there ain’t no rest for the wicked, money don’t grow on trees
we got bills to pay, we got mouths to feed there ain’t nothing in this world for free
we can’t slow down, we can’t hold back though you know we wish we could
there ain’t no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good
here is what i came home to a couple of days ago:
i finally decided that having browser bookmarks on several different machines was not a good thing. it’s frustrating when you’re on one computer and you’ve bookmarked something on a different computer so you have to resort to googling all over again for something that may have taken you a while to find originally (hence the bookmark). i’m also a great fan of Google and their products; the google toolbar is great. however their bookmarking feature isn’t solid. i don’t like the fact that their bookmarking solution doesn’t allow sub-folders. i’m also getting rather tired of giving so much (too much perhaps) information to 1 entity.
so i ventured out to try and compare many of the bookmarking services on the web. a lot of “bookmarking” now-a-days is more about sharing and promoting pages and not so much just about indexing pages for private recall. delicious was decent, diigo was better, but ultimately i found a perfect fit with “xmarks”, previously known as “foxmarks”. it has a web based interface, but also includes browser plugins for FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari (for Mac only). the browser plugins make the bookmarking experience so much better. now on all the computers I own or control I can install the plugins and have my brower bookmarks act like they always have. if i need web based access from a computer where i can’t necessarily install the plugins on, no problemo.
anyhow i just thought i’d share my find with anyone interested in some really good, free bookmarking software coupled with a web based bookmarking interface. check out xmarks!
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).
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.
on southpark stan learns about the importance of savings… “and it’s gone”
/movies_public/save-money.flv
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”
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.
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
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.
