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You know what it’s like. You are driving through a beautiful area of countryside. Your passengers are all soaking up the wonderful scenery. Every now and then you hear a “Ooh; look at that …” or “Wow, just look at the cloud formation over the hill-tops” but you can’t look because you are engaged in that old juggling trick of driving and map-reading all at the same time. Not to mention the time lost when you first arrived whilst you raised a second mortgage to enable you to buy all the different Ordnance Survey maps that are needed (why are you never in an area entirely covered by just one single map?) and then managed to find a shop which actually sells them.

There are indeed some beautifully stunning areas throughout the Emerald Isle, and the volume of traffic is light. Motorways are few and far between, and many of the main routes which criss-cross the country are comparatively slow, so there is a great opportunity for you to enjoy the scenery as you drive – providing that you do not have to check which page of the road atlas you should be on, or struggle with the opened-up folded map you are trying to follow.

Well fear not! Technology is here to ease your burden, and there are a number of ways you can utilise it to make your Ireland driving experience more enjoyable than ever before.

The simplest is probably to download Google maps and directions onto an i-phone, using their ‘Maps & Compass’ app. It allows you to specify if you are walking or driving, and shows a map with the route highlighted, or a page with a route listed on it. It’s a free app.

For anyone with an Android based smart phone, there is a fully functional and free ‘turn-by-turn’ navigation system available. The engine is Google Maps Navigation and it is reported to work really well.

Google have recently announced that a full-function version of Google Maps Navigation will soon be available for smart phones, but have not confirmed which ‘phones might be included in the roll-out. There is strong speculation that the i-phone will be included. However, neither Google or Apple are confirming anything publicly; no doubt the Android – v – Apple war needs to end first.

Tom-tom and Garmin are two high volume suppliers of classic ‘turn-by-turn’ nav systems in Ireland. As stand alone systems which can be taken from vehicle to vehicle they are very flexible, and fairly cost-effective. Wherever you are travelling from for your trip to Ireland, you can probably bring one of these with you – just make sure you have downloaded the Ireland maps onto them before you leave home! The very occasional mis-direction along a too-small road just adds to the adventure of your trip.

Most travellers will hire a car, and typing ‘car hire Ireland’ into your search engine will bring up a good deal of choice. It is worth choosing cars with a built-in sat nav, which is generally easier to use than stand alone systems, and do not offer a target to the opportunist thief.

This week Google announced on its blogging platform that it has acquired LabPixies, a company that develops lightweight utilities and games for several platforms, including the iPhone, Android and iGoogle, Google’s customisable home page.

Google and Labpixies have been working in collaboration for some time (Labpixies being one of the first developers to create widgets for iGoogle). According to Google’s blog post, Labpixies is joining the Google team because the acquisition will allow both companies to work closer together and allow them to be more innovative. The small team from LabPixies is due to join the Tel Aviv office of Google.

A statement on the site blog of LabPixies says that “The acquisition is an opportunity to learn from each other to bring more apps to users, help developers and improve the overall developer ecosystem.” The company claims that is has 40 million users across its widgets, which includes a Calorie Calculator, Expenses Manager, Phonebook and Calender and several games, including versions of Minesweeper, Hangman and Blackjack.

It’s not clear whether Labpixies will continue to develop applications for platforms other than iGoogle, though they may stick to the OpenSocial platform which is used by most of the main social networks, except for Facebook. OpenSocial is a common API used for social applications across a number of websites.

Labpixies is the eighth company Google has acquired this year and the fourth this month. This number equals the total number of acquisitions made in 2008 and 2009 put together. So far Google has acquired at least 70 companies to aid it in fulfilling its strategies at a total price of $10bn.

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.

If you’re idea of great pizza starts with a “D” or has the word “Hut” in it, then you probably don’t need to read any further.  On the other hand, if your pizza requires a stone oven, charcoal grill, or something other than a conveyor belt with a heat source, then you’ll be interested in this.

Whether you own the restaurant or you frequent pizza joints, you probably have things you think could improve or are wondering how great your favorite pie really is.  Enter thePizzaExperts.com.

Building on the unexpected huge popularity of his blog, WorstPizza.com, Lapp (our editor) decided to move things to the next level.  He and his crew got so many questions from restaurants they’d visited and reviewed that he decided there must be a need for real, independent, critique and review of pizza.

The group offers consulting on website development and design for pizza restaurants, as well as marketing setups through their affiliated sites PizzaTweetup.com and WorstPizza.com.  They also offer, of course, fair and unbiased critique of the pizza offered by the restaurant, including what can improve as well as what’s being done right.

