Google out, Microsoft in for Digg

In a deal that boosts Microsoft Corp.'s plan to increase revenue from online advertising, the company will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on the popular Digg Inc. news site.

Microsoft also said it will work with Digg to develop new campaigns that combine advertising and technology for the site, and will collaborate with Digg's current advertising partner, Federated Media Publishing, to bring new programs to the site's users and advertisers. The deal's duration will be three years, the companies said.

Digg aggregates news stories from around the Web and lets users rate stories and recommend them to others with the popular "digg it" tag. More than 17 million unique users visit the site monthly, according to Digg.

Microsoft has been slowly building its efforts to become a stronger competitor in the fight for online advertising dollars, waging an uphill battle against market leader Google Inc. and others. This is the second partnership that Microsoft has unveiled in a little more than a week to boost its advertising presence. Last Tuesday, the company said it had added the ability for subscribers of its Office Live small-business hosted service to purchase paid-search advertising from portal Ask.com's s Ask Sponsored Listings.

Partnerships aren't the only way Microsoft is building its advertising strategy. The company is currently waiting for its $6 billion purchase of digital advertising and marketing services agency aQuantive Inc. to close, something the company said it expects to happen next month after a vote by aQuantive shareholders.

Sony Pictures launches online video network

Sony Pictures will on Monday launch an online video network that seeks out and rewards new talent and enables videos to be uploaded in high definition.

Crackle represents a relaunch for the video-sharing site Grouper, bought by Sony for $65m last August in one of the biggest Web 2.0 acquisitions of a San Francisco Bay Area company.

Crackle becomes part of an increasingly crowded video sector, where high-quality content can be a differentiator. The Sausalito-based company also sees itself seizing on a trend of content creators becoming more professional and seeking mainstream acceptance.

The website will offer a slate of themed channels for users to upload material. They include Wet Paint, an edgy animation channel, Shorts, highlighting short films, and High Wire, a stand-up comedy channel.

The best High Wire submissions can win a chance to perform at the well-known Improv comedy clubs, while Shorts uploaders could win a studio development deal and get the chance to pitch feature film ideas to Columbia Pictures executives.

Animation winners could see their work being theatrically released, making them eligible for Oscars.

Videos will be encoded and shown in higher than normal quality in widescreen format, with high-definition uploads also enabled.

{read the whole story}

Google unveils new widgets to help personalize maps

Google has announced new widgets called Mapplets that will let users gather data from multiple sources to personalize maps.

By adding mini-applications like real-time weather conditions or listings of local events, Google hopes to make it easier for non-technical users to easily build maps with dynamic content.

With the new Mapplets, a user looking for a home in Chicago could add Mapplets that display real estate listings and Chicago Transit Authority train lines, Tran said.

In a separate announcement, WeatherBug, which provides live local weather information online, said Wednesday that it has created a Mapplet for Google Maps that puts temperature markers on the map from WeatherBug's network of tracking stations and weather sensors worldwide.

Google expands its Code Search site

Google has updated its Google Code Search site for finding publicly available source code, adding greater coverage and improvements in ranking and access.

Launched in October 2006, Google Code Search enables developers to locate source code on the Web, searching through billions of lines of code.

"Today we made some updates to Code Search that will hopefully make it even easier to find the code you're looking for," said Google software engineer Aleksander Fedorynski in a blog entry Thursday about the improvements.

Coverage capabilities now include indexing of individual files and code snippets from all over the Web, Google said. Previously, only complete archives, such as .zip,.tar, and repositories, including CVS and Subversion, were indexed.

To improve ranking, Google has amended Code Search so class and method definitions now appear closer to the top of search results for certain queries.

Also, users now can access Code Search through several international domains, including Brazil, China, France, and Russia.

Right after the launch, Google's Code Search was criticized as a potential resource for hackers looking to find bugs, password information, and proprietary code.

{source}

ever heard of Kijiji?

EBay Inc. appears ready to take on Craigslist Inc., quietly opening a rival online classifieds Web site in the U.S. on Friday.

San Jose-based eBay activated a domestic version of an online classified site which has until now been available only in Europe, Asia and Canada, named Kijiji.

Posting an ad is free, although the company said it plans to explore ways to make money in the future.

EBay bought bought a 25 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004. It says it is happy with that investment but thinks there is room for more competition in the U.S. online classified market.

