TWiT – This week in tech

Top of the pile by a mile is The TWiT network. TWiT is a collection of over a dozen tech related podcasts; from the daddy of tech podcasting: Leo Laporte.

Leo is probably the most respected (and copied) podcaster / broadcaster in the business and has won every award worth winning.  His wide range of tech knowledge and his broadcasting style are, in my opinion, unsurpassed anywhere.

Leo’s podcasts (which he often refers to as netcasts) pull in huge international audiences and because of his reputation, Leo attracts top people from the world of technology and tech news on his shows.  Regulars on his shows include; Patrick Norton, John C Dvorak, Jason Calacanis, Steve Gibson, Paul Thurrott, Roger Chang, Molly Wood and Tom Merritt – Plus many, many more.

The TWiT network is easily the best collection of tech related podcasts available anywhere and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  By the way, you can also watch Leo’s shows being streamed live, which is always well worth watching if you get the chance!

Side note: Leo Laporte is also one of the inspirations behind me starting this tech blog (Thanks Leo.)

Crave

Crave is cnet.com’s UK gadget blog and the quality of writing there is consistently excellent. Written in a slightly different style to cnet.com, Crave offers news and reviews of the latest gadgets and also gives expert opinion on tech related news.

Bloggers include Nate Laxnon (their senior editor), Rory Reid, Rich Trenholm, Flora Graham and Ian Morris.

I highly recommend you subscribe to the cnet.uk podcast – especially if you already love Buzz Out Loud from Cnet.com.

The BBC website technology pages

The technology section of the bbc.co.uk website is essential tech reading for one extremely good reason: It’s fully independent!

Respected worldwide for its journalistic independence, this is perhaps the best place to find out what’s going on – without wondering if what you are reading is being written or altered, to keep a sponsor happy.  For those who don’t know, the site carries no sponsorships or advertising, so is free to say what it believes, without having to spin anything out.

Whilst I would like to see it updated more regularly, the quality of the writing makes up for the lack of content.

There’s also a tech news blog called dot.life, which is worth checking out.  My favourite writer there’s Rory Cellen-Jones.

I hope you find these recommendations useful.  If you do, please share them!

Image credits: Leo Laporte, CNET & The BBC

Originally, the blog was on the Thesis theme; which is one of the cleanest looking WordPress themes on the planet. However, I found Thesis way too hard to adapt and modify myself.

For a few months, I tried using a glossy looking theme, but it looked way too glossy; like a technology website (CNET / ZDNET) – rather than a tech news blog (Scobleizer / LouisGray.Com)

Whilst I wanted the clean simplicity of Thesis, I needed a theme that gave me 100% freedom to design, tweak and modify the blog myself – without having to learn HTML/CSS or hire a expert.  So, I decided to use Headway (I’m now an affiliate) instead.

On Thursday, I added the Headway theme to the blog and in less than 30 minutes, everything was ready!

You know what?  I’ve often spent twice that long looking for how to make one change to a blog, than it took me to configure this whole blog using Headway.  The design you see right now may not be what you personally like, but I assure you it’s exactly the way I want it to look – with zero compromise.

Quick overview of Headway

I am not going to bore you with an insane list of what this theme can do, so here’s a tiny example of things that I was able to do in less than 60 seconds.  Nothing I have done here required me touching the code – it’s all drag and drop baby!

• With 2 clicks of a mouse, I can change where the top navigation menu sits; either above the header, below the header or turn it off and have it some place else completely.
• I can also add drop down menus to the navigation bar.
• Oh, and I can drag the navigation buttons into whatever order I want.
• I can change the size / dimensions of the blog in seconds.
• In seconds, I can resize any content area, simply by dragging it across the screen with my mouse.
• The same is true of the sidebars.
• Plus, I can make sidebars look totally different on each page. For example:
  • Imagine you have a page on your blog, which sells your services. The sidebar for that page could be an animated list of testimonials.
• I can change the header image in seconds. No FTP access required and as with everything else in this list, no need to touch the CSS either.
• As far as I can see, I can change the colour of everything / anything in seconds.
• Simply by pointing and clicking, I can change the font, font size and font colour of text.
• I can also change the colour of hyper-links to anything, in just 2 clicks.
• I can add a new header image in seconds, without even using FTP!
• I can set the blog to automatically send each new post to Twitter, as soon as it’s published.
• There’s stacks more things I could add here.

