Sometimes simplicity isn’t immediately obvious… but it’s always remarkable. Here’s what I mean: Go to Domize.com and check out their “As-you-type domain name lookup”.
It’s so simple the eloquence might take a moment to sink in. Or then again, maybe not.
Into the mosh… Everyone’s doing it: Email. Word Processing. Calendaring. Spreadsheets. Presentation slides.
But everyone’s doing it in a different pit: The office. The conference room. On a plane. In a hotel. Out in the field…
Whaddaya use when you’re users are moshed all over the place?
In 2008, one smart answer is Google Apps for business. Available anywhere - online or off* - Google Apps lets companies achieve levels of office app sophistication previously available only to the very big guys. (*offline functions are limited as of now)
It provides collaborative access to documents in ways that PC office suites can’t - and takes care of all the attendant housekeeping and security so you don’t have to.
Businesses and employees will want the Premier Edition for $50 per user per year. This gives you branded, ad free screens - and enormous storage quotas that defy even the most neurotic email hoarders amongst us. Users get emails branded with @yourDomainName.com not @gmail.com, and 25gb of storage each. When you add up the annual cost of maintaining Word Processing, Calendaring, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and Email Apps for each user’s PC (desktop and laptop in some cases), $50 is a complete steal.
And just when you’re thinking this sounds cool, it gets better: Teams can collaborate on documents across the web, eliminating the need for emailing large attachments to each other and playing the “can you name the latest version” game. (Okay, we’re jumping up on stage now)
But in case this isn’t enough to get you downloading Google Apps right this instant, recently announced integration with SalesForce and the Google Apps Engine will surely stoke the fire.
Here it is. Check it out.
Now we’re on the stage, arms up over our heads, looking down at the undulating mosh, smiling wide… and now we’re diving in… 
Hi! I’m a recovering .MP3aholic!
Endless gigagbytes later, I was buried like a collector with just too much damn stuff … then along came internet radio.
Originally it was MusicMatch, until Yahoo bought and buried them, now it’s all about Pandora.
A browser based, web 2.0 and absolutely FREE internet radio app, Pandora allows you to create a radio station and teach it preferences by selecting “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Then, over time, these preferences kick in and Pandora plays more of what you want to hear.
To quote the company “Pandora has a single mission: To play music you’ll love - and nothing else!”
Used to be easier to be a pretender on the web. Just take the visitor counter off your site and voilà!: pretend you’re a “General” like Motors or Electric. Google Benchmarking bodes a new day.
Today it’s all about transparency. Smart companies from Google to Zillow to Kelly Blue Book are making - what used to be insider only - information readily available in the browser of your choice. Instead of hiding their nuts, the winners are working hard to lay them out in the open.
Google Analytics Benchmarking (in beta) is optional and free. Benchmarking shows how your stats compare with other industry verticals. Yours or another.
It’s not the total transparency that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wants to see, but it’s a step in the right direction. (psst, Michael, pass the cashews)
We’re not talking about the Carl’s Jr. chili burger mess on that guys face. We’re talking about how your visitors are going to find what they’re looking for on your web site.
Google offers a very low cost - $100 a year - custom edition search engine called the “Business Edition“. (50,000 page sites cost more).
The coolest thing is that you can fit Google Search Business Edition seamlessly into your site - sans the “Powered by Google” logo - and with no results page ads. To completely customize the look and feel around your core branding instead of theirs, Google offers an XML API.
So the topLingo tip for today is: Google Custom Search Business Edition with the XML API is the way to go if your site needs a commercial grade search that won’t detract from your core branding.
Now you got it. Now you’re good.
This weekend, WordPress released version 2.5 of their top-tier open source blogging software. This release sets the bar high for intuitive admin systems. I could write on and on, but nothing compares to actually using it. I’m composing this entry, for instance, using the new full-screen editing mode. This allows the writer to focus solely on his writing, without any clutter. I love it!
Go get it (or view demo) at WordPress.org. If you’re running an existing WordPress installation, this is a must-have upgrade. The 2.2 to 2.3.3 upgrade added incremental improvements to the front-facing app and some advanced SEO features. But this upgrade is 90% geared toward admins … thank you, WordPress … and, at the same time, sets a whole new standard on usability.
Bonus geek fact: This weekend, I found out the origin of the word “bLog” and why it employs that odd capitalization. It’s short for “WebLog”, a term coined back in the first dotcom bubble.
