverness one morning. I couldn’t see the huge motorway signboards ahead clearly. I pulled over at Borders, downed a cup of coffee, and felt significantly better as a result.

But still, the thought my eyes were getting worse (or at least the left one) haunted my coffee and my reading. Here’s a problem I’ve had since I was 16 but it’s been stable. Could my eyesight be that poor? So I selected a pair of Rimless Metal Frames with Temples. These come in a Petal Style, which is perhaps a little gaudy for my taste. Of course, I’ll prefer the more conservative brown for the frames.

I don’t usually buy new glasses even with Holiday frames just for a single season. I prefer to own glasses for the longer term, but I already own three pairs of glasses (one old pair, one new pair, and one pair for driving with tints) so it doesn’t seem out of place to own a seasonal pair. There are so many styles of frames and lenses available, at the prices I saw, it would be affordable to buy a new pair for every day of the festive season from Lent to Ephiphany.

As a regular blogger, I do find that I spend a lot more time staring at the monitor of my computers; so it is important to look after my eyes. I would certainly add an anti-reflective coating as well to prevent glare in night driving, and might even help me with the glare from my computer monitor! At $4.95, it wouldn’t add much to the cost, and would seem to be in keeping with these more austere financial times.

Ever gotten into the office as the phone was ringing only to pick up the receiver and find the line gone dead? Yes, I know … it was just bad timing… but what if that had been a customer trying to reach you…

Well, Phone Number Reporting’s new website would like to help you trace those errant and miscreant phone calls… You can enter a phone number that has just rung, find out if there are any others with similar calls, and leave your comments! It seems plenty of people already have. There’s also a link to a reverse phone number lookup service (for which you’ll need an inexpensive subscription).

Sponsored, after all.

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Recently, Google announed that they have improved BlogSearch, and boy! They did so with avengeance.

It looks like Google is now about to take on Technorati and several other blog aggregators with the revamp. It’s been done to look similar to the NewsGoogle, and will work in a similar fashion to NewsGoogle, taking summaries, images and links from popular blogs all over the web, aggregating the stories and presenting them in an automated fashion as a summary of what’s happening. For top bloggers, and those who are ‘discovered’ this will be a huge boon to their traffic as the service becomes increasingly known. For readers, it makes it easier to find news stories, popular blogs, though it may break or weaken loyalty between readers and ‘their’ blogs. Worth watching, though it didn’t show up much from after September 16th for my blog…

Today, we’re pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we’re now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

Questions remain: how is a story rated “most interesting”, how are stories ranked or clustered, will spidering occur more often as a website or blog gains ‘momentum’? At what point does a blog become rated “most interesting”, by whom and by what means? Mmm. To read more, visit BlogSearch Blog for the announcement.