As of now Kijiji is not available in the Philippines, only India, China, Japan and Taiwan are the asian countries with Kijiji ads.

Dell colors its laptop world

Business computer-maker Dell plans to start aggressively courting consumers Tuesday— in part with new laptops colored flamingo pink.

The No. 2 PC maker has always offered some consumer computers. But they tended to be offshoots of its business products, and usually amounted to only 15% of U.S. sales.

Dell wants to change that. The company, which has struggled in recent quarters, has created a consumer-focused division. Its mandate: produce a fast-changing line of dazzling consumer PCs.

The first models will be available today on Dell's website. They include a slim performance laptop and feature-packed PCs. The most eye-catching are midrange laptops available in eight colors, from espresso brown to sunshine yellow.

Dell is also launching new services. Buyers of two of its most-popular consumer brands — Inspiron and XPS — can back up information online for a year for free. (Inspiron owners can store up to 3 gigabytes of data; XPS owners can store up to 10 GB.) Dell has also beefed up consumer Web pages and support.

{read the whole article on usatoday}

Google Continues Search Gains At Yahoo's Expense

Internet search figures for the month of May showed that U.S. queries rose 11.2% year-over-year, with Google Inc. continuing to grab market share. The Web search giant now has a record high 50.7% of the U.S. market, according to global Internet information provider comScore.

Google has been consistently trending upward in search, which could prevent Yahoo! Inc.’s attempt to boost its share of revenue in this market, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney said in a note to clients.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share of the search market fell to 26.4%, its lowest level in more than three years. Microsoft remained at 10.3% and the Ask Network dipped slightly to 5%.

Tech-savvy job seekers send 'avatar' to interview

It's now possible to meet with recruiters without actually showing up for a job interview.

Some employers are experimenting with Second Life, the online virtual community owned by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, to screen prospective hires. The program allows job seekers to create a computer-generated image to represent themselves — known as an "avatar" — and communicate with executives of prospective employers as though they were instant-messaging.

A number of big companies put the new medium to a test last month, when recruitment-advertising firm TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC hosted a virtual job fair with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sodexho Alliance SA, a food and facilities-management services company. TMP says it will host another virtual job fair in August.

The use of Second Life for recruiting marks yet another way that employers are incorporating popular Web sites into their talent searches. Employers have already set up pages for prospective hires on Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and have posted recruitment videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube, the video-sharing site. Some companies troll for prospective job candidates on News Corp.'s My-Space social-networking site.

The phenomenon of recruitment on Second Life began with smaller, more-progressive companies that already used the site to market their products. These companies occasionally recruited Second Life users who visited their buildings. Now, other employers — even in stodgier industries — are inviting prospective hires who have never used Second Life to show up in the virtual world and meet with their avatar recruiters.

[read the whole article]

Meet the real TiVo of the Web

Never mind YouTube. An application just launched by Dmitry Shapiro, a serial peer-to-peer software entrepreneur, allows you to watch not only everything on YouTube but every piece of free video on the Web.

Shapiro is the founder and CEO of Veoh, already the 10th most popular video-sharing site in the country, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, with content from CBS, Paramount, PBS, and 20,000 other sources. Veoh TV is a free video browser, set to launch in late June, that will grab, store, and sort just about everything out there -- whether it's on NBC.com, CNN.com, or even AskANinja.com. (CNN.com, CNNMoney.com, and Business 2.0 are owned by Time Warner.

Think of Veoh TV as TiVo for the Internet, with a similar DVR-style interface. You can search for and subscribe to shows and then save many of those video streams as downloads to watch later. (Naturally, you also get any ads embedded in those videos.)

In short, it looks remarkably like TV, and you can control it with a standard remote. (For that you'll need a PC with an infrared port or an extra plug-in device.) "The video-viewing experience should be more akin to watching TV than surfing the Web," says Shapiro, who plans to make money by placing his own ads between shows. His recommendation engine will also serve up targeted ads and other shows you might like.

Veoh TV's main competitor is Joost, the Internet-only TV service started by the founders of Skype. But unlike Veoh TV, Joost is a closed system: It shows only videos from producers with which it has licensing deals. Veoh TV also shows clips uploaded by consumers, à la YouTube, which could get the company into hot water with major media companies.

