Best Websites for Current Events

Some days I just have no money to go out and have what some people call “A life”, so I look for things to do or read on the internet. Most often I find news, and then I try and find a place to talk about this news. some cases, you can do that, right there are the source.  Most of these news sites force you to register to be able to comment, or they make you link some other social website account so that you can comment, without a long registration process. In most cases, you link your social account, and you still have to sign up. That gets frustrating.

Reddit

Sodahead – Changed froma news site to something weird.

google news

yahoo – nope.. not anymore.

Slashdot

 

Can you add to the list ?

Google Rearing up to by yahoo?

Story is that Google is gathering info to buy yahoo, meanwhile they just purchased a large office space to house thousands of employees.
Speculations:
Could this be to house the Yahoo employees that keep?
Could this be to just start a whole new venture, and by checking the cost of yahoo, they will start a new place and use the yahoo value as the bar for expense limits?
Could this all be a distraction?
What will this mean for Yahoo/Msn Handshake?
Are they just going to shut down the rights to all yahoo code?

One thing sure we can count on, is if Google buys out yahoo’s search engine and patents, there will be lots of toolbars coming down.

Mark Zuckerberg Rumored Buying Myspace

Story is that Mark Zuckerberg is buying Myspace.
I don’t see it happening. I see the chance that Mark and crew might implement even more stuff like Myspace content to their site, but not a buy out.
but the rumor says that Mark Zuckerberg and crew are going to bring it in, all Myspace links will still work, and there will be a slow gradual change of advertisements from Google adsense to the Facebook platform of advertisements.
Also within this rumor is the chatrooms will be brought back. Your existing Facebook profile and Myspace profiles will then merge, you have the option of which one . I doubt that. I see Facebook not wanting anything but their own.

I personally would like to see Myspace buy out yahoo or merge with Yahoo. and run Yahoo advertisements. Have you ever seen Yahoo’s chatrooms? Spam farm. They have no control of their own network.

I would also prefer to see MSN bring back their chatrooms and work more on their Myspace killer (lol) they started but never completed.
I would also like to see aim chat (or what ever in the heck aol used to have for their chatrooms)get in on this deal and use their servers or what ever is left of them

The more the choices we have, the more innovations we have and the more freedom to choose what network and what abilities we want to use and have. As of now there are still a few social sites that are sitting stale. Why not move them all up?
What social Changes would you like to see ?

How Bing Could Squash Google

Adsense. What is the easiest way Google makes certain their people who pay to be in the search engine get seen ? they share the wealth.
Bing has yet to even begin to try that. all they have to do is make an affiliate program to share the adverts with the websites out there.
Totally remove the whole Silverlight program. That and adobe air have got to be the clunkiest pieces of garbage. I don’t care how you improve it. A perfect turd is still a turd. Quit forcing people to hold that turd. I don’t want it in my computer, I don’t want a turd in my hand. Simply put, If I have to install that program to use your software, I will stop using your software.

Get yahoo off of Clicksor. I used to clicksor with all sorts of hopes of having an alternative to the goliath. I never made one red cent. Not one penny. I had a relative call me and tell me they clicked some ad on my old site, they said they bought something from one of the ads and never got their product. They thought I controlled it all. Clicksor never even noted the click. I did not tell my relative 700 miles away to click it. it was months later when I found out they did. Once they got tired of waiting for their products.
Clicksor then dropped me and said I didn’t have enough traffic. I had 200-2000 people a day. It fluctuated.

So having yahoo tied into something like that, surely isn’t helping them at all. Having a program where websites serve their ads for them will profit Bing and the website owners and would allow competition to Google’s adsense. Truth is adsense needs competition, they are getting a bit diva/spoiled princess.

When a person uses a search engine, they don’t want to be told how to search. People do searches like they think. They type it like they expect it to work. Not like they are told a search engine should be. Bing can do this if they just look at the most common searches. They all look like a question. Bing has this information. Google has this information. Yahoo, I have no idea why yahoo quit like that.

