January 2007 - Posts
The big search news of the day today is that Google Maps are being slowly integrated into search results pages. What's happening in essence is that when Google recognizes that the search being conducted is local they will provide a "
Onebox" which includes a map and three business listings. Web users will also be able to obtan driving directions and get more information on the sites appearing in the OneBox. The OneBox however is nothing new. Previous local Onebox results were limited to text only listings (minus the map) however and looked in many respects like an Adwords listing. This version features much more "depth" for end users and includes links to reviews, details on those listings appearing and Web pages that link in.
If you've got a local business, now is the time to take advantage of these local SEM features. Both Yahoo and Google offer complimentary ways of helping small local businesses generate some exposure online. All it takes is an Internet connection and a browser. Of course,
a free subscription to Website Magazine wouldn't hurt either.
Here's a quick look at the new "Onebox":
Whether voluntarily reported or prodded by the IRS, taxation for transactions, trades and barters through metaverse sites such as Second Life and World of Warcraft may be on its way. The Joint Economic Committee of Congresss is set to release a report in a few months that will address the tax issues surrounding these virtual - yet very real - economies. While this may be bad news for players in the metaverse, and even worse news for those that actually make a profit from these sites, one can take comfort in the fact that those IRS folks are going to have many, many long nights trying to wrap their heads around this one.
It's certainly going to be a challenge for the people trying to set taxation standards. One hurdle is the varying exchange rates of these virtual economies. World of Warcraft's currency, the Azerothian gold coin, trades at an unofficial rate of seven per US dollar. Second Life's offical exchange rate is approximately 50 cents per 100 Lindens (Second Life dollars). Now, what happens when the next 500 metaverse sites with their own currencies and separate exhange rates pop up - over the next few months or years? You can bet that if a user is successful making money on one of these sites, they will be hopping from world to world trying to make even more money.
And then there are trades and barters. How can you set a value on trading a spiffy new sportcoat for a shiny new bicycle? Who makes out better in that deal, and how many Lindens are changing hands? IRS spokesperson Nancy Mathis said via email, "whether exchanges constitute bartering depends on the facts and circumstances of each case." In other words, the IRS' official stance can be said to be "undecided." But, rest assured, the government will find a way. This may just be a quick stab at scaring users into voluntarily reporting their metaverse income, while testing the waters for future taxation standards.
There is good news. Former Joint Economic Committe chair Representative Jim Saxton was clear in his opposition to this sort of taxation, back in October 2006 when the research project was launched. His chief economist, Dan Miller, is a veteran World of Warcraft gamer with a very high-ranking character in his arsenal.
UPDATE: eBay has announced a ban on auctions of assets acquired with World of Warcraft and other online games. Signaling the grey area of such transactions, eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy said, "We are not saying they are legal and we are not saying they are illegal." eBay currently does not consider Second Life a game, so the restriction does not apply.
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Compete.com had a notable blog post last week regarding
where time is spent online. The answer? MySpace. In fact, of all time spent online by U.S. Internet users, 11.9% was spent on MySpace. Other key observations include:
- Only 20 domains capture a whopping 39% of all our time spent online.
- Only 2.1% of our time is spent on Google.com (includes all sub-domains).
- MySpace (#1) is miles ahead of Yahoo! (#2), however Yahoo! impresses by holding a significant lead over Google+YouTube.com, MSN+Live.com and AOL+AIM.com.
Technorati Tags:
myspace, google, yahoo, compete, time spent online
Amazon Web Services Developers Playground:
Create REST or SOAP requests and generate code samples on the fly for Amazon
services.
More practical design and development solutions:
Code Igniter: Open source Web
application framework. There's a good flash tutorial to see
Code Igniter in action.
Automatic Pullquotes with JS and CSS: Super simple way to create website
pull quotes with JavaScript and cascading style sheets.
Free Web Development Programs:
A great collection of free and very useful web development tools and programs.
JonDesign's Smooth Gallery:
Javascript gallery and slideshow system that allows website to have cross fading
image gallery, slideshow, showcase text and other stuff.