Still, the more Veoh TV can become the go-to application for online video, the more of a player it can be in the $70 billion market for TV commercials quickly moving to the Web.

article from money.cnn.com

Safari brings new color to the web

Safari may not be rewriting the rules for Web browsing on Windows just yet, but it's leading the way with one significant change: photographs with better color.

Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users now aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.

However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.

Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB color scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But it's not likely Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.

While average Web surfers aren't likely to notice much of a difference, some professional photographers do care about the issue. For example, those selling images over the Web as stock art want them to look as good as possible, but they often encode their images as sRGB to make them appear better on the screens of potential purchasers.

read the whole article from usatoday

Getting the best of both worlds at same time!

Are you using Google as your main search engine, how about Yahoo? How about searching on both websites at the same time? Yes... you can with Searchboth.com. These two big names in web search has joined forces along with AT&T, owner of Yellow Pages Corp. - the people that came up with the tool for users to search both google and yahoo at the same time. When a user types a search word, Searchboth displays results of both search engines in a split screened frame.


This is a nice feature especially for users doing research, it gives them more variety and they can easily compare the search results from both web sites. According to online polls and blogs cited by the YellowPages, the majority of tech savvy and non-tech savvy American search engine users are crossed between either Google or Yahoo. Each show the same results, but on different pages. Some results may come up on Google’s first page; however, the same results could be on Yahoo’s second, third or fourth page, or vice versa. Not the first one, similar to YaGoohoogle (which seems to be defunct ) from awhile back, and extremely similar to GahooYoogle, this seems to be a nicely built one, with capability to perform images, news, videos and more searches instead of just the default web search.

Searchboth.com is managed by IdeaLabz, and they confirmed that they are also planning on adding MSN, Ask.com and LiveSearch to the available choices in the near future.

Free hosting or Paid hosting?

Just came from Megamall after watching 1 cool movie - (Ocean's 13), but before that i passed by Metrobank to pay for my web hosting account. Now some are asking why do i have to pay for an account when there are free hosting services out there (geocities, netfirms, freeservers, tripod, angelfire and the likes)... well, i've been there... done that... now... i need the money :)

I've been using Yahoo's geocities for quite long and I've been annoyed by their ads that they attach to your website in return to the free hosting. And then I found out that you can really earn some money if clicks to those advertisements will be credited to you. And how do you do that... by paying a web host for your own web account and domain. Read this article to learn more about Free vs. Paid Hosting:

Free Hosting

Ten years ago your options for free web hosting were pretty clear cut; there were a few major companies that ran the market and you simply chose between them. Their options and conditions were also pretty clear cut: each one had ads that displayed on your web site, each one severely limited your allocated web space, and each one controlled the content that you were allowed to display on it.

Now, in 2007, the market is much different. Most free web hosting companies still require you to place their ads on your website, though now the ads are far less intrusive and take up much less space. Free hosting companies are now offering much more space (I’ve seen free hosts offering in excess of 100 megabytes of storage) and are giving their users more control over what can be displayed and how it can be accomplished (website, forum, blog, etc.)

There are even companies that will give you free domain names in exchange for advertising space.

Almost all free web space providers also limit your monthly bandwidth (the amount of data that your site can send or receive). If your website becomes popular you may see it taken offline when it exceeds it’s daily or monthly bandwidth allocation. This can be, at the least, incredibly annoying; at the worst it could cost you or your business money (from lost profits are lost sales).

Paid Hosting

Free hosting will always be the same animal: free web space and a sub domain, but you must place their advertisements on your website (and receive none of the profits). For many users it doesn’t really matter. However, if you are trying to create a website for business, profit, or professional use you do not want someone else’s ads on your site, period.

Advertising on the internet has become a big business. In fact, billions of dollars are spent each year on internet marketing. If you have a website that’s hosted by a free provider chances are good that you’ve given them their fair share of that billion dollar pie. Having your own hosting leaves you open to choose what you want to do regarding advertising or monetization.

Essentially, your website can make you money much easier than a site that’s hosted for free can. This is primarily because all of the ads that may appear on your website will be because you chose to put them there. If your website becomes popular this could become a big income- why give that to someone else?

Paid hosting has come down in price quite dramatically. You can now find hosting for $3 a month Host Gator and domain names as low as $8.88. The number of features that that you receive for such a low price are also on the rise.

A few years ago $3 a month might have gotten you 100 megabytes of storage and a few e-mail addresses. Today $3 gets you 500 megabytes or more of storage, hundreds of e-mail addresses, multiple FTP accounts, mySQL databases, and so much more.

