As of the winners of our birthday comp, I can confirm that both XyleneFree and Shirr0 have received their Nintendo Wii — yes I gave out two of them!!! Now both are suffering from domestic conflicts from family members fighting over the Wii remote. I shall post their excellent video later.

1. Keep your Personal Information Private
2. Read Everything Before Requesting a Sample
3. Make Sure You Are Ordering Direct or from a Quality Source
4. If You Like The Sample Buy The Full Product
5. Make Life Easier when filling out Forms
6. If It Is Too Good to be True, It is Too Good to be True

Great tips. I have always wondered why I am getting so many spams and unsolicited calls — maybe not always keeping (1) is the reason. On the topic of RoboForm which was mentioned in (5) — you can now get 33% off discount which has just been posted to OzBargain this morning.

Read the full article here.

There currently aren’t that many free samples in its Australian directory. However as the site has only started recently (domain registered in August 2007), hopefully there will be more freebies for the Aussies listed there in the near future.

My current favourite freebie site remains to be The Freebies Blog. The site has grown a lot since I last looked at it — 650+ feed subscribers according to FeedBurner! Thanks Teresa for doing a great job there!

Okay. Now the real reason I am writing this blog post is, that some changes I’ve made to OzBargain last week might put myself into competition with these sites. First of all, the fact — not everyone likes freebies. Sometimes you got to wonder why companies and manufacturers give out free samples or free promotional offers. After all, it is generally agreed that there is no such thing as a free lunch. So, as a recipient of these free samples, you are either

1. Doing marketing research for them, i.e. testing out “beta product”, or
2. Taking that first addictive bite so you might actually pay to get more later.

People who dislike these freebies voted against them on OzBargain, which generated some discussion and some proposal to remedy the issue. Basically at the end of discussion is — freebies should be separated from bargains and coupons, and an option to hide them in user preferences.

So I coded the solution in a few evenings, and from now on, as a registered OzBargain user (register yourself an account if you haven’t!) you can set up your own threshold for the number of minimum votes before the deal appears in listing. You can basically set the freebie type to a very high minimum vote threshold to filter out the free product samples that get posted on OzBargain.

However, there are always people who don’t care about being a test druid and would love to try out all the free samples — this link (and corresponding RSS feed) will list every freebies submitted to OzBargain. Hopefully the current setup will keep everyone happy.

Upcoming development tasks — migrating to Drupal 5.2 (OzBargain is currently on Drupal 4.7 with lots of mods), and implement a new theme. If you have any feedback and feature request, please post them to our announcement & feedback forum.

Linked watch is a children watch with Hello Kitty and green wrist band, but you can select pretty much any watch from seller “thecode”.

1. Register an account at BidMate.
2. Click on “Buy Out” on the watch!
3. You will get a notification that you have purchased the item, and you just need to wait for the offer message.
4. Seller will ask you via message whether you have got any promotion code — just reply with OZBW01.

Viola! Free children watch. Great for your own kid, or as a gift for family members or friends. Offer expires 27 March 2007, or when no watch is left.

The latest freebies, free stuff, free samples, coupon codes and great deals the internet has to offer. Featuring Australian and Worldwide freebies.

There are usually quite a few posts a day, but for us Aussies there’s an Australian Freebies category (and the corresponding RSS feed). You can also subscribe to their newsletter if RSS is not your thing. Very worthwhile to check it out.