Those of you readers that have been with us for a while might remember our revealing post about Ford Motor Company’s shady marketing tactics (via its media agency) to attract attention and web traffic to the brand by asking bloggers to participate in a Ford website-linking contest and win a place in the company’s 2010 Model Year Drive event. That said, we are no strangers to the mommy-blogger-type approach from marketing companies representing major automotive brands, but we never cease to be amazed. This time we were approached by a social media agency called Knallgrau on behalf of GM’s European Opel unit. When we received the first email, we believed it was a media / press invitation but upon our request for additional information, we discovered that wasn’t the case. In a similar fashion to the Ford incident, the agency asked if we wanted to write about the new Astra GTC and participate in a type of contest, the winners of which will be invited to the official unveiling of the three-door hatchback at Opel’s headquarters in Rüsselsheim, Germany.
They say bad things happen in threes (don't go all Tosh.0 on us now - the opening picture was a random choice that has nothing to do with our dislike of BMW's all-wheel drive turn to crossovers), and that seems to be the case for Carscoop these past couple of weeks. After Google’s cloud outage that left us offline for more than 24 hours earlier this month, this week we were faced with a new technical problem followed by a computer blackout that wiped out one of our hard disks… Well, what matters is that we’re back online now and ready to provide you with the latest auto news.
If you wondering why we have been dragging our feet on the news front these past few weeks, it’s because we were busy with the HTML5’s and CSS’s of our brand new template. True, the feel and the design have remained more or less the same with some subtle changes in the aesthetics and the size of our site, which is slightly more compact, but almost everything underneath is new. 
Think of Carscoop Version 5.0 as something like a new Porsche; while the looks remain the same (to the previous Version 4.3), everything else is new or revamped. In our case, this should translate to a better experience on most modern browsers and more importantly, faster speeds regardless the connection.
As Professor Farnsworth would say, Good news, everyone! We’re back! For those of you that missed our rants and were wondering what in tarnation happened to us for the past 24 hours, put the blame on Google’s engineers and a supposedly regular maintenance issue that turned into a widespread outage. Here at Carscoop, we’ve “lost” about a day’s worth of posts, but Google’s people have promised to reinstate them soon. If they don’t keep their word for any reason, no worries, we’ll just do it the good ‘ol fashioned way – manually…
