G1 Android Mobile Online Emulator

And we thought we will have to wait for long to play with much hyped Android Mobile - G1.  Thankfully we were all wrong.

You can play with it anytime at G1 Emulator. You can move it in 360 degree. It also allows you to interact with with buttons and interface.

My take on G1: Had they made it a bit more beautiful, it would have been such a great product *cough* iPhone killer. Nevertheless, it’s still too early to comment and knowing that I am looking for a phone, it can very well find place in the list of candidates.

Learning Artificial Intelligence :-O

Artificial Intelligence has always fascinated me, especially from the day I saw this movie. Never really thought of reading about it, though I always wanted to. Lazy me.

Anyway, I had a nice conversation with Azhar last evening, he gave me links to MIT online books. He is an intellectual dude, I always admire him for that. We often discuss things about future of web, Google monopoly and programming.

Back to books: he’s currently reading Introduction to Algorithms and Software Engineering for Internet Applications.

I have just started with lectures’ notes on Artificial Intelligence. It’s interesting so far with trees and graphs (although I hated the same topics in my semester exams). Well, that is all with the latest news.

On a side note, this is my third post of today. I know I am out of my mind, you need not prove that.

Google Taking Date on Documents More Seriously

These days Google is showing dates (timestamp?) in the SERPs, I am not saying they have just started doing so, but I am sure that they are doing it more prominently now. I am always impressed with their parsing capabilities.

The date parsing is even more amazing on forum threads, on more than one occasions I have found that the date which was being shown alongside the SERP listing was that of the latest reply on the thread, not the date on which the thread was created, very nice way to show the freshness of content. Really great.

As a user, it has surely affected my search experience in a positive way. I have started taking dates in my decision making for which link to click through with in the SERP listing.

As a webmaster, it’s something more serious. This can really affect CTRs, may be marginal but remember small things do add up. As a result, I have now removed the dates on single posts on some of my blogs, why? because those blogs are not news based, their content are timeless and thus an old date in an SERP listing might become a turn off for a searcher, as it is for me.

Buying a phone finally!

So I am looking for a phone. A phone which should have:

• Large screen
• Querty keyboard
• Good web browsing and email

Basically a smart phone but should be stylish also. In last 4-5 weeks I have remained nothing but confused, the last phone and I bought was Nokia 6630, which also the phone I am currently using and which was also my very first phone. It’s been two years and now I am feeling the need of it.

I did shortlist some nice ones few weeks ago:

• N95 - No Querty, huh!
• N96 - No Querty, huh!
• iPhone - Discussed with Abhishek, I am waiting for him to buy it first. :P
• E71 - Saw it on Mani Karthik’s blog
• E61i - Recommended by Shashank

So N95 and N95 were not for me because traditional dial pads are pretty lame these days, who uses it? we have phonebook. At this time, I seem to be going with iPhone because of its bigger screen than E71 and E61i and also for better web browsing experience, but you never know.

Nokia is also launching its iPhone rip-off called Nokia Tube. Let’s see. Any recommendations?

I am here only

From last few days people have been asking me about my inactivity on Technodiary, on Twitter, and on other few sites I am usually found. First of all, I am not sorry at all for not writing for so long, it’s my blog after all, hah!

When people ask me "Where are you?", I know that they are actually asking me "What projects you are working on these days?". They think that I am working on some super stealth projects all the time. I really have no idea why they think like this, either I am really bad at hiding things or they are over smart, perhaps the former and a bit of latter.

By the way, time for a discloser:  yes I am working on some stealth projects these days. Ding!!

Google, We want <noindex> </noindex>

Update: Yahoo already had this for over a year. Check this story on search engine land.

It’s so frustrating when you want to copy paste some third party content for good and at the same time don’t want search engines to consider it duplicate content. I wish we had something like <noindex> </noindex> tag, using which we could tell the Search engines not to index the content between these tags. Just like we do rel=nofollow with links.

For Example:

Original content

—————-

——-

—

-

<noindex>

Copied content

———–

—–

–

-

</noindex>

Original content

—————-

——-

—

-

I hope we’ll see this feature implemented in near future. By the way do we really need this custom noindex tag? or is it just me? anyone? hey…

No, it’s not the time to switch my browser

I am sure everyone reading this article has already downloaded and used the new kid on the block - Google’s Chrome. At first I thought of not using FF anymore - may be I was just too much biased by the hype Chrome was having. Anyway, It’s a sweet little browser with innovative architecture - that multi-process thing, I liked it.

