If you've been monitoring your online sites using a third-party service you'll be more than slightly aware how expensive this can be. While there might have been some rationale to these high prices in the early days of Web monitoring, with the plummeting costs for hosting and bandwidth, today you'd expect these services to be cheap, er, more cost-effective.

I recently found a new service called  BinaryCanary (a clever but really geeky name) that monitors any of 12 protocols (including HTTP, FTP, DNS and IMAP) and is reasonably priced.

BinaryCanary monitors your sites from three locations (Seattle, Washington, D.C. and London) and crosschecks between locations before raising an alert to prevent false positives. BinaryCanary can also check for domain name expiration and can monitor for unauthorized page changes (in case hackers deface your content).

The total number of "monitors" you use is calculated by the number of monitoring locations you select for each of the servers — so if you have all three BinaryCanary locations monitoring server A and the same for server B, then you are using a total of six monitors.

As the company points out, commercial monitoring of a Web site once per minute for less than 16 cents per day doesn't exist. On the other hand, BinaryCanary's starter service offers 10 one-minute monitors along with 20 SMS alerts for $5 per month! The company also offers a free service that allows each user five monitors with a 15-minute check rate for life.

BinaryCanary's Web site and service are very well designed and easy to use. I'll give BinaryCanary a rating of 5 out of 5. There's nothing to dislike about the offering and, goodness knows, it is cheap, er, reasonable.

On another track, this week I'm chairing the meeting of the Convergence Technology Council in Calabasas, Calif. This should be an interesting meeting as the topic is "Predictions for Webonomics & Advertising 3.0".

Each speaker will introduce himself with a single "elevator pitch" slide. Our elevator is apparently in a really tall building as each speaker gets five minutes and, unlike most human vertical ascension systems, it has multimedia capability.

As I generated the introductory slides in PowerPoint I thought it would be cool to have an on-screen timer to keep 'em honest during the pitch, so I started looking for one and, to my surprise, found very little of use … until I stumbled onto PPTAlchemy.

While this site has some great tools for extending PowerPoint, what I really liked was what I was after: A free PowerPoint Slide Timer. This tool uses a cute trick: You create a shape with some formatted text in it, select it, and then run a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro that the site provides and tells you how to install.

In the macro there are variables that specify the duration of the timer and the size of the "step" and a simple edit will allow your timer to count down instead of up. The macro loops around copying the shape, replacing the text with the time for each step, and setting the shape's animation properties so that each shape appears in sequence. Voila! "Une timer formidable" as the French might say.

The obvious problem with this hack is that these timers don't work if you change slides. You can use them on the master slide but then the timer will restart on each slide change. Nevertheless, a neat hack worth checking out. I wonder if you know of anything better … .