Internet News
Google Presents…
From Google’s official blog:
Starting today, presentations — whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor — are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it’s time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching.
I checked it out. It’s cool. Now, is it going to be the Powerpoint killer some have made it out to be? Hell no. Powerpoint has a LOT of capability that Google Presentations doesn’t have. That said, what makes Presentations cool is the collaborative aspect. For example, multiple people can work on the same slide at the same time. And, when presenting, it integrates with Google Talk to allow live conversation right along with the presentation.
I smell future use of this for doing webinars.
Iran Bans Google
In yet another affront by the Iranian government on it’s people, they have banned access to Google and Gmail inside the nation of Iran. These kinds of stories always catch my eye. Freedom of information is always key to the freedom of people, and you can always tell the governments which are suppressive by how they treat internet access. The Internet is the most free medium of information that has ever existed, and governments like Iran are interested in filtering out that freedom of information. They want to keep their population dumb and unable to participate online with the rest of the world freely. Either that or they just want to keep their population from dieing of playing video games.
I’m not one to take on political causes online. I might occasionally state an opinion, but I am no political blogger. But, we all need to, collectively, stay aware of these kinds of things. Internet censorship is a big deal, especially if done at the governmental level. We should always remain aware of any government controls on the internet and never let it start with our own governments.
And those of us in the U.S., don’t think for a second that many in Washington wouldn’t just LOVE to do this. Just look at the battle on talk radio and you’ll see what our current crop of politicians really think of freedom of speech.
Blog News, Google Moons NASA
Google is apparently on the verge of releasing their “Powerpoint killer“. This is going to be a presentation package which is added to the mix of Google online office applications. So, we will have Docs, Spreadsheets and soon “Presently” (the name for the new app). I think this will be a cool addition to Google’s apps, but come on, this is not going to be a Powerpoint killer by any means. A recent story at InfoWorld says that sales of Office 2007 are almost double that of Office 2003. Face it, Google, Microsoft has the Office suite thing down.
The popularity of ad-blockers is getting some attention. A story on News.com says that there is the possibility of litigation in the future on this topic, especially if the ad-blockers begin to negatively impact revenue. It’s a similar situation as has come out of the popular use of DVRs and TIVO. Now that viewers can fast forward through the commercials, it begs the question at what point will companies start to raise a stink?
Google is aiming for the stars. Or the moon, to be more exact. Yes, Google is putting up $20 million to the first private team who is able to put a robot on the moon. They’ll throw in an extra $5 million if you can manage to take an extended trip on the surface or send back visuals of NASA’s prior landing sites. It’ll be quite interesting to see if anything comes from this. It would be done without government money. And, more importantly, it would need to find new technologies for doing it on the cheap. I mean, we all know NASA can burn up $20 million and send it out the back of a rocket on one launch.
John Reese’s new venture, Income.com, is set to launch today at 6PM. Now, I know he has really big plans for that domain, and what I read mostly focused on a new product called BlogRush. I don’t know the extent of the plans, but BlogRush is going to be a community based blog promotion service. It will be free and will operate through the use of widgets put into people’s blogs. Seems very similar to what Minekey is doing (who, BTW, is featuring me on their homepage).
And, lastly, from the blogosphere, here are some items of interest:
- How to Get Quickly Ranked in Google, from YoungEntrepreneur.com
- Jaiku Adds Better Social Networking Features, from Mashable
- Magento – Open Source eCommerce Evolved, from EarnersClub. Check this thing out. Magento is certainly going to kill OSCommerce.
- Yahoo buys BuzzTracker, Preparing a DIGG Challenger?, by Marketing Pilgrim
- Best Time Saver Ever – Jott, by Lazy Business Owner
- How Make Money on a Site with a Small Budget, by ShoeMoney.
And with that, enjoy your weekend.
Lazy Linkage: Sep 6, 2007
If you are a user of Google Reader, we welcome a couple new enhancements to the mix. First, you can now SEARCH your feeds. Awesome. Secondly, you can now give your tag folders real English names without Reader dumbing it down to URL-safe strings. Nice. I posted a Google Wish List over on PCMech which you can read for a little time wasting.
YoungEntreprenuer.com has posted a cool rundown of 20 tips to managing your time. Many of them are common sense, but we all need the kick in the brain every now and then.
