We’ve all been reading a lot this month about Google’s updates to Page Rank and how a lot of sites have been adversely affected by this.

After much of the buzz has calmed down, I’ve noticed that it appears Google has slapped my own site, this one, in a strange way.

http://www.joetech.com seems to have been completely removed from Google and my Page Rank of 5 seems to have vanished entirely. Either this is a very strange glitch that will hopefully be resolved very soon, or Google has penalized JoeTech.com in a big way for perhaps one of the following reasons:
- writing positively about Google at times
- being online for over 10 years
- not selling links
- not spamming or submitting my URLs to link farms

What gives, Google? I’m pretty sure I’ve been pretty nice to you and followed the rules.

Everyone’s always talking about the coolest new cell phones, but I think it’s also important to bring some attention to the abominations that somehow actually make it it market. It seems that too often, some company decides to do something different and new, but lands way off the mark. Here are 8 phones that you will pray nobody every gets you as a gift.

F88 Wrist Watch Mobile Phone
(thanks, GizmoWatch)
I decided to start with something that isn’t all that horrible. It is a bit super-geeky, in fact, but just too bulky to be caught wearing. I mean, you might as well walk around with a Treo strapped to your wrist and get it over with.

Virgin Lobster 700TV / HTC Monet
(thanks, Mobile Gazette)
Lobster? Really? I think whoever named it was trying to send a message to the people who designed it. It’s different, sure, but it’s not “good different”. Let’s chop that fat off the side for starters.

Car Themed Phones
(thanks, DialAPhone)
If you are so ego-sensitive that you must have your cell phone look like your expensive car, people are probably already laughing at you behind your back, so go ahead and buy one of these. It’s a cute idea if you’re a 10-year-old.

Ugly for the super rich
(thanks, World of Wonder)
At a cool million bucks, this is one of the ugliest things you can go broke buying. If you see someone sporting one of these, steal it and smash it into bits. This is financial Darwinism for people like Paris Hilton.

$23k Ivory Ugly
(thanks, TechEBlog)
You could spend $23,000 on this super-ugly phone, or you could just buy a white phone and send it to me along with $500. I’ll drop the phone out of a moving car every day for 3 weeks, then I’ll leave it with a 3-pack-a-day smoker for a month, then I’ll send you back a phone that looks close to the one pictured here.

Dual LCD, Many levels of ugly
(thanks, Gizmodo)
A dual LCD phone probably sounded like a great idea when it popped out of someone’s mouth. Then they started putting the plan into action. How hard can it be to make the first real dual LCD phone? Not that hard, I guess, when you completely forget about making something anyone would want to use, buy, or be seen in public holding.

Football (soccer in the USA) Phone
(thanks, PCNews.ro)
I know it’s a phone, but I still want to kick it. This is actually pretty brilliant. Next time your 12-year-old begs you to buy them a cell phone, just grab one of these babies and you’ll probably not be begged for a car 4 years later.

The Ugliest Phone Ever
(thanks, MobileWhack)
This phone should be set aflame, stomped out, urinated on, shot, and then buried in a deep, deep hole. I don’t know why anyone would pay thousands of dollars for this hideous phone, but if you know someone who did, get them mental health assistance immediately.

Take a look at this picture and tell me why anyone would ever do this to a Corvette:

I guess you can find just about anything on Google StreetView with StreetViewFun.com

The funny thing is that picture was from Mesa, Arizona. I guess the heat does things to people’s heads out here.

This past weekend, I surprised my wife with a trip to Disneyland for our first wedding anniversary. What I didn’t know was that Disneyland has a few new treats. I had tried to make the whole trip about our anniversary and a weekend for her, but she was as accommodating as she usually is when it comes to my technology lust. When we saw that they had an Asimo exhibit, we immediately went in and had a seat.

Here’s the videos I captured with my still camera:

Asimo Walks

Asimo Runs

Asimo Ascends Stairs

Asimo Descends Stairs

Asimo Dances

Asimo Balances and Kicks

Asimo Can See You

Bonus, Disney’s Scream roller coaster from my perspective yesterday.

I’ve done a couple sponsored posts, but this one hit home with me. Like most bloggers, I’m always looking for a larger audience, and unfortunately, that means I need to learn search engine optimization rules, tips, and tricks. So when I was given the opportunity to review Wordze.com, I was eager to review it after taking a first peek. If you don’t believe me, scroll down. I think I got a little carried away, but it was easy to do because Wordze offers so many tools to help you improve your search engine ranking with keywords, ultimately resulting in more income for your blog or web site. In any case, I should start with a few definitions of terms used in this review:

- Count : This is the estimate number of searches for a keyword. (The Keyword Search, Expander, Importer, and Dig tool are all based on 30 days, while the Keyword History tool is based on daily traffic.)
- Estimated traffic : This is an estimate of search traffic over 30 days if you get in the top three positions on google, yahoo, etc.
- KEI (Keyword Effective Index) : Summarizes your competition in a number the higher, the better.

