What happens when someone does not cause a first good impression, its very hard for me to accept somebody on my social circle after that person has screw things up from the get go. That is exactly how I feel about Google Buzz, I’m this is coming from a “Google Friends”. I use almost every Google product out there but I refuse to use Google Buzz.

I won’t say that I will never try it again, but for that to happen they need to get the Buzz out of Gmail. Gmail is very important to me, it’s almost like my physical address, I don’t give it to everyone and I protected and work hard to keep it clean. I’m also on almost every social circle that is available out there, so for me Buzz is almost like a new toy. Except that I want it out of Gmail.

Buzz can be an application by itself, just like Twitter, they even own a platform-website that copies twitter and what once was Pownce. Anyone remember Jaiku? That’s right, Jaiku was a project acquired by Google to, as far as I can see, let it die on the web. Buzz needs to get out of Gmail, I don’t care about their motivations for adding it to Gmail but that is a mistake.

The marketing implications for the mistakes they made at the beginning are so profound that a great number of Gmail users are turning their back at Buzz. Recently, I even heard Leo Laporte (from TWIT) commenting how he’s Buzz profile has almost no stream of information, no friends are using, and only people that don’t care about their initial mistakes are still using it.

That sounds to me like a total disaster, one would think that anything that Google does is bullet proof, this proves us wrong. Merge or rename Jaiku with the Buzz name and I’ll use it, remain a Gmail feature and I refuse. What do you think about Buzz? Did you know a service name Jaiku exist? What does Google needs to do to save Google Buzz? Share your thoughts with us.

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.

[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.

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.

I had to ask myself, what am I looking from a SEO blog? I need simple explanations on topics about SEO, I don’t need the big picture, because that’s too much information that I might not even understand. I need to know what works for what, I use WordPress as my blogging platform and I’m not sure which of the many plugins available for WordPress is right one for me.

I think the main player in search engines that you want to be noticed by is Google, sure other search engines like Yahoo, and MSN are important but Google is widely used by people trying to get information about specific topics. My experience is that Google can find anything, and anyone, so here are some tips for getting the most of those SEO bloggers out there.

First of all, understand that SEO is something you need if you have a blog, and you need to understand it well. Find the authorities and read them all, in just a couple of months you can tell which of the bloggers you follow actually make sense to you. Here are a couple of the one I follow, www.problogger.net, www.bloggingpro.com, and www.seomoz.org/blog.

Unfortunately, not all bloggers have the time to sit down with you and explain every concept, this is when you need to seek their forums. Don’t expect for anyone to explain the whole concept to you, try to understand it yourself by asking the right questions. I.E. Which is the best SEO plugin for WordPress?

When you ask questions like that, you should keep in mind that everyone’s taste is different. You should write them down and make your own mind by reading the options that all of them give you. Also, check the forums for problems that other might have with the plugin you are thinking about using.

Contribute with your experience, many of these SEO bloggers need to know if their tips have helped you becoming a better blogger. If you don’t tell them they have no other way to know, also providing feedback helps you being around those who know better about the subject.

Finally, you may become so popular that you end up hiring some of this “pro-bloggers” to do SEO jobs for you, ask for credentials, ask around other people may have hire them before you and they can give you a better recomendation. Look for them on Linked In and see what others have to say about them. You can’t always be too sure when hiring someone that is not even on the same zip code that you are.

Add your tips and tricks for finding the best SEO content by leaving a comment on this post, share your experiences, good or bad with our community. Email me for questions and suggestions to lmenendez7 [at]
gmail.com or use my forums to spark a topic. Also, add me as your friend on twitter, find me at www.twitter.com/lwees, thanks for reading.

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.

In advertising revenue is where both Yahoo and Microsoft fail, Google has managed to stay top in the competition, so far ahead that the only way for the other two companies to be relevant are by joining forces. I heard people saying that Microsoft should focus on their core competencies and forget about Yahoo. I disagree, they need to do both, they need to work on an OS (operating system) that after five years in development, it works.

At the same time the OS market has very little to add to our desktop world, what else are you expecting from an OS. MS Office has growth potential but not if Microsoft decides to change the language structure every six years. Yahoo has done great stuff, but also most of their innovation is via acquisition too.

After all these two companies are not as different as one may think, there’s still time, Microsoft will try this again, especially in a weak economy like the one we have right now. Whether is or not a good idea, that is not easy to determine, I thought that Time Warner plus AOL merger was a good idea, and it was not.

I just want the conversation to end, I’m tired of this subject. Unless you have something else to add, leave your comments in this post to keep debating about this silly subject.

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.

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?

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?

To give a relevant point of view for my blog site using this approach, I will go with the “cup half full” attitude. The fact that over 23% of my readers actually wonder around my site is flattering to me, I don’t have anything else of importance on my site. Of course I have some ideas of what else I could do but for now every other page on my site are stuff I would like to profit from in the future.

You can tell more about my personal interest by reading my other pages than finding actual information that will help you do anything. The bounce rate is not a bad thing, this is my personal opinion, I don’t totally disagree with Mr. Kaushik but he’s statement was kink of directional when in fact it can take many directions.

Whether you agree or not, learning about Google Analytics is very important for you if you have a web site. The most important feature is the price, free; can’t beat that. If you are a blogger, what is your take on this? Do you think the bounce rate a something that the higher the worst? Do you, blogger, even care or know how to read this information? Share your thoughts with our community.

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.

A plugin that did not worked and the one I’m going to miss is Twitter Tools, the author of this plugin already advice the community of this problem and he will be working on a fix. Since the same author has many other projects this may take awhile, I will be waiting patiently. I haven’t tested every single feature of the new WordPress 2.3 but so far, I haven’t had any other issues. Tell me your story about upgrading to WordPress 2.3, did it work for you? What plugins are you going to be missing? What you think of the new enhancements?

I like the fact that the feature that activates the WYSIWYG is now a default option, this is something that I use a lot. In the past, I remember disabling the WYSIWYG because it conflicted with some other stuff I was doing, I have yet to test WordPress to see if any compatibility issues still exist. I was able to set the tag cloud really quick, I’m now looking for a plugin that allow me to limit the amounts of tag words on my tag cloud. The last noticeable update is the update notification, it advice me of two outdated plugins and even gave me a direct link to download them. What a service and all for free, this is a good time to donate to the WordPress project.

I will be updating the community and my readers about any other problems or benefits of upgrading to WordPress 2.3, stay tuned for more great content. Remember that you can leave comments on this post as well as you can contact me using the contact form provided in my drop-a-line tab. Thanks for reading.

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.

Same thing happened with websites like Twitter.com, when I try to access them they would show up in their mobile version, even when connected to the Internet via WiFi. I’m not complaining about this, in fact I think this is a good idea. Websites load faster and that is very important if you are on the go, as for other functionality they both work the same, I haven’t notice any other differences.

The only thing I miss about the iPod touch is the icons layout, of course with the many software the iPhone has is impossible to have them layout the same. I wonder if in the future we will have the ability of changing or re-organizing the icon in the “Home” screen. Share your experiences with the community, give us your opinion on this matter. Thanks for reading.