Managing my passwords has become a point of frustration and fear.

Email accounts, client accounts, ftp accounts, banking and much more… ever forgot your password.  Of course system administrators are great at forcing secure passwords that include unnatural characters and numbers (a good practice by-the-way).  It only makes sense that a good password is also a hard password to remember.

Then comes the warning… don’t use secure and highly sensitive passwords at websites or other “not so secure” locations that may be vulnerable.  Perhaps you are in a similar boat as me? I have hundreds of client accounts, hosting control panels, email services, servers, etc. etc. and there is now way to keep all of the user names and passwords.

Enter KeePass

As noted on the KeePass website:

“KeePass is a password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). For more information, see the features page. “

I have been using KeePass for the last couple of years and I love it!  I like that the user interface is straight forward and intuitive and I like that it is free. Free as in OpenSource. In fact is is OSI Certified.

The author of the software, Dominik Reichl says,

“in my opinion all software that has something to do with security should be open-source ”

KeePass is now in version 1.11 and  comes ready Windows as well as a new version for your memory stick.  There are also several community contributions for PocketPC, Linux/Mac and even BlackBerry!  I have to try it on my Blackberry!

Visit the KeePass site at this link and you can download the software.

Hey – why not get Skype now and give me a call?

Cheers -
David A. West

ODIOGO is a service where you can give your blog a voice… free. I like free.
With a few keyboard strokes and a quick download of the WordPress plugin I had my blog talking within 10 minutes.

From the Odiogo site… “Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device. “

So, how can something so good… be free?  Advertising revenue of course.  While it is not initally apparent, a short dig around their site and you will find that their business model includes the insertion of audo ads into the audio stream.  I will be listening for the ads in my blog stream.

As noted on the Odiogo site “The Odiogo Advertising Servers insert audio spots into the content. The Odiogo Billing Servers calculate the revenue share among the parties.”

I like cool things on the Internet that seem to have great potential.  Way to go Odiogo!

Hey – why not get Skype now and give me a call?

Cheers -
David A. West

Tom Costello and Anna Patterson of the new search engine “Cuil” have something to celebrate!

Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system. She believes her latest invention is even more valuable — only this time it’s not for sale.  See the Fox News site for full article

And according to CUIL;

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Since it’s launch on July 28th, CUIL has enjoyed more than 50 million searches. This type of traffic closely rivals that of Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live.  A fair feat to celebrate given that CUIL is a small start up with only 30 employees.

I spent some time on CUIL testing some of my favorite keyword phrases, like “Calgary website design“. I have mixed feelings about the search results that CUIL is returning.  Actually the result for Calgary website design is fairly excellent   When I search the names or domain names of some fairly well know Calgary business websites, to my surprise they don’t perform as well as I thought that they would.

I think CUIL is a pretty fine tool. I am looking forward to it maturing and giving the big boys a run for their money. There is a lot of room for strong search engines on our Internet… competition is good for us all.

CUIL claims to be the “World’s Biggest Search Engine“… now we wait to see if the search results are a relevant as our friend Google.  While indexing 120 Billion plus pages on the internet is quite impressive, the true measure of success for a search engine has to be in the quality of the actual search results.

By the way… did you download your free report from Stuart’s blog yet…
http://blog.itsuccessmentor.com/connect-the-dots

Hey – why not get Skype now and give me a call?

Cheers -
David A. West