People are visual so YouTube is more powerful than Twitter, right? But Twitter allows people to post very short messages. In an age of Big Mac attacks and instant coffee, that makes Twitter more valuable, doesn’t it? Well …

I don’t know, maybe we should take a vote, or a poll. I personally like both tools. You can actually use them simultaneously. Here’s how you can use both tools to make each one more powerful than it is on its own.

Upload a YouTube video. Then, send out a Twitter message with a link to the page for that video.

Another way, you can upload the video to YouTube then blog about it on your blog, embedding it there. Then send a short message on Twitter with a link to your blog post.

Here’s a Ron Paul video I Twittered a few moments ago:

Internet marketers have been looking for new and innovative ways to market themselves for years. They’ve tried article marketing, blogging, SEO, pay per click, video marketing, viral marketing, and a host of other ways promoting themselves online. Is toolbar marketing the next wave?

Toolbars allow marketers an opportunity to build a community around their niche while making extra money in the process. Thanks to a company called Conduit, many marketers have built toolbars around popular niches and earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, depending on usage. One example is the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Marketers have built toolbars around many niches. Poetry is just one. There are toolbars that focus entirely on marketing and SEO, giving users tools that will help them in their online marketing and search engine optimization strategies, entertainment, news, sports, and various other niches. Toolbar creators make money whenever new users download their toolbars and whenever users use their toolbars to search the Internet, read blogs, use gadgets and other toolbar features, and can even listen to the radio through their toolbars. While it’s just a small thing, it is just one more new media tool that can be used for marketing purposes.

Google has decided to enter the browser wars. That’s fine. Their ubiquity will supersede them.

I don’t have a problem with Google Chrome. I haven’t even downloaded it to take it for a test drive. I probably won’t. I really don’t even have a problem with Google wanting to get in on the browser wars. It’s possible that they will beat out Microsoft IE in the long run. I think that’s what the plan is, though they will never outsmart Mozilla Firefox.

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin has said that the success of Firefox is what inspired Google Chrome. That’s cool. But that won’t necessarily equate to success for Google. Take a look:

My problem with the whole Google Chrome browser introduction is that Google seems to want to be the king of all media - but I thought that was Howard Stern? OK, pardon the digression. The point is, Google may want to own the Internet, and I think their idea for the next generation of Web browser - one that will serve as a real-time application for Web 2.0 with all kinds of cool bells and whistles - is a good idea. In fact, I think Mozilla Firefox will incorporate some of those ideas into its next upgrade version. I certainly hope so because it’s my preferred browser.

Microsoft may even try to use some of Google’s ideas in its next version of IE, but MS needs to first catch up to Mozilla before it can try to tackle Google. When it comes to Web browsers, I want something that helps me see information online better. I don’t necessarily want a browser that will sing and dance and show me some skin. One of the best ideas that Google introduces through its Web browser is the multi-application approach. The fact that each tab can run separate Web apps simultaneously without clogging my computer memory and when I close a tab all the memory required to run the app that tab opened goes away as well is a cool and useful feature. I hope Mozilla Firefox incorporates it because I really don’t want to switch browsers.

GoDaddy is very popular. Lots of people use them and they’ll start a blog using GoDaddy as their host. But most of these people don’t know how to set up a blog properly. If they did they wouldn’t want GoDaddy hosting their blog.

WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms because it is free, open source, and great for SEO. That’s SEO - search engine optimization.

Webmasters and bloggers, those who are worth their salt, consider search engine optimization important because a healthy knowledge of it will practically ensure good rankings in the search engines. It involves studying search results and figuring out what best practices to use to help web pages rank well for their important key terms. One of the things that many webmasters and bloggers have found to help them rank better in the search engines is something called a permalink.

Why Permalinks Are Important - Even At GoDaddy

A permalink is simply the permanent URL address of a blog post. Whether you use WordPress or another blog software, your permalink is the URL that appears in a visitor’s web browser when they land on a specific post within your blog. WordPress has a default URL structure that looks like this:

http://newsandmediablog.com/?p=123

The special character “?” does not mean much to search engines. They will rank these pages, but some of your pages may not get crawled due to this permalink structure. That’s not good. So what you want to do is create a structure for your page URLs - your permalinks - that are more “search engine friendly.” That’s the part you need to know and which GoDaddy is not very good at recognizing.