Previous Posts In This Series:
Practical Design and Development Solutions - Volume 5
Practical Design and Development Solutions - Volume 4
Practical Design & Development Solutions - Volume 3
Practical Design & Development Solutions: Volume 2
Practical Design & Development Solutions - Volume 1
Technorati Tags:
web design, web development, code igniter, smooth gallery, javascript, css
This is not a post about what happens when Google goes away - because we all know that won't be happening for quite a while. What this post is about however is where users go after they search on Google. It should come as no surprise that Web users query Google for what they need at a specific time but how about after that? What do they find? What they are increasingly finding are alternative search engines - and we're not talking arbitraged landing pages. Once users find a site, service or resource that they appreciate and find value within from any of the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN's Live), will they return to it? Well yes, of course they will! Read Write Web has an excellent post today on the
Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. Everything "cool" in search is covered; search homepages, articifical intelligence, clustering engines, reccomendation engines, metasearch engines and more. These are all good places to consider if you're targeting the long tail and secondary impressions from various content specific networks.
Google will soon begin testing an abbreviated pre-roll advertising model with the BBC. Via
BBC News, "
YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity". The system would be rolled out in a couple of months and use a mixture of advertisements including short clips shown ahead of the videos.
Mercado Software has unveiled Mercado 4.0, a site search and merchandising
solution for online retailers (currently used by industry leaders such as
Williams-Sonoma, Macy's and Sears) which integrates metrics from back-end ERP
systems, web analytics data gleaned from Coremetrics, Fireclick, and Omniture,
and customer reviews and ranking information from vendors like Bazaarvoice and
PowerReviews.
“In order to maximize profits, eCommerce businesses need a merchandising
strategy and tools that integrate the disparate data that reflect their reality
– metrics like conversion rates, customer reviews, inventory levels, and product
freshness,” said Corey Leibow, president and CEO of Mercado Software. “Mercado
4.0 is very significant for our industry because it not only connects the dots
between various meaningful eCommerce metrics, but also allows merchandisers to
immediately act on this data and deploy the merchandising mix that is right for
them.”
Some of the features:
- Relevant and merchandised search and navigation results and rankings
- Linguistic support–synonyms, spelling correction, and stemming
- 20+ industry domains dictionaries
- A comprehensive rules engine managed by business users
- Actionable reports with integrated data and metrics
- Metrics Driven Merchandising™–integrates and leverages the power of dynamic
metrics to enable merchandising
MyDomain.com’s will be holding a domain name discount and customer incentive event that offers the .MOBI domain name on a two year contract for just $4.99. Accroding to the release "Customers can tap into the latest realm of Web site creation built for display on cell phones and other mobile devices at a low price." That, and .mobi is just a cool domain name to posess. Beginning at 4PM Eastern Time, on Tuesday, January 30, visitors to MyDomain.com are eligible to receive a coupon code for one .MOBI domain name that is valid between Wednesday, January 31 and Monday, February 12.
Set your calendars.
This is almost too easy. Odiogo™ has
released an application that
enables text content providers (say for instance, bloggers) to create new audio media. Blog entries
are converted on the fly into high fidelity voice files ready to play on MP3
players, PDAs, phones, or laptop computers.
Odiogo – a play on "Audio To Go" –
extracts blog posts or articles from member news sites and converts them to
lightweight MP3 files in seconds. The files can be loaded to any mobile device,
giving users anytime-anywhere access to their favorite web content.
"Odiogo
allows end-users to enjoy blogs and news on the go, at the gym, in the car, or
on the subway. They gain quick, easy access to content they previously could
only get by reading a computer screen" said CEO Marc Kawam. "On the other hand, Odiogo gives news sites and bloggers finally an economical way to automatically
podcast their textual content and reach more mobile users."
podcast
podcasting
blogs
web
2.0
mp3
rss
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text-to-speech
yahoo tech
Joining the ranks of free blogging platforms such as Vox and others,
ShoutPost.com today announced their
official launch. The platform may end up setting a new trend in the blogosphere with its advertising-free
blog space and easy syndication. ShoutPost was developed by the creators of the
popular tBlog.com, which received some attention with its "thought matching"
technology for blog interaction. According to ShoutPost.com creator Taylor
Bayouth "With the new syndication system, we also offer the first free method
for any website owner to easily syndicate their ShoutPost blog anywhere on the
web. We think this feature will play a large part in ShoutPost's success."
blogs
blog
community
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site
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social blogging network
Google's
Site Exclusion tool, which allows for the exclusion of advertisings from showing up on particular sites or sections of sites, has been expanded. Now Adwords advertisers can exclude an unlimited number of sites which should help improve ROI and according to the
Inside Adwords Blog refine your targeting across the network. Google is suggesting that advertisers review sites carefully before deciding to exclude it from their campaign as hasty exclusions may result in missing out on potential customers.
