Flip Video - the revolution will be in high-definition

So I bought the Flip.

If you haven’t heard of the Flip, check it out - it’s a very simple, high definition video camera about the size of a cell phone. The best part, and why I thinks it’s a game-changer, is that you can buy one for about $200, making the Flip the cheapest, high quality video camera on the market.

But this isn’t a product review for the Flip. Instead I want to share my thoughts on what I think the Flip means to the internet and our day-to-day lives.

According to Flip-makers, Pure Digital Technologies, their product currently accounts for over 13% of all U.S. camcorder sales. That’s over 1 million of these tiny cameras being carried around in people’s back pockets in the US alone (they’ve recently been launched in the UK and Canada). And that, in turn, means a lot more opportunities for people to capture all that is weird, funny and disturbing in this world - in other words, a lot more video of what we (sadly) consider news. This is very cool and for the internet I think it means a heck of a lot more interesting video being uploaded everyday.

So what does this accelerated proliferation in video uploads mean to the way we live?

To illustrate my point, consider the multitude of police beating videos online or the famous video footage of the man tasered by police at an airport who later died. How many more instances of such things will be caught on tape now that people can carry the Flip with them wherever they go, 24/7?

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Google is updating PageRanks

It looks like another round of Google PageRank updates is underway, as I am starting to get scores on some of the new blogs I have created over the last couple of months.

For those unfamiliar with Google PageRank, here’s a quick rundown.

There are very few measures out there that clearly tell a blogger what the Google gods are thinking about their website. One of the best ones is Google PageRank - a score from one to ten that is assigned by Google to every page that it indexes. In really simple terms a blog’s page rank is determined by the number of quality external links it has referring to it on the internet.

The easiest way to figure a web page’s page rank is to download the google pagerank plug-in if you’re using Firefox or go to a site like PageRank Checker.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of PageRank that gets into all the nitty gritty.

Like in anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO) though, it’s important that you don’t obsess too much about any single factor. Good SEO and a successful blog overall is a culmination of doing a whole bunch of things well, so don’t read too much into a blog’s PageRank. For example, Perez Hilton only has a PageRank of 7 out of 10 and he gets millions of visitors everyday.

I use PageRank as a relative measure of blog health that gives me a report every few months. Do I obsess about it? No. But if over a year I see the PageRank of a particular blog continue to fall, it’s probably a good indicator that I need to re-think what I’m doing.

I Heart Wordpress 2.7

Anyone who knows me well knows that I don’t mince words and I’m rather emotional. In other words,  If I like it, I love and I’ll tell you.

And I got to say that I love the latest version of Wordpress (2.7) that I finally got around to updating on a couple of my blogs today. Now I know with any new tech, its always better to remain neutral for the first while to ensure that there’s no gaping holes or total screw-ups before offering an unequivocal endorsement as I am doing here. But I’m throwing caution to the wind.

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Warning: Wordpress shuns Google by default

Okay, I admit that I to use overly dramatic headlines, but I wanted to grab your attention, especially if you’ve just started using the blogging software Wordpress. And please use Wordpress as it is by far the best blogging platform on the market.

But you see, there’s this little niggly default privacy setting on Wordpress that tells Google and all the other search engines that you’re not interested in being indexed in their search results. What you will see in the source code when you first install Wordpress is a piece of code that looks like this:

<meta name=’robots’content=’noindex,nofollow’/>

This little piece of code is known as a ‘no index’ instruction for search engine ‘robots’ in that it tells search engines to not index your pages in their search results. So Googlebots (also called spiders) show up to index your site and that nasty piece of code tells it you’re just not interested in being part of their search results.

I’ve written about this problem before but I was only suspicious that this was a default setting and I thought it was more likely that I had screwed up (which is usually the case). But I finished the basic install for a new blog I am making for someone as a Christmas present and lo and behold there was that ‘no-index’ instruction.

Here’s the instructions for how to turn this no-index instruction off, it’s really very easy:

1. Go to the admin section of your Wordpress blog

2. Click on the “settings” tab in the top right corner

3. Click on the “privacy” tab in the blue bar

4. You should see a section now called “blog visibility” that looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

5. Make sure that it is set to: “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.”

If this doesn’t work (it did for me), then there are some more technical fixes out there, just google something like: “no index code wordpress” and you’ll see lots of great ideas and information.

Seriously, does anyone have any idea why Wordpress would have this as the default setting?

Walk before you run: Google releases Search Engine Optimization 101 Guide

The first thing you learn in baseball is how to hold the bat (remember to line up your knuckles) and its pretty hard to go any further with the game until you figure this out.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different. There’s a whole world of amazing resources that discuss the day-to-day minutiae of SEO, and my two favorites are SEOmoz and SearchEngineLand.

However, before you dive into the technical details of How Google Improves Search Quality Through The User Interface I would suggest that you take time to understand the fundamentals. Just so happens that Google released a short and sweet beginner’s guide to Search Engine Optimization today.

So dive right in, the water’s fine and after you nail down the basics you’ll be talking Differential Diagnosis: A Broken Website Ranking Atop Google with the best of them.

