Are you ready for a re-design on your WordPress blog, or need one designed from scratch? Converting a TypePad blog over to WordPress or installing? Have you optimized your blog for SEO and speed? Is your blog getting the attention it deserves? Need a professional evaluation to see how to make it even more impactful?

We’re offering a spring-cleaning sale on WordPress. For a limited time we’ll take 25% off our standard rates for any work on WordPress (MU and BuddyPress too!)

We’ll evaluate your current blog, recommend plug ins and tweaks to help it run smoother, get less spam and more visibility. We can freshen up a new design, create a custom theme, integrate your blog into your web site and even give you a short course on blogging and social media.

Why not find out what we can do for you? There’s no obligation to spend a dime, just Email us to find out more.

A few ex-Google employees just launched a new search engine called CUIL (pronounced cool). The UI is sexy, black with white text and laid out in three columns, allowing you to quickly scan the results. It’s got some nifty AJAX sliding menus on the searches that allows you to view sub categories in your search.

According to their website, CUIL “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

CUIL ranks pages based on relevancy of the content so I did a search for my own name and got links to content I’d written or mentions of me or the company, but several of the images that came up with the search were totally unrelated to the content on the page or my name. (There’s no mention of the potomac on the page and we’re in California.)

I did another search for the Exploratorium and discovered some nice features. A box pops up with related searches such as location, other museums in the area, local information and maps. Sweet!

They may need more time to index as fully as they intend to. A search for Twitter on Google yielded 73,400,000 results and on CUIL 800,000. I didn’t go through them all to see if the 72,600,000 missing links were irrelevant. Maybe I’ll try a smaller search.

All in all I think CUIL needs more time to develop, but I like the direction. For the moment I prefer Chunkit which returns more digestible chunks of information, let’s you email the “Chunk” to a friend, and shows you an indexed version of any site you visit. More on that one later.

The parade of apps that support Twitter never ends, and that’s probably what both brings Twitter to it’s knees and keeps people using the app. All these shiny new toys cannot be ignored. TweetDeck is the newest of these, and, as usual, it was irresistible to sign up for the beta.

I’m a big fan of Summize for keeping track of topics that pop up on Twitter, and I’m also a big fan of Adobe Air clients that make my life easier, so beta testing TweetDeck is a no-brainer.

One of the things that drives me bonkers about Twitter is that when they start to get a heavy load they turn off pagination, or even replies. This means if someone replied to an interesting Tweet last night you’re going to miss it. Using clients like Twhirl let’s you view these older tweets, but you have to scan through a pile of content to get there, and in a pretty small window. This can be painful.

TweetDeck archives up to 168 hours of Twitter traffic in their databases, allowing you to see what you missed while you were offline.
Even if Twitter is offline, you can still follow the tweets that happened before the outage.

You can see your Twitter results in multiple columns, All Tweets, Replies, Group, and Search, making it much easier to quickly scan for what you wanted to find.

The group tab allows you to select Tweeters you want to follow relative to a topic, your friends, or whatever else you’d like, making it a lot easier to see what’s going on in particular areas of interest.

You can perform global Twitter searches using Summize, or local searches of just your friends, and the results stay in the search window, updating automatically.

Remember, this is still in Beta, so there are a few glitches. I noticed that some of my friends didn’t show up in the group lists (This may be because they hadn’t posted recently?), but overall it’s a solid app and a welcome addition to my toolkit.

Maybe you don’t want to hear every single detail of the conference one of your Twitter pals is going to. Or you’re tired of hearing about the new iPhone? TwitterSnooze to the rescue. Tune out those annoying Tweets without having to un-follow or block the user. TwitterSnooze allows you to filter out a Twitterer or topics or subjects with a few keystrokes, all without tipping off your friend that you’re tired of hearing about their trip to Tahoe.
Ahhh the bliss.

We’ve been working on some custom WordPress templates lately, and several will be appearing for download here soon. Who knows, someday we may actually find time to update our own WordPress blog with some cool mods! In the meantime, here’s the newest WordPress template, called “Clean Machine”, as modified for Talk to CJ. You can also check out the custom templates we built for BigFix. Please let us know what you think and what you’d like to see. As we develop these templates it’s a great time to hear new ideas for WordPress designs!

Do you ever remember a site you went to by it’s content or design but can’t remember the name of it?
Unless you’re very organized your bookmarks or favorites list are probably all but useless to help you find that site again.

Enter WebMynd.
It’s a Firefox extension which allows you to keep a virtual gallery of pages you’ve visited. Kind of like a cross between Tivo and the Waybackmachine.
The result is a gallery of screenshots of sites that you visited. The images show up in a slideshow that you can zoom through, or a grid you can quickly scan to find just the site you’re thinking of.

The gallery is not stored on your machine, it’s stored on the WebMynd servers, so it’s easily retrievable wherever you are.

Will it keep every site you’ve ever been to?
Nope, you can turn it on or off or specify sites that it doesn’t need to record, so your journeys to the job banks need never be recorded.

