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Get ready to Skypecast

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Contributed by: alexb on November 9, 2006  |  Comment

Till now we are pretty much familiar with Podcasts. But soon we will be able to see Skypecasts in websites and weblogs. Wonder whatz a Skypecast is? Niklas Zennström the co-founder of Skype described it as public conversations or audio conferences that people can moderate. He in an interview at the Web 2.0 summit said that Skpe will soon be offering bloggers and website owners the ability to integrate audio chats. This will be possible once the Skype’s next version is released. He didn’t mention any timeline though. He also revealed something more interesting .. Skype has had conversations with many social-networking sites about offering services that would allow users to “share content with each other in a conversation”.

Source: news.com.com




 

MediaWhiz Acquires Text Link Ads

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Contributed by: ramnath on November 8, 2006  |  Comment

Text Link Ads, one of the largest growing link marketing network is now a part of MediaWhiz, a New York based leading interactive marketing agency. Patrick Gavin in this official anouncement at the TLA’s “link building blog” shows his optimism for the TLA success in the comming days and also adds that TLA will be soon introducing CPA offers and CPM display advertising for Publishers while email marketing, CPA offers, CPM display ads, etc. for the Advertisers.

This is good news indeed. Wish TLA and MediaWhiz all the best!





 

Blogexplosion traffic generation and Alexa traffic rankings

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Contributed by: alexb on  |  Comment

What is Blogexplosion?

Blogexplosion logo

Blogexplosion is the internet’s largest traffic generator with over 45,000 blog owners participating!If you have a blog, need visitors but haven’t tried out Blogexplosion, sign up and get traffic. The more you earn credits the more you get traffic to your blog. Again there are many ways to earn credits like surfing blogs, participate in the battle of blogs, rent out your blog space, etc. How are you going to get traffic to your blog? You may assign credits, participate in the battle of blogs, buy blog space, get listed in the huge BE directory, and lots more.

So there are several reasons why the Alexa traffic rankings of BE is just a bit (!) above your invaluable blog - 10,372 !! And why not that can increase the earning possibilities.

Does getting traffic increase your alexa traffic rankings?

When a visitor comes to your blog via BE, the visitor views your blog inside a frame. Let me try to make it simpler. Take a look at this:

A random blog
(Snapshot of a random blog)

Question How to check if these are frames?
Answer Just view the page source.

As you can see from the picture above the website is divided into two frames. FRAME 1 (this is the parent frame) and FRAME 2 (child frame). I think what alexa thinks is like you are visiting yet another BE page rather than a particular webpage though am not aware about their algo. I guess getting more traffic from BE wont better your Alexa rankings. From SEO point of view too this is less value as it wont help much in boosting up your rankings. Again the whole system of BE is designed in such a way that there must be frames (because of the credits, the timer, etc.) But cant this whole stuff be re-designed? Maybe some embeded tracking code? Time will tell.

NOTE: There are many traffic generating communities similar to Blogexplosion but I chose to discuss about it since its the king of all.

Did your alexa traffic rankings improve once you start generating traffic from Blogexplosion? Share your thoughts.





 

Alexa Traffic Details widget Ajaxified and upgraded

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Contributed by: alexb on November 7, 2006  |  Comment

Alexa traffic details is the best way a website owner gets to see the traffic details of his site his competitor’s. In Alexa with the help of a widget we can see a graphical representation of the traffic details, alexa rank and also the page views in comparison to a specified interval of time. We also have the freedom to compare it with another site. Very recently this tool got some major upgradations.

What we had in the past:

Alexa: The past pic
What we now have (red dots indicate changes):

Alexa: The present present

The three tabs Reach, Rank and Pageviews remain unaltered. For the first time we see the introduction of Ajax in this section. So we not have to wait for the long delays of pageloads. This is pretty smart and its pretty fast too.

  • The Date Range is increased to a great extent. In the past we used to have the ranges as 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 year, maximum. But now we have some more ranges. It starts from a week till the maximum range. The complete range is 7 days, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, 3 year, 5 year and the maximum range. This is going to help the webmasters a lot. They need not have to wait for three months to get the updated graph. They can now analyze the performance metrics over a variety of date range.

  • Visitors can now ’smoothen’ the graph in four steps. Once you drag the level indicator to the right a bit you smoothen the graph by one level. This I guess is done to makes it easy for everyone to read the graph and is of great help to me atleast. I used to get puzzled at times while viewing the graph of some big sites. This is a new feature that is introduced.

  • Visitors can now compare five websites at a time and make a comparative analysis. This makes life easy for many traffic analysts. In the past only two sites can be comapred at a time.

  • What more the permalink also takes its place just above the widget!

If you see any other changes please drop a line to others know as well.





 

Analyzing Searchmash - the experimental Google

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Contributed by: alexb on November 6, 2006  |  Comment
Searchmash logo
A couple of months back a newly launched search engine named Searchmash made buzz. Since the name of Google is associated, I hope the buzz is still on. And why not? Google always try to slowly experiment and improve things up. Searchmash is an experimental search engine and its purpose is to analyze the user experience behavior and design the search engine accordingly .. as it says ..

