Monday, January 30, 2006

Mobile Ringtone Convertors

MP3 To Ringtone Gold is an ringtone converter. It can be used to convert the popular compressed audio formats (.mp3) to ringtone format(.mmf,.amr,.mp3,.wav, .mid) and send them to your cell phone.

The Mobile AMR converter uses Sony Ericsson AMR converter to convert AMR files (Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec, *.amr) to wave files (*.wav) and vice-versa in a user-friendly way. Also, you can directly convert MP3 to AMR files for use with your mobile. It can also save several wave files into one SP file and vice-versa.


Posted by: Jethro | 9:44 PM |

Super Secret Dance Society

Don't tell anybody because its a secret.
I am now an agent of the Super Secret Dance Society?
How do I know?
Don't go there or you might find out.


Posted by: Jethro | 9:25 PM |

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Robocop

Robot Cops to Patrol Korean Streets

The South Korean government has robot fever, and they're about to unleash a whole army -- literally -- of the mechanized creatures on their public. According to The Korea Times, the country will see the rollout of police and military robots within the next five years, thanks to a newly approved $33.9 million spending appropriation. Patrol bots will guard the streets at night, and even chase criminals, while horse-shaped combat bots will augment the country's fighting force. In both cases, the bots will communicate via Korea's vast mobile network.

To get things rolling, so to speak, Korea will debut a series of household bots in the private sector this October. Unlike domestic bots already released in Japan, the Korean bots will be relatively cheap, since they use the network to perform much of their computational work instead of internal hardware and software.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:49 AM |

Saturday, January 14, 2006

De-Lurking Week

Belatedly I am writing a post to let you know that it is International De-Lurking Week
So if you read this site, regularly or not, then come on - comment!

Say who you are, why you read or what colour the sky is? I don't really care what.

Just comment.

I know theres 4000 unique readers a month hitting the www.spyjournal.biz website so someone must have something to say.
At the very least tell the other readers who you would choose out of Kylie or Gwen.


Image courtesy of Paper Napkins


Posted by: Jethro | 1:08 PM |

Sunday, January 08, 2006

WiseGeek

Want to know the answers to geek questions about stuff?
There is an excellent geek website called www.wisegeek.com where you can find answers to all sorts of questions.

Here are the categories, and also a link to what SATA or Serial ATA is (how I found them). Thanks wisegeek!

Home and Garden
Issues related to your home and everything around it.

Technology and Gadgets
Technological innovations seem to trickle down and find their way into our lives either directly or indirectly. We cover all those gadgets that you fumble around with each day, as well as other technologies that may not be so ubiquitous.

Manufacturing and Industry
Manufacturing techniques and industrial technologies.

Internet and Computers
Information technology is altering all of our lives; in this section we address search engines, keyboards, storage, networks, security, auctions etc.

Health and Wellness
Diseases, conditions, cures, fitness and other health-related matters.

Crafts and Do-it-Yourself
Information about tools, materials, crafts and do-it-yourself projects.

Finance and Investing
Answers to your questions about personal finance and investing.

Science and Engineering
Scientific research and the associated breakthroughs are fueling modern life with new innovations and ways of viewing the world.

Cars Boats and Airplanes
Cars, boats, planes and trains- they're everywhere! We cover all sorts of topics related to the vehicles that we use to transport our possessions and ourselves.

Business and Economy
Business, economics and other questions related to money.

Sports and Hobbies
Answers relating to sports, hobbies and other pastimes.

Food and Cooking
All about food, cooking and cuisines.

Travel and Entertainment
Vacations, cruises, and all sorts of ways to relax and enjoy yourself.

Art and Music
Film, poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting and all sorts of music.

People
Information about all sorts of important people, past and present.

The World
World politics, geography, country statistics and the environment. We also provide an extensive collection of maps.

Animals and the Environment
Everything about the natural world around us

The United States
The history, places and economy of America.

Language and The Humanities
We tackle questions regarding figures-of-speech, philosophy, logic and language.

History and Government
Wars, historical figures and events that have shaped our lives.

Miscellaneous
The repository of our ansers that do not seem to fit in one of our other categories.


