Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

My man on the inside has reported that the 3G iPhone was announced today to great fanfare. A few quick points:

• 8GB 3G iPhone - $199
• 16GB 3G iPhone - $299
• Small Battery (in size)
• 5 hours Talk time
• Real GPS instead of cell phone triangulation
• Many more countries
• Available July 11th

I also hear that it was a great keynote and one of the biggest cheers went up when India was announced as one of the new countries where the phone would be available.

See Also: More pictures and Live Blog

There should be a drop in price on ebay for the 1st generations soon: Read the rest of this entry »

Image by aqhong via Flickr

Since participating in RSS Awareness Day I have found myself much more aware of the lack of RSS! There are so many things that are pushed to me by e-mail that I would rather have the option of pulling by RSS reader. I know both technologies have a push and a pull aspect but the bevy of e-mail notification tools make e-mail the pushier option of the two. I’m not after a mass switch here but options, give me more options! Anything on the web that can change should have an RSS feed available.

Here are some advances I would like to see:

• Social Networks - RSS is starting to show up more, but what these networks need are the options to filter by each item that can be updated and to create multiple feeds. For example if you are on Facebook you should be able to subscribe to an RSS feed(s) that you set up from your newsfeed. You might want one feed for everything and I might want everything in one feed except to peel off status updates to second feed.
• A widely implemented SRSS (Secure RSS) - Feeds of from your bank, credit card companies, and investment firms are among a few useful places for Secure RSS feeds, there are any number of other uses including private corporate feeds. If there is one single item needed to push RSS more to the mainstream, this is it.
• Advertisements - The ability to mass ignore posts in RSS also makes it the perfect vehicle for the spammy type e-mail services you may tolerate.  I like to see what Dell has for sale and the current prices on all the random computer gear at the new CompUSA.com, but I delete those e-mails unread for the most part, it would be much better to scan them and trash them in bulk in an RSS feed.
• DRSS (Dynamic RSS) - I don’t know if this is a coined phase or not, but this is a feature that’s just starting to pop up and that I hope to see a lot more of, an RSS feed that builds itself from a site’s content and your interests.  I currently get an e-mail from Bankrate.com when they write about 529 college savings plans, make this an RSS feed for me instead! Call it filtering or call it search, either way you’re making the feed dynamic for my interests.  With RSS bloat and purges this type of focused RSS will keep me reading and less frustrated.

These are my major wishes for RSS, what are yours?

Image by lloydi via Flickr

CA Internet security and I haven’t gotten along very well in the past and my attempts to get rid of it were just a continuation of the same problems. Previously I had had problems getting a Removed by HIPS FW error on webpages and that led to me researching the efw file problem that so many people were having. Well, the next and hopefully final problem I’ve had is when trying to uninstall. I was signed in as the administrator but still got a W9011 error claiming I didn’t have the correct permissions and giving me a registry key.

It’s pretty easy to give yourself the correct permissions, but we do have to dive into the registry so you’ll want to be very careful and change only the items that are listed in the error message (or 10 messages as mine ended up)

Here’s what you need to do to fix the problem

1. Run the uninstall and leave the error message up on the screen
2. Click on the Start Button and the Click ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ and press enter
3. You should now see the registry editor
4. Find the correct registry key (this is set up like normal folders so just navigate like you would in the windows file system
5. Right-click and select permissions
6. Click on your user name
7. Check the Full Control box and apply
8. Close the error and rerun the uninstall process
9. Repeat as needed for more error messages

Image via Wikipedia

If SEO, or search engine optimization, is of interest to you then you probably saw the recent Google blog post Introduction to Google Search Quality, if you didn’t then take a look - one of the most interesting parts of the announcement was this paragraph that breaks down some of the tools that Google uses to rank search results:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

As a searcher this just means that Google is trying it’s best to get you the best results it can. As a new blogger this means that you should really spend your time writing quality content and think about SEO later because until your site and posts get some age and respectability, you’re just not going to get great ranking. For the more established bloggers and SEO experts this sounds like Google gently trying to sway people away from schemes with a firm statement that Google is interested in the best content for the query, and if you can deliver then you’ll get the best rank.