The Green movement is oh-so-popular these days. I wonder how far we can take it.
Over a great beer the other day, I was talking to a Prius-hugger about creating a smaller carbon footprint. As he droned on in his self-gratifying manner about how he was saving the planet, my mind drifted towards applying those same green principles to coding. That is, an approach to building software that is so lean & mean that it sucks up magnitudes less computer power. On the web especially, this could really have a significant effect. Imagine if every single Myspace page used half the computing power to render. On the client side, it wouldn’t do much — although if you multiply that across hundreds of millions of pageviews, then the impact would be impressive. But on the server side, I’m sure the differences would be amazing. Servers could probably even be decommissioned. Entire data centers might utilize less power based on changing a few lines of code.
Would anybody adopt this coding style? Programmers are notoriously resistant to change, especially when that change is forced upon them from management. They have to be that way to be able to meet tight timeframes. If a coder needs to make a quantum shift in thinking to simply architect a new project, that is going to slow them down unacceptably. Oh, and they’ll be cranky too.
So maybe this green coding would be taught at the college level, making it innate for programmers. No change necessary. Professors are idealists generally and would love this sort of methodology. It hearkens back to the old days of lightweight coding when every line counted. In fact, there was a physical limit to how big your program could be. I remember hacking out entire chunks of code so that my early projects could fit on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk. The professors’ teaching assistants would assign better grades for actually using less lines (although it helped to be really wordy with your comments, so that they would have less to look over). And the professors, off on sabbatical or whatever, would smile smugly to themselves in awe of their incredible teaching skill since nobody had handed in a final project that was over one floppy disk in size.
When I learned to code, 4 megs of memory was an awe-inspiring luxury and processors crawled along at 5 Mhz. Remember the Commodore 64? The “64″ stood for 64 kilobytes of RAM! Programmers had to be very careful about resource usage otherwise the entire computer would crash. Luckily things went steadily downhill after that.
As Windows and other memory hogs came about, computers strove to keep up with the ceaseless demand for more and more power. Developers cared increasingly less about creating tight, lean code. What we have now (with Vista, Photoshop CS3, etc.) is just massive, massive code bloat. And there’s no way around it. In the rush to meet deadlines and get products to market, you can’t spend months and months optimizing code for speed. Besides, by that time, computers will probably be fast enough or memory cheap enough that the fatter application won’t matter (at least that’s what Marketing says).
Moving apps from the desktop to the “web-top” (i.e. web-based software like Photoshop Express and Google OS) seems on the surface like a reasonable solution. But that just shifts the resource usage from the client to the server. It’s the same obese app, using the same power, but now it’s running in a data center instead of on your box. But at least you’re not paying the electric bill.
Truly, the only way green computing can be accomplished is at the code level and it must be taught in universities and junior colleges. Anyway, it’s a worthy goal, for sure — one that deserves more thought from you and from me as to how it can be accomplished. By the way, this whole train of thought had the added bonus of getting me through a tremendously boring conversation with a holier-than-thou driver. But the beer was sure good (Lagunitas India Pale Ale).
Spam email chafes. It’s like wet sand in your bathing suit. It’s the electronic version of a freeway driver flipping you off - not with gestures - but with daily offers of stuff you don’t want - or worse - things that offend you.
We’ve all received ‘em: solicitations for Canadian drugs, cheap software, implants, enlargements, and the list goes on ad nauseum - leaving the email reading public irked and in extreme cases “spam enraged”. Still, good people are often surprised to discover that their own websites may be unwittingly contributing to the problem. Contributing how, you ask?
One way is by publishing email addresses in plain view on their sites. Bots (robot programs) crawl the web constantly, harvesting addresses that are sitting on websites screaming to be hijacked. To the naked eye, these addresses look something like this: john.sales@mycompany.com. To bots they look like this: mailto: john.sales@mycompany.com.
For the uninitiated, Mailto: is html code that instructs the browser to open a window in the users default email client - e.g. Microsoft Outlook- and insert the address from the web page. So by searching for mailto: on your web pages, bots can easily harvest your stuff.
How do you defend against email harvesters? One way is to use forms instead of email addresses. Forms can be filled out by the visitor and submitted to one or more email addresses without ever revealing the recipient addresses. Two other advantages are that one, user information can be saved to a database for later use and that two, forms work regardless of whether the user has an mail client available on the computer they happen to be using at the time.
