Automakers gaining on the almighty Prius

It is refreshing to see that there is getting to be a lot more to choose from in the hybrid arena .I think that it is about time that all the major car companies get on board with the energy efficient automobiles .It is a little disappointing that the gas mileage figures are not higher than they are .But hey ,it is a step in the right direction .It is my belief that we need to pursue cars that get a lot more mileage than theses if we are going to wean ourselves off foreign oil .I would like to see vehicles that would even exceed the highly acclaimed Prius .

Savings accounts online

You've gotta squeeze the most out of your pennies in todays economy. Make sure that you are getting the best online savings accounts available by comparing rates. It very easy to do now, and even easier to move your money around to a higher interest account. Don't let your money sit idle, even a half percentage point can make a big difference in the long run

More option for saving on gas prices coming soon

It is refreshing to see that there is getting to be a lot more to choose from in the hybrid arena .I think that it is about time that all the major car companies get on board with the energy efficient automobiles .It is a little disappointing that the gas mileage figures are not higher than they are .But hey ,it is a step in the right direction .It is my belief that we need to pursue cars that get a lot more mileage than theses if we are going to wean ourselves off foreign oil .I would like to see vehicles that would even exceed the highly acclaimed Prius .

High speed internet

I've had either dsl, fios, or cable internet for several years now. I've been happy with most of the services that I've used but I think the FioS from Verizon provides the best performance.

I'm always looking for a better deal and more performance. Checkout this blog post with tips on finding the best internet service.

New hybrid vehicles from Honda

Honda by hybridization is optimally applied to smaller vehicle and the new care will be competitively equipped for its class. The vice president of Honda R & D Americans said that they are developing an all-new, purpose-built hybrid vehicle, scheduled for introduction later this decade that will meet the needs of a family at a price beneath the Civic Hybrid. They have reduced content in addition to improving the cost-efficiency of electric drive components and also have confident that they have struck on an elegant technology approach that can meet these emissions standards without a tank of urea. More affordable fuel-saving options from Honda are just over the horizon.

See also: Top 10 fuel efficient cars for 2008

Linked

Google has released a Social Graph API that allows to see how things are related on the web using only pubiclly available data. One of its many features is maping how your websites are related. If I input my websites into the demo:

http://del.icio.us/baileycross
http://www.grilldemon.com
http://baileycross.com
http://pdxtransit.com
http://kitchenandlaundry.com
linkedin.com/pub/2/681/106
twitter.com/baileycross

it assigns a score indicating how many of your claimed sites can be reached from each url. Maybe this has some applications for SEO. Not really sure at this point.

Check out the following link to see my social graph relationships

Mother of all Smokers

Well, mother of all bbq smokers may be a bit of an exaggeration. However, the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker comes very close. The WSM is a very functional, affordable, and efficient grill. You can pickup one for just a little bit more than $200 on the web. Its small enough, when disassembled it can fit into the back seat car. The construction is top notch. Rust proof and heavy duty. It keeps a nice even heat during use.

The WSM has all of the functionality of the larger horizontal grills including a water pan for indirect cooking, a smoking rack, 3 configurable air vents (1 top, two bottom), and a fair amount of cooking surface.




With practice you could feed an army with your smoker. I recommend using a vertical rib rack to increase your usable space. Easily you could smoke 5-7 racks of ribs on the top rack and at least 1 medium-large chicken in the bottom area.


Recently, I participated in a grilling competition in Seattle with the pnwba. I noted that at least 50% of the participants used a Weber Bullet. If your just getting started in bbqing or a seasoned veteran, I highly recommend buying a weber smokey mountain cooker.

Grilldemon.com lives - just barely

I just kicked off a new website called grilldemon.com. Its an oscommerc loaded website with a template inspired by abtelectronic.com website. It has a lot of whitespace, and is hopefully easy to read for potential customers.

I decided a site soley dedicated to outdoor cooking, grills and accessories would be a good idea because it would allow the development of content within a small set of products. I wanted to get away from having sites that sell too many different types of products.

I'd love from grilldemon.com to grow into a site like webernation which has a huge and loyal following. Well, its a start at least. One thing I did discover is that godaddy is not the best site for hosting using their free hosting account. they but a fairly large banner in the heading. not a good way to win over new customers. As a result, I'm going to migrate grilldemon over to neureal.

We'll see how it turns out.

Google Labs shows trends of keywords

Google has some interesting research tools on the web for tracking the trends of keywords. This article on popularity of hybrid vehicles show how the web matches the popularity of a given trend. You can also use the google trend tool on famous people to see important dates and events in their lives.

Ebay store doing well

I opened up an ebay store a few weeks ago at http://stores.ebay.com/Cross-Computers-and-Electronics. I signed up for the basic store, only $15 a month. It allows you to add new items, create categories, display promotions, and customize the site layout.

Its been very successful so far and I've had over 15 sales - mostly Weber grills and accessories.

I'm looking into buying some ebay market data, but not sure if its worth the money. I've struggled with determining what items to sell, how much to sell for, and finding the sales history available.