There are any number of ways that you can structure your permalinks to benefit you. The bottom line is, you want to replace “?p=123″ with something that includes your keywords - the keywords that are important to your blog post, not necessarily your entire blog. For instance, this blog post that I’m writing now plays off of these keywords: “media”, “news”, “GoDaddy”. I have all three of those keywords in the title of this blog post and I want them all in my permalink as well.

If you set your WordPress permalink structure just right, your blog post title will become your permalink. Your URL for the blog post will then look like this:

http://newsandmediablog.com/online-media-news-is-godaddy-a-good-hosting-company

Of course, you can structure in a number of variations that include the date of the post, the title of the primary category you’ve placed the post in, or any other combination of important details. But you want to make sure that what follows the “/” after the domain name of your blog includes your primary keyword once. If you can do that then you’ll increase your chances of having that blog post rank well for your keyword in the search engines.

Sounds Simple, Now What, GoDaddy?

It does sound simple, but it is a little more complicated than that. To change your permalink structure, you have to find the htaccess file on your server and make some changes to it. In fact, you have to change your settings in WordPress for the structure that you want (WordPress gives you several options) then copy the code that WordPress generates for you and paste it into your htaccess file. If you do not have an htaccess file then you have to create one and past that code into your newly created htaccess file.

Creating an htaccess file is fairly simple. You can do it in Notepad. Then you FTP it onto your server in the root of your WordPress blog folder. If you do that with any host other than GoDaddy, it works like a charm. But you can’t do it with GoDaddy. They have a version of Apache that makes this an impossible task and causes bloggers using WordPress to be stuck with a less than adequate permalink structure. Chris McElroy explains it at Things That Just Piss Me Off.

GoDaddy is a popular web host because they are inexpensive and appeal to new webmasters who won’t ask a lot of questions. But if you want to run a WordPress blog through GoDaddy, you will have a tough time making SEO work in your favor and your competition will have the upper hand. That’s not good.

For years, the scientific community has been baffled by how the brain registers images and allows us to see color.

The human eye can distinguish approximately 10 million colors. That technology is available but limited. The robotic eye can only distinguish 1 million colors. So you see (no pun intended), the margin for improvement is quite large.

That margin has become considerably less with the latest scientifc breakthrough. New York University biologists have mapped the medulla circuitry in fruit flies, setting the stage for subsequent research on how color vision is processed.

Morante and Desplan reconstructed the neural network in Drosophila’s medulla–the brain structure where color photoreceptors project–focusing on neurons likely to be involved in processing color vision. In this endeavor, they identified the full complement of neurons in the medulla. They also developed highly specific analytical tools that will allow scientists to functionally manipulate the network and test both activity and behavior.

Eventually, the scientific community hopes to map the entire eye, optic nerve and brain to answer many questions. For more on this subject, click here.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study recently that describes who is excited about information and communication technology and who is so-so involved. It seems that the average American isn’t as bullish on the Net as we’ve been lead to believe, but like some folks, I’m encouraged by the study nonetheless.

In a nutshell, here are the findings:

• 31% of American adults are elite users of ICT
• Among that 31%, 8% of completely engrossed in technology
• 7% are connected and use ICT heavily
• 8% are termed “lackluster veterans” - frequent Internet users but not hip on cell phones; ICT as a whole is just a tool for casual use
• The final 8% of the top-tier of ICT users are productivity enhancers, nothing more

A little lower on the totem pole, Pew reports:

• 10% of American adults are mobile centric; that is, they love their cell phones but the Internet not so much
• Another 10% are connected but find information to be a bit of a hassle
• This 20% are referred to as “middle-of-the-road” technology users

The final 49% of American adults have relatively few technology gadgets. The question is, will they ever get them? Here’s the breakdown:

(more…)

IF YOU cross the road in New York while listening to an iPod or chatting on your mobile, you could end up facing a $100 fine.

New York State Senator Carl Kruger said he has had enough of people being killed crossing the road while distracted by electronic devices and it was time to fine people.

The streets will not be a place to use Blackberry devices and video games either. Kruger told Reuters that the government had an obligation to protect its citizenry. Although we would have thought Darwin would be a little more effective in the long term.

Yeah, that’s what we need. A law telling us not to jaywalk while listening to Jay-Z. Why don’t these people just walk underground? You can do that in New York. You can walk the entire city under the ground. It’s pretty cool. I’ve done it. Where else are you going to see break dancing midgets for free? Or a lady painted blue all over (I’ve actually got a picture of this.

But I know New York has a lot of lawyers and lawyers like to argue. Didn’t any of them ever think to say, “iPods don’t kill people; people kill people.” It works with guns.

News and Media