Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Google Video File Uploader Needs Improvement

Google Video really needs to develop a better upload tool for large videos. I have a client who has some one hour long movies that they wanted to distribute free on Google Video. The videos are documentaries on the health effects of energy waves from cell phones and cell phone towers.

The videos were large. One in fact very large, nearly 1 GB. I needed to use the video upload tool. I have to tell you it was excruciating. It took one week connected to Google for one of the videos to load. A full week online! The other I had to have broken into two pieces and then it still took over three days to load. Now I know that some of this is a factor of file upload speeds using DSL and a factor of my ISP, but why can’t I use FTP to upload a file? Why did I have to use this arcane video file uploader?

I routinely use FTP to load Flash and video files, even big ones, but I don’t know what is happening at the back end of Google but this file uploader really discourages use. It is prone to crashing or locking up mid-way through a large load and cannot go back to where it is.

Additionally never overwrite a file on the server with the same name, the tool simply cannot do it in reality. If it does load, the file on the Google server is corrupted, you cannot open it and then you have to start all over again. It took a painful three weeks to load six movies! That is really outrageous. Come on Google if you want to do video, help us out and improve the upload tool!

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Another New Quick Launch Website Launched

We’ve just launched this nice looking Quick Launch website for Michael P. Taylor an attorney in Baltimore, Maryland. You can click our post title or visit it here http://www.mptlaw.com/.

This very simple yet attractive website is five pages and uses one of our Quick Launch pre-made templates. Quick Launch allows for an affordable and super fast web presence. Check out the site and see what you think.

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Are You Too Connected?

I just shopped for a new cell phone yesterday. Wow is there some eye candy out in the cell phone marketplace, but do you really need all that stuff?

First, I have to say that it used to be (well two years ago) that you could get a pretty hot phone for $100 with your two year contract. Now the starting price is over $250 with a two year contract. As I looked at the phones I thought do I want to be on the Web, do I want people to email me on my phone? You know what, I simply do not want to be that connected!

I am busy enough without being out and about away from the office that I want clients and customers to call me anytime and anywhere. I need some downtime and so does my family. So I have made the decision that although many may disagree, that I do not want to browse the Web and get email on my phone. When I am out of the office after a 50 hour work week, I need to be just that “out of the office”.

So my new phone is my old phone, music enabled, photo enabled, but not a browser or email application. I am letting my 18 year old get the new hot phone and then he can pay for his own Internet access. :0)

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Google’s Knol For Wikipedia-Like Information

This is Google’s new brainchild that is in testing – knol – or as they call it “unit of knowledge”. Currently this new roll out is in testing and is being done by invitation only. The bottom line is that Google is wanting authors who are experts on specific topics to write a piece and then for a community, like Wikipedia, to interact with the information.

It creates a mini-web page for each topic. Clearly this will be searchable and will give authors on good topics excellent exposure and even a portion of ad proceeds. You can click my post title to read the full information about this new interactive tool from the Google Search blog.

Here is an image of a Knol on insomnia from the Google site. Looks like a very slick version of Wikipedia.

May personal take on this is that this could be very good for a business. Instead of posting articles on various sites as link bait, why not have one really great page that Google will create and that all you have to do is moderate. Also as this is Google, remember, it will certainly be included in the SERPs in a big way. This could be an extraordinary degree of exposure for experts and consultants in their industry.