The latest in Iphone craze? Well, Apple just screwed over almost the entire lot of early adopters of the Iphone. They lowered the price of it by $200. You know, just when I start to think kind thoughts about Apple, I see something like this which goes to show me that Apple is in the habit of kicking their customers in the nuts while simultaneously trying to tell them how great they are for using Apple. They put out all that marketing to get people to walk into the Apple store like wide eyed zombies. They plop down $600 for a cell phone, walk out with a device which ties you to AT@T, and then turn around and drop the price by a third on you.
I am a Gmail fan, but if you don’t want to use it, Mashable has posted a list of 75+ email services that aren’t Gmail.
Facebook is opening up to search engines. Yes, they are opening up Facebook profiles to be indexable by Google and Yahoo. This might rile some feathers for those who have questionable alternate personalities on the internet, but the good news for those freaks is that they can opt out of this if they wish. Personally, I think it’s fine. I mean, if you want your life to be private, what the heck are you doing online to begin with? Besides, people like me use Facebook for identity management, so I want my profile to be searchable.
And lastly, if you’re a blogger like me, you can pat yourself on the back. The US government has officially recognized blogs as a form of media, according to Techcrunch. It was determined by the Federal Elections Commission, the end result being that blogs are subject to the same freedom of speech laws as the traditional media. According to the story, it looks like the case was brought up by a conservative blogger who was complaining that the Daily Kos, a left-wing political blog, was charging for ads and posting posts favorable to Democrats. This conservative blogger claimed that the Daily Kos should comply with campaign finance laws. Well, first off, I applaud the FEC for making this decision. Secondly, that conservative blogger is a disgrace to the conservative philosophy, as far as I’m concerned.
With that, enjoy your weekend (when it gets here).
Lazy Linkage: July 17, 2007
I’ve been doing an awful lot of articles lately that I write myself, but sometimes I like to take a break and link out to some of the wise words of others. As usual, there is a lot of interesting content being published around the web on my favorite sites. Let’s check some out.
- Apparently, Google has responded to some privacy concerns by expiring user cookies after 2 years rather than waiting until 2038. That’s big of ya, Google. I’m not sure why this makes a difference. I mean, a 31-year old cookie is overkill anyway, so I’m not sure why Google even went that far to begin with. Any computer operating today that has a Google cookie on it is very likely to be in a landfill in 31 years. So, instead of Google responding to it’s users privacy concerns, I think they’ve gotten real.
- Microsoft has apparently devised a way to artificially raise their search stats by inventing a game that requires people to use the search engine. I must admit, that’s creative. But, at the same time, it’s practically an admission that they could not compete with Google in terms of what’s important – search.
- Looks like Gnomedex 2007 is going to be broadcasted live over Ustream this year. I think that’s pretty cool. Apparently, Chris is going to be using his usual Ustream feed and broadcasting from the conference rather than his office as he usually does. That means all of you can catch the action if you want. I’ll try to find the cameras and say hey, since I’m going to be there in person.
- DoshDosh has published an interesting piece on how to use Flickr for traffic building and brand marketing. Good stuff, and true. I have yet to experiment with Flickr, but I do know that images are a traffic draw. People love to look at other people’s pictures.
- How Can Interlinking Benefit Your Blog? Some good advice on how to raise your PageRank throughout your site. Even though the title references blogs specifically, the theory holds true for any website.
- 10 Golden Rules posted an article I put into the “duh” category, but I bring it up because its so important anyway. Entitled The Value of Quality Content, the article again talks about how important it is to have real content on your site. If you read my recent series, you know this already.
- Smashing Magazine has posted a compilation of outstanding start pages. Taking into account that you have about 3-5 seconds to get a visitor’s attention before they take off, the pages they list are stunning. Some of the designs they point out are kinda funky looking – not really my taste. But, do they achieve the wow factor that gets a person to click to another page of the site? Hell yeah.
- CopyBlogger has posted an article on The 3 Key Metrics You Need to Know. This is what you need to know to judge how successful any page is on your site.
- The above article linked to this post which compares different Analytics packages for your site. Interesting post. Someday I plan to look more into this myself. I am using Google Analytics now, but I see some of the pay-for services out there like ClickTracks and I’m left wondering why people pay for those things.
