Every site, including searching for “google” as you can see below are apparently malicious. Every second Google is down costs the company millions of dollars, and all of the businesses that rely on Google to market and advertise their services.

Spending the past 12 months developing my blog, I’ve learned a lot when it comes to how to optimize Adsense placements, and I wanted to share some of the best tips I’ve learned.

Easy Adsense Placement Techniques

Place Your Ads Inline

As you can see from our sister-site FinancialPlanr, if you want to have users click on your ads, you need to make sure they’re seeing them. If you’re not sure where your users are clicking, and where their mouse activity is, you can use a piece of free software called ClickHeat. As you can see, all of my activity is in the main left pane.

Place Linkunits As Menu Options

The key to getting users to actually want to click on your ads is to make them useful. Placing linkunits at the top of your page creates directly relevant content available for your users. To see it in action, head over to FDIC Loan Modification.

Prior to finding this out, I always thought the linkunit was a worthless ad piece, but now I’ve found that this ad-size has the best returns for me.

Hopefully these tips are useful for you, if you enjoyed this post, please hit the Stumble button, we definitely appreciate it.

Great minds like to work in numbers, and nobody knows that better than Pixar. They are the Hollywood-blockbuster producing Animated Powerhouse that has brought us Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles, etc.

Their first big hit came with Toy Story, where the entire core teams focused on creating this masterpiece. After its success, Pixar had to figure out how to recreate the success of Toy Story, and that’s where they looked to the power of teams.

The Power of Teamwork

From an article in the Harvard Business Review, by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, titled “How Pixar fosters collective creativity.”

It’s been obvious for a long time that no one gets very far in the movie business believing in the myth of the lone genius “artiste”. Catmull says, “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems…A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas.” Depending on one brilliant creator to come up with all of those ideas just wouldn’t make any sense; “every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

Although each movie has a core team who are responsible for the coherence of the overall product, everyone is expected “to show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew” so that “people learn from and inspire each other”.

Pixar believes in the power of what I call “collaborative webs”–networks of expertise that extend beyond the boundaries of any one organization. For example, their artists are encouraged to publish their research and talk about it at industry conferences, rather than to guard it as a trade secret. Why? “The connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed.”

And finally, Pixar’s office space is designed to foster “maximum inadvertent encounters,” just as I advise in Group Genius. The central atrium contains the cafeteria, bathrooms, meeting rooms, and mailboxes, and Catmull writes “It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.”

The process of creating the widget was very Google-esque, and I was done in about 5 minutes. So far, I’m the only member of the site, but there is a big upside with this Friend Connect. One of my biggest complaints about MyBlogLog is that it is so damned slow. It’s always slowing down the loading of my pages and their interface is utterly worthless.

Friend Connect Setup

Getting the actual widget setup was a breeze, there is an introduction screen that sort of describes what to expect with these new features, and customizing the widget was also extremely easy.

The Friend Connect features themselves appear to be in Beta, much like almost all of the Google products, however, it is built around the Open Social framework, so there should be a lot more widgets available soon, with the easy of use of plug and play functionality — no programming required.

So please join the community, slap the widget on your blog, and let’s start building this Friend Connect from the ground up–

The Best Google Logos From 2001 to Today

This will be great for YouTube growth, but I don’t know how well this is going to play out for monetizing YouTube.

It’s a pretty cool feature none-the-less, meaning you can browse through pretty much any YouTube video from any widget on any site. Grooveshark just released their widget, but unfortunately it doesn’t include the ability to listen to any song on a remote site, although we may see that functionality employed in the future.

I had pre-ordered the gPhone about a month ago, when T-Mobile announced the phones were going on sale.

It took me a couple of tries until the screen actually worked, but I eventually was able to place my order. Unfortunately they didn’t have any White units in stock, but luckily they didn’t stick me with the Brown.

For some reason the brown sounded appealing at first, but if I ended up with one, I would have felt short-changed. Look at the Zune: brown doesn’t work.

T-Mobile G1 New gPhone Review

The packaging is very nice, with the box having an insert and the outer frame showing through in the area with the ‘G1′. Inside the box was a nice foam padded area, and the phone was prominently displayed.

