Rev2.org

Well, readers here should already know that we’ve heard enough about the iPad already, but Apple made another announcement today.  The iPad will be available in the U.S. on April 3, in stores and online, and pre-orders can be made starting a week from today (Friday, March 12).

Two models will be available: the Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi 3G.  Next Friday, they’ll both be in the Apple store at Apple.com.  Store orders will ship to arrive on April 3 or you can pick up yours at a local Apple outlet store.  Base price for the iPad is $499 and battery life is about ten hours.

The base model has 16GB of memory, which can be doubled for another $100 or tripled for another $200.  Wi-Fi+3G models won’t be available until later in April and will have a base price of $629 for 16GB and going up in $100 increments for the 32 and 64GB options.

The other denizens of the world will see the iPad roll out throughout the year.  Most of Europe plus Australia and Canada will get theirs in late April and then Asia and other markets will see it later in the year.  Some apps, such as the iBooks reader and the iBookstore app for accessing electronic book titles will be a free download (books themselves will still require purchase).

Computerworld’s Mitch Wagner plans to camp out to get his iPad on release day.  John Biggs at Crunchgear plans to make do with his NotePod Plus until the release date.  Whatever a NotePod is.

Regardless, there are some of us who are looking forward to April 4, when all the iPod buzz will be over with.  I, for one, certainly hope the iPad won’t be taking the place of this year’s iPhone upgrade..

Caffeine, Google’s most recent algorithm update has been in the works for some time, but is being rolled out over the first part of this year. The biggest change in the Caffeine algorithm is the increased importance of web site load time. Up until now, this has been a point of contention in the SEO community – some argued it was taken into account by search algorithms, while others argued it was not. With the unveiling of Caffeine, we finally have a definitive answer: sites that aren’t optimized to load fast and effectively will see a definite drop in their organic search rankings.

What type of sites are usually the slowest to load? Bingo, Flash sites. The thorn in the side of SEO’s for years. Even with Google’s latest spiders being able to crawl through Flash content, the rankings are on average much lower than non-Flash sites. After the Caffeine integration, page rankings for Flash sites will drop even further.  Coincidentally, another device will be launched in the next month that has a beef with Flash – the iPad. I won’t be the one to say that Google and Apple have conspired to wipe Flash-heavy sites off the internet, but it definitely seems like a sign of the times to come, especially if the iPad is a huge commercial success as predicted. Of course, even Adobe has voiced its distaste of the overuse of flash and how it can detract from the user experience, as stated in the Flash Blog. http://theflashblog.com/?p=1698

But back to Caffeine,  what other changes will we see?

An increased relevance will be given to quality outgoing links and having fresh, updated content. Google will be making a push to keep search rankings current and relevant by giving higher rankings to sites with targeted, up to date content and pertinent outgoing links. Actually, as a whole, it would seem that the caffeine update will primarily be affecting on-site SEO and not offsite SEO – good news to those who have spent countless hours building incoming links. Google is effectively using their algorithm to police the internet and banish slow or irrelevant sites to the back pages of search listings. And why not? I don’t know anyone who enjoys running a search and finding a three year old article pop up as the top result only to have to scroll through two pages to find a more current article.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of extra relevance was given to sites that were heavily linked by social networks. Google’s live feed, social circle search results, and the launch of Google Buzz all look like pretty clear indication that Google’s future looks to draw heavily from the spheres of social media.

As a final note, Google will also be rewriting their own indexing structure which will allow them to crawl sites faster and produce search results quicker. Hey, at least they aren’t hyprocrites.

Some tools for you…

Page Speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/index.html

Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

And, for those who want to build more quality backlinks but don’t want to risk using link brokers, try Publishers Network who find quality blog sites in your sector and commission great articles for them on your behalf. They are the only ones I’ve found so far who do this properly.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, did a live interview at Search Marketing Expo West in California (transcript here).  He said several things that have a lot of people asking a lot of questions and making more than a few conjectures too.  The recent deal with Yahoo! that has received the OK from the European Union and will begin rolling out over the next year plus the question of who’s talking to who at Twitter are hot topics right now.