Don’t have the resources or knowledge to implement forms? There are other strategies that can be used:
Another way spammers spam is by creating programs that automatically complete and submit web forms - forms like contact us, feedback, tell a friend, blog comments and user registrations.
So how can you defend against the form bots? The best and most widely used defense is a technology called CAPTCHA and it’s a process that’s designed to distinguish humans from computers. CAPTCHA comes in many styles - for example the “reCAPTCHA” API from the inventors of CAPTCHA technology at Carnegie Mellon University:
CAPTCHA solutions like the one above are easy to implement on most blog sites. For example, the reCAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress, developed by Ben Masters, is free and simple to install. To the contrary, implementing CAPTCHA solutions on regular websites usually involves some code twiddling and is probably best left to coder types.
There’s volumes more that can be written about spam defense, but if this post has at least heightened the awareness of site owners to the risk of exposed e-addresses on their sites, and has succeeded in providing some practical strategies for protecting against “the dark forces of spam” we’ll chafe less here at topLingo, knowing we’ve help someone somewhere avoid spam rage.
How many people are searching for iPhones versus Blackberries? IBM versus HP? Real Estate versus Jobs?
What if you could track how many people searched for your goods or services last month versus last year and the year before that? What if you could see how frequently your search topics showed up in Google News articles?
Google Trends does that. Free.
With Google Trends, you can compare up to five topics at a time and see how often they’ve been Googled over time… globally, nationally, or by state and region. It also shows you which geographic regions searched these terms the most.
Want to see the top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the U.S.? They’re updated hourly.
In topLingo fashion, here’s another “tool you can use”.
Cool. Free. Useful.
Try it!
Web agencies like topLingo - working five, ten, twenty projects at a time - need a cheap, easy, secure and online way to manage tasks and milestones. They also need a way to collaborate with internal and external team members (including clients), set varying authorization levels, and provide an accessible repository for project related files.
Basecamp from 37signals does all that.
What’s the buzz about Basecamp? It’s intuitive, affordable, highly functional, secure, web hosted and accessible. It comes with impossible to miss tutorials on screens that the user hasn’t yet added content to, putting help resources where and when they’re needed most.
Basecamp is priced on a monthly subscription basis. It’s worth checking out. Learn more.
Now you can schedule Google Analytics to automatically email site statistics. Schedule reports to be generated and sent at the interval that works best for your situation: daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Reports can be generated in PDF or other formats, and sent to one or multiple email addresses.
Most web builders are familiar with Google Analytics. It’s something every web site should run and that every web builder
should make their clients aware of. Not just because it’s FREE, but because the reporting and dashboard functionality is just plain awesome. Google could easily charge thousands of dollars for this functionality and get paid for it because the ROI is there, so why would you NOT use it?
Learn more here: Google’s three minute video tour.
Pronounced like “color”, this flash application built by Adobe is great for creating a nice color scheme to use on a website design or elsewhere.
Need a solid video host?
Brightcove, an internet TV platform, not only hosts your vids but also helps you promote it via:
1. Community: Leverage viral video sharing.
2. Distribution: Attract affiliates and list content with video search engines.
3. Advertising: Generate revenue from advertising.
Check out their 2 minute demo: http://www.brightcove.com/products/index.cfm
With great fanfare, Steve Jobs told the world the one of the biggest innovations of the iphone was bringing the “real” internet to a mobile device for the first time. No more junior, stripped down websites, with the iPhone you can view entire original websites as they were intended to be viewed.
Because the iPhone did not ship with the ability to run third party native applications, Jobs boldly told the development community they should build web 2.0 applications that would be just as good as native applications. Than Apple release development guidelines detailing how developers could build custom web applications formatted perfectly for the iPhone.
Thousands of web applications have sprung up for the iPhone, many of them very useful and well done. But these are custom applications that only run on the iPhone. What about the rest of the mobile market? What ever happened to the “real” internet? The point that you didn’t need to develop any kind of special or stripped down version of a site just to view it on a mobile phone? Apple has fallen into its own bear trap. I’m not complaining too much, being an iPhone user myself, but the rest of the mobile world is getting a little bit of a rip off with more development time being put into iphone specific web applications.