I don’t think that anything ground breaking was revealed in this post no matter how much coverage it’s been getting, but I did notice one link into the article that peaked my interest, and that was someone who worked on the search team posting on their personal blog. Who better to get ideas about SEO from than someone who works on the team? And even if they aren’t telling any secrets on their own blogs, then maybe their site source will shed a little light on the subject. This particular search team member’s blog was a little used and fairly barebones install of Wordpress that offered no insights, so I went looking to the only other source I could think of,  Matt Cutts.

Matt works for Google and is well known for his SEO expertise and antispam work. I expected a search on Google SEO to put Matt at the top of the list and figured that if you looked at Matt’s blog and his source you could probably get some great tips (I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader) One surprising thing popped up on those results - at the time I ran the search Matt is listed after a Google help page on the subject and by a site titled Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist. A page that lists many of the top confirmed SEO tips and tricks along with the rumors that seems to have some backing. Any site that outranks Matt Cutts on a Google SEO search is certainly doing something right so take a look and I’m sure you’ll learn something useful!

Some sad news from Wesabe this week, CEO Jason Knight is stepping down to care for his new son:

If you follow Wesabe on Twitter, you know that a few weeks ago, Jason Knight, our CEO, and his wife Jane welcomed a new son into their family. Unfortunately, their son was born with a serious respiratory disorder, and has been in and out of intensive care since his birth. While the prognosis for his long-term health is good, he has required and will continue to require very close care for a period of years. The amount of care and attention Jason’s son and whole family need at this point have led Jason to decide that he must resign from his position at Wesabe and focus on his son’s health.

You can read more on Wesabe’s blog.  I’m sure this was probably one of the hardest decisions Jason has had to make in some ways, and the quite the easiest in others.  It’s a brave and noble thing to do and Jason and his family will be in my prayers.  I briefly met Jason on my visit to Wesabe last month and he immediately comes across as a kind and good natured man, I have no doubt that his presence will be a nurturing and comforting presence for his new son.

Wesabe will be in good hands as Marc Hedlund steps in as interim CEO.  I know Marc stays very busy already and I wish him well as he takes on the CEO responsibilities.   I have no doubts that the wonderful staff of Wesabe will pull together and support both Marc and Jason.

To win you had to pick the 5 most popular startups out of a field of 100, and the popularity was judged by several different standards. I picked 4 out of the 5 companies to win, my top 5 were (in alphabetical order)

1. Acquia
2. Igloo
3. Mill River Labs (owns tradesvibes)
4. Sprout
5. Zoho

The winning companies are all the same except the surprising result that Acquia is out and Rearden Commerce is in. Check them out and you tell me if you wouldn’t have made the same choice I did.

Thanks to TradeVibes for running the contest and offering such a generous prize!

Svetlana Gladkova is the Vice President of Business Development at Profy.com. Profy is a new and exciting entry into the hosted blog market that is aiming to outdo the current heavy hitters by building from the ground up as a one stop blogging, social network, and RSS reader. The social features and the greater customization and monetization options should put Profy in a good position after the service exits beta. There’s a lot more to recommend Profy and as long as users won’t scoff at Profy placing an ad on their free blogs, I think we’ll see a steady rise in traffic as users switch or supplement their other blogs with Profy. I do have a few Profy invites if you leave a comment I’ll see what I can do. If you want to see a Profy blog you can take a peek @ KnightKnetwork.Profy.com. Svetlana was kind enough to talk to me about Profy and share some of her thoughts about blogging in general:

What benefits do you see in going with a hosted blog service over self-hosting? Why should users choose Profy in particular? Read the rest of this entry »