If you have suggestions for Bing or Yahoo post them here in a response.

The Seo Book We Should All Have

A good friend I know (I reference tons of stuff to her website) Alicia Crowder,  has a book out now called “SEO Standards for Beginners“.
If you are a web designer of new or professional status, this book is under $10 and a quick read. I assure you, there will be something in there that changes your knowledge about Search engine optimization.
Her description of the book is:

SEO Standards for Beginners is an informative book to help individuals and business owners better understand what SEO is and how to better compete in the online marketplace. Providing a general comprehension of the purpose of optimization, as well as practical methods for achieving better results online, this book will assist beginners in simplifying what is often otherwise bewildering.

I have had short encounters with her where we just sit and talk site building and SEO. Each sit in she says something that I have to study up on. Each time we have conversed she reminds me of stuff I have been neglecting to remember. Stuff I have been overlooking. This book is a must buy for anyone who needs crib notes, reminders, and new working ideas to build your website to comply to search engine needs.

She works for an SEO company. She has done so for as long as I have known her. She is great at what she does and has many large name clients ( I will not reveal or other seo companies may try and swoop em up). This book will be, for certain your best investment in web-design and site building as of yet. This book will help you in your quest to get to the front page of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and the huge string of other search engines.

It would be foolish of a professional Search Engine Optimization person to pass up on a chance to find things they have been overlooking, to find things they never knew. Or to ever assume they know it all.

Go get Seo Standards for Beginners. It will be well worth your effort. Trust it is not just for beginners, I’m certain there is something for everyone in this book. I will be ordering mine Friday.

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SEO Standards for Beginners

Gaining Rank In Google

First and foremost, make sure you have a good website host that is dependable. powweb !!!
I have no idea how companies do it. I have been working like a dog to gain rank for some of the sites I work on. I do all of the optimization I do all of the meta tagging. I find that social sites are a poor source. I mean 3-5 years ago, it was the best snowball. Now, not as much as they still claim it is worth. advertising on sites seems to do nothing for me. I mean it is good while you pay for the advertisements. As soon as you stop paying, your rank plummets. The whole time you pay, it seems no one clicks the links.
SEO Tools
I work hard on alexa ranking, Compete ranking and MozRank. Alexa moves really fast when you try hard, but compete and Moz not near as fast.

Web ring. So far the best assurance to gain rank at either site, is to be in the good old fashion web ring. A web ring is a bunch of sites with similar interest who link back to each other. That of course is very hard to achieve. Most of the people who are in the same field as the site I am working don’t want to give up some potential customers by having them click my links and see better stuff for cheaper cost. Or what ever. There are a bunch of sites that have “submit link” button on their site with a code that you put on your site so people can find them better, much like a web ring. Downside to that is, if your competitor crawls your website to see what gets you so many people, they will  see that stupid link and use them also. Now you are right back where you were before you resorted to that method.

Originality. Many of the sites I work on, I can copy almost every sentence the owner wrote up and find it in Google. Word for word. Google will not accept that. Why would they link to a re-run ? So now I have to explain the importance of originality to the site owner without talking to complex and without sounding like I think they are a moron, yet still keep their attention so they allow me to fix it.

Updating and creating new content. I do it all the time, but you can only have so many pages before your website is to much. You can’t have customers trying to look through a website of greater than 10000 pages. It’s just insane. Unless you have a detailed search feature. Getting page rank is a bit more costly that it needs to be with this method.

Generating traffic. Well you can’t force people to go. you have to have people say “no it’s cool and all of the cool people do it” otherwise everyone everyone refuses to follow advertisements. Yes we are that simple of a species. Good idea to try is find a social site of some sort and make like 50 fake accounts and mention your site. but not spammy, just find topics that relate and chime in. Of course one person calls you spam and your i.p. addy is banned and your site is submitted to your dns and Google dns as spam. BLACKLISTED.