If you’re a business and you are looking to make some noise in the mobile market, should you create an iPhone custom web app? Probably, especially if you believe your target customer is likely to own an iPhone, but don’t forget about the rest of the mobile universe. It’s still a great deal bigger than the iPhone market, at least for now.
The hot buzzword in 2008 will be social platform. Rising social network star Facebook got the ball rolling this year when they announced their open development platform which allowed software developers to create custom applications to run inside Facebook. This has turned out to be wildly popular and other social network sites are following the leader. Myspace has been working on a platform and more recently, news that LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals is also creating an application platform.
Social networks will become much more than networks in 2008 as more social platforms arrive, allowing users access to more features and marketers access to more of the so-called “social graph“.
Google has been making some big moves lately, one of which is in the social network arena. Open Social is a set of API’s (application programming interfaces) which will allow developers to create applications that will run on a variety of social networks at once. Facebook applications can only run on Facebook, but Open Social applications can run on any platform that adopts the standard. At launch, some of the important partners include, Myspace, Linked In, Salesforce.com, Ning, and NetVibes.
Facebook currently dominates the social network space, in part due to their vibrant application platform. Open Social could serve to level the playing field. It will also make things easier for developers as they will only have to write one application for distribution across many platforms. This is one to keep an eye on. Will adoption grow and how will Facebook respond?
Top Companies
Only surprise on this list is Facebook and since Microsoft just invested $240 million their numbers are still to be determined.
Source and full article: Tech Crunch
Top Social Networks & RSS Readers
MySpace is still king for now, but for how much longer. Facebook is climbing up the ranks quickly.
Source and full article: Tech Crunch
Top Social Bookmarking & RSS Readers
WOW! Google dominating del.icio.us and My Yahoo was a surprise.
Source and full article: Tech Crunch
When it launched we blogged a review of Google Audio Ads, the marketing service that allows you to manage your radio advertising campaigns online.
Now intending to get people excited, Google is offering a $2000 future ad credit if you spend $1000 in advertising.
Nice two for one deal! Enjoy it while it lasts!
San Jose based Adobe Systems is a legend in Silicon Valley, most famous for their dominant Photoshop application. Adobe is also a leader in desktop publishing and has a strong competitor in online video editing as well. Now Adobe is stepping into a whole new world, the world of online Web 2.0 applications. Adobe has purchased Virtual Ubiquity and their online word processor Buzzword. This puts Adobe in direct competition with Google and Zoho for the online office productivity market.
Traditionally a master of the desktop, it shows a great deal of savvy and guts for Adobe to move into the online market. What makes this even more interesting in the Buzzword word processor is based on Adobe’s Flash technology. Adobe is playing up the benefits of Flash, saying it is more flexible and powerful than Ajax, which is the current favorite web 2.0 technology. Adobe’s AIR allows Flash applications to run offline or online, which will prove to be a critical factor as most web 2.0 apps do not work offline yet. The Zoho word processor does work offline but Google Docs does not.
A question everyone should be asking is, where is Microsoft in all this? As of yet, nowhere to be found. Microsoft clings to their venerable Office suite, continuing to bet on the desktop. It may be a long time before web 2.0 supplants the desktop application, but I am surprised to not see Microsoft at least put a toe into this water.
Sometimes technology uncovers things we have never considered before or shows us things we have not noticed. Such is the case with this Navy building and it’s unfortunate shape, only discovered and disseminated widely because of Google Maps and blogging. Now the Navy will spend $600,000 to redesign the landscape and buildings to change it’s appearance from the air and on Internet mapping systems. Another related post details the various rooftop advertising around the country also now visible on Google Maps.
I once hit 15 consequtive emails back and forth trying to coordinate a meeting time with 3 different people. Pure chaos!
Ever heard of Timebridge?
I downloaded the Outlook connection utility and instantly loved it! I now schedule ANY meeting that may appear to be difficult to coordinate a time with and the clients that have used it with me have also begun using it themselves.
According to Timebridge …
“TimeBridge is an online Personal Scheduling Manager designed to help busy people find a time to meet. It works across all calendaring systems, companies and time zones and with our one-step scheduling you select attendees, propose meeting times and send a meeting invitation. TimeBridge then does the rest— collects everyone’s availability and selects the best time. Everyone gets a confirmation once the meeting is set. To make it easy, attendees need only a web browser to respond and no registration is required.”
