Review: New Google Keyword Tool Sucks!

Posted August 13, 2010 – 5:21 pm in: Uncategorized

I am very disappointed by the new version of Google’s Keyword Tool. In my opinion, the new keyword tool is a big step backward and basically sucks.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a keyword research tool that is part of Google AdWords. Until now, it has been the most accurate, most accessible, and most useful keyword research tool available.

But there are major problems with the new version which result in much lower quality and accuracy keyword suggestions.

Sadly, Google announced this week that the new version of the Keyword Tool is coming out of beta at the end of August. At that time, the old tool will no longer be accessible. In recent months while Google has been testing the beta in general release, Google has provided an prominent link from the new interface to the old interface. That has allowed me to put off the day of reckoning.

But with the imminent demise of the old version upon us, I’ve taken some time to carefully test and compare the two versions side-by-side. The result is not pretty. My conclusion: Without a doubt that the new version generates just incredibly, dramatically worse keyword lists than the old version.

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Review of Buzzr, A Drupal Website Builder

Posted August 9, 2010 – 6:03 pm in: Uncategorized

Buzzr is a new hosted website building platform based on Drupal, a popular open source content management system (CMS).

Buzzr aims to make it much easier to build websites in Drupal by creating a user-friendly front end for the Drupal CMS. In a sense, Buzzr is a sort of WordPress-for-Drupal.

However, while WordPress is primarily designed to build blog-based websites, Drupal is fundamentally a more powerful and versatile website development platform that can be used to make virtually any kind of website. However, with this richness comes complexity that puts Drupal out of reach for many people.

Buzzr is trying to capture some of the superior functionality of Drupal while improving the interface to make it accessible to a much wider range of people. I think they have been largely successful in doing so.

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Best RSS Feed Reader for Windows?

Posted March 7, 2010 – 5:39 pm in: Uncategorized

Recently, I’ve been doing a deep dive comparison of the top RSS readers for Windows.

It all started when I became aware of the new Netvibes Wasabi edition. This version was released last fall (here and here).

Wasabi provides an alternate format for viewing feeds within Netvibes. The new Wasabi reader is more in the style of Google Reader as compared to the ‘start page’ (or ‘widget’) style Netvibes reader I’ve been using for some years. You can switch back and forth between the ‘widget view’ and the ‘reader view’ with a click of a button.

While my initial reaction to Wasabi was very positive, I had some problems with my feeds. Thus began a month long re-look at all the major Windows RSS readers to see if there was something better.

At the same time I starting looking into the top feed readers, I also cleaned up and expanded my custom feeds. These include feeds generated by Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, Google News, and Twitter Search. Turns out these custom feeds are fairly problematic for many feed readers and were the stumbling block that got me looking elsewhere beyond Wasabi.

Here’s a recap of what I found about the best RSS readers for Windows.

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