LwEEs.com

Hello World! I’m testing Picasa Web Albums embed functionality. I’m placing my images into WordPress using Google’s Servers. I wonder if they would mind, I don’t know if this is a violation to their terms of service or what.

If ou have more information on this practice, please let me know. For now you should see a beautiful woman picture cropped and pasted into an iPhone picture, if you don’t please let me know.

Google has lunched an update to their iPhone application for search that gives the iPhone the ability to search their database by using just your voice. The application was officially released on yesterday (Monday, November 17, 2008) and since its launch the blogosphere hasn’t stop talking about it.

[amazonify]B000S0B9ZC[/amazonify]For those that don’t know, the iPhone allows users to install third party applications, some of these applications are free and others have a price associated with it. Google is very good at making good application available for free and the iPhone is not exception. Google made available an application for search and I remember that back when they release it many people where questioning its use.

Google amaze me with the addition of the speech to search option and I think is the best way to search for anything using the iPhone. Let say you are driving, and suddenly you feel like to eat some Chinese food, in this example you are out of town on a not so familiar city. Grab your iPhone, launch the Google App, and just say Chinese food.

The Google application uses the iPhone’s location services to bring up the closest options for you to visit, you have the option to call the place or just call the map iPhone’s map application to get to where to need to be. This is a killer feature and I don’t really care if it’s new or not, this is the first time I have this functionality on a phone and I’m loving it.

I read a very interesting post via Daring Fireball on waxy.org, about the application, these guys are trying to reverse engineering how the application works and the conversation in the comments area of the post is awesome.

On my testing the application is working as advertise, disregarding how they do it, I think is genius. Of course that if you try to test its accuracy, I’m sure that you will be able to get it to be confused but if you are realistic about it, you can get a lot use from something that first of all its free and second of all is adding functionality to a product you already own.

[amazonify]0470246677[/amazonify]I’ve notice that most of the bloggers that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are getting too busy promoting their books, blogs, and point of views, that they are forgetting something, “Us”. Most bloggers don’t understand anything about SEO, we need to read about it and understand it one piece at a time.

I totally understand that SEO bloggers need communicate the reality of how page rank, bounce rate, and advertising works, but without asking anyone to give out what they sell, please help us a little better why all of these subjects are important and we may buy from you. Very few SEO experts actually talk about tips and tricks about SEO at a low level, some bloggers are not that savvy, including myself, and this is causing a big deal of confusion in me.

I read blogs about SEO topic day and night, the reason I read this blogs is because I don’t fully understand how to implement SEO on my website. Maybe the tools I’m using are not the correct ones, and the ideas behind my strategy are not correct.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve heard so much about the subject already, the truth is that I’m as tired as when the only conversation you’ll hear was iPhone this, iPhone that. Microsoft made a bid on Yahoo for little over 40 Billion dollars, after Yahoo take some time to think about it, we heard that the Yahoo campus is undervaluing Yahoo. The whole thing is one big mess mainly because you would think this kind of offers comes after long periods of discussion, which was not the case.

The funniest part was that many people talk about the subject like it was the end of the world. I got a kick out of some ideas, like some Flickr user group came up with the slogan “Keep your evil grubby hands off our flickr group”, funny indeed but the reality is that several thousand people joined the group.

I was listening to John C. Devorak talk on his show Cranky Geeks arguing about what was the point on Microsoft wanting to buy Yahoo. True above all, I heard someone say somewhere that Microsoft idea of innovation was via acquisition, here is yet another example with the whole Yahoo hostile takeover.

The truth is that I don’t find any of this hostile or troublesome, Yahoo is a great company but the their user base has decline in the last couple of years. Companies like Google among others are giving a good show of market competition. What’s in for Yahoo? What’s in for Microsoft?

Yahoo has a great number of people using Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft’s Hotmail is a big web mail client as well as good Messenger user base. Combined they are definitely bigger than Google since Gmail is not as big as some may think and don’t get me started on Google’s Talk chat client. I’m not saying these Google products are not good, it’s just that people haven’t got around it.

Read the rest of this entry →

Every now and then, you need to run an application that was wrote specifically for a previews version of Windows and there are no updates for it. If you try to run the application on your current environment it will act on you and you will think that there nothing you can do to make it work better. This is something that can be address with the Windows compatibility mode options within Windows and here is a small tip for using this function.

I first came across this set of options not too long ego when I was trying to install QuickBooks 2006 on a Vista machine for a client. I searched around the web and one of the options that worked before for someone else was the Windows compatibility mode. It is very important to understand that this option is not perfect and it may not work every time but at least it did for my client.

The first step is to install the software you need, here is where you are going to have a challenge since the application is not compatible the system will try to persuade you from installing it. Give it a try and continue installing the application and if you are not successful try Google, most of the time someone try in the past and you will find tips and tricks to help you on this task.

After you have installed the application, look for it and instead of clicking on it to open it, right click, and open the properties panel. One of the tabs inside the properties window should read “compatibility” and here you have several options.

Compatibility Mode – in this option menu, you should see a drop down with several versions of Windows, read carefully your software specifications and select the correct one, click on the “Apply” button and hit “OK” to exit.

Display Settings – some software will require you to run it at a specific size or color settings, the performance of the software may be hit by the Windows user interface, this options allow you to set the software to ignore those too. Again, read carefully the software specifications, select the desire options, and click “Apply” then “OK” to exit.