10 Sites That Make Me All Fuzzy Inside
As I work away this week on a big client job as well as on some strategic things on PCMech, I thought I would do a good, old fashioned link love post on WebbyOnline today. And I thought I’d give it a cute little “Top 10″ title for all those linkbaiters out there. Eat your heart out. Here we go:
- I found a new blog (well, new to me) called Dosh Dosh. Its a blog dedicated to “helping you make money online”. Some articles he wrote which I like are 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank and Using Lists to Build Authority, Traffic and Links to Your Website.
- I’d like to send a shout out to Crystal Linnen, a virtual assistant from Colorado. She is a frequent commenter here on WebbyOnline. She also has her own website where she is doing her own podcast about virtual assistants. She was also nice enough to send me a list of grammar mistakes in my recent report “Top 7 Practices for Success on the Web”. Thanks, Crystal! Oh, yeah, her blog is here.
- Another great blog site I ran across is the Friday Traffic Report. Great content and I like his writing style. And I’ll pimp his free Authority Black Book. It’s a great report. It’d be worth money if he actually charged something for it.
- CopyBlogger made a cool post entitled Go Big or Go Home: Why Being Bold is Critical to Getting Noticed. Reminds me of a post I saw several months back on ShoeMoney about him interviewing a pornstar. Don’t know if he did it, but it’d be a bold move and I’m sure a bunch of guys noticed that site!
- Yaro over at Entrepreneurs-Journey has launched his new program Blog Mastermind. I assume its been keeping him super busy because his post frequency went down. I only hope Yaro doesn’t go the way of Lee Dodd, who I used to read and then his posts got all commercialized and he eventually dropped his blog. Dodd has been MIA now for sometime and hasn’t posted anything useful to his blog in many months. What a shame.
- Smashing Magazine has posted a new list of 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Wordpress Themes. Good stuff.
- I came across another site called Lazy Owner, which is a site dedicated to owners of businesses who are flat-out lazy (I’m raising my hand here as I type). This guy gives some really solid tips.
- Andrew over at Web Publishing Blog has posted a post with an inviting headline: Google Maps Sucks. He posts some visual comparisons between Google Maps and Live.com Maps. Interesting.
- Shifting gears, I am a long-time user of Cloudmark Desktop which integrates with Outlook and Outlook Express to fight spam. Apparently they are just a few weeks from completing a long-awaited version of their add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird. I’m excited about this, because Cloudmark has been one of the leading reasons I am still using Outlook for my email. With this release, perhaps I can actually evaluate Thunderbird as a mail client replacement in my daily life.
- And finally, from the guys over at Sitepoint.com, I find this interesting post about FirefoxPortable. He does on to basically recommend PortableApps. Those of you with a mobile lifestyle might find this interesting.
Lazy Linkage – Google Buys Feedburner
So, looking out into the internet, what’s going on this week? For those of you who may be running a blog on Wordpress.com, something new is available to you. Wordpress has begun allowing folks with domains mapped to the service to now use email using their own domain, with Gmail as the email client. That’s a welcome addition for Wordpress.com users, however I still maintain that having your own Wordpress installation offers MUCH better flexibility. Pick The Brain has also posted a great write-up on 27 lessons he learned while bringing his blog up to 3,000 visitors daily.
On the productivity front, I recently listened to the latest podcast over at Internet Business Mastery. In it, they talk about the book The 4-Hour Workweek. Yaro also interviewed the author of this book over at Entreprenuers-Journey.com. That’s two separate sites talking about this guy, so I guess he’s on a bit of a media blitz. But, the book sounds very intriguing. Without having read it, it seems to be about the idea of running your business primarily through outsourcing and allowing yourself to live the lifestyle you want rather than allowing your business to become your lifestyle. It’s interesting enough where I will probably pick up a copy and check it out. Not that I intend to cut my work week down to 4 hours (gimme a frickin’ break), but it sounds like there are some great, workable concepts in this book.
