New contest: Win a full year of free hosting at TypePad.com

We have a new contest, and this one is open to anyone anywhere in the world and the universe! The prize is one year of free blog hosting at TypePad.com, the blogging service that hosts this and the other new noisy blogs. This is a $108 value if purchased on your own. TypePad does not have free hosting. All TypePad bloggers (with the exception of laid-off newspaper journalists) have to pay for the TypePad service.

The Contest - for Camera Geeks
This is a contest for camera geeks. The task is simple on the surface, but tricky to find a winning combination: Pick one camera, and suggest how to fix one of its problems or issues. The trick here is to come up with something practical and realistic, yet creative at the same time. For example, anyone can come up with "add RAW to the Canon XYZ". So you have to get more geekily creative.

Please provide only one fix for one camera in your entry!

Write your entry in the comments section of THIS post, and be sure to include a way for us to contact you if you are the winner. And if you are the type who likes to edit your comments, then create an Intense Debate account (free to signup)

The contest is open until 9am eastern time on Monday September 28. The winner will be chosen on a subjective basis - the one who comes up with the most practical, interesting and creative idea, will win the prize!

This is open to new TypePad bloggers only. If you already have a TypePad blog (like we do), unfortunately you cannot enter (win) the contest.

The Prize: one year of free blog hosting
The winner will receive a FREE full-year (12 months) of the TypePad Plus service, which costs $9 per month. Twelve months times $9 is roughly $108 if our math-memory serves us well :)

The winner must activate their free account by October 14, 2009! The free service is good for 12 months from the day you activate it.

A number of photography blogs are hosted on TypePad, including Mike Johnston's TOP, the dpreview editorial blogs, the Tamron Tech Tips, the National Geographic magazine blogs, Lawrence Ripsher, Cliff Mautner, Zoriah and many more. You can see a partial list at this homer post.

Why TypePad?
There are plenty of free-hosted blogging services out there. So why use a for-pay service like TypePad?

We were using Blogspot for our blogs up until last year. Blogspot (and the other free services) are wonderful if there are no problems. However, when you do have problems and need immediate help, you are out of luck. As they say, you get what you pay for!

That is why we moved our main blog from Blogspot to TypePad when we had a major technical problem with the blog (Blogspot bot accidentally semi-locked the blog) and we couldn't get anyone from Blogspot to help when we needed help (they eventually fixed the problem after two months). If you look at the Blogspot support forums, the same story is repeated over and over and over.

Another option of course is to use a self-hosted service, with Wordpress being the most popular and the one with lots of plug-ins. There's also other choices, such as Drupal, Movable Type, Joomla, et al. We looked into these options as well, but the problem with all these is time: You have to wear both a webmaster and a blog sys-admin hat. And you have to deal with hosting service providers, which, unless you are signed up for an advanced (read: expensive) plan, it is usually a major pain. And if your blog becomes busy or gets traffic spikes from Digg, Reddit, Engadget and such, they will likely kick you out because you are using too many resources.

So here comes TypePad to the rescue! TypePad provides both the blogging-service and the hosting-service. Yo do not have to worry about patching your blogging server like Wordpress et al, or webmastering your web-server, backing up databases, optimizing performance, and things like that. TypePad takes care of all these tasks.

And because of this, we are able to save about 40 hours per month of webmaster/sys-admin work and worry :) And that means we can use this extra time for additional blog projects, such as M43reviews.com, the Camera diaries, and more to come.