Just played Rail of War on MiniClip.com . At first I thought the interface was too complicated with all the options you have to choose before you actually start the game (locomotive, passenger car, single and 2-slot wagons and so on), but once you get these right, and by the way you are on a budget when designing your killer train, the game starts after map generation and game play is actually quite dynamic. The sound is good enough and corresponds well with what’s going on during play. Check it out!

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This is a great post on SEOMoz featuring a pretty detailed and complete glossary of SEO terms. Even if you are seasoned SEO professional, this may come in handy especially when communicating with clients, but also with peers. A standardized way of communication is key to any future development and mass adoption. SEO is certainly getting more attention with companies and individuals running web based or web dependent businesses. Although SEO is perceived in a wrong way by many business owners and companies, an issue that will also take time to get resolved, a glossary of SEO terms, such as this, is a great tool to use as backup when the talk gets serious.

To be fair, this is not the first time SEO glossaries have appeared as Barry Schwartz noted in his post over at Search Engine Land.

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WeLoveLocal.com is a local business and review portal for businesses in the UK. Nothing very exciting I guess if it wasn’t for a small twist. The developers added Facebook integration (using the Facebook API), so registered members (aka Reviewers), can share personal information using their Facebook profiles, but on WeLoveLocal.com . Neat. Oh, it’s London only businesses for now, but the developers promised to cover all UK very soon.

Another dimension to consider about this concept is that apart from reviews alone, reviewers are engaged in a community where they can add friends, and share information about businesses they reviewed or are interested in. This presents a new opportunity for social promotion. If you have a business based in the UK, you can add your information for free to their categorized business directory. After confirmation, using regular mail, your business will be available for viewing and reviewing. Just be careful, if you are an offline retailer, the next customer that comes to your office or store may just be a WeLoveLocal.com member and reviewer. So tidy up and leave a good first impression!

I have a client who runs a UK based business, and I’ve already submitted his business information to this directory. We are awaiting the mail confirmation and activation. When new developments occur, I’ll post my impressions here to add to the introduction.

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This is a customized Google search engine, in all black colors. The idea is to save battery on portable devices such as PDAs, smart phones, laptops and such. Since the white background otherwise found on pages takes up some of the energy in order to keep those pixels lit all the time (and there are many when you take the whole screen into consideration). I couldn’t find some actual data pertaining to energy saving, but I will try to update this post with any energy saving information in the near future. Anyway, even if you don’t need to save your battery, try Blackle.com . Maybe you’ll like the fact that you can actually rest your eyes a little from the stronger glare produced by all white/bright backgrounds.

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WebProWorld has launched a new brainchild called WebProWorld Exchange. It’s kind of a portal really, aimed at providing webmasters with a nice environment in which to exchange opinions, experiences and offers regarding content, web properties, services, online advertising and more. There are five major channels to explore and delve into:

• sites for sale - there are no offers at the time of writing this post, but hey, this bit of news just got in; it pretty much comes down to forum-like communication between registered members and private messaging for the serious stuff;
• content buy/sell - already posted an Online Rental Business System which provides content related to video, DVD, real-estate and such, ready to go on your web site; if you have products or services that you can follow up with an easy to implement content generation system, this is the place to offer it on
• services for sale/hire - needles to say, this one is already filled with plenty of offers ranging from programming to asking for advice
• domains buy/sell - this one is obvious, so go get some domains, or if you want to sell domains contact me first
• ad space buy/sell - try and get some cheap advertising space here

In my experience WebProWorld has been a good resource for SEO and other stuff related to Internet business. I have especially enjoyed some pretty good video content in the last year or so. Try these resources in the following months. There is a pretty good chance you’ll come across interesting offers, considering that WebProWorld already has a large community of active participants.

To be fair, there is a similar place on another great webmaster resource, SitePoint.com. They’ve had a similar environment for some time now, called SitePoint Marketplace. You can also go there and see some of the great deals you can come across.

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Ducati, the famous motorbike manufacturer, has decided to wonder into personal computing technology. After Ferrari laptops, McLaren mobile phone, this time it’s something smaller - a flash drive that really shows sleek Ducati motorbike curves.

The new flash drive boasts 20Mb/s transfer rate and 4GB capacity, both worthy of the super fast looking housing. It really looks like a motorbike fuel tank. This would make a great multi-functional key chain, especially if attached to Ducati bike keys :)  If only this happened sooner, a couple of years ago, when the then new Ducati model was featured in Matrix Reloaded (you know the part when Trinity has to rescue the Key Maker from the moving truck on the freeway) …

See more details on the SanDisk website, the manufacturer of the flash drive.

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This concept was introduced some years back by Mercedes-Benz, but they have finally followed-up with an actual engine that has been tested and some interesting data to show about its performance. Mercedes-Benz claims the 1.8 l engine to output 238 bhp and 295 pdft of torque. The engine has turbo-compression, direct fuel injection and “controlled auto ignition”. As some of you may know auto ignition is a process used in Diesel engines where the fuel self ignites under huge pressure. Gasoline has to be ignited with an outer heat source, such as spark plugs. Controlled auto ignition would then have to be a hybrid process of Diesel-like self ignition used on gasoline. Fuel consumption is about 6 l / 100 km, and Mercedes-Benz says the given data is for larger category cars, such as limos from the S-class. Pretty impressive.

Read full story here.

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This is a very smart marketing campaign, this time by Nokia, which takes a very interesting and unique approach. Nokia smart phones are getting to be so advanced that laptop computers are beginning to lose their nerve and starting rebellion all over the world, sometimes with serious consequences for their owners. Check this out on jealouscomputers.com !

Disgruntled laptops are turning against their owners. Beware laptop owners! Tame your laptop beasts on time or suffer.

I especially liked this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOhmYp7bbiI

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Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team in Google, discusses the best uses of Flash on websites. Although I have always thought common sense was the best criteria for implementing Flash on a site, information like this, straight from the source of the majority of traffic from search, is always useful. So, let me quote the bulleted list right away:

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement): Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

Point (2) is interesting and is almost standard practice, at least it should be. A thought about point (3): do you really need a splash screen? Why not let the visitor get to the real stuff right away and save them time (and money?) instead of risking losing their attention over an animated “check out this cool animation..” intro. One case where I’d use Flash as an intro is maybe when a company has a major ongoing offline marketing promotion, so attacking the visitor with the Flash version of the promotion upon entry to the website may actually yield positive effect because it follows up on the offline marketing communication. Any thoughts on this? Drop a comment.

If you’d rather read the whole post, and perhaps draw your own conclusions, go over to Google Webmaster Central on BlogSpot.

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The iPhone craze continues. Louis Vuitton, the famous fashion designer, decided to jump onto the iPhone crazy train and contribute with specially designed cases. I must say they look pretty good. I guess if I was a fashion nut, and already wore clothes and apparel befitting a modern urban warrior, this would certainly be a welcome addition to my style. Heh, the price though, it’s kinda Vuitonish. The alligator case is about $1100 US! So, if you have a grand lying around, get a Louis Vuitton iPhone case (you may want to get an iPhone first though) You can always get an Louis Vuitton iPod leather case instead.

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