You can use eBay Market Data to:

• Conduct factual analysis -- explore pricing or product decisions
• Build pricing guides -- understand the fair-market value of goods
• Understand customer behavior -- understand what people are purchasing by
  demographic
• Identify market gaps -- discover where supply constraints exist
• Improve marketing effectiveness -- decide which merchandising features work
  best
• Provide consulting and training -- help eBay sellers better understand
  marketplace dynamics

adventures in ecommerce

I decided to try wordpress at an ecommerce solution because of the fantastic framework, adaptability and growing number of plugin. I didn't find a lot of good shopping cart plugins available when I embarked on builing my site, http://kitchenandlaundry.com a few months ago. The best available was the WP Shopping Cart (3.4.6 beta). Out of the box, it provides a lot of good functionality, a nice interface for adding products, paypal integration, and it’s easy to modify the layout using CSS.

All that being said, I've had the following difficulties with the plugin:

• SEO and indexing - I thought that this would be a big benefit for using wordpress but none of my product pages have been ranked by google and it appears that they overall structure is difficult for indexing. As a result, most of the traffic to my website kitchenandlaundry.com has been through Google adwords and not organic search.
• Compatibility with other plug-ins - There are some fantastic plugins available for Wordpress but they may not necessarily work with the wp shopping cart. The reason is that instead of using “posts” to represent products the plugin creates a new set of database tables and functions. As a result, Wordpress plugins designed to function on posts may not work.
• Tracking products - From the shopping cart control panel, its tough to see how many times a given item has been viewed, added to the cart, etc. You can do this through google analytics if you setup a funnel.
• RSS product feed - I'm sure this has been added, but at the time I installed it wasn't available.
  Documentation - If you want to modify the functionality of the plug-in, you are basically on your own. This is understandable as the company wants you to buy their upgrades in order to add functionality.
• User community - Still very small compared to oscommerce & zend cart.
• Users accounts - Oscommerce does this very well as customers can login and check their order status, address book, etc. It may not be a big deal if you aren't interested in repeat customers.
  

I’m sure a lot has changed since 3.4.6 beta and I’m interested to hear what other people’s experiences have been with wp shopping cart. Any suggestions?

amazon zshop

I was burned by amazon marketplace and I would not recommend their service to anyone. The review and comment system gives absolute power to the buyer and leaves the seller little or no recourse if dissputes occur.

Trying out amazon.com zshops

I signed up as an Amazon seller last week to help augment the sales of my main webpage http://cceshop.com. For $39, Amazon sellers can list products for sale on the main Amazon market place website, as a stand alone web zshop, or as an auction site. Signup was very easy and they provide a suite of tools to help you import your products, prices, and inventory into their system.

You can find my zshop at www.amazon.com/shops/cceshop

Live traffic condition for Portland, Oregon on your cell

Google recently announced Google Map Mobile will provide live traffic data for Portland, Oregon and 30 other cities in the US via cell phones. I decided to try it out of my Blackberry and share some of my findings with you.
To download and use Google maps, open the following link on your phone, http://google.com/gmm. If you hate typing on your cell, try sending the link as an email or SMS text to your phone. Otherwise, open your phone’s browser and enter the URL. You should be prompted to confirm installation. If you have trouble with the setup, check the compatibility list at http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html.
Assuming that you have the application installed, you’ll need to start Google maps. On my phone it was installed under the “Applications” folder.

Your first task is to find Portland, Oregon on the map. There are a couple of ways to do this: Panning or “Finding a Business” / “Finding a location”. Each is discussed briefly below.
Panning is best used for when you are performing precise selection or fine tuned movement across a small portion of the Google map.
My phone had the following key mapping for navigation:Key Direction5 Pan up8 Down7 Left9 Right
The screen is updated as you pan and requires your phone to perform more frequent requests to Google to update the screen. Note method may prove costly depending on your service agreement and if you per Kb/MB. I suggest you give panning a try just to get the hang of it. Next try Finding a Location using Google maps.
Finding a Business/location is typically the easiest way to navigate to a specific address on the map. This feature is extremely useful if you get lost going someplace and are too embarrassed to ask or call for directions. To use this feature, you’ll need to select “Find Location” option and select then “Enter an address” from the resulting window. Type a valid street address using the touch pad and press the enter key. If you’ve entered a valid address, the map will center upon it and the address will be stored on your phone for future searches in the “Recent places” menu. I suggest looking up the address of your house so that it can be used in subsequent searches. .
Now that you have found a valid address, it should be displayed on the map. If you’d like to save the address in your favorite places for quick searches later press the 2 key. Scroll to “Save as a favorite”.
Ready to see live traffic conditions? Ok, select “Show Traffic” and wait patiently as the Google Map web service performs its magic.
Now your phone will be annotated will green and red lines indicating update to date traffic conditions. To get a more detailed look try zooming in on the map using the 6 key to Zoom in and the 4 Key to Zoom out
This post just scratches the surface of what you can do with Google maps mobile. For more more details , check out the Google Maps mobile website at
Drop me a line and let me know how accurate the live traffic service is during your commute home on The Sunset. cell driving Google map mobile

Web Hosting, Advertising, Keywords

A friend asked me about how to get his website listed on google and yahoo. I thought I would share a summary of what I wrote .

