Most Popular Social Bookmarking Services

If you ever wanted to know how people are storing or sharing content on the web, this graph says this all. It shows a list of most popular social services that are used by netizens to share or save web pages.

Email continues to be the most favorite mode for sharing links on the Internet followed by Facebook and Digg though its a formidable lead.

These statistics are provided by ShareThis and if you compare these numbers with what AddThis provided an year ago, you’ll see an interesting trend:

1. More people prefer sharing links on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace rather than the regular social bookmarking services like delicious.

2. Windows Live is gaining ground and appears almost as popular as Google Bookmarks. The gap was very wide last year.

3. Don’t discount Technorati yet. It looks like lot of people do add blogs / websites to their "Technorati Favorites" and it’s more popular than say Diigo, ma.gnolia.com or Mixx.com.

Using You Tube Videos to Get into Google's Top 10

According to "Ask A Ninja" here are some internet video facts, "In March 2008, 11.5 billion videos were viewed online. There's 10 minutes of video uploaded every second. In a single week, more Americans watch videos on YouTube than the top
10 network television shows."

Watch: http://www.askaninja.com/futureofvideo

You better get those screencasts, or slideshows with voiceovers prepared and uploaded. The evidence is clear, short "how-to" videos, or "what's in the box" videos are proving to be very popular and drive the most traffic.

This is especially true if Google is allowing Universal Search Results in your market. Go do a search and find out. If videos are appearing in the search results, that may be your fastest way into a competitive market.

If you have PowerPoint on the PC, or Keynote on the Mac you're all set. All it takes is a short slide show with a voiceover. But if you've never done a slideshow before, pick up a copy of Garr Reynolds' "Presentation Zen" at any bookstore, and prepare to dazzle your viewers.

If you prefer to use a screen recorder for show and tell, turn to CamStudio or Camtasia on the PC, ScreenFlow on the Mac, to create a short 3 minute "how-to" clip, on something that you figured out how to do. It could be a software tip, how to use a social bookmarking site, how to FTP a file to a server, just about anything.

Once you have your video file, you can visit YouTube & upload your files. Or if you prefer to upload your files once, and have a professional service do all the submitting.

Either way, slidecasts and screencasts are great ways to make video fast. And if Google is showing video mixed with search results in your competitive market, that's your fastest route to the top.

Using Google As a Currency Conversion Tool

Google has a neat built-in currency converter which when used properly will allow you to convert any currency value to another. To use Google’s built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you’d like to be done into the Google search box and hit “Enter” or click the search button. Note - enter the query as shown in the example above.

Google Makes Gmail More Secure

Last week Google launched a new feature that lets you keep track of computers that are logged into your Gmail account — a tool that will put the minds of people who are suspicious of unauthorized account access at ease. But what about people snooping your internet traffic? The session viewer they released isn’t able to solve that kind of problem.

To increase the level of security in Gmail again, Google is now giving users the option to make sure Gmail always uses SSL — effectively making an encrypted connection to Gmail and preventing people from sniffing your internet packets. To set this feature up, log into Gmail, go to “settings”, then make sure the option to “Always use https” is selected. Push “Save” and you’re done. Next time you go to www.gmail.com, you will notice it automatically redirects you to https://www.gmail.com.

[image from Google Blogoscoped]

This has been a commonly requested feature for a long time — in fact, people wanted it so bad they took matters into their own hands. There is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that does precisely what Google has implemented, and not suprisingly, it is the fourth most installed Greasemonkey script for Gmail on userserscripts.org.

Using Google To Find Whois Details

Few people know that you can use Google itself as a Whois Lookup tool! According to Googlified, this service was already launched by Google back in 2004 but was taken off after 2 weeks of its release. This time Google has partnered with DomainTools to provide the Whois records.

To use the Whois Lookup service provided by Google, just go to Google and type in “whois yourdomain.com” to get creation and expiry dates of the domain. Click on the link to get detailed information about the domain on DomainTools.

Google Introduces Site Search Function Below Site Links

In addition to providing site links in their search result pages, Google appears to have introduced a "Search Field" enabling visitors to directly search for specific information while on the results page. Have a look at the results returned above while I searched for "VH1" today.

Google Search Provides Olympic Event Schedules

Find out when events in your favorite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and "Olympics" into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.

Google to sell its Performics search marketing unit to Publicis Groupe

Google has decided to sell its Performics search marketing unit to the France-based advertising holding company Publicis Groupe.

Performics had been owned by DoubleClick, and ever since Google’s acquisition of that company in March 2008, Google has been expected to unload Performics.