This is a very unique idea and is niche-marketing at its finest, I think.  The combination of IT development, social marketing, and expertise in pizza is unusual, so this idea would be hard to copy and beat.  Definitely a good one.

File this under “that’s nutty awesome.”  It’s an extremely simple idea and is probably as old as ASCII itself, but turning plain text upside down has been the stuff of cyber-trickery for all of our modern age.  Now, with the latest communication tool being Twitter, comes Tweact.com.

This is one of those things that despite being as old as the byte it’s based on, it never seems to lose its novelty.  No matter what, it’s always going to make people look twice at what you’ve sent, even if it’s just to say “haha, how do I do that?”  It’s akin to those endless forwarded emails that everyone knows is b.s., but everyone forwards anyway.  Why?  Because it’s still entertaining.

I could analyze why upside-down text always grabs our attention, which may explain why some ideas like this one are just endlessly entertaining to us.  The look of upside down text immediately makes our brains engage.  I think it’s because we’re psychologically trained to see specific shapes and sequences.  That is, after all, how we read.  When we’re presented with the same shapes, but in a generally unfamiliar way, we pause.  Therein lies the entertainment.

I liken it to comedy.  Most people listen to “brainy” comedians like Dennis Miller and feel compelled to laugh at his jokes–no matter how esoteric and almost meaningless they might be.  Why?  Because not laughing would make us “stupid.”  That’s what I call “forced” comedy.

Then there’s slapstick, “low-brow” comedy ala Larry the Cable Guy.  Many people think it’s “beneath them,” but everyone laughs at it.  Even if they’re pretending not to.  It’s just funny.  Why?  Because he’s taking something normal and twisting it into abnormality in such a way that it attacks our sensibilities.  He makes racial slurs, fart noises, says stuff that’s totally obvious, but sounds goofy just because he’s saying it.  That sort of thing.  Nobody classifies that stuff as “genius” in any way, but it’s still funny.  Every time.

Tweact is like that.  It’s not new, original, or even really all that funny.  But it’s still engaging and entertaining.  Every time.  Totally.  That means it’s worth checking out and playing with.

The way it works is simple.  The page loads with a Google-like plain title and box.  Put in your line of text in the box and, as you type, another box with the output (upside down text) appears.  Click “Tweet This” or “Facebook It” and it’s presented to your twitter.com or facebook.com page.  You don’t have to give Tweact any information about you at all, it sends the data directly to the Twitter or Facebook API without your login required.  You then authenticate it through the normal channels for those sites and it’s posted.

Now, of course, since what its’ sending is pure ASCII and not regular text characters, some screens won’t show it as anything more than random Chinese.  Seesmic and TweetDeck, for instance, present it in blocks and dashes rather than words.  On the Web, though, it looks like upside-down text.

I confess that I had fun this with one.  I think you will too.

Freelance nation piggybacks profiles with leading social networking platform

There comes a point in life when you own one too many keys, and may get mistaken for a weighed-down, off-duty custodian minus the mop. The same is growing true of virtual online keys – the dozens of account handles, logins and passwords we repeat, recycle, tweak, and ultimately confuse and forget.

Thankfully, Vois and Facebook have linked together to sync up and streamline their accounts. Facebook members can now use the Facebook Connect utility to hook up with Vois.com (Virtual Outsourcing is Social), the world’s freshest freelance professional marketplace, without cycling through yet another registration process.

What this means is that Facebook members don’t have to create a separate account for Vois, a publicly-traded, social commerce Web company that combines the power of social networking with an online marketplace for on-demand services.

Instead, Web-savvy professionals can connect using existing Facebook profile information, friends and privacy preferences, and log into Vois.com without wasting extra keystrokes. To make this happen, Facebook members simply click the “Facebook Connect” prompt displayed on the Vois website. Whammy, it’s that easy.

Once connected, Facebook members can then share information and actions on Vois with their friends on Facebook via Facebook-fed stories and status updates.

“Facebook Connect integration was a natural fit for Vois, as Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities, which is ideally the cornerstone of Vois.com’s social commerce network,” said Gary J. Schultheis, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vois. “With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real information with them to Vois, including the basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups and more.”

The convergence of Vois and Facebook is about more than convenience and a few saved keystrokes; it’s about leveraging the well-built content and connections from one popular networking platform and using it to get a step ahead in another.