It has just been confirmed over at Techcrunch that Google has purchased FeedBurner. Total purchase price is somewhere around $100 Million. That’s a great payday for the guys who started FeedBurner. FeedBurner is, of course, the very popular service which allows you to set up and promote an RSS feed for your website. You have to have a feed already to use FeedBurner. That is, it won’t create your feed for you. Instead, it acts as a go-between to your real feed and that service allows things like tracking, stats, etc. This is a good move on Google’s part, since their fairly obvious mission is to organize all the world’s information. That mission means they need a lot of information, and with the purchase of Feedburner, they are now going to have vast amounts of data regarding RSS feed use, publishing and advertising. For you and me, this is probably going to be good. After all, when Google bought Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics, they not only improved the service but they made it free. Google seems to love giving away free stuff, and I would expect the Feedburner service not only to improve, but any paid services of Feedburner may end up being free. You never know. On the flip side, this could spell problems for any other RSS services. And, it also means Google’s empire grows even more.
The New York Post, of all publications, has a story about Google purging ads-heavy websites from their networks. Basically, the rumor here is that Google is going around and purging their Adsense network of the “made for Adsense” sites…the ones with hardly any content but TONS of Adsense ads. I’ve seen a lot of these, and the publishers are probably just relying on the “safety by numbers” thing, hoping Google won’t find them due to the number of Adsense publishers. While I don’t like to see people being cut off from Adsense, I can see the point. The best way to avoid it is to provide actual content to the internet. Don’t try to “cheat the system” by throwing up sites designed to do nothing but target keywords and rake in money.
Smashing Magazine, one of my favorite blogs offering up valuable link collections on design, has posted a collection of free icon collections. Very nice stuff.
Lazy Linkage – Wordpress, Universal Search
A snippet of the content from this week’s newsletter, too. See, I told you it was lazy linkage!
Chris Garret makes a great point over at CopyBlogger. He talks about how fancy jargon can and will drive away your visitors. As a person who writes online and has also spent time studying the subject of study, I tell you to NEVER under-estimate the power of words. Both to inform and sell, but also to put people to sleep. Fast. Once a person hits a word they do not know the definition of, the process starts that will eventually lead them to leave the material. And on the internet, you’re already dealing with short attention spans, so that exodus is going to happen in a flash. So, make sure to use words that are easily understood. And if you cannot do so and still maintain the point, then DEFINE the words right on your website. Always test your website using a person not already integrated into your niche and see how they do with it.
AddThis (a social bookmarking tool) has posted a trends page which shows which bookmarking services users of AddThis are using. It covers this year (2007), so only a few months. The top two web bookmarking services are Google and Del.icio.us. BTW, an interesting page worth bookmarking is the Del.icio.us popular tags page. It’s a tag cloud of the popular tags on Del.icio.us, which can help you track what is popular and what people are buzzing about.
Wordpress has released Wordpress 2.2. Yep, a new version. Make sure you check your plug-ins before upgrading so they will still work. Want to know what’s so great about 2.2? Check out Aaron Brazell’s article 10 Things you should know about Wordpress 2.2. Also on the blogging front, its been reported that MyBlogLog is going to be rebranding. Makes sense now that Yahoo has bought them (which Techcrunch confirmed back in January). Among the changes are a re-design, a new name of some kind, and a new widget setup. Since I am a user of MyBlogLog on WebbyOnline, I look forward to seeing what they come up with. I know some bloggers are annoyed by MyBlogLog as it is now. Lastly, Daniel posted a list of the Top 10 Underrated Wordpress Plug-ins. My fave on that list is the Clean Archives plug-in. I’m actually not sure if the one he links to is the same as the one I use, but here is SRG Clean Archives which is the one I like.
In the world of copywriting, I found a great post by Michel Fortin where he lists 5 Copywriting formulas. Of course, he uses the post to point attention at 5 other posts he has describing each of them (very smart). But, worth the read because each of these formulas can serve as general guidelines to those of us who try to write our own copy.
On the search engine front, Profy posted about the story I also found on Yahoo and that is “Google Announces Universal Search“. The basics of it is that Googe is planning on integrating all their various search engines (web, images, video, news, etc) into one unified search engine so that one search will find relevant results in the whole gamut of content types. Here is another post at News.com about it. This is another good idea by Google, and if they are as spot on with their interface design as they were with Analytics, I’m sure the engine will be a breeze. And it brings Google one step closer to making all the world’s information accessible. And them controlling it. 