The conflict of interest is pretty clear, given that Performics advises clients on how to maximize their visibility on Google, writes New York Times.

Launched in 1998, Performics currently has over 130 search engine marketing (SEM) clients and nearly 200 search marketing specialists with employees in US, UK, Germany, Australia, Singapore and China.

“Publicis Groupe has been a leader in the advertising industry for decades, and we believe Performics’ growing business will benefit from being a part of it,” Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google, has said.

Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO, Publicis Groupe, has said, “The acquisition of Performics will not only bring critical mass to Publicis Groupe’s formidable Search capabilities, but it will also enhance our affiliate marketing and overall performance marketing offering.”

Google Content Gets Enhanced

New enhancements that Google has announced today and that will be available in the coming months are the next step in the integration and in enabling standard industry functionality on the Google content network:

Excerpts from their blog -

# Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
# Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
# Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
# View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.
We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don't have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements.

Social Media Growth Rate

According to VNU.net, nearly half of the online adult population around the world is a member of at least one networking site, with Facebook and MySpace between them housing over 170 million monthly active users.

Other social media activity is also continuing to grow at a frenetic pace. According to Wave3 research of active users:

* 394m watch video clips online
* 346m read blogs
* 321m read personal blogs
* 307m visit a friend's social network page
* 303m share a video clip
* 272m manage a profile on a social network
* 248m upload photos
* 216m download video podcasts
* 215m download podcasts
* 184m start their own Blog
* 83m upload a video clip
* 160m subscribe to an RSS feed

(According to Wave.3 Social Media Tracker - Universal McCann)

Friendster gets $20 million Funding & a New CEO

Friendster is not dead yet. The pioneering social network announced on Tuesday that it has raked in $20 million in venture funding led by IDG Ventures and has hired Richard Kimber as its new CEO.

Kimber was hired from Google, of all places, where he served as the regional managing director in Southeast Asia. That's key for Friendster, which has seen most of its recent growth in the Asia-Pacific region, to the point where it's now the No. 1 social network in countries such as Singapore, as well as the Asian leader overall, according to ComScore. Friendster has been translating the site into different Asian languages and focusing on growth there rather than trying to patch things up in the States.

He takes over from Kent Lindstrom, who will remain on Friendster's payroll after serving as CEO since early 2006. Founder Jonathan Abrams left amid the site's U.S. decline, and he now runs an invitation start-up called Socializr.

Baidu’s Q2 Profits Up 87 Percent

Chinese search engine Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) reported its Q2 results today, and its profits came in at 265 million yuan, or $38.6 million, versus 141.9 million yuan ($20.7 million) a year earlier, beating the average expectation of $35.5 million from analysts. Revenues doubled to 802.6 million yuan ($117.5 million) from 401.3 million yuan ($58.8 million) a year earlier, a 100 percent increase. The company expects another uptick in Q3 on account of increased Olympics traffic.

IDG: Although all of Baidu’s revenues come from its China operations, CEO Li said “Our Japan operation is progressing well,” and that the company spent 30 million yuan there during the quarter. He said that Baidu will “open a research and development center in Shanghai later this year to serve Japan-related search applications.” Release here.

Google Launches Music Onebox- Free Music Service in China

Google announced the launch of a new music service called Music Onebox which will offer users a brand new archive to choose music from, in a simple and legal manner.

"We are launching Music Onebox to give users an easy and legal way to find the music they're looking for, and to give music labels and publishers a new channel to distribute, promote and make money off of their valuable music content," a Google spokesperson explained.

The service, available only in China, will be promoted through the company’s home page by directing users searching for a certain song or artist to the Web site www.top100.cn. The service allows downloading and streaming tunes, blocking out all users outside the country.

The financial backing is ensured by Chinese basketball superstar Yao Ming and according to the company’s officials, the money coming in from the advertising contracts will be split between the Web site, music labels and publishers.

The reason why such a strategy was first considered for China is mainly related to the fact that the music companies keep searching for ways of breaking into the market and reaching the same status achieved in the United States and Europe. Once the promotion campaigns will take full effect, the Web site’s traffic will rise and the clients will demand more space for their ads, it is expected that Music Onebox will become a major success for Google.

"This legal music service will help users avoid dead links, slow downloads, inaccurate search results, and poor quality or incomplete songs," Google’s officials explained in a statement, referring to the virtually inexistent paid music download system, which leaves music enthusiasts with the sole option of turning to unsecure and low quality pirated versions of their favorite songs.

How Trust Rank Works

MicroSofts Surface- Coffee Table Computer

Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn't immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.)

Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cell phones at T-Mobile stores. When customers plop a phone down on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.

Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items "onto" the card.

At Harrah's locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah's venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner reservations.

Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.

Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface's surface; digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen. Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images — behavior made possible by the advanced graphics support deep inside Windows Vista.

"It's not a touch screen, it's a grab screen," Bolger said.

Historically, Microsoft has focused on creating new software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. (Some recent exceptions include the Xbox 360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that developed Surface.)

For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology's inner workings under wraps will limit what early customers — the businesses Microsoft is targeting first with the machine — will be able to do with it.

But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by Surface.

Surface is "important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how to innovate, and innovate in a big way," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Have a look below -

The ROI of SEO

Organic optimization brings more than just results in the search engines.

The infograph below shows the additional benefits and return on investment that comes along with properly optimizing a site and pursuing targeted keywords:

Graphic by Elliance

Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content

Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to index and rank their Flash pages.

This situation hasn't been ideal for searchers either, as this limitation has kept them from seeing potentially great matches for their queries because they've been locked away in Flash files.

According to Adobe and Google, all of that is changing. Google is launching a "deep algorithmic change," augmented by Flash reader technology supplied by Adobe, that enables them to "read" Flash files and extract text and links from it for better indexing and ranking. This could be great news for both site owners and searchers.

Cuil to Rival Google

Cuil, the search engine hoping to knock Google off the top spot, has been launched. Associated with the name of the mythical Irish hero Fin McCuil and pronounced like "cool", as the Cuil FAQs point out, the name is Gaelic for both knowledge and hazel. The search engine was founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years. They believe that the current search engines have not kept up with the exponential growth of the Internet. They claim Cuil covers more web sites than any other search engine – three times more than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

Google no longer reveals the size of its search index, merely saying in its corporate blog on Friday that it is "proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine," and that their systems show the Web as now exceeding one trillion independent URLs. Estimates put the Google index at around 30 to 50 billion web sites. In comparison, Cuil, which specialises in English, claims it has already indexed 120 billion.

Data protectionists will probably be more interested in another difference between Cuil and Google. Whereas the latter saves user data, the former does not. Cuil says it wants to analyse the web, not users. The operator's privacy guidelines are accordingly short, and they contain a passage about cookies, explaining that they are only used to save a particular user's preferences and are not stored on Cuil servers.

Cuil does not display search hits as a list of links and short key words, but rather in columns with a brief text and an image. The operators called this new way of presenting hits "organised results" and claim that the hits are more easily readable this way. In addition, a box of categories is displayed for surfers to fine-tune the hits displayed. Search results are not sorted by popularity, but rather by content. At the moment Cuil's search results preview is a bit indiscriminate as it tends to associate the wrong thumbnail images with sampled search text. For example a search for "John Hammond" shows pictures of John Hammond jnr., the famous blues singer, associated with search text for Sir John Hammond FRS and John Hammond the BBC weather forecaster.

Madrone Capital, Greylock and Tugboat Ventures have already invested $33m in the project. Madrone alone has put in $25m. In addition to Patterson, CFO and co-founder Russell Power and product manager Louis Monier are former staff members at Google. Monier also used to work at AltaVista, where he got the automated machine translator Babel Fish going. He later went to eBay to oversee a redesign.

Google Decides Against Buying Digg

Google (GOOG) last week decided not to go ahead with a $200 million deal to buy the social news aggregation site Digg.com, according to TechCrunch.

“Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame,” TechCrunch reports. “One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google decided after spending more time with Digg’s top team that there just wasn’t a fit.”

While we’re talking about Google, meanwhile, there is quite a flurry of publicity this morning for a new search engine started by some Google refugees called Cuil, which describes itself as the world’s biggest search engine.

Facebook to add Microsoft Live Search

Microsoft has announced that the company has expanded its deal with Facebook and will be integrating Microsoft's Live Search into the social network.

This is big news for Live search, which has been languishing behind both Yahoo and Google in the search stakes for some time.

It is understood that Microsoft will utilise this deal to serve up advertising (both traditional and sponsored search results) through Facebook by the end of the year. Microsoft previously bought a $240 million stake in Facebook at a whopping $15 billion valuation, in exchange for global advertising rights.

This deal parallels the search deal that Google signed with MySpace in 2006, when it won the rights to provide search and advertising to the News Corp-owned social network. Thus far the deal has failed to produce any real results for Google as they have struggled to monetise the worlds largest social network, but it blames the under performance on the difficulty with monetizing social networks in general.