I took the Survey—did you?

Last year, A List Apart created their Web Design Survey for people who work on and develop the web. When the results are in, they present their findings, analyze them and then publish the data (excluding personal information).

I took the survey last year, and I finally had a few minutes to take it again this year. Last year's 37 questions were reduced and refined into just 18, and it took me about five to 10 minutes to get through it this year. Last years Survey yielded responses from 33,000 web professionals from the United States, and all over the world.

If you work on the web building web sites, or web applications why not take a few minutes to take the survey? It's good for the profession, and good for you. Last year they even awarded some prizes to a lucky few who participated...

Boost traffic: Claim your blog in Technorati...

Here's a simple tip if you're looking for something to do with a few idle minutes, and it can help you boost traffic and return readership.

Claiming your blog in Technorati is simple and very quick, just log into your Technorati account and follow these four easy steps...

1. Enter your blog's URL
2. Choose your claim method, I just chose the standard default method this time
3. Activate the claim (so their spiders can crawl your site or blog)
4. Customize the blog information

That's it — your done! You can also follow my posts using Technorati by clicking either one of the button links below...


Keep in mind that it takes a lot of traffic and bunch of fans to create a decent rank (mine is still a pathetic rank at: 1,940,128) so don't get disheartened and give it time to percolate and bubble-up. Organic traffic takes effort and time, but it's free and if you like to blog it's fun — and it's a lot better than chewing rocks...

Search better than Google?

If you're looking for something cool on the internet these days, you'll probably use a search engine. You've also probably used all the big well-known search engines out there, but now there's another player in the space, cuil (pronounced "cool"). Developed by former Google engineers, and self described as "the world's biggest search engine", cuil boasts an index that spans over 120 Billion pages (Search 121,617,892,992 web pages).

Cuil's results are neatly presented in columns, very relevant to your search terms, and based on actual content not popularity. At the moment, there are no ads to get in your way either. If you value your privacy, cuil believes "that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach" so they "don’t collect data about you and your habits" which is very refreshing.

Its features include relevant drill-down suggestions, roll-over definitions for additional information, tabbed choices, and logical search suggestions.

Its name is an old Irish word for knowledge, and if you still haven't found what you're looking for — then give cuil a try »