Wordze provided me with an account at http://www.wordze.com to play with and I have to admit, after watching a couple screencasts, I was already liking it and eager to dive in and play with it. One of the more interesting tools offered is the Digger. This tool allows you to “dig” through the search engines and find out what keywords some of the top sites are using, based on an initial keyword or phrase you provide. Sounds good. Of course, I entered “technology” and braced myself to watch a “processing” animation for ten minutes. This is where some forethought and elegant design shows up. Instead of an animation and a wait, I got this message: “Your dig has been started and you will find the results in your download manager when it’s done!”. We’ll come back to the download manager and the digg tool in a few minutes.

Guessing that a dig might take a while to complete, I headed back to the members menu and right into the core of Wordze’s business, the Keyword Research Tool. Again, searching for “technology”, 10,000 results are delivered to me within less than a second. I imagine 10,000 is a limit imposed upon my test account, but it should be more than plenty for me to see what this service has to offer. Having watched the screencasts, I started clicking, refining, and narrowing my list down to something more manageable. The first phrase on my list is “technology ps camera”. I turned on all the filters, and four seconds later, I had a new list of 10,000 words. I added “geek” to my search terms and found myself with no results. Switching my search style from Exact Match (the default) to Any Match opened me back up to 10,000 results again. Interestingly, when I made “technology” optional and “geek” required (”technology +geek”) I was able to narrow down to 362 phrases, but there’s a lot of competition. This tool is probably more useful for other industries (or perhaps if I experimented with other keywords), but I’m anxious to get back to those dig results.

I headed back to my download manager and found that my dig for “technology” had completed to the tune of 10,344 keywords and phrases. The download manager lets me know that I have many options to start using my new data. I can download it as an Excel or text file, with or without KEI and with or without the count, or I can view it online. Optionally, I can delete the result if I made a typo or something. It’s not much to look at until you use the another tool to manipulate and narrow the results to your liking.

I had over 10,000 results for my dig on “technology”, so I definitely needed to trim that down. I played around with this tool until I was able to save 134 keywords related to technology into my project.

Keyword density is also a big concern when you’re trying to optimize for the search engines. I pulled up Wordze’s keyword density tool, which allows you to see the keyword desnisty for various keywords on a given site or find related keywords for a given site. I tried it out on JoeTech.com and found some funny results. Namely my links to Stumble, Digg, Reddit and deli.cio.us showed up with pretty decent density because they’re found on every post. If you ignore those and click on a valid keyword that ranks high for your site, you get a list of suggested related keywords and phrases, which is a good way to re-evaluate your strategy for keyword density.

One great tool that I nearly overlooked was the typo search. At first, I figured it sould be like the rest, but it offered up some good matches. For example, I entered “search engine optimization” and one of the results was “earch engine optimization” with a KEI of over 8,000. I’m still learning, but I’m pretty sure that means that if I had an SEO blog, I could get some pretty cheap (per click) traffic for it from AdWords and would likely want that phrase in my keywords list to increase my chance at showing up as one of the top 3 links when someone accidentally searches for that phrase. I searched again for “technology” and found “technologu” with a KEI of 2,637.5 and finally, I tried a very profitable phrase, “web hosting” and netted “wweb hosting” with over 5,000 KEI. Already, I’m imagining more uses for Wordze, and I’m adding “technologu” to my keywords list for kicks.

Finally, I tried out the keyword trends tool. This is a great way to get a quick snapshot of the search trends for a specific keyword or phrase. You may not notice anything that seems too useful when you enter a keyword or phrase that has steady public interest, but get creative and you’ll see how useful it is. For example, I typed in “blackwater” (prominent in world news this past month) and below is a partial image of the results. You can clearly see that this became big news around this time last month. Anyone who knew how this would hit and blogged about the topic probably saw some new traffic coming in because of it. A way I might use this is to watch for items of importance in the technology industry that I think created a buzz yesterday, check with this tool, and blog about items that seem to be gaining search momentum.

Some other tools are pretty self-explanitory, so I didn’t dive in too much. These include an import tool to import lots of keywords to search on, a keyword thesaurus, the screencasts I mentioned above, keyword market competition (which looks pretty useful), and the affiliate program.