What’s the catch? Obviously they aren’t going to store your surfing history forever. WebMynd archives sites you’ve visited for a week, then you start over. If you want to record them for longer, you can et a paid account and keep your sites visited for 6 months ($10) or 1 year ($20).

All in all it’s a deal if you’re doing research for a project and don’t want to keep bookmarking everything, but don’t need the links long term.

We stay on top of the latest browsers to make sure all our sites look consistent in them and Flock is no exception. It’s based on the Mozilla platform , and we pretty much got what we expected.
But Flock has a different viewpoint on the Web. It’s more than a browser, it’s a social network browser!

With Flock you can keep track of all your social networks in one place.
Once you’ve logged in to your various networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flicker you can click the option at the top of the page to remember your account there. From that point on Flock will track what’s going on in that network. It can show you what your friends are up to and give a nice summary of all of them in one place. You can also add your favorite RSS feeds and easily scan the headings all on one page.

Pluses

• You have one browser for all your social media links, your rss feeds etc.
• Bookmarking can sync with your del.ico.us account.
• Everything is automatically updated, and it’s in an well designed interface.
• You can upload files to flicker or YouTube easily and all in one interface.
• The built in blog editor allows you to post to your blog from wherever you are, rather than having to login.
• Your favorite Firefox extensions will mostly work with Flock. After all it’s the same base platform, but there are some nifty new ones to explore that are specific to social networks.
• The inline feed viewer allows you to

Not so Pluses

• Flock weighs in at over 56 Mb so you’d best have some room on your drive.
• You can’t run Flock and Firefox at the same time. You must quit Firefox to import your favorites from Firefox.
• There’s a bit of work to do to add all your social media networks and configure the browser.
• while it’s true you can post to your blog, Flock won’t let you pick the category it’s posted in and it saves drafts locally and not online, so if you save a draft you have to post it finally from Flock or re-write it.
• There’s also a learning curve to use the browser itself, though thee are tutorials available.

Privacy issues
Somewhat like Facebook’s much maligned Beacon, Flock keeps track of what your friends are up to all day. And what you’re up to all day. Extensions like Me.dium shows you and your friends what each other are up to, what sites you’re surfing and even discuss the sites while you’re there.
There are lots of other nifty features like this, so if you are privacy conscious then choose your add-ons wisely.

Gonna to use it?

Yes and no.
I’ll use it for testing until I’m sure that Firefox and Flock render our designs the same way, or we see how to adjust.
I won’t use it while I’m working or researching. Partly because it doesn’t play nice with Firefox open at the same time. (Because I’m constantly testing I often have 2-3 browsers open at the same time.)

I’ll use it for browsing my rss feeds, social networks and surfing for fun.

Basically it will be where I keep my links for fun, talk to my friends and play, but not where I live.

Well first you need to define it. A lot of people pretend to know what Web 2.0 is, where it’s going, what the new, new thing will be, but quite honestly if I really knew that I wouldn’t be writing this blog from San Jose. I’d be on the Côte d’Azur working on the next new, new, really new thing.

I don’t mind watching though, and love to see this stuff growing and the amazing things that young techs are coming up with. As more and more clients tell me they need to have WEB 2.0 technology, I work with them to help define what it is they really want, how they can use it to the best advantage for them, and find the resources that will help them keep current without buying itno the hype. There are a lot of new tools and techniques coming out of Web 2.0 that will be useful long after the first blush is gone and VCs start to ask questions before opening their pocketbooks.

So, is Web 2.0 the next tech bubble? I sure don’t know, but we’ve been through this before, and see some of the same signs. Apparently so do a bunch of the CEO’s of major Web 2.0 companies.



I don’t think it’s time to abandon ship by any means. This is the evolution of the web and it has been, in large part, a good thing. Just don’t rush out and buy stocks or take that new job with a Web 2.0 start-up without doing your homework. Remember last time?

BigFix is a company that strives to be on the leading edge, both in the security universe and how they present themselves on the web. We’ve just finished an overhaul of their website, converting static pages to a new format that will enable the BigFix team to constantly keep it fresh with dynamic content, and make it much easier to update. The site is optimized for Adobe’s Contribute to update pages and add new content.

Of course a company like BigFix can’t have a plain old press room, so we used a highly modified version of WordPress to keep all the best news from their three blogs, press releases, media attention, videos and a virtual media kit right on the front page of their new social media newsroom.

If you want to get the skinny on who BigFix is, and what they do (how could you not know??) check out the Buzzroom..

Oh, and if you’re looking for your own social media newsroom, a modified WordPress blog, or need to figure out what kind of social media will work best for you, drop us a line. We’ll be happy to help you carve out your own unique space in the online community.

A local dog group wanted a place to view their video collection, so we put this page together. Now the group has a place to share community videos that is easy for anybody to add to.

The Wimpy player is easily skinnable and customizes to your look and feel, and once configured and installed, adding new content is truly a breeze.

Please note: the quality of this video is not so hot, but that’s not the player’s fault. You can still get great compression with Flash and have your quality cake and eat it too!