Five Tools for Spying on Your Competition

"By understanding the marketing strategies of your competitor, you can always stay a step ahead of them. The key is knowing how to obtain all of this vital information without having to hire a PR firm, an FBI agent, or an undercover spy. Luckily for us, all we need are a few online tools to find out exactly how are competitors are running the show."

Spying is kind of a harsh word when it comes to keeping an eye on the competition. It's not like these sites are tracking down secret formulas. However, they appear to be some easier ways of tracking down info than completely manual processes. I find Google Alerts to be very handy. In fact, I suggest setting up google alerts related to your own business as a way to keep an eye on your own internet presence. Sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised to see a link on a blog or something you might now be aware of without the help of such an alert.

Interview With Jeff Bezos On Amazon Web Services

TalkCrunch: "Moments after Jeff Bezos left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to talk to him for a few minutes about Amazon’s web services ambitions. Jeff is emphasizing that new services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are going to be a key business line for them in the future, and they are planting the seeds now."

I'm really into the possibilities for S3. It's interesting to hear some info straight from Bezos.

Squidoo or Squidon't...

So it's been around for a while, and it has been pretty much bodyslammed. But I wanted to expeirence the UI, it's OK but clumbsy overall. Here's a resulting page: http://www.squidoo.com/jydesign/. In the end, it's too proprietary to replace one's blog. However, I intend to use it as another page out there that promotes what I'm up to. It's pretty easy to load it up with RSS feeds and other content so that you don't have to manually 'touch' the page that often - kind of like a 'start page'.

Blogger Beta: Feature Complete!

Blogger Buzz: "This morning's push marks a huge milestone for the version of Blogger in Beta - it's finally feature complete! ...you can now publish blogs via S/FTP, a feature formerly available on the older version of Blogger. Beta's FTP functionality is significantly enhanced however - it includes Label support!

Most importantly, the addition of FTP to the beta means that account migration will soon (like Really Really Soon) be available to all Blogger users -- it's currently just enabled for blogspot users. Thank you all for your patience with the recent outages and networking problems - they'll soon be a thing of the past!"

This could not come soon enough.

iLounge Rings In The Holiday Season With Its The 2007 iPod Buyers' Guide

"The world's most popular iPod and accessory buyers’ guide is back for its third year, and better than ever!" - I dig the wide-screen edition.

WebAssist Offers Up Dreamweaver Tools for Google™ 1.0

WebAssist Professional: "Enhance your websites with advanced Google innovations without touching the code. Install Dreamweaver Tools for Google to quickly add powerful Google Search capabilities targeted to your site, drop a Google Map on any page to highlight multiple locations with custom markers or sell goods and save money with Google Checkout. Best of all, Dreamweaver Tools for Google is absolutely free."

Thanks WA.