Many of the methods that promise high Search Engine rankings are basically spam. Google doesn’t like spam at all and if Google finds out that your website contains spam elements, your website will be penalized. Will Google forgive you if you remove the spam from your site?
Yahoo has launched its digital advertising solution called APT (formerly called AMP).
An excerpt from Search Engine Journal
Specifically, these benefits are:
Fostering a more transparent marketplace through the ability to connect to new business partners for cross-selling;
Providing ad selection and inventory management tools to match relevant ads to marketers' target audience; and
Allowing publishers to manage their own private networks.
Yahoo is fighting hard to defend its teaming up with Google for serving text ads beside Yahoo results. While that stays, display ads is one area where Google has relatively lesser market share.
Supposing that Yahoo does real well with the display ads solution, would it still be able to challenge Google in the long run? That is a question that most have on their mind. This only leaves Microsoft as a eligible competitor to Google and that too a very distant one.
See full article.
Related Entries:
Yahoo delayed new advertising technology - 20 July 2006
Could Terry Semel bring Yahoo back into the black? - 11 May 2007
Yahoo, Print Media Boast Alliance - 14 June 2007
Yahoo’s Beginning… - 10 November 2007
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Google made news with its patent application for designing a datacenter that floats on sea. While the Search Engine claimed that they file patents for very many ideas, this one in particular has a lot of potential for the future.
Datacenters are critical for large scale operations. Almost any enterprise or web based business depends on efficient data center management for its operations. At the same time, data centers can run up huge power bills. This in particular is one reason why Google's floating datacenter may be more than just an idea. Using water as a coolant and tethering the data center to power sources that derive their energy from waves may just be the perfect eco-friendly solution.
Datacenter Knowledge has a post on this.
Google's concept is based on power systems from Pelamis, a UK company that developed huge “wave snakes” comprised of a series of floating cylinders. The first commercial wave farm went live this week off the coast of Portugal, and will supply up to 2.25 megawatts of capacity to Portugal's power grid.
Here is a video link for a demo of the concept.
See full article.
Related Entries:
Datacenter Virtualization Start-up Virtual Iron Software Launches Company - 26 January 2005
Green Datacenter on the rise - 01 July 2007
Sun’s datacenter-in-a-box - 30 January 2008
Datacenter in the desert - 27 May 2008
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google, Social Software, Googleholic, Search, web 2.0
In this edition:
Continue reading Googleholic for September 26, 2008
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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Social Software
After months of planning, MySpace has rolled out MySpace Music, a new advertising-supported streaming audio service backed by the four major music labels.
There are a few things that make MySpace Music worth checking out. You can stream all the songs for free. And you can add songs to a custom playlist and post that list to your MySpace profile, making it easy for people to find new music. And finally, if you find a song you like, but you want to play it on a portable device or when your computer isn’t connected to the internet, you can click the Buy button in the player to purchase the a DRM-free copy of the track from Amazon MP3.
But I’m still not particularly impressed. I was able to find MySpace pages for most of the artists I searched for. But not every song was available for purchase from Amazon. And for many artists you could find one or two albums, but not every album, and certainly not every song.
Since MySpace Music is basically a streaming audio website, it’s hard not to compare it to similar services like Last.fm or even SeeqPod. And I have to say, while the audio player is nice, and the social aspect could be useful, the music selection isn’t very impressive.
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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Freeware, Social Software
There’s a new version of the free Windows chat/social messaging client Digsby today. Probably the biggest change in this release is a dramatic reduction in memory use. Like a 75% reduction.
One of the biggest complaints early Digsby users had was that the application was a memory hog. And while it still certainly uses a bit more memory than some IM clients, that’s to be expected since Digsby isn’t just an IM client. The program also provides email notifications and updates from social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
The latest release also adds LinkedIn support. Once you register your LinkedIn account you’ll be able to see the number of unattended alerts at a glance by looking at the icon in your system tray. You can also click on the icon to see the latest updates from your LinkedIn contacts.
There have also been some performance updates that should make the program more responsive. And each IM protocol will try several connection methods for getting around firewalls and proxy servers before giving up.
If you’ve been avoiding Digsby because of its high memory footprint, it might be time to give it another look. In my tests, I’ve found that it uses between 25MB and 40MB of memory. Now if only the Digsby team would hurry up and release Mac and Linux versions they’ve been promising.
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Many people still don’t know what it takes to convince Google that your website is more relevant than the millions of other websites on the Internet. There are four simple rules that will help you to get your website on Google’s first result page:
With the spread of micro-blogging services, there is a change in the way URLs are conveyed. Long URLs tend to get unwieldy for use on micro-blogging services and hence the URL shortening services that make URLs succinct but in themselves meaningless.
There is an article up at SEJ that summarizes the benefits and disadvantages of the same.
To quote from the article:
* use the services when you can't do without them (e.g. with Twitter and Twitter applications that automatically shrink a long URL using TinyURL);
* use the services when you don't care if the link will be clicked or who it will be clicked by;
* don't use them at your own site.
The use of URL shorteners does not have any advantages as such.
A list of URL shortening services can be obtained from here.