I do what I have to do. Sometimes I have to do everything. Just not so much it jeopardizes my domains. Gaining pr is no easy task, page rank shouldn’t be easy. Otherwise Google would be full by now. Alexa, mozrank, compete, search engines like, Google, bing and  yahoo would practically be useless. you would just type stuff and see where it lands you. So getting page rank is a validation of your site’s worthiness. Only thing is  to get page rank you have to get someone’s attention to prove you are everything you need to be. So how do you get the needed attention to gain page rank? well…. just keep at it. It will happen.

Things to Consider When you Hire Someone to Design Your Website

Make sure that you have a place to store your material that composes your website. Make sure you have as much space as you possibly can, like powweb, they have unlimited storage at a very good price. Very good. So far I have registered for three different companies websites at powweb and all three were under $100 for two years.

Okay we all know that web-design, Some people can do it, some people can not do it. (wait, I am not selling you web design, simply because I am sick of it) I know it’s not actually an art . but you really have to think of it like you think of art. Try and not think of it as construction. You can not just lay out blueprints and say “hey this is how it goes, this is what i want and this is exactly what you will give me”. Ever try that crap with a guy that just draws cartoons or caricatures ? You can’t go and grab someone who draws realistic drawings with perfect angles shading lighting and life like appeal, to just draw you on a rocket ship with a rodeo clown shirt on. It’s just not his thing, and well, he has his certain fields he has focused on really well. It is best you let him utilize his abilities to his best interest.

You are not a web designer. So having a lay out or a design  that you want, well you are going to have to do it yourself. If you do not lay out your website yourself, be certain that what he will make for you, will not be to your liking on the first round. It’s just a fact.

A person that knows about web design is doing everything with full optimization in mind. This person has this thing laid out with full SEO integrated in their design. The more you toss ideas at them and the more you incorporate a third party web designer in this project, the more you throw this guy out of his field of operation. You will also start to make a complete professional web-designer look like a total amateur. Let him finish his project and you will see what he gave you will have tons of great cooperative segments of the site’s design.
Have an open mind, be prepared for creative differences and be prepared for someone more knowledgeable in this field to tell you that what you want will not work. Or be prepared for someone to just build you exactly what you want and leave to to fight the internet on your own.

1. If you have a specific idea that you want done and must have, then be clear about what you want from the start. Draw it on paper, show each page individually and fill in the exact text you want or need that explains that page. He can not read your mind. He is not in your business, or you would have more competition. Be prepared for the designer to re-word your text to handshake his SEO portion of the design.

2. Give all logos you need for the design.

3. Be ready for some of your ideas to get scratched. They may be obsolete or to complex for the average user to enjoy. Or they just may screw up the Search Engine Optimization portion of your design. Some of your idea may be unrealistic.

4. Be certain that your site’s topics cover what means the most interest in your company. If you sell airplane door hinges, don’t make your company website talk about what your company started as, what it is becoming and what it is now. Make your website about airplane door hinges. It would take a pretty submissive web-designer to not tell you that you are goofing  by using the wrong content.

Don’t ask the designer of your website to copy another website. Do not go to the nearest search engine and steal pictures off of the internet and ask your web designer to design your website around them. Do not under estimate the power of proper Search Engine optimization. Do not expect SEO work to happen over night. It takes most search engines two weeks to set your site in rank order. Heck it actually takes that long just for them to get around to noticing you are there. Do not look at a crowded Navigation bar/ menu and request more in there without a bit of a remodeling.

You can have the site you want. Just have your wants and needs laid out already. save a copy for yourself and give a copy to the web guy. If you already have a web guy then by all means, let him do the work. just be ready to hire someone else for SEO and make sure your web guy is ready to comply with the SEO person. It’s hard for one web guy to go back behind another web designer and figure out what they changed and how to make it work with the full plan. Improper communication ends in crazy results.

Here is an image I found on Facebook that seemed to fit perfect.

facts about website outsourcing

facts about website outsourcing

Site status check

Website Status, value and worth.

