Not too long ago I found the photo blog of Thomas Laupstad of northern Norway. As I married into a family of Scandinavians who come from a land as beautiful as they are, his photos have been a great addition to my daily perusals in my feed reader, as I have commented before.

Thomas has put together and is selling a calendar of 12 of his amazing photos you can buy online. Here’s your chance to avoid those calendar stores in the mall and purchase an even better calendar right from the source!

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For many people, shopping is only part of the gift giving experience. Just as people came off a big weekend of traveling all over for Thanksgiving, their gifts for others will be doing the same.

If you want to ensure gifts will get to their destination in one piece, then visit my friends at The UPS Store on Clark Street in the Loop in Chicago. The friendly staff can pack your items and ship them based on your needs and your budget. Based on your needs, they can recommend the best shipping method for your items. They carry a full line of boxes and packing materials as well as greeting cards for all occasions and unique Chicago souvenirs. Try getting that kind of service at the post office!

In the holiday spirit, they are offering readers of The Hot Iron a special deal. You can get 5% off Ground shipping and 10% off any other service or product through December 31, 2007 – just tell them The Hot Iron sent you! Full details are available at the store, and this offer is only good at the Loop location at 230 S. Clark Street in Chicago. If you are not close to Chicago, check out The UPS Store in your neighborhood.

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What a coincidence – I write a post on whether or not people use Classmates.com, and then they file an IPO. I read this at TechCrunch, and they did a great job at describing their filing and get into the details of their business model.

After reading all of this, would you buy Classmates.com stock?

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Classmates.com was a social network before the term existed. The Web-based service to connect fellow graduates and alumni of schools, colleges and businesses began in 1995, and today they are owned by the group that owns NetZero among other companies. It has comparative features to other services like LinkedIn and Facebook, but has a much different business model.

I am considering deleting my profile from Classmates.com and thus I have written this post – do you pay for Classmates com? In order for you to interact with anyone on the site, you have to pay. It is free to setup and edit your profile, but if someone sends you a message, you can’t see it unless you are a paying customer.

Here’s an example. I get regular emails from them, and here’s a segment of the latest one:

Someone signed my guestbook – cool. So who did? When I click the link to get to the Web site, here’s a segment of the Web page I get:

In order for me to see who has signed my guestbook, I have to pay. Of course I have no idea who signed it, if they are someone I know or if it is spam or a legitimate message.

Classmates.com has lowered their annual cost to $9.95 from $39. But between LinkedIn, et. al. and a Web site I helped create for my high school class, is this really worth it? Isn’t my profile in Classmates.com worth more to them? For if I and others leave, wouldn’t the site becomes less valuable?

With the proliferation of social networking sites, how many can you really be active on? I am not on Facebook or others daily, and on LinkedIn I usually check the home page for updates every few days. Is Classmates.com worth the cost to you?

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