Submitting URL to search engine for free
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps - Submit a sitemap that allows google to efficiently index your website content. It requires you to create a robot.txt file and verify that you are owner of the site. There are two verification methods, uploading a html files with a provided name or including a meta tag in your header. You site must be verified before you can use the tools mentioned below.

The site also provides statics about your site, how/when its been last "crawled", pages that have been indexed, etc.

Checking keywords.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - Give this one a try and see how many hits your keywords will generate.
Google has another great tool for keywords research. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=3

Cheap Domains (No web hosting included)
http://order.sbs.yahoo.com/ds/ChooseDomain?d=&.p=YD1&m=dom&.src=sbs&.promo=PASSPORTPLUS Yahoo! Small business. Domains cost $3 for the first year. However, it goes up after that! I bought one domain with them and the service is pretty good
http://godaddy.com domains cost $6.95. I’ve bought a couple of domains with them and they have good customer service.
http://www.ipower.com – Domains cost $2.95 but I’ve heard the customer service is kind of iffy.

Amazon Instant Ecommerce Website

Amazon is offering free Web hosting of your e-commerce bookstore. Or you can sell any other kind of merchandise except the usual prohibited stuff like firearms and pornography. Amazon hasn't announced this program yet. It's still in beta, but you can sign up here.I've got to admit, I never saw this coming. It's a bold move by Amazon, and a huge counterpunch to eBay's Stores program, which costs at least $14.95. The barriers to entry to e-commerce are just about gone now.

The only remaining obstacles for Joe Six-Pack having his own Web store are monthly hosting fees and the hassle of getting your own domain. With this offer, Amazon eliminates both those headaches for you -- you just give them the name of your company and the URL you want to use.And not only that, Amazon will collect the payments for you, so no need for you to fiddle with PayPal or paying a big application fee for your own credit-card merchant account.Believe it or not, it gets even better: Amazon is thinking about offering to warehouse and ship your goods too. My understanding is this part of the program hasn't been finalized, but it's part of the plan.Looks like Amazon is targeting every kind of merchant under the sun, not just booksellers. Here's one of the pilot stores, a Web site that sells waterproof bedding. Other pilot stores are selling coffee, auto accessories, flowers -- a big variety.Now this program won't automatically generate traffic to your e-commerce site -- that's still your job. But here's the great thing about it: Say a visitor to your site buys your item. During the checkout process, they see related merchandise from another Amazon seller. You can get an affiliate commission (probably about 6.5 percent) on that additional sale. To get these additional commission, you'll need to sign up for Amazon's Associates Program separately. One more thing: The word I hear is that Amazon will tie this new program into its plans for pay-per-click advertising. In other words, if you're paying Google to bring in customers using Adwords, Amazon is going to go after that business too. [From slickdeals.net]

Free Hosting, website at Microsoft Office Live Beta

Microsoft Office Live Beta is giving away basic websites, domain name registeration, 5 email addresses for free. See http://officelive.microsoft.com/default.aspx

Cool stuff and random thoughts

You gotta check out my buddy's blog at http://amelabs.blogspot.com/. Tony has some good articles on cool new products available on the web.

The Bridge™ iPod® Docking Station

Now, The Bridge literally links your iPod and Harman Kardon allowing you to share the favorite tracks and playlists stored on your iPod with anyone in listening range of compatible Harman Kardon AVR - even in a connected second room. Dock your iPod in The Bridge, then sit back and operate it with the AVR's remote control while on-screen and front-panel menus guide your track selections. The Bridge also charges the iPod while you use it.

Features:
Simple Solution for playback and navigation control of your iPod.
Ready AVR Receiver
Single Cable Connection from the Bridge to the AVR
Use AVR's Remote and Front-Panel to navigate and control iPod iPod Navigation displayed on-screen and AVR front panel

SpamBaiting

Mike Wendland (Detroit Free Press): November 4 article looks at SpamBaiting

There's a new way to fight those Nigerian scam e-mails that keep circulating online.

It's called SpamBaiting.

The idea is to pull a reverse sting on the spam scammers, leading them on by pretending to go along with the con through increasingly silly and insulting e-mail replies.

While it's not officially endorsed by law enforcement, the pastime has become so popular that more than 50 Web sites are now devoted to hassling the scammers. The biggest and most imaginative is 419eater.com, which calls the practice a cyber sport and has posted dozens of e-mail exchanges with scammers from all over the world.

Surely, if you've been online for any length of time, you've heard from these electronic con artists who pretend to have fortunes worth millions that they want to invest or move out of the country. They offer you a lucrative cut, supposedly to help them do it.

As the greedy victims get sucked into the scam, the con artists find ingenious ways to get them to send their bank account info or pay up-front fees needed to get the cash out of their country.

The con is called the Nigerian scam, or 419 fraud, after a section of the Nigerian criminal code that makes the practice illegal. Although it originated in Nigeria, it is being used by online criminals all over the world.