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be complex, frustrating and expensive … like as much as $5000-$10,000 per month expensive. So, for the DIY crowd here are a few web sites that help break it down into plain English as well as offer some very cool online tools.
VideoJug.com an online video resource for expert advice and professional know-how knows their niche market.
Thier tagline appropriately reads “Life Explained. On Film.” and have taken a business model from the likes of Ask.com whose approach to competition is not to worry about the 800 pound gorillas (Google and Yahoo for Ask and YouTube for Video Jug) rather serve their niche markets to the best of their abilities.
In VJ’s case their niche is education and to date they’ve recieved more than 30 Million dollars in venture capital, staff 50+ professionals and have produced 20,000+ high definition how-to-videos such as “How to be the perfect girlfriend” or “How to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds.”
The geniuses from 37 Signals who brought you Basecamp (the web-based project management miracle worker) flex thier muscles once again with “Ta-Da List” an online To Do List manager bare bones in features … just as it should be.
Less is more these days and with tasks as simple as jotting down action items there’s no reason to convolute software with massive features. Ta-Da List is simple to access, simple to add to and simple to manage items quickly and efficiently. It also produces independent RSS feeds either per list or for all lists and allows you to share lists by giving others access via email logins.
“I want one for my website! You know that square graphic thing-a-ma-jig next to where I type my website name!”
They’re called favicons (not to be confused with decipticons) and these 16 x 16 pixel sized graphical icons in .ICO format are found in the URL of the web browser.
To create one you’ll Photoshop, a plug-in from Telegraphics, some sort of design skills and patience to work with a small palette.
To post live on your website you’ll need to upload the file to your servers root directory or wherever your website index file resides and may also need to add this line of code to your page:
<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
Full tutorialSmashing magazine who recently gave me a headache from filtering through links in their article “42 Design/Tech Magazines to Read” recently published another informative list worth checking out …
53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without
Man I love Google! Not only are they buying up some very cool companies handsomely rewarding the owners, they’re hooking up the users as well by “Googlizing” the products.
For those of you using Feedburner, a new Google purchase, two critical features and reasons to pay monthly for the service are now free. MyBrand which allows you to remove the Feedburner URL and use your own, and TotalStats which gives you more analytics are now FREE! Here’s how to enable:
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/07/feedburner-give.html
Online applications are slowly replacing traditional software and it’s important to know what your options are. Today, in our 3rd online webinar topLingo addressed the benefits of using web software and demo’d 17 cool apps that can help your business in the areas of IT, communications, marketing, sales, workflow and project management.You can view the presentation online here:
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ONLINE
(5.7MB Flash)
Or for your iPod:
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
(22MB M4V)
Recently beta launched Google Audio Ads allows you to create radio advertising campaigns by producing high quality radio ads and allowing you to set your own budget and decide when and where your ads air. And for a little as $400 … I can hear that!
According to Google “Website Optimizer, Google’s free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).”
So, after I looked up what the word multivariate meant I then checked out the demo.
This free new tool comes with a Google AdWords account and lets you rotate and track ROI on webpage variations. The example they present is scenario with three different homepages that only differ by a unique headline, photo and paragraph of copy. These pages are then auto rotated and tracked by Google whose analytics reveal which message is the most effective. Try it out.
I have an art degree. I know hundreds of Photoshop tips and tricks. My spare time is spent video editing in Final Cut. So with that in mind guess what application I use the most? Microsoft Friggin Word!
Welcome to business 101.
If you do any client development, and do it well, the necessary evil of any web shop sales professional is to spend a massive amount of time typing client proposals and contracts. Why? Here’s a good article with reasons …
An avid user of LinkedIn, the MySpace for business professionals, I’ve been playing around with their new Answers section.
Similar to the popular Yahoo! Answers the concept is social networking based and allows professionals to quickly post a question based on specific subject matter and receive responses from professionals who either know the answer or connect you with someone who does. I.E. sales networking.
Like any web development company in the U.S. topLingo has a minimum development cost to take on any new project. Our threshold is $5000 for new clients.
Can we do it for $500? Sorry, no. But we offer three alternatives to prospects
Outsource overseas. India is the most prominent country in the list and there are services that exist like oDesk which allow you to post a project then monitor it using webcams, activity level recording and screen-capturing technology. That’s some serious big brother stuff! And although very few Americans would work daily under those conditions and I sympathize with the developer on the other side … your project can get completed on the cheap. 
