It took less than a day and two people stepped up with prizes. That's great, and I hope more will come! Mark A. Rayner of the skwib fame has donated 2 books -- Amadeus Net and The Meanderings of the Emily Chesley Reading Circle. Amadeus Net is about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart being alive in 2028 and in love. Say what now Mark? Yup, that's right. Wolfgang is alive, in love and apparently the book starts off with the musical master going into a sex change clinic to have his "sprouter" snipped off. No, I'm not lying. Check out all the details at Mark Rayner's website. The second book, for which I currently have less information (but am awaiting it from Mark) is a collection of Victorian satire put together by Mark and others. Victorian satire certainly sounds interesting (ok, maybe bizarre), so I'm looking forward to more information, and then I'll pass it on. Mark's a funny guy (just read his blog, the skwib), so I'm sure these books are worthwhile. Now if we could only get him to contribute to IGotNewsForYou! The second person that stepped forward is Jeff Turner, the fellow behind Blogbeat, a blog performance/stats tool. In a nutshell, all bloggers are obsessed with knowing who is reading their blog, when, how often, what they're reading, etc. It's pretty amazing to see people coming out from the woodwork, doing crazy searches, finding links from other sites and reading your words. Blogbeat helps you track all of that in a very easy to understand interface. I've been using it for a couple of months and while I've stopped obsessing over stats every 5 minutes, it's still a great tool to really understand the nature of your visitors and traffic. Blogbeat is easy to setup, it shouldn't take anyone more than a few minutes, even if you're not a tech savvy person. A yearly subscription to Blogbeat currently costs USD $24, it's a great price for a cool application, and I know Jeff is working like a madman to constantly improve it. And, the best part is that Jeff's offered a 1-year FREE subscription to Blogbeat for the winner of our IGotNewsForYou Fake News Writing Contest. I know a lot of the contributors to the first contest run their own blogs, so I think this prize will interest you. Thank you to Jeff and Mark - your donations are appreciated and we look forward to more in the very near future! (Technorati Tags: blogbeat, mark rayner, writing contest)