Its a great feature to use when one wants to convey a specific site within the constraints of the character limit.
See full article.
Related Entries:
SEO experiment on hyphenated, underscored, and conjoined keywords in urls - 19 August 2006
Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs - 19 June 2007
Scalable On-Page SEO Strategies - 26 July 2007
How Short Should a URL Be? - 30 July 2008
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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Utterz, a mobile service for sharing photos, videos, and audio — most people know it as a place to crosspost audio tidbits to Twitter — recently got a total identity makeover. Well, not quite total … the site is now called Utterli, which is a slightly more clever cow pun. But why the switch, after Utterz had already carved out an identity for itself in the market?
The company blog explains: “Utterz has outgrown its original identity. The cow puns, mascot, etc., are loved by some of our earliest customers and employees. … However, the Utterz identity was limited in scope and appeal, inhibited some new customer adoption and interfered with some key business discussions.” I would guess that their growing user base landed them some potential investors who were ok with cows, but not with the mental image of milking one.
On the new feature front, Utterli is now going to be organizing things around groups, as well as rolling out with partnerships with device manufacturers and other web services. They’re not saying what these are, for now, but they do claim to be “quickly gaining on Twitter.” Looks like we’ll find out over the next few months whether the cow was really holding Utterz back. That infamous whale doesn’t seem to be hurting Twitter’s dominance of the microblogging world, though.
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Social Software
Are you leaving work early to fly off somewhere with your sweetie? You could Tweet that to your followers on Twitter, or you could tell them, “I’m going to ✂ out of work early today and hop a ✈ to Montego Bay with my true ♥.”
Adding symbols to Tweets used to involve remembering a whole bunch of keystroke combinations but thanks to TwitterKeys, created by the folks at The Next Web Blog, all you have to do now is cut and paste.
Just drag the TwitterKeys bookmarklet to your toolbar and next time you’re looking for a symbol, just click the link to open the directory. Find the symbol you like, copy it (Control + C), then paste it (Control + V) into your Tweet. Pretty sweet.
Two things to note: TweetDeck users will need to change the apps defult font setting to international/utf8 in order to use TweetKeys. Also, Mac users will recognize many of these symbols from the Special Characters set found on OS X. While not all of those characters will work cleanly in Twitter, the ones selected for TwitterKeys will.
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Social Software
If you’re social life won’t be complete until you’re socially connected to David Hasselhoff, I have some good news for you. Now you can sign up to be one of the Hoff’s 15,000 closest friends by joining his social network HoffSpace. Woo.
Free membership on the site gets you your own home page, and access to Hasselhoff’s media collection of pictures and videos (though I’m guessing not this one.) You’ll also be able to read Hasselhoff’s blog, shop for personalized gifts, and chat with his adoring fans worldwide. There’s even a page filled with ringtones and wallpapers for your mobile phone.
I know you’re probably thinking this has to be the oddest social networking site ever created. Probably not.
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If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimize your web page titles.
Filed under: Fun, Photo, Social Software
Alana Taylor is probably best known for writing a song about Twitter, but maybe not for long. She’s also just released a Facebook app that you might find handy. If you go to a lot of tech-savvy social events, like Alana, or if you just have friends who like to play Facebook paparazzi, you’ve probably wished you could grab all the tagged pictures of you in one fell swoop.
That’s what this new app, the accurately-named Get My Tagged Pics, can do for you. It displays all your tagged pics in rows of 10, and lets you download each row as a zip. This is good, because it’s halfway between the one-at-a-time method and the other extreme of grabbing hundreds (or maybe thousands!) of pics in one huge file. Sure, it could let you select 10 at a time, but clicking to select wouldn’t be any faster than clicking to download. One click is all you need, here.
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Filed under: Audio, Fun, Photo, Social Software
A few obvious uses for postcard.fm spring to mind: it’s more thoughtful than a Facebook wall message for a friend’s birthday, and it might even go over well as a surprise for a significant other. In a pinch, you can use it to share a song with a friend, if you don’t have somewhere else to upload. There are some limitations, but they’re not a big deal: it’s mp3-only and just streaming, no downloads. The best part is that postcard.fm isn’t at all ugly or tacky, so it’s as considerate a way as we’ve seen to quickly show someone you’re thinking of them via the Internet.
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Filed under: Fun, Productivity, Social Software
Sleep.fm is a personalized alarm service for your computer, phone, or Internet-enabled alarm clock that lets you and your friends leave each other personalized wake-up messages. While I agree that waking up to the radio, the standard alarm clock beep, or some obnoxious fake birds is less than ideal, I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on the utility of Sleep.fm.
I started to get the picture a little more clearly after checking out a video on the Sleep.fm FAQ page. In this little demo, a woman who had missed her Japanese studies the day before wakes up to a teasing message from a friend, in Japanese. I think that says a lot about what Sleep.fm is trying to do: turn the wake-up alarm into another useful way to communicate. I wouldn’t object to waking up to a message that all of my meetings for the day were cancelled, for example, or finding out about a change of lunch plans with a friend.