13 Good Reasons to Dump Your iPhone for BlackBerry Bold

Easy now. Before my Apple Cult membership is revoked, I love Mac. I do. I love Mac. I like the iPhone, for what it is, which is a tiny little Mac. Mac lovers like me were sold on the idea of a tiny Mac in our pocket that could do those three things.

Remember those three things?

“Well today, we’re introducing THREE revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen ipod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.”

- Steve Jobs, MacWorld Keynote, 2007.

I actually waited until the second gen iPhone came out before buying in. I was concerned about the lack of 3G given the amount of data the iPhone was capable of downloading. So I bought mine in August and used it for three months. Having used BlackBerry, Treo, an assortment of different handsets as well as iPhone, it is clear to me that iPhone does not compete with Blackberry on two of the three functions.

So, without further ado, here’s the top 13 reasons I now carry a BlackBerry Bold instead of an iPhone:

1. Battery life - the Bold kills the iPhone on battery life. Under heavy use, say a business travel day with no laptop access, I have repeatedly burned through a full charge on my iPhone by early afternoon. This includes phone, e-mail and web usage, but typically not iPod usage. My Bold gets through a full day of similar activity with a half charge left at end of day. No comparison.

2. Battery life part deux - the Bold is not afflicted by “sudden drain” syndrome, something that has happened a few times on my iPhone. On occasion I have put a near full charge iPhone in my pocket and taken it out after a short period of time to find it down to the red for no apparent reason. Yes, I have applied all the iPhone updates that were released.

3. User Interface - my three year old can drive my iPhone. Should my 3 year old be able to drive my business device? Is that a good measure? I don’t think so. I tire of tapping through endless screens to get to the one I want when looking at e-mail, for example - I have five email accounts. I like the Bold’s contextual menus. Everything I might want to do on a screen has been put only a click or two away. It really works well, once you’ve learned it. Oh, and cut and paste…and keyboard shortcuts. Pretty rows of icons that jiggle on demand are fun to look at, but once you dive in it can be an uneven and frustrating experience.

4. E-mail - the e-mail just works better on the Bold. BlackBerry just knows how to do mobile e-mail. It works great. iPhone is slow to load e-mail, in my experience. Writing e-mail is wildly different as well. I became very frustrated with the iPhone’s keyboard. It was slow to respond, would often lock-up for seconds or more as I typed faster. On occasion it would simply lock-up completely, necessitating a restart - not acceptable for time-sensitive communications.

5. Stability - My Blackberry Bold does not crash. iPone apps crashed regularly. In particular, Safari crashed most frequently, followed by several third party apps I installed. As mentioned above, Mail would lock-up.

6. Appearance - iPhone looks nice out of the box, but as soon as you handle it it has finger prints and smudges. After a busy day with lunch meetings and such it could wind up looking pretty bad and take some effort to clean up. Impressions matter. The Blackberry Bold finish is not subject to this kind of smudging, except the screen area, and that cleans up with a single wipe.

7. Speed - My Blackberry Bold is generally faster than my iPhone. This is based largely on perception, but I’m referring to scrolling through screens, launching apps, viewing e-mail and most importantly, rendering web pages. I have also noticed the BlackBerry browser will pull the mobile interface by default for many sites, which I like, since I’m mainly interested in the data. This makes the experience faster yet.

8. The Keyboard - I prefer the physical keyboard to the virtual one. This is personal preference, I think, but for reasons I’ve mentioned above, I think it is also more reliable.

9. Multimedia content - I use a media monitoring service and need to view TV clips and listen to radio clips. These clips are provided in .3gp. Unlike the iPhone, the Blackberry Bold brings them up immediately in the BB media player.

10. Voice activation - Blackberry Bold has great voice activation out of the box. iPhone? No, which is surprising from a company that pioneered this technology.

11. Clicks are easier than gestures - The iPhone flicks, pinches and sweeps are neat, but clicking my spacebar once to scroll a page is actually more precise and easier in general. Clicking once to zoom page content is faster and simpler than the two finger, two handed equivalent on iPhone. With my Bold, I can stir my martini and navigate the web at the same time. The trackball wins. I think the touchscreen is a good way to get more screen real estate, but it is not necessarily an improvement in UI.

12. Storage - on my Blackberry Bold I can swap multiple 8GB microSD cards whereas I can have only one internal flash memory on iPhone.

13. Video - I like to post pictures and video remotely. I can’t do that with iPhone because it doesn’t record video. The Bold does.

Sorry Mr. Jobs, please don’t revoke my Mac Club Card, but the iPod touch with a mediocre phone = an iPhone that just isn’t eve close to the functionality of the Blackberry Bold. If you want a business communications handset with excellent multimedia internet capability, GPS, WiFi and a 2MP video camera, get a BlackBerry Bold.

If you want the latest tech toy for cool kids, you’ll hit the mark with the iPhone, but please heed my warning that you may find yourself gazing longingly across the room happy go-lucky Blackberry user sitting up at the bar.