Many hosting companies will give you a domain name for free when you purchase a hosting plan through them. This is a low-cost way to create a professional and branded website.

So, which is best?

Well, they’re both good. In fact, as time goes on, they’re only going to get better. However, if you want to have any level of professionalism you are going to want to allocate a few dollars every month to professional and reliable web hosting- the number of benefits are simply too numerous to pass up.

article from coupon.sc

YouTube adds a new feature for their embedded videos

I read that YouTube recently updated the interface for their embedded videos. Though lately most of my videos were uploaded at Dailymotion, some of my early video ads can still be found at YouTube. So just for curiousity I tried to put 1 real estate video w/c i uploaded to YouTube, and pasted it to a sample page. (see image below)


What happens is when you click the "menu" button on the bottom right corner of the screen, the current video shrinks and an array of related videos will pop up below the screen. Hovering and clicking on any video will open it on the same player. A very cool feature indeed, because if like me, you have a set of videos for say, different condominiums, all my other videos will most likely appear below so viewers and readers don't have to go to the next web page just to see the other movies. But the problem is not only my videos will appear, but most likely videos by other real estate brokers/agents (competitors) which in fact happened in the sample above. So though it is a neat feature by YouTube, there's also a risk that I might lose some prospective clients if videos by other property agents will suddenly appear. And with that i'm still sticking to my embedded Dailymotion vids :)

Since Google acquired YouTube, others say it's an attempt of monetizing with YouTube... For the next several months, people will get very used to using the related video tool that was just introduced. As soon as it becomes second nature for viewers to use it, we should start to see sponsored results mixed with these related videos. Pretty clever, don't you think?

a click or not a click? what's your "impression"?

There's no doubt the online advertising market is very well increasing as more advertisers shift to the internet to sell and promote their products and services. Marketers are rebelling against old media as more and more listeners, viewers and readers connect to the internet, advertisers are obviously following the suit.

But with these comes issues, some advertisers and web sites are having some troubles because they can't agree on what they should be counting. Most debates point to "clicks" on an ad. Advertisers argue that they should be billed only for clicks that bring customers to their Web sites to shop around. They don't want to pay for clicks made by accident or by, say, malicious competitors trying to make them exhaust their marketing budget. They also worry about unscrupulous Web site operators who click on the ads on their own sites - sometimes employing computer "bots" to do the job - so they can put more money in their pockets. But sellers of web advertising say it's not easy to distinguish the good clicks from the bad.

One of Google's business product manager wrote in a recent blog that their servers can accurately count clicks on ads, but the system cannot know what the intent of the clicking user was when they made that click. True. Thats why the big names like Google and Yahoo are said to be working on new technologies to sniff out phony clicks. I guess they should really work on this and make some kind of standard on measuring w/c clicks are counted and not. Because if you scare away the advertisers, publishers/web site owners who run these ads will definitely be affected in the end.

trapik

had a busy week again... what i'm doing now is trying to improve philHousing's traffic flow... i noticed through my site stats that it hasn't been visited that much by search engine bots, unlike kali w/c is crawled very often... i submitted my url to some web directories but what's eating most of my time lately is RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or Random Stupid Site or whatever) - it's a simple XML based format that allows anyone to easily share content on the web... i started putting rss feeds on the latest property listing of philHousing with a little help from rapidfeeds.com w/c saves me from the coding part of the xml file... then submitted my RSS to hundreds (ok not hundreds but quite a number) of RSS search engines/directories... with these i'm expecting some changes with regards to the number of visits on my sites...

"whole lotta love" 4 the internet

internet again...lagi na lang... right now i'm in a computer rental in pateros, updating my sites (including this blog) while listening to "kashmir" (that's classic Led Zepellin to you youngsters)

-checked my email accounts (around 10 email addresses... i think)
-edited philHousing
-checked new posts/members of kali
-(now i'm listening to "immigrant song" (my favorite Led song! i actually liked the NIRVANA cover w/c Kurt and co. have on their 'with the lights out' dvd)
-i'm also experimenting on other ad programs beside adsense... i installed adbrite for now on my sites, gonna check the results after a few days...

after this i'm gonna go home and guess what will i do?

...internet again... and again... and again... and again...
that's it for now, im rocking this one out with "whole lotta love" on my headphone (",)