Ballmer’s remarks on the deal with Yahoo! made it clear that Microsoft wants to roll forward with their advertising and integration, through Bing, quickly.  At the same time, CNBC interviewed Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz, and pointedly asked her not only about the attempted buyout by Microsoft (for which Bartz was not CEO or even at Yahoo), but about whether she would entertain another MS offer today.  Her answer to the latter?  “Sure.”

Now the question there is whether Microsoft would be amenable to offering another buyout.  With Yahoo’s stock down to around the $15 mark per share, it could be a bargain for the Seattle Giant, who offered $33/share a couple of years ago.  The new question now would be whether MS would gain much from the purchase, since Bing is already beat that double-digit market share on its own.

Speaking of that, much of the conversation during the Q&A with Ballmer centered on Bing’s growth and, of course, the search giant: Google.  Ballmer was willing to give props to Google for “getting it right first.”  His implication, obviously, being that being first doesn’t necessarily make them best anymore, but it does give them the King of the Mountain status (for now).

Now for Twitter.  During the interview, the MS CEO was asked about Twitter.  Here’s his resposne to that, which you can judge for yourself:

Q: You mentioned Twitter. Buy them, should you be buying them? Should you get them out there, they’ve got that great data, shouldn’t you just own the whole company and have it out there?

STEVE BALLMER: Not clear. I mean, we have a great relationship and partnership with Twitter. Not clear to me. I mean, I would hate to not have that partnership. Whether we need to own the company or not I think is far less clear. In some senses, as an independent, they have a lot of value and a lot of credibility, I think, with their user community. Would they have that same credibility with the user community if they were captive? Not clear. And they want to be an independent company, which means we want to have a great partnership with them, and do a good job.

Coming from that outspoken CEO, a non-answer like that says volumes.  Obviously, partnership or buyout are just as good as far as Microsoft is concerned.

The Google Chrome Blog has announced a new beta edition of Chrome, Google’s browser, which includes innovative language translation options and a new set of privacy tools.  The machine translation comes as part of Google’s popular Web Monkey translation engine for the Web while the new privacy tools are what many users have said Chrome should have had from the get-go.

eWeek says that the new updates come when Chrome has reached 5.6% of the browser market share.  The polyglot language options for Chrome are very unique and particularly useful, probably making Chrome the easiest of the browsers to use with multi-lingual translation.

The browser simply knows your base language setting and when a site is loaded that is in a different language, it automatically offers a button to translate.  Simple and effective.

The privacy additions are something which PCWorld agrees are a long time coming.  They allow site-specific privacy settings for JavaScript, cookies, plug-ins, pop-ups, and more.  The new privacy options are available only in the Windows SP2/vista versions of Chrome, but are definitely a step in the right direction.

These latest updates to Chrome are available in the Chrome Beta channel.

One thing that gets only a fraction of the attention that the iPad has generated is the question of its processing power.  The iPad will be powered by a chip called the “A4″ and that’s about all that Apple has told anyone.  It will be a System-on-a-Chip (SoC), similar to the iPhone and other devices, and speculation has been that it will be a new version of the Cortex-A8.  One insider says it’s more like a stripped-down, “nothing to write home about” A8.

Jon Stokes at Ars Technica says that the reason Apple has been so quiet about the A4 SoC is because, well, it’s not that special.  If they did go public with its core processing specs, much of the bonanza of free publicity for the iPad would be lost as talk would quickly devolve not to what the device will be good for, but instead to what it’s not.

He’s got a point, since most of what is being talked about right now is how the iPad will (or won’t, or could, or might) do to revolutionize [insert everyday computing task here].

What Stokes says is that the A4 will merely be a single-core A8 in 1GHz and will be a lot like the other Apple products in the “simple device” market – i.e. the iPhone and similar electronics that aren’t full-blown desktop/notebooks. Basically, this makes the iPad an iPhone/iPad with a little bit faster processor (1GHz rather than the phone’s 600).

As Apple Insider points out, this refutes the earlier assumption by many that the iPad would include the rumored A9 CPU.  Of course, they also come up with a reason why this is a good thing.  Despite the fact that this makes the iPad a glorified iPhone – an iPhone that, by the way, might work a little faster, but that won’t fit easily in your pocket.

Regardless, the devices are getting a lot of buzz and will probably have record sales as early adopters snatch them up on release.