Prep up your biz info and contacts

It began perhaps a few years ago. But now, if you look at all the social medias like Facebook, Linked In, Twitter are all getting connected to each other. In the sense that if you had an interesting post that you would want to share, the first place I am starting with is LinkedIn.

In LinkedIn, there is an option to get all your notes on the status to automatically get posted on Twitter. And the same goes from Twitter on to your Facebook.

So, in short, if you have something really nice and professional to post, you better post it on LinkedIn. What follows is a series of information flow on the social media highway. A cool way to show your professional skills on the fly.

What I infer from this is - to have a solid business contact. That would go a long way to present yourself business and skill wise.

Its good to have your say pulled up on Twitter which is a very good medium to have your say. Hope this goes to be in the long run a high successful biz and revenue making idea.

Some useful SEO Tools for you

Okay guys, this is what my wife just sent me - a very nice and handy set of SEO tools you can chose to use. Pretty handy website, considering the fact the info that is put out there.

Check this out for more Your Daily SEO Plan For An Hour and I am sure you would want to thank (not me) yourselves for having such cool documents with you.

Google with some cool things for you to play around.

Okay, so with the winter setting in (or has it already?) - its kind of tough to predict the outcome of flu - especially the infamous H1N1 - better known as Swine Flu.

Google has come out with another wonderful stuff - places where you can get your flu shot - maybe minutes of walking from your home.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-flu-vaccine-information-in-one.html - your treasure bag to flu shot centers.

As their research (?) goes on, they are adding in more places. I wonder what is to research in there than to just enquire and find out the places that DO HAVE flu shot centers.

Here is where I got this news from - Flu Shots Vaccine Info On Google Blog

And yes, there is another feature that G has for you. I am really amazed to see this option - of course I think this would really help most parents to let their wards browse happily on the net. Why? Because the Safesearch option that is available on the internet really works such that  even if you are logged out of your account the Safesearch thingy works.

Well what is exactly Safesearch? While you use Google it helps you (your ward) from viewing unwanted porn or adult related websites where the material is considered not suitable of children below permissible age.

Here is the link for locking your SafeSearch

Search Option Now On Google Images Are Getting Better

I just happened to read this article on the very own Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/search-options-now-on-google-images.html.

Yes, this means you can search images on Google. The searching only got better due to the variations like colour additions - helping you choose a colour, based on which the images will be displayed.

For example, I typed 'beef shawarma' and choose the colour say 'blue' - which has got nothing to do with 'beef shawarma', right? Wrong! The colour I choose actually helps me get images with a 'blue' in it. Say, like the blue billboard that reads 'Droubi's'. Well, makes sense?

To most, it won't unless you experience this. To me it did, to an extent. Because it helps the end user now to chose if s/he needs 'Yellow' Mercedes or a 'Black' Cadillac. Now, does it make sense? Yeah, it does!

Here is what I typed in first - a Cadillac, and just about any colour. And this is the image that it returned back in my search.

As you can see there are images of various colours. Even a red Cadillac can be seen. It does not matter where the colour is - even the background (sky, buildings, road, just about anything) is taken into consideration.

Interesting to note that Google certainly has taken efforts to make the search look more interesting.

And here is what I typed in later on for the same Cadillac. I typed in 'Pink' Cadillac and as expected you will see in this image that almost everything is Inky Pinky Pink. If you notice closely, one of the pics has the upholstery also in pink. Basically, it means the images must just contain the 'Pink' colour and that's all about it.

Evidently, the choice of colours are not much, there are just 12 colours to chose from. But I think they are enough to chose from the huge repository of images.

Apart from this, there are also options for size of the image and type. Type would be like 'clipart', 'face', 'photograph', 'drawings' and so on.

Well, we will have to wait and watch how it progresses. Google as it is has had tremendous audience power around the world.

It just remains to be seen, how effective this would be for Internet marketing and search engines, apart from the usual website builders who would perhaps be happy to get specific details?

Google Friend Connect

I have seen this being used in blogs. From what I think, it would actually help like minded people (and that is the reason why they would connect on to a blog?) to help share ideas amongst themselves. With the advent of the use of languages - or atleast a part of it in Orkut where you can scrap in languages other than English or OpenSocial which has begun adopting native languages (See the official Google Blog for more)

What makes me think is - does this actually help spread information? What kind of information can be passed on from one user to another? Is this going to be a begining of the use of a language convertor of sorts? (I've seen that being used in various world meets where the representative of a nation is unable to converse in English.) 

Does this also mean - one would have to begin using multi-language keyboard as in India where you can find a user easily conversant with atleast 3 different languages! Or for that matter the Chinese, Japanese and the widely spread Arabic speaking countries. 

Time to get some coffee. 

Google Reader - how good can it be?

I heard a lot about Google Reader and was wondering aloud what the heck could it be? Until I thought I must Google it to find out exactly what it is. So, i got down to business and searched for Google Reader. 

Yes, I found it was (yet another?) invention of the big G. So, what does this reader do for you? Well, it certainly does not read the morning newspaper for you (or does it?). 

This is the best way to keep yourself updated about the latest happenings through blogs of your interest. You can actually go create an account in Google and you are done. Find out blogs of your interest and you can get fresh news from them, everyday. 

Now, isn't that great? 

I thought it was, until I realised that I was not getting exactly what I wanted. Okay, I intended to start the Google Reader only for the purpose of receiving news and feeds related to SEO, PPC and Internet Marketing. But, I realised that I had been mindlessly following so many other bloggers and there was one who had subscribed to the reader. Unfortunately, I fell a victim to the crap load she was posting. 

My concern is: how do I remove the blog from my reader? I have not subscribed to her blog though. 

Another thing I wonder is why does the post not go up (like a scrolling text) slowly so that I am saved of the ignominy of pressing the left mouse button continously? Or you know, like the flash screen, display each post for say 5 minutes and then flash up the next one. Cool idea?

Labels however is a cool feature. I am yet to explore that option. Though I do feel that it helps a lot. 

Then of course, as Google would always want (to gather as much sh*t it can), you have the reader where you can subscribe to feeds, share your feeds and post notes, just in case the writer's bug got the better of you. 

So, here goes another post - just like anybody else would have written, into the cyberspace.

Have a good week ahead. 

Microsoft Bing - will it really zing?

Well, I just gave a search in the newly created baby of Microsoft - Bing. The same I gave it in our trusted ol' Google.

This is what I gave. I wanted to search for cable tv retailers or outlets in Cochin and I gave just this "cable tv cochin"


What Bing gave me is this. Pretty handy I must say as I got a list of the local cable tv operators in Cochin at the very top. This was of course followed by the top cable operators list in the yellow pages.

What I did notice is that it picked up the tag / keyword from the description area. I found the title pretty much different from each other, unlike the Google, where if you look at closely, you would find that even the title (link) would contain keywords picked up.

Does this mean that Bing is more result-centric than Google? Just because it returned me the results with a list of local cable operators?

I don't appreciate much of what Microsoft has done so far. Bing though, it seems to have (or will slowly) make its mark.

Here is what Google returned for me for the same set of keywords "cable tv cochin".

Well, as you can see, I just got a list of ads where the keywords "cable" "tv" and importantly "cochin" were added at the very first title line. Of course, irrelevant ads were also displayed here.

For example, there was an ad from a well known hotel here displayed in the list.

Which makes me ask "Will Google come out with a search which understands what we want to type or search?". Or has it already come out with such a search?

Time will tell, how Bing copes up in this big race to be the best search engine against the BIG giant G.

I will come out with more search examples later in some other post. Till then, happy weekend.