Marathon is a long-distance foot race with an official distance 26 miles 385 yards. Marathon is  usually run as a road race but there are many variants of Marathons including cross country. The event is named after the fabled run of the Greek soldier Pheidippides, a messenger from the Battle of Marathon to Athens.
More than 800 marathons are contested throughout the world each year, with the vast majority of competitors being recreational athletes. Larger marathons can have tens of thousands of participants such as the London Marathon.
Half Marathon is also popular with athletes who are not able to run the full marathon.

My friend Nick Byng invited me to join him in running Birmingham half marathon on the 26th of October, I accepted his invitation and registered, that was the easy part. The challenging bit is to be fit enough to run 13 miles, I am doing quite well so far, I am sure I will manage it, I will try avoiding breaking the world record for the person who run 13 miles at the slowest possible time.

I am hoping to use the marathon to raise money for Amnesty international, you can sponsor me by donating to Amnesty International via this page.

While you are here, why not visit the page Nick put up for his own run and sponsor him as well if possible.

Her Majesty Revenues and Customs (HMRC) had lots two disk containing nearly half of UK’s population sensitive benefits data. The disks, which are said to be password, protected but not encrypted were lot in internal HMRC post data safe.
The chancellor Alistair Darling said there was no evidence the data had fallen into criminal hands - but urged people to monitor their bank accounts.

his gross incompetence by a UK government department would be and excellent addition to the armory of anti national identity card campaigners as they have always argued that the government does not have a good track record of keeping confidential and sensitive.
In a similar data security laps a few months ago, sensitive information about junior doctors was made available accidentally to anyone browsing the NHS website that had the data on it.

You can read more about this at BBC.co.uk

Mahattan Service or perhaps Manhattan rip off services is a better description of the services offered by the above site if business at Mahattan Service is conducted the way he seem to run the so called blogupper.com which is nothing but a con to fleece you out of money.  blogupper.com is supposed to be a blogs directory, but instead of paying to have your site reviewed like most decent paid directory, blogupper asks you to ‘donate’, the reason for this being the fact that if you donate using PayPal you cannot dispute the payment afterwards, this naturally is the best payment option for a con man to trick unsuspecting victims.

Next time you are out promoting your website, should you come across any of the above site, you want to run a mile.

One of the long established metrics for measuring traffic to a website; page view is to be replaced by total time spent online. This announcement was made by the largest Internet benchmarking companies; Neilsen/NetRatings. The changes was said to have been brought about by the advent of web 2.0 which has significantly changed the way websites are used.

In the past, hits to a site was used to rank traffic, this was superseded by page view which is now about to give way to total time spent online.

Neilsen/NetRatings will not be discarding page view completely, it will just be relegated to the position of a second measurement of traffic, while time spent online becomes the primary metric.

User generated contents, the so called web 2.0 sites are expected to be rated higher using the new measure when compared with sites that attracts lots of traffic but do not keep hold of their visitors for very long. Sits such as YouTube and other large providers with IM are expected to be ranked higher in the new Neilsen/NetRatings rating system, while sites such as Google will be rated lower because it generates high amount of traffic but most visitors do not stay on the site for long.