If you are a blogger and want full control over your blog, using drag and drop – you need to check out Headway(affiliate link.)

Full disclosure

Headway is the first theme I have ever been an affiliate of and the first product I have ever promoted on this blog as an affiliate. It’s simply amazing and has transformed the way I blog.  It’s also saved me hundreds, by being able to do everything, in minutes, myself.  As you will have seen, I give full disclosure when I link to an affiliate site. It may look weird, but I believe in total transparency.

If you want to take control of your blog and get great, professional results (without having to wait for or pay for professional help), I strongly recommend you take a good look at Headway.

Check the video’s out by clicking the banner below!

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For blogs like this, that offer full disclosure, this means we finally get a level playing field; at least within the USA.  Readers expect bloggers to be able to run a financially successful blog, they just want sponsor information made available.  Sadly, many bloggers fail to disclose it.

The FTC and Twitter’s Controversial SUL

Will bloggers on this list NOW have to declare it in their Twitter-related posts?
This raises a question about the highly controversial way that Twitter has randomly ‘gifted’ certain bloggers with (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of traffic, via their Suggested User List or SUL.

I assume this means that blogs like mashable.com, will now have to declare, in each post they write about Twitter, that Twitter gifted them a place on Twitter’s Suggested User List?  After all, in mashable’s case, this gift from Twitter has gained them ONE AND A HALF MILLION new followers since they joined it and (apparently) a huge surge in traffic.

For blogs like mashable, traffic equals money.  This massive increase in traffic dramatically increases their advertising income and as such, is of enormous financial benefit to them.

The irony is that the most trusted bloggers, are those who clearly disclose their advertisers or sponsors.  When Robert Scoble’s blog was sponsored by Seagate, he did not need to include a disclaimer in every post. He simply made it possible for every reader to identify what the business model behind his blog was.  If they were interested, readers could see that the blog’s sponsors was Seagate.  This did not stop the scobleizer blog becoming massively successful or people trusting what Robert wrote.  I don’t always agree with Robert, but I trust him.

Open and honest works great!

Blogging 101 is to give your readers what they want.  When it comes to news related content, people tell us time and time again that what they want is openness.  It really is that simple.

FireFox 3.5 available for download

Mozilla has released the next version of their massively popular Firefox browser – FireFox 3.5 download it here

This latest version comes with a few new features and some important improvements.

FireFox 3.5: Memory footprint now smaller

As experienced FireFox users will know, the browser has always used way too much memory when it’s running.  In 3.5, Mozilla claim that this has been addressed and that FireFox now has a much smaller memory footprint.  This is especially good news for users of netbooks or machines where memory is at a premium.

FireFox 3.5: Speed – Twice as fast as 3.0 (10 times faster than 2.0)

FireFox 3.5 now uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and it’s really quick!  Mozilla claim that 3.5 is more than twice as fast as 3.0 and 10 times faster than 2.0  It certainly feels that much faster to me.  If speed is important to you (and it should be) it’s worth updating right now as it will save you a stack of time each day!

FireFox 3.5: Location aware browsing

Another new element is the addition of what Mozilla call “location aware browsing.”  In essence, this gives you the option to get location specific web pages – say if you wanted to find a pace to eat or hire a car etc.  A lot of people think location aware browsing is going to be big.  The key thing here is that this feature is OPTIONAL - so you don’t have to worry about people snooping!

FireFox 3.5: Quick overview

This blog’s all about getting tech news out there quickly.  If you want a full feature run-through, you can check out the FireFox 3.5 specs here.