Technorati Tags:
google, adwords, site exclusion tool, arbitrage
Google will be testing an Adsense video distribution and sponsorship model with a small group of publishers the next few weeks. Google ran a test previously with MTV to distribute ad-supported video content but they will now be working with a larger group of content providers (
Warner Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment) and pairing that content with advertising. These ad-supported videos will then be offered as "playlists" which publishers can select from and display on their Adsense websites. This is a major development and provides a clear view in my opinion on how Google will monetize their YouTube acquisition.
Technorati Tags:
google, google adsense, google video, youtube
One of the most important changes in the most recent release of WordPress has to do with plugins and how many of those that you have installed will no longer work in 2.1 - let's call it WordPress plugin sensitivty. There is some good news however. WordPress is providing a
plugin compatibility page where they list all the plugins that work (or don’t work) with the latest release.
Technorati Tags:
wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress 2.1
Wikipedia has added the NoFollow attribute to all external links, effectively cutting off spammers from attempting to derive value from links included in articles of the online encyclopedia. If you've managed to get a link within Wikipedia, there is still value to be received from the click-through traffic but there simply won't be any value to pass on from this trusted resource in the future.
'Technorati Tags:
wikipedia, nofollow, no follow attribute, wikipedia nofollow
While it might be cool to show estimates of how the local Web market is forecasted to "meet or exceed" one hundred bajillion dollars by next year, I hate such estimates almost as much as I hate forecasting anything at all. As a website owner, a blogger or someone responsible for web success all you care about (
and I know because I do too) is how to make the most of a burgeoning opportunity - nothing more, nothing less.
You can probably see the value in marketing on a local (geographic) level, especially if you're a small business catering directly to consumers. There are some online resources and services which are helping SMB's just like you take advantage of and engage in the "local conversation". While you may not end up being the end all be all of information about what's happening in your zip code, it's imperative that you at least participate on some level.
Outside.in is one such service that enables users to discover "conversations" that are happening in a neighborhood (where you live, work or want to be). The Web is amazing in that it provides a continuously updated stream of information. The challenge has been to seperate what happens on a local level from what happens on a global level. Outside.in is trying to change all that by being a "bridge between information space and real-world space." In essence, what they are trying to accomplish is letting local share their knowledge in ways that make sense to them.
Registration is free so submit a blog and a local story now and join the local conversation.
Technorati Tags:
outside.in, blogging, local marketing, community marketing
Yahoo made it official and announced that they are in the process of rolling out some changes to its search results. From the
Yahoo Search Blog:
"As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began last night and should be complete very soon."
No, I'm not talking about lipstick for your blog, but rather what a web page consists of - it's makeup. There is an excellent research and analysis tool I came across via
ResourceShelf this morning which provides a detailed view of a web pages external objects (
images, scripts, etc.) and those objects sizes and how long it takes to download them in seconds. You can also look through the code of any page - it's excellent for even the non-technical user to get a bare bones, behind the scenes look at what makes some pages tick.
Check out the URI Valet
Jennifer Slegg reported yesterday afternoon that Google will now allow publishers to display competing contextual ad units on the same page as long as they don't look like Adsense. Oh, hooray. While Google is really putting the squeeze on the competition with these TOS changes, they are still doable, but most bloggers completely missed the change regarding scraping something which is of infinitely more importance.
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright laws unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. How Google would go about determining who the scraper was is beyond me - it may just be a way to kick out the obvious Adsense riff-raff. The result will be a better return on investment from contextual advertising.
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox
which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Via LifeHacker:
After installing it, you'll need to head to Firefox's Customize Toolbar menu and
drag the FireFTP icon to a toolbar. From there, just click the icon to launch
the client in a new tab. (You'll also see a second tab from the author, who
requests charitable donations.) Now click Manage Accounts to add FTP sites.
FireFTP employs a simple Explorer-style interface and offers features like
directory comparison and syncing, SSL encryption, and file hashing.
There is an excellent support page covering installation, general usage, troubleshooting, some miscellaneous
questions and a great walkthrough for beginners available by Prisca Schmarsow.
Technorati Tags:
firefox, ftp, ftp tools, firefox plugins
Google has made several significant changes to its Adsense policies that
could have a major effect on many publishers. The policy change that has stirred
the most controversy in the blogosphere is to the section regarding competitive ads
and services: From the Adsense Help Center:
In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search
boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services
formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on
that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your
responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.
If you are placing any non-Google ads on your site that resemble Adsense (and
there are literally hundreds) even if they are not contextually targeted ads you
may be in violation of the AdSense policies.