T-Mobile definitely took their time crafting nice packaging for the device, but as usual, the accessories definitely underperformed. The new gPhone packaging and look for T-Mobile makes me feel like T-Mobile is starting to build their brand beyond AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.

I don’t know about you, but I like all of the accessories to maintain the same fit and finish of the device, but the accessories definitely fell short.

There is the headphones, that look like the standard blackberry affair, and the charger was disappointing, as strange as that sounds–I didn’t expect an iPhone charger, but I would have liked a foldable charger akin to the Blackberry.

The device itself is actually pretty impressive. It looks like your typical PDA/HTC phone, but has a little sophistication to it. The all black lines give it a business feel, and the keyboard isn’t as bad as I thought.

Personally, I like the iPhone’s keyboard the best, and can type on it using one hand. With the gPhone, I have to use two hands.

The most annoying part of the keyboard is my right hand. It’s inhibited by the bump of the buttons, and makes it hard to start hacking away like I would on a Blackberry or iPhone. I’d have to say the keyboard is more of a drawback than a feature.

The buttons on the base of the device are pretty useful, and I found myself using the trackball more than I did the screen. Maybe it’s because I’m used to my Blackberry 8800 and its trackball, but it seemed to get the job done for the most part.

The trackball didn’t always became ‘active’ on the screen. And what I mean by this is essentially when you’re using a PC and you’re trying to click in the search box, but the mouse hits the wrong area, and you can’t type. This is the same situation with the trackball. I had to essentially tap on the screen with my finger to get the trackball in the correct sensing-position.

The flip mechanism was a lot more well constructed than I expected, and you can see the locking and snapping mechanism, it looks pretty robust. My girlfriend actually felt the snapping of the keyboard into place was a little too violent and thought it might lead to deteriorating after extended use/drops.

I think it should last you at least a year, but for those people who don’t upgrade their phones as often as me, it could present a problem.

The Android OS was less than impressive. It felt more like a computer than the iPhone, but lacked the fit and finish I’ve come to expect on the iPhone. Browsing around menus was often confusing, and not as intuitive as the iPhone.

I expect over time to learn the ins and outs of the phone, but would have liked more ease of use out-of-the-box. One feature that was appealing was the ability for apps to run in the background. I could listen to music on the Imeem app, while browsing the Internet, or trying to figure out how to connect to a Wifi hotspot.

Managing the connections is also less than intuitive, and I hope will get more updates in the future. You can’t manage connections from the desktop, but have to go into settings, which can be a lot of steps for trying to setup an open network. I actually couldn’t get on our local open network, because it requires you to validate the session in the browser, and I couldn’t get the connection started, and validate in the browser effectively.

Wifi on my home network was great, and I could even stream Imeem over Edge, which was particularly impressive.

The camera was better than I expected, but the shutter was incredibly slowww. It is even slower than the iPhone, making it virtually useless. You can see in the picture below that it seems to have some shake, which is really because you have to hold the camera still for a good 6 seconds.

Hopefully we’ll see a software update for the camera, because as of now it’s useless. As for video recording, I can’t find anything. I was hoping there would be a native app, but there’s nothing included. I searched the App Market, but couldn’t find a video recording app as well.

Using gMail and my email was a little annoying to setup. Unlike the iPhone, you don’t have a central area for mail. You either have your Mail or gMail. You can’t view both inboxes at the same time or even switch to them. You have to log into each application separately.

There are nice notifications that come up when you have new emails/SMS/etc but without PUSH, it’s a little aggravating the email experience is so lackluster.

Overall, my conclusion is that I will most likely be selling the G1. It doesn’t offer me the email ease of use that my Blackberry has, and without a 3G network in my area, the iPhone is killing it in terms of speed.

While I think I would be more confident having only the gPhone if I were on a trip, and the iPhone wouldn’t perform as well. On a day-to-day basis, the iPhone fits my personal uses better, and is more impressive, and show-stopping.

For those of you on T-Mobile, who don’t have an unlocked iPhone, I would say this is a great phone upgrade for anyone not used to Blackberries, and the Sidekick users should be really happy with this upgrade.

There are a couple of caveats you should be aware of. This new gPhone is not the only Google Phone to be released. T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T all will be releasing a gPhone at some point, although Sprint has said they will not have an Android phone available.

