Next time you’re searching for a rental car in a major city, try picking up the car in the downtown core instead of at the airport. The savings can be pretty substantial.

Car rental in Seattle, via www.Alamo.com:
Pick up the car downtown, drop off at Seatac airport: $303.41
Pick up the car at Seatac airport, drop off at Seatac airport: $437.80

Also, price-compare on a few of the travel search engines. 5 minutes of window shopping can save you quite a bit. I use kayak.com, travelocity.com, and expedia.com. Kayak is my favorite for flights: it’s got the simplest and most functional search UI and search results UI, and often the best selection of results. Travelocity is my favorite for rental cars: it seems to have the best selection, and the total price shown in the search results UI is accurate.

Happy trails.

Tired of boring old .COM domains? Thinking of buying a .CA domain as a gift for that special someone? Look no further. I just spent 20 minutes hunting through the official list of .CA internet domain registrars trying to find the cheapest ones. In the process I picked about 25 at random and noted their prices for your reading pleasure.

These are prices for a 1 year basic domain name registration, in Canadian dollars. (Which are, more or less, just about the same as US dollars now.)

$10.45 http://www.10dollar.ca/
$10.50 http://www.trillium.ca/order/
$11.50 http://www.bigdomains.ca/
$12.50 http://www.canhost.ca/
$12.90 http://www.budgetnames.ca/
$12.95 http://www.domainsatcost.ca/ (“Canada’s Price Leader”. Not.)
$12.99 https://swww.baremetal.com/
$13.45 http://www.sibername.com/
$14.95 http://www.domaindirect.com/
$14.95 http://www.register4less.com/
$16.00 http://www.papa.ca/
$16.50 http://myid.ca/
$17.45 http://www.lowcostdomains.ca/
$19 http://www.cadns.ca/
$19.87 http://www.thinkprofits.com/ (This site was my favorite. It has a video track on its home page with a message from the eerily intense CEO. That is topped — but only just — by the picture of a rabid chihuahua on the domain names page. Sign me up!)
$20 http://www.canadanic.com/
$24.50 http://www.arcticnames.ca/
$25 http://www.domainsunder.ca/
$29.95 http://www.dotca.ca/
$29.95 http://www.fastwebserver.ca/
$34.99 http://domains.411.ca/
$39 http://www.easydns.com/
$49.95 http://www.caregistration.com/
$50 http://www.internic.ca/ (“the leader in Canadian domain name registration and was the first .ca accredited domain registrar.” Yuh huh.)
$50 http://www.canadanic.com/
$89 http://www.ontwebsite.biz/

For an interesting benchmark, the web host I use for MyOwnPirateRadio charges $6.50 USD per year for .COM domains. If I recall correctly they had a $3 special a while back. Unfortunately they don’t do .CA domains yet. I wish they would!

I stumbled across several more .CA registrars that I didn’t include because they were too expensive, forced me to submit personal information in order to get prices (err… I don’t think so), or didn’t actually offer domain registration services to the public, despite being on the official list. So, sadly, the median price in this unscientific little survey seems to be around $20, if not more. I guess many of these businesses are banking on customers remaining uninformed. Time-tested business strategy… banks, anyone? Insurance? Perhaps a mortgage?

Speaking of transparency and informed customers, are any journalists reading? This is good fodder for a nice little investigative article. Why is the price range so broad? Why are the prices generally so high, especially in comparison to the US? Who is getting the lion’s share of business here? And who really is the cheapest of them all? Inquiring minds want to know.

www.ning.com

A platform for building social web apps. That’s a brilliant idea.

And they encourage source code sharing, which should make it much easier to get started by cloning existing apps.

Yahoo!, Microsoft or Google should acquire this company and really make it go. Hmm… could be a nice partner to Yahoo!’s recent Flickr and Delicious acquisitions.