Well I have been working with  the company website ( the company I work for) trying to see what it’s page rank was and how well my SEO skills are. Doing that usually consisted of me hitting about 10 websites every day and me making the adjustments to the company website I felt like I needed to make.

Well, just as you would, I got tired of all of the Google searches I had to do and bookmarks to crank through. so I found a site that some dang dude was selling a php script  that would supposedly  do all the work for me. Well the program barely did but it gave me some insight as to what labors I needed to perform on the PHP script to make it work like I needed to get the information i needed

I needed  page rank information, I needed to see how many index pages in search engines I had, I also needed to find how many websites linked to me. So I took this clump of crap I bought for like  four dollars and started asking around if I could use tools from the sites the guy originally incorporated. Sad thing is, I have not gotten the “value” part in a monetary pattern. Soooo, It will not tell you what your website is worth.. Heck I don’t really have much faith in any of those sites. If you know of one that works really well and is spot on, please tell me where it is. I will contact the site owner and see what i can get done, for him, for me , for the users.

Website Status, value and worth.

Oh there is a “whois” tool added so you can check if a domain you want is open, sorry I do not sell website domain names. I do how ever like Netfirms. They seem to have the best prices. I don’t care much for their storage though.

Comparing Social Networks

We have to look at the word Social first.

“It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.”

I’m not so sure about the word “irrespective”; sounds a bit redneck to me.  That’s what I hate about Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it, even redneck Jim.

Well, to start…in that sense, Wikipedia is a type of social network but, let’s leave educational means of communication out of the ring of  social networking and, for this case, let’s leave out YouTube and Revver. They do have nice social methods (telling people their video is crummy). Let’s not go into all of that. Also, let’s not use Digg either; their methods of filtering the spam has eliminated most comfortable social connection.

So let’s nail out the big Social Networks.

Myspace . This has been known as the trailer park of the internet. Why? Well, because of the 1997 appeal. The place is full of the mouse tracers and sparkly profiles like Geocities had. Everyone adds every person they see on there as their friend. At one time, it was like a huge challenge to get as many people as you could get added to your friends. Then you spend the next three months weeding out all of the spammers and the real freaky people. It WAS an OK place to go and just read profiles. The profiles used to be like little ” I need a friend” resumes. Now, at most, they are nothing but favorite band lists. Really, why in the heck would someone list 200 bands. The ideal list would be, at most, 10-15 bands; not every dang band you ever listened to and didn’t want to smash your head with a hammer.

Then came the use of MySpace apps. MySpace apps are games that are connected with your MySpace profile. They allow you and your friends  to join in and play against others and their friends. Great concept. For those who chose to not play the games on MySpace, there’s the bulletin board. In the bulletin board you could write a short story and share it with your friends and let them comment on it or re-post it. There was also the use of the “blog system” so you could write a long story and show your friends or even share it with everyone on MySpace. Some days you could get up to 2000 reads of a blog on there. I know I have many times.

MySpace also has the  “mood” section, where you can show the world your mood and give a quick explanation of your mood.

The bulletins have been taken over by the friends who have MySpace applications. Some of the applications set to default the users to post to the bulletin and they do give the option to post to the bulletin, but most people don’t take time to read that junk and they just see the words “post click yes”, so they do. Now the bulletins are flooded with “billy bob just  walked three feet”. Stuff no one cares about.

It is a clunky piece of junk that has not had a major overhaul, since…well ever. But, it is an OK place to find a whole lot of people.

Facebook. Facebook is a lot like MySpace, even though the platform it is built on is different. The people join there and add as many people as they can. There is even an application to allow people to see people who know people they know. This gives them a chance to locate someone long gone. This also leads to 1000 people going “wait, who are you?? how do I know you?” For years I called Facebook the antisocial network.