Input Settings – this option is self explanatory, check the box inside this settings window to “turn off advanced text services for this program,” this might be affecting the general functionality of the software. Again, read carefully the software specifications, select the desire options, and click “Apply” then “OK” to exit.

The last thing you will notice on this screen is the “Learn more” link at the bottom, you can click there to learn more about this options and also to access a Compatibility Wizard that Windows has available for this purpose. Should you have questions feel free to post them on this article or use Google to find answers to almost all the questions you may have about this features.

If any of the information here provided is wrong feel free to point it out and I will make the necessary corrections. If you liked this post, share it with your friends and/or co-workers, you have the option to print this article below the title. Subscribe to my blog and tell your friends to subscribe too, and thanks for reading.

Yesterday, I noticed that Google added a new feature to their Reader, Google Reader Friends’ shared items. At first I started thinking about what a great idea this was, to add a social spin to Google Reader could be fun -I though. No, who wants this, who’s idea was it?

I stumble upon a post from Robert Scoble where he was warning everyone about the consequences of allowing hundreds of friends to share items to and from, immediately Scoble said, “this feature sucks”. I couldn’t agree more, why would anyone want to spam their fiends like this, it makes no sense especially in situations where you and your friends don’t share the same interests.

Then you have the problem of having friends that do share the same passion you have for technology or anything else, only to find out that they are contributing nothing new to your feeds. The same feeds you subscribe to, are the same one they have, creating duplicates all around the place. What’s the point then?

What’s worst, I don’t know if there’s a way to block or remove my friends from the list or even opt out on having my friends looking at my shared items. This could be a very bad move for Google, I’ll start moving my feeds somewhere else if this gets on the way. What is you impression on this new Google Reader feature?

As I was listening to episode no. 78 of Six Pixels of Separation with Mitch Joel, I heard Avinash Kaushik talking about the bounce rate on Google Analytics. He was explaining how a high bounce rate could mean that your site suck, he went on and on explaining his idea and I just had to say something about it. Don’t think that Mr. Kaushik has no clue about what he’s saying, the fact is the he has write books about Google Analytics, he is a pro on this industry.

I understood his point of view and how this will apply to some sites, especially if your site sells stuff, or has multiple pages of content. But a big percentage of people that listens to Mitch podcast are bloggers, and as bloggers we usually have a blog page on our home page. This means that our content is on our home page and if you are a regular reader, the probabilities that you are going to keep wondering around my site and low.

The normal reader on a blog will get to the point, read what they have to and leave. Unless you have a “campaign” going on, or a story that has related post that are a must to understand the current one, you wont see people searching around your site. My site has over 77% of bounce rate and I think this is not that bad for a blogger. If you are a blogger, what is your bounce rate?

Read the rest of this entry →

I just upgraded my Wordpress install to the latest version, the upgrade went well with no issues at all. I made sure to read the Wordpress forums and look out for major catastrophes when people tried to upgrade, I read suggestions from other bloggers for smooth upgrades, and that was mainly why I had no issues. I’m finding that this is the fastest Wordpress I’ve ever used, pages in the admin area loads fast and even the dashboard with all its feeds is moving amazingly fast.

I had a couple issues but they were all related to plugin not working, it took me some time to figure that out. The plugin Google Sitemap Generator activated properly, but after activating it the auto save function of Wordpress was giving me a hard time. The same when trying to save or delete a draft post, I simply disable all my plugins and started again to activate them and testing the features that were causing me problems. I heading back to the plugin homepage to see when and update will be introduced.

Read the rest of this entry →

I played with the iPod touch for a week, during that time I spent over 10 hours on the web. I tested different websites like Google, Google Reader, Gmail, Soonr.com, Popcat.com, etc. I surfed and tested Twitter, MySpace, among other sites. Between yesterday and today I’ve been doing the same thing with the iPhone and found out that Safari behaves differently on each device.

Lets clarify something, I understand that both devices are different, one is a phone and the other one is an iPod. One would think that they have the same applications installed, but even if they are the same they don’t behave alike. For the most part the Safari on the iPhone behaves like a mobile device, on the other hand it behaves like a regular browser on the iPod.

Whenever I surfed to Google the iPod would bring my iGoogle site the same way I see it on my computer. In the iPhone it goes directly to the mobile version of Google.com. I guess that since the iPhone could be working off the Edge network and the iPod touch not, this is a good thing since the iPhone would seem sluggish opening a full version of a website off of the Edge network.

Read the rest of this entry →

This morning as I was checking my Google RSS reader I notice something new, instead of giving me a count of 100+ items like it used to do in the past, it gave me the exact count of my new items. Immediately I knew something happened overnight, but that was not the only feature improvement they rolled out. You now can search from within the reader, giving you the more power to search all the articles that you have subscribed to.

I wrote an article last week about Google reader, very detailed on the various functions, find it in this link. Another feature that I can’t recall if it was there before is the ability to choose whether you want to see the whole article or just the title of it, find this in the upper right corner, right below the sing out link. Another great feature is the ability to close the navigation pane on the left of the page to have more screen real state to read your news, I think this will be a welcome feature for those of you who receive thousands of news every day.

Read the rest of this entry →