Creating online demos

Joel recommends Camtasia Studio for online demos:

One product I just can’t stop singing the praises of is Camtasia Studio,
by the folks at TechSmith in Okemos, Michigan. It lets you "film" your
computer screen, all in software of course, then edit the film, add
narration, then squeeze it down to a very compact flash movie you can
put on the web. This is a beautiful piece of software. It does exactly
what you need, works the first time, and comes with great documentation
you’ll never need.

Here are some free alternatives:
AutoScreenRecorder
CamStudio
VirtualDub
Wink
Windows Media Encoder  Overview

Mac
QPICT

T-Mobile Offers Street-Level Coverage Maps

Glenn discusses the business decision for offering visual maps of cell phone coverage

Open Source: Capturing the Upside While Avoiding the Downside

A recording at ItConversations by Clayton Christensen about disruptive ideas in traditional businesses

[:29] "skate to where the money will be"

[:21] "..if you come in to an existing market with a better product, odds are the competitors will get you….if you come in with a disruptive product, odds you will win because you setup a situation where the establishment will flee rather than fight…"

Getting noticed by Google

I’m not sure how accurate these tips for Better Google Rankings are but they are worth considering. See, I used tip #11 for the link in the previous sentence.  I think you can be too clever and some tips may not even work so you may be sacrificing needlessly.  For me, the important items are to choose your words carefully and provide useful information that would make others link to your content.

Search Engines News contains lots of good stuff about how Google and other search engines work.

There are many companies out there that want you to pay them to help you create and maintain a high search engine ranking.  I can’t vouch for them or for the techniques used.  I would pick and implement the "low hanging fruit" techniques, maintain a weblog, and just write about things that customers or your audience would be interested in.

Martin recommends leaving Google Page ranking behind:

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine
success. It (did) have everthing to do with "importance"…So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What
you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many
"RELATED _ RELATED" places that you can and let search engines do their own
thing.

Derik offers Top 5 tips for Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings:

In the past couple of years, many of the major search engines have shifted their
ranking algorithm to give higher preference to those sites that are more popular
by having many links to them or having links from important sites

A few more insights in what get’s Googles attentions

Finally, Google technologye explained by Google itself:

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The
speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search
algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together
to create a superfast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages
developed by our founders Larry Page
and Sergey Brin at Stanford
University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every
aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for
all of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its
vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence,
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.
But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page
receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages
that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
"important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google
remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean
nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with
sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and
relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term
appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the
content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your
query.

Here’s a plug for not submitting your website to search engines

Whole Foods Chicken Sandwich

I love their chicken sandwich.  I think the killer ingredient is the carmelized onions.  Jane makes some awesome quesadillas with carmelized onions.  The “Austin Grill” chicken sandwich is not on the menu but the people there know it by name. In case they forget, here are the ingredients:

Grilled Chicken
Monterrey Jack Cheese
Carmelized Onion
Lettuce
Tomatoe
Cooked Red Pepper
Chipotle Mayo
Toasted to melt the cheese.
Served with tortilla chips
Yummy!

Content Management Systems

Compare CMS systems

Free CMS Systems
Content Management Systems Directory

Thread comparing CMS systems

Open Source Projects

Collaborative Groupware Software

Registration/Licensing software

ASProtect

Habits of highly productive computer users

   1. Use an RSS reader as a way to efficiently find information  of interest to you without having to navigate the web or re-visit websites.  It’s a "push" technology that comes to you rather than the hit-and-miss method of "checking-in" at websites of interest to you, or having to constantly "Goggle" for new stuff.

   2. Use Microsoft’s MSN Desktop Search.  I know there are others like Google’s Desktop Search, but the built-in "shortcut manager" built in to the MSN Desktop Search is very powerful and can improve your PC desktop experience dramatically.

   3. Use a tabbed browser.  If you are online at least a few hours a day or use Google and constantly follow result links to find just the right page, then a tabbed browser will make you more productive.

   4. Use email effectively, expecially if you are part of a mailing list, read this article to learn how: "Tips for mastering email overload"

Data Structures and Algorithms

For a refresher course on basic algorithms, check this page out.  It has some nice Java animations illustrating some of the algorithms.