My blog posting on Petrolprices.com is the entry that receives the largest number of hits by far. Not surprising as petrol prices continue to rise and there is a wide variation in pump prices even within a small area. The site now has a blog and recent articles include discussions on biodiesel and a special 4p/litre off promotion in Northern Ireland. RSS and Atom feeds are available so you can keep up to date with the topics via your favourite feed reader.

TechXtra is a free source of information in engineering, mathematics and computing and is now an independent service. Previously connected with the EEVL gateway, TechXtra is an initiative of the ICBL and the Library at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. TechXtra is based around a search engine that provides access to the freely available full-text content of millions of articles, key websites, theses and dissertations, books, industry news, new job announcements, technical reports, eprints, learning & teaching resources and the latest research, in engineering, mathematics and computing. Where the full-text is not freely available, TechXtra provides links to vendors for pay-per-view options. In addition, free trade magazine subscriptions and technical document downloads, job announcements, industry news, new books, information about offshore engineering publications and newsletters are available.

The basic search offers keyword searching combined with categories such as books, industry news, latest research. The Advanced Search offers various keyword options (all the words, phrase, any of the words, without the words) and options for selecting Special Collections for example Directory of Open access Journals, CiteSeer – Computer and Information Science Articles, NASA Technical Reports.

Some of TechXtra’s resources will not be picked up by the standard search engines, or you may have to wade through volumes of murk and mire before you find them. I tried it out on some of my test searches relating to the energy sector, in particular on deep drilling and the origins of petroleum, and was impressed with its speed and relevance. TechExtra is now in my list of key search tools for this area.

Set up and maintained by Fubra who run Ourproperty.co.uk and petrolprices.com, Aiport Parking Shop compares prices across 6 of the biggest UK parking brokers for 24 UK airports. Select the airport from which you wish to fly, enter you departure and return date, and the number of passengers. It then comes up with a list of possibilities.

As I always use public transport to get to UK airports I was astounded at the variety and range of options and prices. At the upper end of the market you can treat yourself to a meet and greet deal where you drive straight up to departures, leave your car with a valet who will park it for you, and then have it waiting outside arrivals on your return.

For each entry in the results you can see if the service is on/off airport parking or meet and greet, transfer time to the terminal, frequency of transfers, any awards that the service has won, and more detailed information in an aiport car park guide. It also tells you whether or not there is a charge for credit card processing. If you decide to prebook – and apparently you can save up to half the cost by doing so – links take you direct to the car parking service web site.

On every page there are also links to the Car Hire Centre, another Fubra run site, that compares the prices of a range of car hire brokers; coverage is worldwide. Choose the airport or city where you want to pick up the car, enter the dates and you are then presented with a list sorted by price. Cheapest first of course!

If you don’t manage to get to the Blogs and Social Media Forum in May, VNU are now offering podcasts of the individual forum sessions for £25 + VAT each, or all 8 sessions for £150 +VAT.

The speakers included Euan Semple – ex Head of Knowledge Management, BBC; Christopher Barger – Blogger in Chief, IBM and JP Rangaswami – Global CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wassertein. Brief details of the forum sessions and further information are available on the VNU web site

To purchase a Podcast please contact Belinda Sprules on telephone number +44 (0)20 7316 9126, or by email Belinda.sprules@vnuexhibitions.co.uk

As interest in corporate and business blogging increases, the number of listings of these types of blogs also increases. The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki at http://www.eu.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi is a good starting point and lists active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products. According to the web site authors, Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext), only 27 (5.4%) of the Fortune 500 are actively blogging. Not surprisingly the majority are in the IT sector but notable exceptions are General Electric, General Motors, and MacDonald’s who run a Corporate Responsibility Blog. An alternative listing together with comments on updates and new blogs is at Fortune 500 Blogs (http://www.fortune500blogs.com/)

The Fortune 500 covers US companies only but there is a link from the Socialtext bizblogs page to a handful of Global 1000 blogs at http://www.eu.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi?global_1_000_business_blogging and one to a list of European corporate blogs at http://www.corporateblogging.info/europe/. Unfortunately, the latter will no longer be updated after April 2006 but for the time being it is still a useful list.

Another excellent starting point for corporate blogging is the NewPR Wiki at
http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php, which has lists of CEO blogs by country, corporate blogs, product blogs and and business podcasts. There are also sections on blogging policies, legal challenges and articles on business blogging.

I was alerted to this site by my friend and colleague Dot Walker. It claims to give “information for door-to-door travel for both public transport and car journeys around Britain. Our aim is to provide you with comprehensive, easy-to-use travel information to help you plan your journeys effectively and efficiently.” They work with both public and private travel operators and local/national government. It is operated by a consortium led by Atos Origin. The non-profit service is funded by the UK Department for Transport, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Executive.