Well, Facebook is just like the bulletin section of MySpace, but you really have no other means of group socialism. It is hard to just meet random people on Facebook because of the way the place is built. They are working on that, but, at the same time, they are messing up bad by integrating many features that MySpace has.

Facebook now has Apps also, just like MySpace.  If you have one friend who plays the apps on Facebook, then you have a million and one invites in your inbox, 200 app gifts on your main page, and the bulletin is flooded in updates in the  user’s progress in whatever game they find the most fun.

“Facebook is really sucky, with all the app invites and gifts and games and crap taking up the only means of ‘social interchange’, this place is worse than MySpace, except the custom profiles.”

Yahoo Chat .”Hi, look at my profile and lets trade pics” spam bot link farm, full of  regulars who do not like new people. All of the regulars have programs to kick other users out of the room, especially if the user is prettier, wittier or cooler than them. The regulars do not kick out the spam bots. This is the epitome of what everyone ever perceived a chatroom to be. It is not what chatrooms really were.

Twitter is like the Mood and status updates of MySpace. Difference is, the place is a farm of spam, get rich quick and stick it to the man. I have lost a bit of interest in this place also. It seems Twitter has taken another route since it became mainstream. It is not quite what it looked like it would be. Yes, it is a great place for all of  your followers to get a notice at one time about what you are doing or about to do or about to be or just left. Yes, that makes it awesome. Especially if you are ,for examlpe, a musician and no one knows when your show is going to happen. Musicians miss that point. Some think it would be cheesy so they refuse to connect at all; and that makes them crappy and not heart effort musicians. If it ain’t from the heart, it ain’t music.

I truly miss MSN chatrooms. That was really Social Networking. You used to be able to join a chatroom and exchange wit and banter with with up to 50 people per room. The rooms were separated into many categories. Most were separated by location, like city and state. The city chats were always full to the max of 50 people. The overflow rooms were always full of up to 50 people. The chat rolled at such a fast pace, your mind stayed well exercised. I feel as if I am getting slower by the day because there just is nothing that fast paced left to do. I can’t leave one post and wait 6 days for someone to reply to it. It’s just way to slow.

MSN says they dropped the program because it was not that big of a money maker. They have to be kidding. They had rotating banners in every single chat. With 50 people in each room, and there being over 200 main rooms, they had some serious revenue flowing in. I think they tried so hard to be like Google or to beat Google, they missed out on what was really working for them. I swear, just a little bit of innovation for their chatrooms, and they could have potentially kept MySpace and Facebook from ever coming out of the ground. Heck, those places didn’t rise well and established until the chatters had nowhere else to go. Facebook was around for at least three years that MSN still had chatrooms. Now look at the place.

Beat the Comcast Hijack

Have you seen your computer redirect to search3.comcast.com or search5.comcast.com ? Don’t worry, you do not have a virus. Your web traffic is being filtered. Kind of like if your phone misdials a number, you get a mcdonalds commercial or pepsi commercial. Not cool, right? Read below if you want a better understanding of what that means. A cool fix of the issue is there. If you don’t want to read all of that, scroll to the bottom and look for the bold text “Simplest way I know“. That’s the way for someone looking for the quick fix.

If you do not know by now, Comcast is doing something I can describe as being the same thing they were told not to do. But not calling it what they said they would. They are throttling bandwidth and monopolizing from more than one direction. How?

Ok for starts they are filtering and snooping your internet traffic. You can see proof of this activity if you use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, and type in a link that does not work. Now this in no way says that Internet Explorer is any safer than Firefox, in fact it says internet explorer does the same thing but by the works of Microsoft Bing.

If you type a link that should land you to an error/404 page while using Firefox, it takes you to “http://search3.comcast.com” . Now you see I will not actually link that page because the whole reason they send you there is because they actually make money from yahoo search and the advertisements on that page. Of course they affiliate with Yahoo, they tried to use Google as an example to why they should collect money from website owners because of the traffic they send them.

