I’d never heard the expression “Broke as a spoke, and that ain’t no joke” before. So I googled it, because I was curious about the expression, being a TESOL teacher at heart! Couldn’t find anything, so I guess the expression really must be Polish!

Broke As A Spoke blog is all about how Corrin battles her way through poor spending habits (as we all face our $3 lattes in the morning!), credit card debits, etc.. Along the way, she writes about British Airways in which she ended up with cheapish (non-refundable) tickets and an emergency. British Airways aren’t known for being the world’s favorite airline, except in their own advertisements. I quite like her post on the snowball technique for paying down debt. She’s used it, and found it quite effective.

She blogs about Suze Orman, a lady whose style on TV I admire as she tries to separate the financial and the emotional in front of a TV audience. In fact, she supports her against criticism from the New York Times which says Suze Orman “…she’s taking them on a path she really hasn’t traveled herself.” Naturally, one doesn’t need to have been a car accident victim to know how, as a professional doctor, victims should be treated. So, it’s a muted criticism.

And if you stick around, you’ll find free offers, great deals, and more in here “More Bang for your Buck” category of posts.

One suggestion I have: do use friendly URLs in your blog titles, it will help to make your blog posts easier to find!

This is a Buzz post highlighting a friend’s blog.

Google Pack is now available for Vista as well as XP. And there are a ton of goodies that you can install, though some of them are from well-known companies, such as Realplayer, others are from Google itself. I haven’t used Google Pack for quite a while, but when I went back I was quite surprised at the range of installs now on offer.

Google Pack is an install software that runs on XP/Vista only with IE or FF browsers installed. It installs a selection of software including some of the following: Google Earth – 3D Earth browser, Google Desktop – Desktop companion, Picasa – Photo organizer, Google Photos Screensaver – Photo screensaver; as well as more standard fare, like Adobe Reader – PDF reader, Norton Security Scan – Security utility, RealPlayer – Media player, and Skype – Voice, video and chat.

I did check around and found that some of the software requires money to get full functionality, such as Skype for SkypeOut calls and Norton for updates after six months.

Many of these resources can really help the avid blogger/investor in a number of ways that will enhance your productivity a great deal. So check them out and see what piques your interest.

If you are interested in other online applications, Digital Nomad has a few good suggestions, too!

There are a bunch of different page rank predictor websites out there in the wild, but it seems that there aren’t many reliable tools. I tried a variety of tools, all of them claiming to predict a website’s future page rank. However, I found that some of the websites merely queried Google search engine websites for current rank information. Not one of them actually predicted anything. Moreover, I found that few of them used any information that wasn’t available from Google directly. So why bother? Well, you can read more about Linkrain’s experience using these tools the result of which was: most of the predictions where wrong.
I’ve tried these tools and found that most of them were not telling something I didn’t know already. I’ll just mention two tools that I liked:

1. PR Prediction and recorder provides a useful summary of not just PR information, but a bunch of other stuff, too!

2. Google PageRank Prediction seems to provide the only genuine alternative number I could find that showed some rationale for their number.

One website that just didn’t work no matter what I entered.

So, if you are looking to find out where your website might be heading, try these tools, but take the results you get with a large pinch of salt!