Yearly Archives: 2009

diggbar – better than tinyurl

Apps, Browser Extensions

digg might have been crazy for not selling out to Google or any other suitors by now, but they are continuing to develop. i personally feel that digg is a more likely business to return real dollar bills back to investors than twitter. sorry, i’ll use twitter while it’s free but i think that’s short lived unless Google eventually buys them and continues the give-it-away-because-we-can-afford-too model of.. cough cough business.

more to the point, the diggbar is better than tinyurl.com. digg has taken the tinyurl idea to another level. they’ve turned it into a sticky service which completely compliments their core service of promoting popular content. too bad for the tinyurl folks they didn’t come up with this sooner. but heck if they’re just slightly lucky Micro$oft might come along and offer tinyurl a quarter billion bucks (i think that’s how they do things over there nowadays).

so here’s how it works

Electric Cars – Made in America, thanks Tesla Motors

Business & Economy, Technology

a couple of years ago i saw “Who Killed the Electric Car“, for some reason i didn’t blog about it but here’s my chance to recommend it. this movie encourages the question “why don’t the oil companies bailout out the auto makers in Detroit”. it’s ironic to see up and comers like Tesla Motors pushing forward something that GM was years ahead of EVERYBODY on. now, GM needs federal bailout cash while they’re years away from a hybrid hybrid that uses 8 or 9 different sources of energy… gas, electric, hydrogen, coal, solar, wind and hamsters. this way if the hamsters union strikes you can flip the switch back to gasoline.

yesterday Tesla finally released some pictures and promotional materials for their sedan the Tesla Model S. looks pretty nice for a sedan.

keep in mind when you’re pricing these electric cars, you’ve got to factor in how much you’ll save in fuel costs.

Google Lengthens Snippets, But The Meta Description Still Important

Programming, Search Engines

So recently Google officially released longer snippets on search results. There has been some chatter about this depreciating the value of the meta description. I have to play spoiler here and say I disagree.

The extended snippet stuff is great for long tail queries, like the many that I do when looking for programming information. Yet I don’t think it changes the importance of the meta description tag, especially for shorter search phrases.

Short snippets indicate tighter keyword proximity within the optimization of content; more precisely what the searcher is looking for. Longer snippets are only displayed when the keyword proximity is wider, therefore the content might not be precisely what the search is looking for, so that the searcher can better determine if the content on each page might have what they’re searching for.

Here’s some examples of tight keyword proximity within the content of the ranked pages, resulting in mostly short snippets:

“asp.net response.cookie expiration”

“Austin rodeo tickets”

Here’s some examples of loose keyword proximity within the content of the ranked pages, resulting in many long snippets:

“asp.net response.cookie expiration not working”

“can i watch the austin rodeo on tv”

So I stand by my opinion that body content and title tag are equally the best places to optimize for keywords and phrases to increase rankings, while the meta description is the best place to encourage a click through.

2009 March Madness Bracket Predictions

Sports

2011 Update >> MARCH MADNESS BRACKET FACEBOOK APP
March Madness Bracket

let march madness begin! i’ve decided to try to pick the winners this year. to be honest i don’t watch college basketball… too many games. so, watch me pick perfect 🙂 nah i very seriously doubt it, especially after hearing that there is big prize money available for anybody that picks perfect. evidently there are even math wizards at universities like MIT trying to develop systems for picking perfect. it seems that buzzer beaters ruin any kind of mathematical logic. i’m personally not suprised; wasn’t it coach mack brown who said prior to the greatest college football national championship game EVER “we don’t have to be the best team ever, we just need to be the best team tonight”.. to paraphrase. so in my picks you might notice i’ve included a couple of upsets, however nothing drastic.. just a few buzzer beaters that i think could play out. i guess if i have any kind of luck, because no doubt that’s exactly what it’ll be, i might have to join one of the endless pool invites.

so here’s how i’m seeing it go down… sorry longhorns (prove me wrong please!) but i’m taking UNC all the way.

by the way, ticketcity has march madness tickets

below are my failed 2009 predictions..

2009 March Madness Bracket Predictions

GoldMoney, iPhone app and real gold make good combo

Apps, Business & Economy

i’ve been using GoldMoney.com to buy and hold gold and silver bullion for just a little while, but i really like the service they provide. i was so happy to learn that they had released an iphone app a few days ago.. and guess what.. the goldmoney iphone app is the first one i’ve actually paid for. yep, i have several apps loaded up on my iphone but all of them except the goldmoney app are freebies. it’s a nice app, although they need to keep adding features to it. i’d love to have the ability to get text msg alerts on price points as well as the ability to buy, sell and trade metals and currencies through the app itself. all in due time i hope.

Got Slingbox? iPhone app almost here

Apps, Movies, TV

i finally bought a slingbox. i ordered it from amazon at an insanely discounted price with free shipping. anyhow i set it up last night in 5 minutes and tested it at work today for just a couple of minutes and it was soooo clean. i’m looking forward to having access to the other information superhighway (my uverse cable account) every i go so long as i have internet access.

slingmedia said that they would release an official slingbox iphone app before the end of the quarter. so, any day now 🙂

Garmin Phone, Real iPhone Rival?

Technology

google android? no, garmin nuvifone. that’s right garmin, a long time maker of consumer gps products is near releasing their new smartphone, iphone contender called nuvifone. since the 2nd generation iphone was released with true gps capabilities i have been waiting for garmin to release an iphone app specifically to step up the value of the gps feature of the iphone. i guess my wait was in vain as it seems that garmin has chosen to put its efforts in competing head on with the iphone rather than settling for ‘the most useful iphone app ever’. i gotta say, it’s not gonna be an easy battle… the iphone is pretty slick with many many many features. but, i wish garmin the best of luck and i’ll be keeping an eye on their product line.

learn more about garmin phones (G60 & M20) at the official site.

Garmin nuvifone
Garmin Phone
nuviphone
Garmin GPS Phone
Garmin iPhone Rival - nuvifone

Flight of the Conchords Tickets

Funny, Music

who likes to rock the party? Flight of the Conchords tickets are on sale as the 2 piece band / comedy group tour the USA and hit Canada for some shows. most people have a love/hate take on FOTC. back in the day i hosted some of their songs and they nearly crashed my server. so far i’m ok with their second season series on HBO, but i hope it gets better.. there were some really good episodes from season 1. although, i much prefer their live version of The Humans are Dead over the pop video style they did on the show.

anyhow, if you’re interested in checking them out.. tickets are selling out fast. in fact when i tried buying tickets for their Austin show the ticket box office site was practically crashed too. but, you can find Flight of the Conchords tickets here if you can find them anywhere.

Trillion, it’s the new Billion

Business & Economy, Funny, Politics

have you noticed that the word “trillion” is well on it’s way to being the most used word in 2009? trillion, trillion, trillion. the word “billion” is getting tossed around a lot too lately, but poor measly “million” is slipping into the small time. i thought i was poor when a million bucks seemed like a lot of money 🙁

so here’s the clearest description i can really comprehend of how much a trillion dollars is:

if you spent one million dollars per day, it would take you over 2700 years to spend a trillion dollars.