As well as the new features above, there is also beefed up security and a large number of improvements to existing features.  Before you upgrade, check to ensure your most important add-ons are 3.5 compatible. If they are, I recommend you upgrade.

First things first, I am not a printer geek. In fact, printers REALLY bore me.  I have probably owned around 20 printers and they were all pretty much the same – other than slight improvements in the print quality and speed over the years.  So, when the 8500 arrived at our offices, I was not expecting to be impressed.

I was wrong – here’s why!

Ok, firstly, the HP Officejet Pro 8500 (909g) has wifi and the range is superb.  You can, if you wish, connect it using USB or Ethernet.  However, the wifi option means there’s no need to worry about where you place it in your office, because it doesn’t need anything other than a power source.

Like many printers in its price range, the 8500 is also a photocopier, a colour fax machine (does anyone still fax?), a 5 slot card reader and a scanner.

Functions are controlled, either from your computer or via the bright, colour touch screen on the front of the machine.  Using the touch panel, I was able to connect to the office router in around 60 seconds.

Print speed, cost and quality

I know what you are thinking, it’s an inkjet printer, so it’s going to be slow, expensive to run and the print quality is going to be nothing like as good as a colour laser printer. No, probably no, and no.

Speed wise, this printer is easily the fastest inkjet I have seen. It’s actually as fast as my HP laser 1300.  Usually, an inkjet printer really struggles to print lines or tables, so I tested the 8500 on a pdf document I have, which is basically packed with tables, line graphs, line drawings and such.  Not only did it print everything without a flaw, it did so extremely quickly.

HP claims the running cost of the 8500 is extremely low, with a CPP (cost per page) of around HALF the price of laser printers in the same price range! Talking of running costs, the 8500 is designed to use as little power as possible, drawing around half the electricity of laser printers in it’s price range.

The print quality is simply stunning.  Text, images and photographs all look superb.  Even using default settings, the 8500 produces sharp, professional documents.

Two sided printing

The 8500 can print on both sides of a sheet of paper, direct from the feeder tray.  It prints on one side, waits a few seconds for the ink to dry, then it feeds the sheet back into the printer and prints on the reverse side.  The alignment of the print has been perfect every time and the end result very impressive.  I have seen this feature on more expensive laser printers, but not as sophisticated on inkjet printers or laser printers in this price range. This is a great way to reduce your paper costs and is obviously kinder to the environment too.

Scanner & OCR

The 8500 will also scan documents to a network folder, by pressing it’s ‘digital filing’ button.  Equally, you can scan direct to email – again, at the press of a button!

In addition, it comes with it’s own Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which works very well. I tested it, by getting it to scan a document, which it had already printed.  It then opened that scanned document in my word processor and the OCR was 100% accurate.  It can be configured to open scanned documents in other programs, depending on your requirements.

Memory card support

There are 5 slots on the front of the printer, for memory cards.  It takes:
1. Compact flash 1 and 2
2. Secure Digital (MMC)
3. XD Picture Card
4. Memory Stick / Magic Gate Memory Stick / Memory Stick Duo
5. USB – PictBridge enabled

The price?

The Recomended Retail Price in the UK is £310, though at the time of writing this they are available via amazon.com for £249. Shop around!

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 – Pros and cons

Pros

• Wifi - Can be easily positioned and no need for cables.  Wifi range is very good too.
• Speed – Comparable to laser speed.
• Running cost – HP claim running costs are 50% lower than similarly priced laser printers.
• Print quality – Excellent.
• Convergence - Photocopier, scanner and fax all work well.
• Software set up - Easy and quick to install.  Set up took less than 25 minutes under Windows XP and Vista.
• Touch screen – The touch screen is clear and really useful.
• Environment - Low energy pull and double sided printing, to reduce paper consumption.