And in a bit of humor, Andrew has posted about the Maxim Hot 100 list for 2007. And he’s got some not-so-flattering pics of some of the contenders. Of course, we all know these women has hotties, but they have to be thanking the folks at Adobe for Photoshop, because its that in combo with the makeup which make them look above average on the red carpet.
My Marketing, Useful Resources
Below is this week’s commentary “blurb” portion of the weekly newsletter we run every week here at WebbyOnline. I don’t usually post these things on the main site as a blog post, however today I thought I would. To recieve this content in your inbox each week, just subscribe in the form at the top of the site. It is free and I work hard to make the email useful each week.
Well, I’m a day late on this newsletter. Been awhile since that has happened, but this week I have been so busy working on various internal marketing and enhancement projects that, yesterday, I literally FORGOT to look at my todo list. And therefore the newsletter went undone. But, here I am today. So, what have I been up to that led me to overlook my sacred Webby duties? Well, I mentioned that I had picked up the Traffic Secrets course. So far, I have only watched two of the DVDs of the course. But, at the same time, I have been following other material. For example, this week I attended web seminars being put on by Marketing Experiments and Michael Fortin. As I would have expected, I’m getting a lot of common themes out of all of this, such as:
- The importance of ad copy
- The use of landing pages
- The importance of testing and analytics
Well, even though I have just gotten started (and have about 80% of the course still ahead of me), the ideas start a-rollin’ and I find myself moving ahead with other things. So, in short, I am looking at my business from more of a marketing perspective and seeing the opportunities that are out there if I can couple the delivery with good, solid marketing. So, I am getting a few things going in order to pick up sales of PCMech products. We’re also on the cusp of releasing our second DVD video tutorial on the site. I am also putting some work into enhancing the subscription model (called Supporter memberships) over at PCMech. This stuff takes a lot of work to implement, but that’s been a big part of what I’m doing this week.
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Lazy Linkage – Issue Two
OK, today I am going to post the second “issue” of the lazy linkage. You might wonder why I call it that. Well, its just a lame dork attempt at humor because rather than creating content of my own for you, I’m just linking to other people’s content. But, I try to be fair and balanced here at WebbyOnline. So, here we go…
- The Sales Funnel Explained
This is a great article which explains exactly what a sales funnel is. You hear that term in ecommerce circles all the time. If you’re trying to do business online and have not thought about this concept with your online store, you could be throwing dollars away big time. Worth the read. - Touchgraph – Google Browser
A cool little tool worth checking out. This thing will search Google and generate a graphical diagram which illustrates on the relationships between a website and other websites, according to Google. When you run the search, you get a cool little java browser which does the work. - TaskFreak
I have been talking on and off here and in the newsletter about the Getting Things Done (GTD) method. Well, I ran across Taskfreak, a PHP/MySQL free web-based task manager which is GTD compliant. - 10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page
Another great piece by CopyBlogger where Roberta outlines 10 important guidelines for copywriting a landing page. - Gliffy
Check this thing out. It’s a Web 2.0 style web application for drawing diagrams on the web. And the stuff you can design with it looks frickin’ nice. Amazing. - Expanded Search with Yahoo! Alpha
Profy.com discusses Yahoo! Alpha, the new enhanced search being tested by the #2 search engine. This is classic Web 2.0 as it brings in content from many different sources. Very cool, Yahoo. - Crazy Egg
This is an analytics service with a twist, allowing you to overlay link stats, even a heat map, over top your site. You can use it for free, with traffic limitations. - Top 100 April Fool’s Hoaxes of All Time
This is one of those links that make you laugh a little. A, for a more web-focuses one, check out this fake story about Techcrunch buying Fuckedcompany.com. - Wordpress 2.1.3 and 2.0.10 Released
It’s a security release. Wordpress’ers – you’ve been warned.
- Chitika Blog Bash
Chitika is the comparison shopping service many bloggers make a dime with. This month, they are doing something unique with their blog – recruiting famous bloggers to come and post for 30 days. Its funny…I caught wind of this from an ad on BloggingPro which says “Chris Pirillo on BlogBash”. And it was an ad running in Google Adsense. Funny how they use Chris’s name in an ad and it works.
Well, there’s your lazy links. Now I’m going to go sit and have a Heinekin like a lazy ass while other bloggers supply content for the next “issue”.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