Posted by: Jethro | 1:26 PM |

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Random links to useful stuff

www.joelonsoftware.com Joel is a well respected programmer who writes a pretty fun blog with some good stuff in it. I particularly enjoyed his article about making wrong code look wrong He is also going to be a speaker at Webstock in May 2006 in Wellington NZ
Blog Design Usability
Microsofts New "Live portal?"
Ever want a remote controlled forklift?
SilverStripe is a professional looking outfit running a content management system software development business from Wellington NZ
Brisbane City Website
High Heeled Shoe Museuem click the shoes to go to the stores selling them


Posted by: Jethro | 2:57 PM |

Friday, January 06, 2006

Search Engine Ranking: Anchor Text is Key

Reprinted by permission


Try an Experiment

If you have a web site, try this experiment when you have some spare time. Pick a nonsense phrase, like "bed happy meatball" or anything equally silly. Make sure it's something very unlikely to appear on a web page anywhere, and make sure it's a phrase (not a single word). Also, make sure it does not appear on your own site.

Next, get a few friends or co-workers with web sites of their own to post a link to your site using that exact phrase (without the quotation marks) as the anchor text. What's anchor text, you ask? It's simply the word or words that form the clickable part of a link.

Now, wait a while. Make a note to yourself to check your web site's ranking in the results for a search of your chosen nonsense phrase at a major search engine in a month or two. Unless you picked a phrase that actually appears on other sites, you'll find that your site is #1! Moreover, that's in spite of the fact that the chosen phrase does not appear anywhere on your actual web site. Think about that.

An infamous, large-scale example of this same test involved the phrase "miserable failure." Some enterprising bloggers got together a few years ago and decided to link lots of sites to the official biography page for President George W. Bush at the whitehouse.gov site. The goal, of course, was to make that page show up in the #1 position whenever unsuspecting (or in this case, many suspecting) searchers typed in that phrase. It worked. (Side note: at last check, Michael Moore - famous film maker and Bush detractor, was in the #2 position at Google for this same search). Again, keep in mind that the phrase "miserable failure" does not appear anywhere on either man's web site.

Is There a Point?

OK, so why bother with this seemingly asinine experiment (that's actually been dubbed 'Googlebombing')? Ahh, Grasshopper, for the lesson it imparts. Which is? Well, it points to the power of anchor text in determining search engine ranking. And it has definite relevance to your activities as a webmaster.

Many of your fellow site owners - including a lot of them who run sites in direct competition with yours - have never heard of anchor text. Some of you reading this may be unfamiliar with it. But, as should be clear now, anchor text plays a major role in search engine ranking positions.

In basic terms, it works like this...

Search engines rely on links to help them ascertain both the theme of a given web site and its popularity. Knowing that, consider two scenarios. In the first, your site has built up a lot of links pointing to it, and each one has your domain name as the clickable part of the link (anchor text). Let's say your domain name is your company's name, JoeSmithBakery.com - and you sell baking supplies. OK, great - now your site will show up in the #1 position at the search engines whenever anyone searches for your domain name! Hmm. Think that one through. If they know your domain name, why would they need a search engine to find it?

In the second scenario, you have lots of links pointing to your bakery site, but instead of the domain name as the anchor text, you wisely chose a phrase that lots of people search for, like 'baking supplies.'

Easy question: which would you prefer - being #1 at Google when people search for your domain name or being #1 when people search for bakery supplies? This is why the anchor text you choose for the links you build is so important.

A Plan of Action

Now, here's a simple plan of action to improve your site's link situation and search engine ranking going forward from this day...

Step 1 - Research Keywords

A great service is provided by the folks at wordtracker.com. They catalog search activity at the major engines, and then make available those numbers to the general public. You simply type in a word or phrase related to your site's theme, and wordtracker shows you the number of times that entry is being searched at the major search engines. Cool, huh? The service will also give you a list of related terms, so you can look for other important search words to target.

Step 2 - Pick a Few and Get Some Links

Compile a list of several search terms that are most closely related to your site's theme and that get searched for often. It's up to you, of course, but you should pick those phrases that get a few hundred to several thousand searches. These will be the terms you use in the anchor text of the inbound links you build from now on. Doing so will really increase your site's search engine traffic - once all your new links begin to boost your rankings.

Nothing Else Changes

Now, just carry on with your usual link building activities: reciprocal links, one-way links from directories and article distributions, etc. The only change is to make sure you choose a phrase from your list to use as the clickable part of the link you ask for (the anchor text). If you rotate your choices, your site will move up in the rankings for each phrase. The only downside is that you'll be getting fewer links per phrase, so it may take longer for any single phrase to rank high.

Keep in mind that the phrases you pick will be popular, unlike those in the examples that began this article. To score high rankings, you'll need to be diligent and get lots of links. Never stop! Over time, this strategy will really help your site's traffic, but it does take time. As the famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famously wrote: "All good things come to those who wait."


About the Author: John Schwartz is the owner of Web-Article-Writer.com - specializing in professionally written web site content and articles. Our goal is to help clients increase web site traffic through links from related sites and higher search engine rankings.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:56 AM |