Cons

• Software - I found the software to be awkward to navigate around at first.
• Noise - Noisy on start up. Fine after that though.
• Standby mode – One of its energy saving features is to go into a standby mode. I found the computer sometimes lost the connection when the printer came out of standby mode.

Overall: 9.0 out of 10

I really enjoyed putting the 8500 through its paces.  The print quality is superb and once you get used to the awkward software that comes with it, it’s very easy to get high quality results.  If the running costs are as low as the guys at HP claim, I will increase my score to 9.5 / 10!

[Full Disclosure: This unit was sent to me to review by HP, free of charge.]

FriendFeed beta

There are way too many improvements and new additions for me to cover here, so here are a few of my favourites.

What I have found most useful thus far, is the ability to easily track all the conversations I have taken part in, in real time!  I leave a comment in a discussion and am then instantly notified, without having to leave the screen.  This makes conversations flow with ease and dramatically improves the overall experience.  It will also see far more people engaging in conversations.

FriendFeed beta – Direct Messages

Another function of the beta is the ability to send and receive Direct Messages.  However, unlike Twitter, you can send a Direct Message to more than one person at a time.

FriendFeed beta – Filters

One of the most common complaints about FriendFeed in the past, has been the huge amount of information that’s fed into a users feed.  This has been addressed too, through the development of a number of extremely useful filters.  These allow you to only see comments (for example) from certain people or for you to see comments / shares about a certain subject, which have a minimum of 2 ‘likes.’

FriendFeed beta – scalable

FriendFeed, with it’s new filters and massive amount of customisation, makes it super-easy to follow people in huge numbers, with no additional apps required.  Twitter is a prime example of a platform, which has failed to scale correctly.  I’m not talking about the fail whale here.  I’m talking about the fact that with so many people using Twitter, the amount of noise generated is ruining the experience for many users.  This is why apps like Tweetdeck have been developed. It would be close to impossible to manage a large following on Twitter, using only the Twitter website.  This would not be an issue with FriendFeed, thanks to the new interface.

FriendFeed beta – Overall

Whilst there are many new bells and whistles added to the new FriendFeed beta, for me, the single biggest improvement is the ability to have real time discussions and track your discussions with pretty much zero effort.  This totally changes the FriendFeed experience and transforms it into a far more valuable and user friendly environment.  I can see myself using Twitter less and less.

I believe that if enough new people get to use the FriendFeed beta, there will be a huge increase in user numbers.  If people try it, I think they will love it!  If you have not tried FriendFeed or you tried it before and found it awkward to use, check the new beta out now at beta.friendfeed.com and let me know what you think!  My FriendFeed user name is jimconnolly

FriendFeed beta – The video

Take a look at this introduction video.  It was shot by techcrunch and shows Bret Taylor of FriendFeed going through the new interface.

Why mashable?

Firstly, mashable has some VERY good writers. My personal faves include; Jennifer Van Grove, Adam Ostrow,  Stan Schroeder and Pete Cashmore of course.  These guys know how to make tech news interesting, without being sensationalist.  The quality of the writing is excellent and the consistency of their output is as good as you will see in any news publication – not just those in tech news or online.

Secondly, mashable has managed to ‘somehow’ stay engaged with it’s readers; even though its readership is huge and growing fast.  The mashable team are listening to what their readers want and they provide it.

They get the whole ‘social thing.’  You only have to either read the comments on mashable or see the interaction Pete Cashmore and the team have with their readers on Twitter / FriendFeed etc, to see what a great relationship they have. In fact, according to compete.com, traffic into mashable is growing fast.

Thanks mashable

Over the past year, I’ve noticed myself reading and recommending mashable more and more.  I have to admit, after listening to mashable’s young founder, Pete Cashmore, getting the better of Jason Calacanis on Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast, it was obvious why.  Pete’s a smart cookie – not a smart ass.

I have no hesitation whatsoever in highly recommending mashable to you – Go and read it now!

I would also like to personally acknowledge the role mashable played, along with a few other great tech sites, in inspiring me to write this tech news blog.