Isn’t that what we have voicemail, email, text messages and Twitter for, though? I agree with the Sleep.fm theory that waking up is personal, but for me that means just wanting to be left alone. If you’re the kind of person who likes to jump right into the day with new information, someone who checks email and rss feeds before even getting out of bed, this might be a good new tool in your arsenal. The site is taking signups now for its upcoming relaunch.
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Merissa Meyers, VP of Search Products & User Experience has made an insightful entry at Google Blog that hints towards some directions Google will be taking as its Search Engine and search technology as such evolve in the next decade.
Interesting among the details mentioned are the reference to Search as a science that is in its infancy. Indeed search is far from perfect and there is a long way to go but unlike a field in its infancy, there is really little radical breakthroughs happening. Or perhaps its just that the breakthroughs are such that when they finally trickle to the surface its only a minor shift in search accuracy.
To state the points she mentions in the entry:
Search could become more ubiquitous, being a part of everyday devices so that you can get answers wherever you are.
Search could harness local information more readily to arrive to answers for ambiguous questions.
Algorithmic analysis of social graphs could also lead to more relevant disambiguation of queries.
The presentation of media will get more relevance and perhaps the UI will change to accommodate the larger real estate of new monitors.
Would be interesting to see whether the concept of link analysis itself undergoes radical changes in the coming years. For SEOs there are some definite hints to pick to the kind of changes that may be coming to Google.
Related Entries:
Google Malware Warning Could Hit Your Web Search - 27 February 2007
The ‘Doubly Lucky’ Google - 29 July 2007
Search Retention: Healthy Yet Fierce - 26 August 2007
SEO: What The ‘Near’ Future Look Like - 02 November 2007
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Filed under: Audio, Fun, Internet, Social Software, Search
Since I posted 35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s, I now fully understand just how much everyone on the damn internet wants free music. Well, here’s another place to feed your addiction.
I wandered over to Tagoo expecting to find another piece of hastily assembled Google search garbage. Man, was I in for a surprise.
Tagoo finds direct links to MP3 files, and it lets you stream them or build playlists right on their site.
It’ll suggest while you type: “prote,” offered me Protest The Hero. Well done, Tagoo! When results appear, click the play button immediately to the right of the track to listen to it immediately. The track’s artist, title, genre, bitrate, filesize, and length are all displayed.
It’s even nice enough to warn you about potentially slow download sites, marking them with a red dot.
Continue reading Tagoo Finds MP3s for You to Stream or Download
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Suppose that you have a great website with great content. Your web pages are perfectly optimized for visitors and search engines and you have found many related websites that could link to your site. How do you convince these websites that they should link to your website? Here are five tips that will help you to convince other webmasters.
Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Twitter lets you share short messages with the whole world. Yammer lets you share them with your coworkers (or anyone who has an email address on the same domain as yours).
The idea is to use social networking tools to enhance intra-office of intra-team communications. Users can post short messages to let members of their team know what they’re working on, ask questions, or talk about what they saw on TV last night. There doesn’t seem to be a hard 140 character limit on Yammer like there is with Twitter, so you can post longer messages. But since you’re unlikely to be following thousands of users, it should be much easier to keep track of conversations on Yammer than Twitter.
In order to create a Yammer account you need to sign up with your company email account. Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail addresses won’t work. Once you’ve created an account for your company you can invite more users on the same domain or communicate with others who have already signed up.
Yammer’s basic service is free and includes a web client, a desktop client built on Adobe AIR and Blackberry app. An iPhone versions is coming soon. The company charges $1 a month (per user) for administrator accounts. So if you want to be able to monitor your workplace network you’ll have to pony up a few bucks. As Webware’s Rafe Needleman points out, this may be an unsustainable proposition. While I can see some small businesses using Yammer, larger companies with a few dollars in the bank can easily spend some time building their own Twitter-like application if they want to. I’m not sure why anyone would need to pay for Yammer service.
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Filed under: Internet, News, Productivity, Microsoft, Social Software
According to ZDNet, Microsoft plans to release the final version of Office Live Workspace by the end of 2008. The Google Docs competitor, which was launched as a beta in December of 2007, has been downloaded by over a million users.
Office Live Workspace is NOT a web-based version of Office. Instead, it is something of an Office-add-on (though you can use it on a computer that does not have Office installed). You can upload Office documents (Word, Excel and Powerpoint files) to Office Live Workspace and then access them from another computer (so it is a virtual flash drive of sorts) or grant permission for other users to access your documents. They can then edit and upload versions and share new documents with you.
Live documents cannot be edited directly in OLW, though you can create “web notes” which are similar to Google Docs documents and spreadsheets or “web lists” — that as of right now don’t do calculations. You can also comment on an Office file, so even if you don’t have access to Word to immediately edit a document, you can comment on what changes need to be made.
I have an Office Live Workspace account, but I have to admit, it has received little use. It isn’t so much that Google Docs is that much better — the spreadsheet and forms options are, the word processing is about the same — it is just more ubiquitous and has become a more streamlined part of my workflow.
If you have a Windows Live ID (nee Passport), you can use that to sign-up or sing into the Office Live Workspace beta. It is aimed at Windows users, but works fine on a Mac running Safari (and works with Mac formatted Office documents).
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