This move they are making is taking money from the pockets of the Firefox developers. The people at Firefox built their browser and hard coded the search to work with their affiliate program with Google, Firefox team did leave you/us the option to change to what ever search engine we want. Most of us just left it to the default page. This of course left motivation and or funding to the Mozilla group so they can keep developing and reaching more people with their creative works. The creative works of a group who is not a corporation with a desire to force us into a specified direction, to better highlight other software bundled with it, like an operating system that came forcefully attached to a crappy browser, (windows? mac? lol you figure it out) but no it was a method of freedom. Firefox was the step away from CompuServe and AOL forced browser and constant blast of advertisements. but now someone has their hooks into the money of Firefox. I have the fix

How to fix this issue is go to MVP’s HOSTS site, download the zip file to your desk top and extract all files in that zip straight to your desktop. Right click the file labeled “hosts” the one with no extension and select “open with” and find your notepad.exe file and open with that.

Scroll down till you see the list of website addresses and the ip address of “127.0.0.1” .

My trick is to make this my top line

127.0.0.1 search3.comcast.com
127.0.0.1 search5.comcast.com

This now ensures that my computer will never go to them again.

It however does not put any money back into the hands of the firefox team, but it does not profit a company who is making money off of me because I pay my bills on time, now they also want to make money off of my searches while some other team created the web browser I am using. I have a fear they will do the same that aol did with netscape, buy it up and crud it out till no one uses it anymore, causing the extinction of one last free field for us to graze in.

Another alternative is to leave Comcast all together. I am not against that really. but of course Comcast has taken every cable provider in the area I live and bought up all of their business. Leaving me no choice but to use them if I use cable. Dsl hub is pretty close, I am sure I can pay the same price for dsl and get cheaper cable with more channle and not be bothered by Comcast. but really, what good would I be in the act of toppling the monopoly of comunistcast ?

Maybe I am the only person who hears Comcast complain about increased internet use, every time they increase their internet user count by buying out another company (and all of their equipment). I mean really , if you are losing money guys, stop buying crap and just ride your profits for a while, let the customers be comfortable, you are scaring us.

but on another note, as an extra twist of the knife, since Comcast is using Yahoo for their search engine affiliate :-)

put this in your hosts file

yahoo.com search3.comcast.com

and then close it, select “save” don’t rename anything.. now from the files you saved to your desktop

locate the one labeled “hosts.bat” double click it. you will see a blue box, hit your space bar one time and you are done.

Now close all browsers and re-open them

now go to

sdhfajdhfasjdkf.com

If it takes you to “http://search3.comcast.com/?cat=dnsr&con=ds&url=www.sdhfajdhfasjdkf.com”

Then something has gone wrong, read again, try again.

There is always open dns, this of course really puts you in the same place but slower internet and someone else is filtering your net usage.

and http://www.webmasterworld.com/firefox_browser/3966582.htm

you can always drop Firefox and go for another browser of the same engine.

K-Meleon browser

It won’t fix your issue but you won’t see comcast filtering your traffic.

Simplest way I know is make your web browser go to yahoo any time some one types in the “search3.comcast.com” term by navigating to this folder with notepad (opened in administrator mode) “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc”
open the file labeled “Hosts” by using notepad in administrator mode.

That will highlight everything in that file.
Now copy this line and add it under everything you see in that hosts file I showed you how to get to.

72.30.2.43 search3.comcast.com

72.30.2.43 search5.comcast.com

Then close all of your browsers and re-open them. and try to go to this web site “search3.comcast.com” or “search5.comcast.com”
instead you will be redirected to yahoo. there . you keep comcast from further profiting on internet usage you already pay for.

 

 

Alternatively you can use a different DNS than the one that comcast provides. and this allows you to not worry about most of the comcast $$ making pages you will land on… because you are no longer 100% in their network. It allows you to use the service of the people that comcast pays to bring the internet to your area.
Primary DNS Server : 4.2.2.2
http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
because it works.
crap loads faster and I don’t get that stupid page from comcast when I land on a link.