Thanks mashable!

The blame for this pathetic episode, has been dumped on one employee.  However, the damage caused by this story going public, is a PR nightmare for the whole company.  Informationweek.com wrote a nice post about the story, including an apology by Belkin CEO Mark Reynoso.  Cnet’s ‘Buzz Out Loud’ podcast made the incident their number one story today.

If nothing else, it shows how easy it is to ‘game’ reviews and why it’s always best to get your reviews from a number of trusted sources; not just one!

As one of the first people to download today’s release of Google Chrome; Google’s new browser, I wanted to be one of the first to review it too.  So, having had an opportunity to thrash it for a few hours – here are my first impressions!

Before I start, you can grab yourself a copy of Google Chrome here!.

Google Chrome – Speed

The first thing you will notice about Google Chrome is the speed of it.  It is fast – I mean REALLY fast! Google Chrome also loads from scratch in less than a second on my machine and I have never seen any browser download a web page faster..

Google Chrome – Page display

These are the very early stages of using Chrome, but thus far – every site I have visited looks pretty much the same as on FF3.  This is in stark contrast to the current beta of Internet Explorer 8; which even in ‘compatibility mode’ renders some pages very poorly..

Google Chrome – Ease of use

Within seconds I was able to find my way around the Google Chrome browser.  It looks pretty basic, which I really like.  You will quickly notice that there’s no dedicated search bar. Instead, you use the address bar and it will automatically do a search using your favourite search engine (you get to choose!)

The settings section is very basic and easy to understand.  There are not that many options, compared with IE and Firefox..

Google Chrome – Nifty tricks

You are going to be hearing a LOT about the Google Chrome’s ‘Incognito mode‘.  It allows you to surf websites without that website appearing in your browser’s history folder.  Also, any new cookies triggered from your incognito mode tab will be deleted when you close it.  When you have a tab open in incognito mode, you get a little picture of a detective in the top left corner – so you can tell at a glance which mode you are in.

You can slide tabs around to arrange them in the right order – and they actually do slide.  It’s a nice effect!

Your bookmarks are automatically imported as soon as you install Google Chrome and your shortcuts will appear in the same order that they appeared in your previous browser – so everything’s where you expect it to be.

When you download a file, there’s a little animation of an arrow that plays – another nice little touch!.

Google Chrome issues

As you would expect from a brand new beta, it’s not perfect!  Here are a few known problems from the Google Chrome help center and one of my own.  You can see the full list of known issues here.

-  Google Calendar – If you create an all day event at the weekend it adds an extra day!
-  Laptops sometimes won’t go to sleep with Google Chrome running!
-  Fixed Width fonts on some sites are tiny on Google Chrome!
-  Fellow WordPress bloggers will find some of the posting tools behaving ‘odd.’.

Overall?

As you can probably tell, I am really impressed.  Google Chrome is fast, easy to use and very polished for a beta release.  I will have to play with it for a few more days to get a REAL feel for it, but my initial impressions are very positive.

Knowing what Google are like, Chrome will probably stay in beta for ages.  It seems very solid and the feedback I have received from friends is that they are finding it equally stable.

The so-called browser wars have taken an interesting turn and I am not sure if this little baby is not going to be the winner.  How crazy is that?  After years of the ‘experts’ telling us that it’s either Internet Explorer or Firefox who will win – there’s a new kid in town who ‘might’ win the war (and far sooner than many imagined!)

I recommend you download yourself a copy and give it a go!.

That’s my first impression of Google Chrome - What do YOU think?

How would you like a quick and easy way to find out the Google Page Rank for every page on your website or blog, at the click of a button?

Well, now you can; thanks to a nifty little free tool called “Google Page Rank Inspector.“.

How Google Page Rank Inspector works

Simply visit http://www.rightscripts.com/pagerank and enter the URL of the site you want to check, then click the ‘submit’ button – that’s it!

This is a great page rank tool!  Give it a go and let me know what you think.