Technorati Tags:
google, adsense, adsense policy, competitive advertising
Web Development Community
V7 Network announced the lauch of a new link brokerage service called Contextual Links. I like the naming - I learned early in my career to name things based on what it is that they actually are - it was good advice. Via their
blog: "
it differs from the Pay-Per-Post approach in that bloggesr don't endorse or review a service or product, they just provide a link."
Bloggers and Publishers can
sign up today (no beta - thanks!) and there's a good section also on why to choose V7N Contextual for your link building that is an important read.
Technorati Tags:
contextual links, seo, link building v7n
The latest version of popular content management system (CMS)
Drupal has been released. There are loads of new features that will be of interest to current Drupal users and motivation to download, some of which include 1) a localizable Web-based installer that checks run-time requirements and support pre-madeinstall profiles or distributions, 2) a new default core theme dubbed Garland which uses the new color module to change the theme's entire color scheme on the fly, 3) user management improvements that will give admins the ability to filter users by role, permission and status and 4) provides detailed reports on search terms, 404 and access denied errors. There are also quite a few improvements for developers including the addition of the jQuery JavaScript library, reorganized directory structure, pluggable session handling, PHP template improvements and a Form API.
Learn more and upgrade today at Drupal
BubblePLY.com is an interesting tool that allows users to add their own personal creative input on top of online video, much like a “user-generated pop-up video”. Users’ thoughts, comments, links and other creative content can be added to a video and immediately shared with others to view. If you have video that you need to add some additional content too or simply want to have some fun with other peoples videos, it's worth it
and not just for the entertainment factor.
BubblePLY.com works by employing an innovative technology whereby a
transparent layer, known as a ‘PLY’, is created and placed on top of a video.
Since the video itself is never altered, edited or copied, those using BubblyPly
won't infringe upon the original content owner's rights. On the PLY layer, the
BubblePly user can add "Bubbles" - similar to those found in comics such as a
speech, thought or commentary captions - that can include comments, links to a
website and other effects to accompany, explain or enhance the underlying video.
What makes this such an interesting tool is that information created on a PLY
can be utilized for indexing and searching content which presents some good
commercial opportunities.
There is no download necessary to create or view a PLY and any new PLY’d
video can be easily embedded and shared, by a unique URL that is generated.
Share:
online video
web
video
bubbleply
plymedia
personalized video greeting cards
video greeting cards
bubble-greeting
media technology
video community sites
ply
Just a brief note... The pay-per-click ad network side of
Miva is consolidating its search, contextual and new in-line text ads under a single management console. The Miva Monetization Center (MC) is intended to be a self-service console to allow publishers to set up and manage all three of Miva's ad products in one central location.
Employing search engine optimization tactics on your local-focused website is more than just adding your business address and phone number on your website pages and including your site in local directories like Google or Yahoo! Local. Chris Silver Smith of Verizon's SuperPages outlines some good tips for advanced local search optimization at the Natural Search Blog. While some of the suggestions are a little over the top in terms of practicality (change your business name and my favorite "rename your business streeet address", others are insightful and have been proven to actually work in some scenarious. Read the entire post on
advanced local search optimization.
Tags:
local search, local seo, local web marketing
I know, I know. Everyone has been talking and blogging about
MyBlogLog but for good reason. It's an interesting and helpful way to get in contact with other bloggers, expand your network and get some traffic to boot (
join the Website Magazine community at MyBlogLog here). Marketers could spend a lot of time playing around with MyBlogLog for the benefit of their site and it's a savvy invstment of time if you choose to do so.
To make networking and research a little easier through MyBlogLog,
SoloSEO has come up with some cool tools that improve upon MyBlogLog’s internal networking features by allowing you to do a number of exciting things, including comparing site visitors between two communities, comparing contacts (common contacts between two users as well as contacts unique to the individual users), comparing community members (common members between two communities as well as members unique to the individual communities), showing all visitors to the communities authored by a particular user, and adding contacts that are members of your communities.
Tags:
mybloglog, marketing, website magazine, soloseo
During one of my routine morning searches at Google I came across a very interesting addition to the home page, a promotion for its online shopping product Google Checkout:
Google is obviously pushing Checkout to end users and merchants and (I at least believe) it will probably be in the next few weeks or months that the industry will see some synergy between Checkout, Adwords and Google Base. This is of course only speculation, but count on some interesting developments very soon.
Tags:
google, google checkout, adwords, google base
Chinese Internet users spent 276.76 billion yuan on Internet services in 2006, almost 50 percent more than the previous year, as their number ros