As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.

Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…

Write your own guest posts

Aside from all the great comments we’re getting from you, our readers, you can now also contribute to the blog by writing your own guest posts if you have something interesting to share.

It can be short and sweet or long and detailed. You decide.

We welcome any content along the lines of what we tend to cover. In other words, subjects like Web 2.0, Web development, the Internet, service outages, things to do with Web hosting and datacenters, and so on.

Just press the big button in the right column to get started.

Of course, we won’t just accept just any content. Ultimately, the posts have to be approved by us here at Pingdom before they are posted.

Four new content categories

As you can see, we have sorted all content into four new categories:

• Main – This is the main stream of articles from us.
• Pingdom – Posts about the Pingdom service, for example about new features.
• Outages – Posts about website downtime and other incidents on the Internet. These posts can often be of a shorter nature.
• Guest posts – As we mentioned above, you can now post your own guest posts, long or short.

Guest posts and outages are visible in a separate field to the right of the Main stream. Just click on them to read the full post.

Let us know what you think

So, what do you think about the new design? Let us know in the comments!

Before and after…

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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