The 50 Most Important People on the Web by Yahoo

A list of gurus & elite people of the online media and web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

See who's who on this important and interesting list.

via Yahoo

Power searching in Gmail

If you love Gmail & GreaseMonkey scripts like I do, you may want to read Matt Cutts "Three solid Gmail productivity tips" on how you can be a productive Gmail "Power User" by saving time and effort with "Saved Searches" script.

Matt explains:

If you’re a techie person, email is essential but it’s hard to stay on top of all of it. If you use Gmail and Firefox, here’s a few tips to get email under control.

The first tip is remedial: keep most mailing list emails out of your inbox. I already prune as much of my Gmail inbox email as I can. I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, but add filters like “If the email is to some-mailinglist, skip the inbox.” That way it doesn’t clutter my inbox (which is my to-do list), but it still gets indexed so that I can search for it later.

On a side not:

While playing with "Saved Searches" you will also want to keep this in mind:

Instead of searching items sent to you with the query “to:user@gmail.com”, you can also use “to:me”.

This also works for mail you sent out with the query “from:me”.

Garet Rogers offers a nice summary of Matt's tips.

MBL apologizes to ShoeMoney for banning him.

MyBlogLog, a popular blogger tool which tracks links from a page banned Jeremy Shoemaker of ShoeMoney after he discovered an exploit (and posted it to his blog) in which a malicious person can add himself to another MBL user's community without their permission.

Protest to MBL and support went out to Jeremy throughout the blogosphere, hoping something would be done about his punishment.

Seems bloggers have spoken and heard by the MBL staff. Its very difficult for a company to fight with a celebrity (of any medium), which can affect how the rest of their customers and community may react. In this case, Jeremy, wishes MyBlogLog much success in the future.

An apology is better than having no ShoeMoney as a loyal customer.

The Truth in Ad Sales and How Projects Really Work

Have 5 minutes to spare? I'll guarantee you'll have a laugh.

Ever wonder how typical advertising agencies come up with a so-called "brilliant idea" or branding strategy?

Watch this funny video as a UK agency pitches their version of the clients product.



"The Truth in Ad Sales by John Dodds."

By far, this is the best example I could find on the net illustrating how not to handle your clients and the project which you have been assigned.

via B.L. Ochman's weblog

Gmail for Domains with Account Plans

If you haven't heard about Gmail for Domains, its okay. Most people don't know what it is yet or heard about it because its only accessible via invitation-only. In short, Gmail for Domains will allow domain admins to move their existing or new email service to utilize Gmail with an easy-to-use control panel, Gtalk chat service, and a whoping 2 GB (and counting...) massive storage with all the benefits and features of Gmail.

I've come across RyderRoss.com which happens to have a recent screenshot of Gmail for Domains for one of his websites (breenrealty.com). Apparently he received an invitation email and has taken a quick snapshot of the interface. Google is in development phase to introduce Gmail for Domains with optional account plans to choose from.


Screenshot by RyderRoss.com


From the looks of RyderRoss' screenshot, Gmail for Domains will allow up to 10 free user as many emails you asked for during your registration per domain on a basic account plan. Of course, while clicking on the link "Account Plan" will probably introduce more featured plans to choose from with a purchase. Also below the Account Plan link is "Account Status" which reads as followed:

Account Status
Users can sign in and read email, but cannot yet send email.

Your account status will automatically switch to active when we process your payment and you change your MX records

While it is yet unknown how or when Google will launch this new Gmail feature, much information exist out in the Gmail community.

On a personal note, I'm glad to see that Gmail will allow users to switch MX records and use Gmail email service. With Google's much recent update to allow payments across its Google Base network, it is safe to guess that Google will also expand their payment process to Gmail for Domain too.

Update:
I've stumbled upon a more indepth review of Gmail for Domains with many screenshots. Here's a quick shortcut, if you think your registration for Gmail for Domains has been verified without haven't gotten your email verification notice yet, why not try out the link below, replacing n=domain.com with your actual domain registered.

https://www.google.com/hosted/register?n=domain.com

Microsoft's dim future for web developers

Just for the record, this post is my bias opinion and in no way does it really confirm where Microsoft will be heading in the future with web developers.

