I’ve recently (about a month ago) purchased the Motorola Droid with the Verizon network and my verdict is so far so good. In my experience this phone can do anything any other smart phones can do and then some. Upon first handling the phone the thing that stood out the most was the large screen with a higher resolution than most other smart phones. The battery life is respectable, when constantly surfing the web using the GPS and the bluetooth I get a full days use from it, and can get a full charge in a little over an hour.

When setting up your phone for the first time you’re prompted to enter your Google credentials or create a new Google account, if you set up your phone with an existing account all of your Google contacts will be imported to your phones contacts, your phones calendar will also be synced with your Google Calendar

The phone comes pre-installed with Google Maps Navigation which can easily hold its own against any standalone GPS on the market, the Google Voice app which can be set up to manage some or all of your phones calls and basic text messaging, a Facebook app which can import all of your Facebook contacts into your phones contacts.

Google’s voice search is great as well, it does a comprehensive search of your phone and the web and is usually pretty accurate. I must note for novice users like myself there is a difference between Google’s voice search and the phones voice dialer, you should use voice search if you want to look up John Doe’s contact information on your phone, or to find the closest restaurant with a Google search, you should use the voice dialer if your actually want to “Call John Doe” or “Call 555-444-777″ or even if you want to “Open Gmail”. After playing around with the two voice apps some more I’ve come to the conclusion that the Google Voice Search App is actually better and more accurate to using for calling contacts by name by saying Call John Doe for example. Read the rest of Getting to Know Droid »

The following is a list of Twitter oriented websites which provide services to enhance the Twitter experience.

• Twellow is a Twitter directory, and in my opinion it’s one of the best, if not the best Twitter directory on the web. Users can add them selves to up to three different categories, and Twellow actually searches the content of user profiles allowing you to search all users or with in different categories, making it the best Twitter directory I’ve encountered thus far.
• Twitpic seems to have become the de facto standard for sharing images on Twitter. With support built into various Twitter clients that allow you to view Twitpics within the client window.
• Twitter Karma is a site which allows you to see who’s following you, who you’re following, and which of your followers are mutual. Upon viewing your three categories of relationships with other Twitter users you can decided which users you want to follow, unfollow, or block.
• What the Trend is a site with blurbs from users explaining why cretin topics are trending.
• Who the Tweet gives you an automated synopsis of what the given user name tweets about. I had a little trouble with it the first time around ( it said I didn’t exist) but after resubmitting my search it gave what I though to be a fairly accurate list of topics that I tweet about.
• Twitterholic is a site which ranks Twitter users by number of followers, and lets you view rankings site wide or by location.
• TwitChuck and TwitBlock are two very similar services which rate user accounts for levels of sparseness, they look for signs of automation, how often a person tweets, interaction with other users, and other factors.
• Twitvid is a site for sharing videos on Twitter.
• TwitterVision is a world map that displays pop up tweets in from the Twitter public time line in real time.

Read the rest of Tweb Sites »

Search engine optimization is the practice of creating search engine friendly web pages with relative content that can be easily searched and indexed. Search engine optimization is usually done with the intention of increasing the amount of traffic to a web site and is a big part of internet marketing.

The following is a simple list of things you can do to improve the search engine optimization of pages on your web site

A simple SEO checklist

• Semantic Markup: Be sure your pages are well structured. A title tag is probably the single most important tag on a page in respect to search engine optimization, other important tags include heading tags, paragraph tags, strong tags, and emphasis tags. These tags should be used where appropriate and should contain key word which accurately describe the content of your page.
• Meta Tags: Although not as important as they once where in respect to Search Engine Optimization meta tags are still relevant and should be used. The description meta tag for example is used by many search engines to allow site publishers to display a short description of pages in their own words within search results.
  <meta name="description" content="A cool web site about web design" />
  and the no follow meta tag can be used to tell search engines that a page should not be indexed.
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
  Click here for more information about meta tags.
• Site Map: A sitemap.xml file properly formatted and placed in the root directory of your site can be used to let search engines quickly index all of the pages on your site, inform them of which pages are most important, and how often certain pages are updated. XML-Sitemaps.com has a free tool you can use to instantly generate a site map for any site you chose. The free version has some limitations
• Internal Linking: Aside from your main navigation using contextual links in the content of your site which accurately describe the page they are linking to can be very beneficial in search engine optimization. Consider the following link for example: Web Design Portfolio.
• Keyword Density: Intelligently using words which describe your page or site as often as possible while maintaining usefulness and readability. Is a good way to let search engines know what your site is all about and what words should be used to find it. Key word density also ties in to semantic markup because keywords used in tags like the title tag, and heading tags have greater bearing on search engine results.
• URL Keywords: Last but not least, another factor used in determining your pages relevancy by search engines are keywords in the URL. Rather they be a file name such as web-design.html or part of the file path like /web/design/ incorporating a keyword or to into your domain is a big factor in this step as well.

Read the rest of SEO : Search Engine Optimization »