As far as comparisons go, this phone is better than anything Sprint has to offer. It is comparable to an iPhone, and is better than the Sprint Samsung iPhone killer.

The Android/Google Phone does not support flash. So you can’t watch Hulu, YouTube (natively), etc. The gPhone does not have A2DP support. And the headphones do not supply a 3.5mm jack meaning you can’t use your iPhone headphones.

The T-Mobile network is also quite slow. It’s on EDGE, and there is not T-Mobile coverage nationwide, so you may be stuck with very slow downloads or streaming audio or video.

Perhaps the next devices will be a little better than this new gPhone, as I think version 2.0 will have a great chance of being a true iPhone competitor or even killer.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed my review of the new Google gPhone G1 or whatever you want to call it

Sure, nobody likes Big Brother looking over their shoulder, but your ISP knows all of those movies you’re downloading on BitTorrent.

And with that notion, you pretty much pretend to ignore that as you download-away your dirty little habits.

So stop whining, and start loving the new gPhone and your current Apple-God who has already shut down all your favorite apps.

5 Reasons Google Kill Switch Ain’t That Bad

1. So why is this kill switch so bad? It means Google can shut off an Ask.com application, right? Or any company that competes with them, like Apple does? No, it doesn’t. Google is built on being an open platform, and they know better than anyone that they’re committing public relations suicide by killing any competitor. Google isn’t Apple, and don’t pretend they’re the same because they both now have Phones.

2. You hate spyware right? Unless you have a Mac, and you have no idea what spyware is, you probably hate spyware. Giving Microsoft the ability to turn off remote apps would be amazing. Hell, you spend $50 on Norton and give them complete control over your computer anyway.

3. Remote kill switch means remote updates as well. With the good comes the bad. With no ability to sync Android with your PC or Mac, you’re going to need to have over-the-air synchronization to get any software updates.

4. Macs run Windows. Apple, the king of all restrictions, allows Windows to be run on its machines. In fact, they fostered Boot Camp development and support users to install Windows on their machines. Apple realizes they only have a 5% market share for a reason. Android right now has a 0% market share, so I doubt we’re going to see them cutting off any apps that drives further adoption.

5. Google is an advertising company. Google is not in business to sell phones. Google is not in business to sell software downloads. Google’s goal is to get more people to use their phones, which means purchasing phones (yes) but they don’t need to make a profit on the phones themselves. The more people who buy phones, the more people who will be using Google’s line of services. Turning off services that prompt higher user adoption is not Google’s business model.

When selecting a WordPress theme, you should have two major concerns. The WordPress theme should be among the best in SEO ranking, that is it allows your stories and articles to have the highest search engine ranking position (SERP) and also allows you the maximum design aesthetics. You want your blog to be ranking highest in Google’s search algorithms and ranking highest in terms of web-design for user preferences.

I’ve been looking to start some small vertical blogs to help bolster my tiny web empire village and am looking for great WordPress themes that are going to rank well in Google and provide little-to-no-maintenance issues for me.

After searching the net, I’ve found 5 themes that I personally consider for my own sites, and wanted to share them with you.

Best WordPress Themes for SEO

PassionDuo Blue
This is actually my favorite, since it has the big placement of the 125 buttons on the side, and although it doesn’t look like much from the screenshot, is a quality building block.

GreenOrnament 1.0

iTheme Clear Blue 1.1

Logi 1.0

MarlexSystems 2.0

The best themes for WordPress are judged by two main levels. How well they rank you in Google and the subsequent SERP they give you, and also the best web design in regards to overall SEO-effect.

The top SEO themes have all of their site structures being very clean, and readable by Google. They will include all of your categories, tags, and stories in easy to read format for the robots on Google including all of the meta and header tags.

Additionally, I would suggest you check out our 50 tips for a high traffic blog, to get you started on your blog marketing and grab the all-in-one SEO plugin as well.

So what happened yesterday and is breaking news this morning? As a morning warrior, you have to be awake at dawn break busting your ass.

I was inspired to wake up at 5am after hearing Donald Trump mention it on the Howard Stern show, he gets up at 5am and so does Frank Lucas (American Gangster), so it’s safe to say I’m in successful company.

Feel Smarter Yet?

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