I attended a small Microsoft (MS) seminar today hosted by two Microsoft engineers (whom we'll refer to them as 'MS guys') at my local college campus. The fact that Microsoft was in town to showcase their new products was just exciting for me to take the time to RSVP and see for my self what they might have to offer.

Now let’s get some personal facts out first. I'm a PHP/Coldfusion web developer with years of experience in backend web applications, since my early teen years, but I don't call myself an expert (yet). I've used ASP, Visual Basic, MS Office suite and continue to use many of Microsoft's other products.

In today's seminar, I was re-introduced to Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express with a live demo. If you're not familiar with Visual Web Developer, it's simply another Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by Microsoft only catered to web developers. This new application packs many ASP.Net features with support for DotNetNuke, a built-in webserver & SQL database migration, and most importantly a so-called "friendly and easy" to use web development environment where making websites should be fun.

Now, as a PHP web developer, I personally believe Microsoft needs a year or two to grab web designers and web developer’s attention to this kind of product. Unlike PHP which has come a long way from being a personal homepage tool language to a full blown dependable and understandable web programming language. I think ASP.Net has a great following crowd and I support their choice and cause for developing in ASP language. Although MS new Visual Web Developer may gain some ground, I see this application to hit rock bottom in the future as ASP becomes too dependable on Microsoft inter-connected products.

From start to finish, I was rarely impressed, except the fact that VWD uses very nice XML based configuration files, which is how far I got interested. As one of the engineers went on to demonstrate the Visual Web Developer, my friend noticed the Microsoft guy to be reading off pages from a book, as if he had no training or professional experience before hand. I understand this was a quick draft presentation, but if Microsoft really wanted to grab me by my feet with excitement, they should consider sending a well knowledgeable and professional web developer. I noticed that VWD had no consideration for web designers and lacked many web development tools and WYSIWYG interface unlike Macromedia's Dreamweaver product. It had too many useless tools and features that only served to their IE browser.

To conclude this thought, I believe that MS does not have web developers in mind as it should have. I think my friend and I had more fun poking at VWD's weak IDE interface. Just to state that the MS guys spend 20 minutes of their 40 minute presentation just trying to show us how to use basic SQL queries to output something very simple as a blog. With PHP this would have taken less time, in my opinion.

GMail - Reply From, an updated option

Gmail had a minor issue with its service when launched publicly. See, if you had configured your Gmail account to send outgoing emails from another email such as "email@otherdomain.com", each time you sent outgoing email from that address and someone replied back, you would expect to reply back with the same previous outgoing email and not have to do any change thereafter.

Unfortunately, that was the problem. Each time, you would have to manually change the outgoing From: field from the drop-down list of email addresses before replying. This could have caused conflict at some point or another. Wishing to have sent email from the designated outgoing email, out of quickness and not manually setting it right, you could have replied back with an email address that was not suppost to be known by that person or others at all.

Well, it seems that the Gmail team has cleared this issue out. For those that are not yet aware or have not done any changes to account settings in your GMail, an update or rather an option has been silently added by the GMail team to recognize and configure itself to change the From: field.

Check out a screenshot sample below of this new update.

Google Personalized Mobile - would you like fries with that?

Google today has released their mobile version of Google Personalized. All I can say now is that I wish my current cellphone had any access to browse the web but I shall see that this problem gets fixed soon, only hoping that my cellphone provider and their network enables free or at least cheap and unlimited usage to surf the web.

So when you're waiting at a fast food drive-thru and your order takes more than 5 mins, pull out your mobile device and glance a peek at your personalized Google Mobile for new emails, your local weather and more. After all, if you live in the sunshine state, you'd like to know how hot the temperature is outside and use that info to complain about your long waited order to the manager.

God Speed - Mobile Googlers!