When you talk for a living, it’s usually a good idea to know the proper pronunciation of the words you’re using. As a radio newscaster, I come across the occasional word that baffles me, either because I’ve never seen it before, or because I’ve seen it written, but have never heard it pronounced.

Case in point, recently a Canadian tourist fell off a building and died in the resort city of Cebu, Philippines. I’d never heard of Cebu before. Often a quick Google search for something like “pronounce Cebu” will provide a link or two with a written pronunciation guide, but there’s nothing like actually hearing someone who knows, pronounce the word.

Probably you’re already familiar with the idea of comparison shopping. These are quite useful websites where you can compare product prices from pretty much every online retailer. During the last 3-4 months I discovered a number of cool websites that successfully implemented the same concept to other areas. Check them out.

1- Compare Product Prices with PriceGrabber

I’ve tried many comparison shopping sites and can confirm that PriceGrabber is one of the best ones. Simply search for the product you want to buy and PriceGrabber will list all available retailers starting from the cheapest. If you’re not clear about what exactly you want to purchase, then you can browse products by categories and filter them further by specs, features and brand. Products can also be sorted by user ratings and reviews.

Being the titilating tweeting twitterer that I am, I figured it was time for another brief round-up of some Twitter tools that have been doing the rounds in cyberspace recently. Twitter seems to be going from strength to strength and web developers are coming up with even more innovative ideas for Twitter web programs and software tools.

Here are a few that have caught my eye recently :

GroupTweet

This interesting service seems to be trying to make a dent in Pownce’s bubble. Or look at it another way - imagine sending out one big private email to everyone - or one big SMS. Now you get an idea of what GroupTweet is all about.

(1) Image Manipulation

GIMP – Alternative for Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

GIMP, short for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, has been written about several times before on this site. However, I felt it was worth another mention because of its versatility as a Photoshop alternative.

Do you want to take your favorite programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more wherever you go and use them on pretty much any computer ? If so here are four free tools that can help you with that. These are portable software packs that can be installed on any USB device. Download the pack, install it on your portable device and done. Use it at work, a friend’s PC, college lab, anywhere.

All of us take at least one trip annually, whether it be locally or overseas. As much we love them, most of us aren’t able to have trips very often. Whether it’s work, school, financial problems, there is always something that holds us back. Thus when we finally get a chance to get out it’s in our best interests to take necessary precautions to ensure that the next trip is a success. Many factors that ruin good trips include delays, insufficient information about the place you are visiting and just plain old loneliness. Here I would like to introduce to a number of useful websites that can help you make your next trip a better one.