I have seen many of these types of services before and most of them have been dire. They are usually OK as far as trains and flights are concerned but when you get down to the really local level where you need to take buses or trams they generally fail. I decided to test it out on some real stinkers. My husband and I have been walking the “Thames Path”. This is a route of foot and tow paths that follow the River Thames from its source near Kemble to the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. We use public transport to get to and from the various staging posts, and we sometimes need to use some weird and wonderful combinations of services to do it. Until now we have had to work out the transport routes ourselves, so I thought this would be a good test of the door-to-door option.

Transport Direct came up trumps every time: Ashton Keynes, Cricklade, Wallingford – even Castle Eaton. And it sometimes came up with better, alternative routes that we had never considered. The Maps section shows each stage of the journey and form of transport.

On tickets/cost it was not so comprehensive. It was able to give fare options for trains but not always for the buses. That is a minor quibble, though. We just need to know that if we break off early on our walk, or decide to go a bit further, that there is a way home other than phoning for a taxi to rescue us. And you can access the service from your PDA or mobile. Brilliant!

Dohop is a relatively new search engine from Icelandic company Dohop Ltd. At launch, it concentrated on low cost airlines but now includes “standard” airlines and fares, and suggests flight combinations where needed. It does not sell flights or take bookings but the search results include links to airlines and travel agent websites where you can book tickets directly. To search, you start typing in the location of your departure point and dohop will come up with a list of suggested airports as it does with your destination. Click on the date fields and a calendar pops up to help you enter them in a valid format.

When the results list is displayed, you can narrow down your search by airport, transits and airline. Prices are automatically displayed when there is only one price for an airline/airport. For the other results, click on the Get Price link and the range of options is displayed together with the source. For my London/Inverness test search it came up with four prices for a flight that it had found on the BMI web site, Expedia, ebookers and Opodo. Prices are in shown by default in Euros but you can change the currency via a pull down menu. So far, I am impressed and I have not yet been able to better the results by going to my usual sources one by one.

I do not normally recommend blogs or web sites whose authors and affiliations remain a mystery but there are many reasons why the person behind this might want to remain anonymous. I came across this blog while searching for background information to the current debate on the so called “energy crisis”, and the recent contretemps between Russia and the Ukraine over gas supplies. The entries in this blog are more like short essays than the usual brief postings that bloggers tend to write, but it is worth taking the time to read them carefully and in full. The writer covers all aspects of energy production, generation and consumption and discusses the feasibility of alternative and renewable energies as a replacement for our current “mix” of energy sources. Whether you agree or disagree with this blogger, some of the points raised should you make you stop and think seriously about how we manage our energy resources now and in the future. As to why he/she should wish to remain anonymous, it could be that his current employer would not be too pleased about the stance taken over some issues.

The 21st annual PNC Christmas Price Index shows that the cost of Christmas for True Love – made famous by the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ – has gone up by 6 per cent. Avian flu and energy prices are major contributory factors the report claims.

Every year, PNC Advisors calculate the cost of goods and services gifted by True Love in the song and this year it totalled USD 18,348. That figure represents the cost of the individual items, not the total cost of presents gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song’s verses. That comes t0 a whopping USD 72,608 for all 364 items, up 9.5 per cent from USD 66,334 in 2004.

Jeff Kleintop, chief investment strategist for PNC Advisors said “Not only are avian flu fears and fuel costs driving prices higher, but gold prices are also on the rise. Meanwhile, wages for skilled laborers are struggling to keep up with rising expenses.” The biggest hurdle for True Loves will be obtaining imported birds. The threat of avian flu has restricted the international shipment of birds, thus preventing the purchase of three French hens from France. However, there are US domestic breeders of French hens, as well as the other feathered friends mentioned in the song. Since the large birds are bought from national suppliers, total costs are higher due to the shipping and related increases in fuel prices. The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens reports the cost of geese almost doubled this year while the cost of swans increased by 20 percent.

For online shoppers, PNC tabulates the cost of The Twelve Days gifts purchased on the web and the figures show that it can be considerably more expensive to go Internet shopping. The true cost of Christmas via the web this year is USD 123,846.62. The greatest differential was for Ten Lords a Leaping: USD 10,947 online compared with USD 4039.02 paid for their services using more traditional means of recruitment.

See the Cheapest UK Petrol Prices for Free – PetrolPrices.com

This site is maintained by Fubra who are the people behind OurProperty.co.uk. To find the lowest petrol price in your area you just type in a town or postcode. By default it looks for unleaded prices within 5 miles of your area. You can change the fuel type to Super Unleaded, LPG, LRP, or Premium Diesel and the distance to 2 miles (inner metropolitan areas only), 10, 15 or 20 miles. As well as listing the 5 cheapest stations and the price, you can see their location on a map from Google Local.

The data covers over 10,000 stations and there are about 8000 daily updates. Data is provided by Catalist in asssociation with Arval and collected from fuel card transactions that are processed at petrol stations across the country each day.

You can search 20 unique areas or postcodes per week and are allowed to search for each unique postcode as many times as you like. It is a free service but you do have to register to view the detailed information.