Really loved Chrome, for:

1. Looks = Blue = Peaceful

2. Interface = Tabs on top = Refreshing

3. Omnibar = Search + Addressbar = Efficient

Enough reasons to switch my browser.. right?

Wrong, Firefox still has an edge, for me at least. Chrome is good and will definitely add more features gradually but -  

I am happy with FF at the moment, because:

1. Awesome Bar is doing better than Omnibar for me.

2. I can’t live without Firebug. Chrome’s code inspector is not that cool.

3. G Toolbar - I use PageRank bar and Bookmarks heavily. It should be coming to chrome soon, but for the time being..

Also read somewhere that Firefox 3.1 is gonna be faster than Chrome, with Tracemonkey rendering engine. Honestly, I haven’t really noticed the fastness of Chrome, its doing as good as FF for me.

For last two days I have been using both the browsers together, so that I have more important (but less in number) tabs on FF and less important tabs on Chrome.

I am not going to fully switch to Chrome anytime soon, FF still stands at #1 for me. What about you?

Do Comments Carry Extra Weight in SEO?

The other day I had a small conversation with a fellow twitterer , he asked whether comments carry any weight in SEO terms. This question wasn’t a new one for me, I have been thinking of this ever since I started with blogging and optimisation.

The question ignited a debate in my mind and it’s time when I should let John and David take over the discussions. Over to them.

Situation: John is playing with google analytics reports while David is doing some routine backups.

John: amazing….!!

David: what?

John: I think more comments on a blog post means high rankings for that post

David: yes, more content is always good for rankings

John: no, I think comments carry some extra weight more than just being extra content

David: but how is it possible

John: why not

David: I mean, how would google know what is comment what is not

John: that I don’t know, I am seeing high rankings on highly commented posts

David: hmm, but there are so many CMSs and with thousands of templates, parsing comments is close to impossible

John: well.. you are right but…

David: I must say that an ideal search engine should well in fact give extra weight to comments

I myself have seen high rankings on highly commented posts but those could just be coincidences and the presence of extra content due to comments is also a factor.

Why not test it?

One can suggest that this should be tested by making two posts with same content - one with comments and one without, and then by tracking the relative rankings. No, it’s not that easy because even if comments carry extra weight, the weight would be marginal and in the above test other SEO factors might very well outplay the comments factor.

Do you think comments are given any weight by Search Engines?

Everyone and their dog is SEO

Being an SEO myself, I come across wide varieties of SEOs everyday. I interact with them through their blogs, IM, social media and forums. I learn a lot from them and will continue to do so.

There are a lot of intelligent SEOs out there but I have a feeling that too many people declare themselves as SEOs prematurely. Being called SEO is something which makes people feel good and hence they always tend to attain the title as early as possible. Most of them Only a Few of them are on the right track but very far from the stage where they can be called genuine white-hat successful SEOs.

I read an excellent article by Jill Whalen - "The Evolution of a Search Marketer". All you SEOs and wanna-be(s) read it, and if you think the article tells your own story then don’t get surprised. It’s the story of most of us. However, I feel that the article needs to be updated now and further stages of evolution should be added as it was written some 2 years ago.

Ok, coming back to newbies. Let me show you a chat conversation that I had a few months ago with a so called SEO. It is a real chat, I have edited some grammars and some not-so-pleasant words.

Conversation:

Him: Dude, what are you doing these days?

Me: I have a SEO project and my own sites to maintain, it’s too much hectic these days

Him: that’s cool

Me: ya kinda

Him: by the way, can I help you in the SEO project

Me: that’ll be great for me

Him: so give me the details

Me: tell me about your experience first, the keywords you ranked for

Him: I am doing a lot of reading, ask me anything

Me: dude, SEO is not about to read, it’s a "to-do" thing

Him: you can ask me any question about SEO, and then see

Me: but what’s the point asking you questions, will the customer ask you questions? no, he will want your previous results. You’ll have to show him your current SERPs.

Him: SERPs what?

Me: Search it on Google

Him: ok, wait

I have more such conversations in my chat archive. If you want some of them ask me :P. I’d also like to clear that I have no intentions to des-respect anybody. Being a newbie is not something which one should be ashamed of. We were all noobs once. Were’nt we?

I wanted to throw some more light on this topic. But not feeling like writing now. Ok some other time then (in part-2 *hint*).

You have no choice but to Follow me on Twitter!

I admit that I have declared this tons of times in last few months, but yes I am back to twitter. I have been On n’ Off on Twitter but this time I am here to stay, I promise :P

Follow me here http://twitter.com/TechnoDiary

This post is now in race for two awards "Shortest post of the month award" and "Most arrogant post title of the month award". Cheers!!