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September 21, 2006: Get Pzizz for Free!

Pzizz, what the hell is a Pzizz? Well, it is one of the coolest applications I’ve ever come across. If you like to nap, you’re going to love Pzizz. If you have an iPod, you’ll probably love it even more, though no iPod is required to enjoy all that is Pzizz. Head over to My Dream App — a contest to decide which three users submitted application ideas will be built by a team of established shareware developers — and place your votes and you’ll get a free license (PC or Mac) to the $40 Pzizz. It isn’t often you can snag free software that is actually something you might actually buy, so don’t miss your chance (be sure to vote for Desktop Wars, that just sounds crazy). Pzizz is hard to explain, it’s best you just try it and see for yourself. Just don’t get caught napping at work, if you do I know nothing. Nothing.

September 21, 2006: RSS Still Too Confusing? SimplyHeadlines Delivers News to Your Inbox

If you still haven’t figured out the whole RSS thing, and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, but are curious what all the fuss is about SimplyHeadlines could help. SimplyHeadlines is a nifty service I recently found that delivers a newspaper styled email to your inbox at the same time every day. Simply sign up and select from a list of popular feeds on a variety of topics, pick a time for your daily delivery of news and you’re done. Nothing more to do other than read your personal newspaper when it arrives each day.

September 18, 2006: Google & Apple: The First Rumors

If there are two things I like to keep on top of, it’s rumors about Google and rumors about Apple. Now that they’ve cozied up with each other, it looks like keeping track will get a bit easier as today there are two rumors involving them. It sure didn’t take long for the two to start working together though I expected the hyper Apple rumor community to have had a good dozen Google/Apple rumors spreading within days of the Google CEO joining the Apple board.

September 16, 2006: The Complete Web2.0 Directory

About all I can say about The Complete Web2.0 Directory is it’s going to be a real time-sink for me. I don’t have enough hours in the day to feed my web2.0 addiction. Goodness, this is going to be a long weekend.

Share your favorite web2.0 site in the comments. As for me, well I really like Last.FM quite a lot.

September 16, 2006: SEO Fundamentals From Matt Cutts of Google

SEO Egghead has posted a collection of SEO tips written the past year by Google’s Matt Cutts that serves as a nice intro to SEO fundamentals. If you’re just getting into SEO or want to learn enough so you can have an educated discussion with your team, I encourage you to take a look. Each tip has a link to the original post by Matt so if you want to dig deeper into any one topic you can.

Optimizing a Web site is a constantly evolving madness and you can quickly find yourself wondering what exactly your SEO expert or team is talking to you about. These 21 tips can help get you up to speed, not only on some basic SEO topics but a few techie things your development team may be doing and not even aware it could pose a problem.  This should be a must-read for anybody involved with marketing, designing, developing or managing a Web site. Since search engine algorithms are complicated beasts, every small piece that you can do to improve your chance to move one position up matters.

Even seasoned SEO pros might want to take a look to get refreshed. It’s really that good of a collection, now go read it.

September 15, 2006: Exposing Amazon Unbox

Cory Doctorow has posted a lengthy dissection of Amazon Unbox’s user agreement on Boing Boing today and finds that it leaves a lot to be desired. Not only is Unbox’s DRM very restrictive, it seems you more or less sell your soul and control of your computer to Amazon for the privilege of buying non-physical copies of movies which don’t come with the customer service we’ve come to expect from Amazon.

Movies from Amazon don’t come with the same rights as DVDs from Amazon—DVDs can be sold, given away, and watched on any player. You don’t have to give up your privacy or control over your property to watch a DVD.

September 14, 2006: Apple and Nintendo In My Living Room

Apple’s “Showtime” event on Tuesday held little surprises for the majority of the time. The new iPod nano looks great, I think it should been renamed the miniMini, but other than its new appearance, the rest was expected. Larger video iPods were also to have more room to hold the expected movie downloads from Disney owned studios. I can’t remember any rumors of changes to the Shuffle, so maybe we’ll give that the status of a minor surprise. A lot of people were hoping for the “true video iPod” with widescreen, wi-fi and the ability to do your taxes, but I don’t think too many were shocked when it wasn’t announced (same with the iPhone).

September 13, 2006: The Click Worth $69.16

According to theproguy, the most expensive Google AdWord is ‘school loan consolidation,’ followed closely by ‘college loan consolidation.’ In fact, as of yesterday, a good chunk of the top-50 Google AdWords are related to the consolidation of loans of one type or another. Not really too much of a surprise as I’m sure the loan consolidation market is not only very competitive, but very lucrative. They can likely afford to pay close to $70 for qualified leads, it isn’t like they’re selling donuts.

September 11, 2006: 12 Sites That Help You Avoid Spam

Have you ever been at a site that you never plan on visiting again and are asked for your email address in order to download a piece of software or a PDF you’re interested in? Even when sites have a privacy notice in place you never really know if you can trust that your email address isn’t going to show up on some partner’s email list so they can send you a “special offer for our interested customers.” One way to keep spam to a minimum is to maintain two addresses — easy to do with Gmail — but that can increase the time you spend sorting through your mail. What if you really need to use an address just one time.

September 08, 2006: Amazon Launches Movie Download Store, Apple to Follow

AmazonUnbox, Amazon’s movie and TVshow download store, opened for business yesterday while many people are still holding their breath to see what Steve Jobs and Apple will unveil on Tuesday. It is widely expected that Jobs will be announcing the availability of movies via the iTunes store, little more than that is for sure, though. I’m still of the mind that watching video on handheld players or even my computer isn’t that exciting for most people. While we like our phones and iPods to get smaller, the one consumer electronics product that everybody wants bigger and bigger TV. I might want to watch a flick or catch a missed episode of “Lost” while I’m on the road or flying, but other than that, I’ve pretty much believed this is an idea looking for a market.

August 31, 2006: 25 Single Page Aggregators Reviewed

Brian Benzinger, from Solution Watch, has compiled a rather large list of single-page aggregators similar to Original Signal that I wrote about earlier this week. What is a single page aggregator exactly? Well, Brian coined the term because right now there doesn’t seem to be anything better to call them. These sites are generally focused on one topic or area of interest and gather the latest stories from the top sites for that topic and present all the latest headlines on one page. Interested in Nintendo’s upcoming next generation console but don’t want to visit a bunch of sites or subscribe to feeds, just drop by WiiNintendo and get Wii headlines from sixteen sites.

August 31, 2006: I, Writely

I missed my chance at climbing aboard the Writely bandwagon prior to its purchase by Google and subsequent lock down on new accounts. This was mainly due to the fact that, for all practical purposes, I have no real use for a word processor, so I wasn’t too interested. When Writely opened for new accounts last week, I figured I should take a look as I had only heard good things about it. I have to say, Writely didn’t fail to impress.