“SearchMash lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t.“

The current features of this search engine can be found here. I use the word ‘current’ because it has been clearly mentioned to check back from time to time to see if there are any change in the existing features. The features right now listed are titled as Start typing!, URL menu, Image results panel, Hide details, More results bar.

A closer look at the current Searchmash features

  1. Start typing! - This feature lets you type the keyword/s and hit enter key to view the results. Is this a normal behavior of a visitor to hit enter while searching in google rather than press the Search button? Probably the answer is ‘yes’! Google must have tracked and noticed this behavior and introduced it here. Of course it speeds up the process. At least I do that as I enjoy the freedom of not hitting the ‘Search’ button every time I search something. Currently Google has the ‘Search’ button but anyone can just hit enter to proceed.

  2. URL menu - Currently Google.com displays the links to Cached and Similar pages just beneath the respective search results. One can just click on the links to view the last indexed page and the sites that are considered ’similar’ by Google respectively. Some more links like ‘More from this site’, ‘Translate this page’, etc. also appears time to time. At Smash if the visitor clicks on the green url three options appear: Open in new window, Open cached copy, More from this site.

    • It has always been a guess game whether the visitor wants the link to open in a new window or the existing one. The bulk of them has always preferred to open the link in the same window. This new feature is for the rest. Mind you Yahoo already has this feature.

    • The other two links are actually helpful for the web masters. But for a normal visitor cached page is a great resource to see a page that might not be opening. While similar pages are a great way to find related results. So the links are intentionally hidden from the SERPs to make things simpler.

  3. Image results panel - This feature is introduced to display related images. At Google.com we need to click on the link named Images and then search for an image. What is the usefulness or the tentative purpose of this feature? We need to wait and watch ;)

  4. Wikipedia results panel - When you search something at Searchax you are going to see related results from the wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) as well. The overall value of wikipedia is always increasing to the internet users and Google realises that too. So now on you need not go to wikipedia to see the search results.

  5. Hide details - This is a common feature now a days. At google.com you need to set the number of results to display in the Preferences page or browse other pages for more results. This newly introduced feature makes the whole process fast and easy. So you need not go to the preferences page every time to choose how many results to display. Again there is a keyboard shortcut (space bar) for this feature. Over the time we are going to see some more keyboard shortcuts at Smash I guess. Webtips too have this feature enabled in the home page to let the visitor choose to read the full story, minimize it or simply delete it.

  6. Usage of Java script functions to determine user behavior - If we take a look at the source code of the default homepage, we can see a couple of javascript functions like handleKey() and handleIdle().

    • function handlekey() - In the homepage just below the searchbox you can see this message .. ↑ type one or more search keywords to get started. Now once you start typing this message changes to .. ↑ hit enter to get results The handlekey() actually determines if the user has started typing or not and displays the messages accordingly. This seems like a step by step guide and we can expect to see more messages in the days to come.

    • function handleIdle() - This function determines if the user is idle for a specified amount of time. Currently if the user sits idle for 30000 milliseconds, this function is executed and you get to see messages like .. ↑ not sure what to search for? try exploring popular searches. The popular searches link leads to a random search result like mariah carey, floyd landis, images:che guevara, images:marilyn monroe (image search results). I guess the results are taking the help of Google zeitgeist and the random results are going to be determined according to the country. So if am sitting in India I may see sania mirza or aishwarya rai instead of mariah carey. This is something nice and I feel the adwords which are missing from Searchmash serps are going to play a key role soon.

We can clearly see some experimentation going on. Its is a learning searchengine. But is this going to be the next generation Google.com with a touch of the old a9.com .. a more Web 2.0 compliant Google? Lets wait and see.

Things we might see soon getting introduced at Searchmash

Here we are going to predict what may be introduced at Searchmash.com Google always welcomes user feedbacks and it asks for the same at Searchmash too. Lets submit our online feedbacks through this post. So leave your thoughts to let Searchmash(aka Google) know what do you feel.

  1. I predict once we do a normal search we may see a link to the top related searches for better results. Like if you search for ‘books’ you might see search terms like ebooks, amazon, blah blah in the top related searches section. This can be an introduction of something similar to tag clouds which is gaining popularity day by day but with more refinement and relevancy.





 

Blogsearchengine.com defaced by Mosavi1986

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Contributed by: alexb on November 4, 2006  |  Comment

Blogsearchengine.com, one of the largest search engine and directories of blogs in the internet have been defaced. Today as I opened this link I was shocked to see this ..

Mosavi1986
A Hacker from Iran
Special Thanks to Nobodycoder
Help?

(the Help link pointed to mosavi1986 [at] gmail.com)

This was a bit too much for Blogsearchengine has an excellent alexa traffic ranking of 34,795 and you can imagine how many people is getting affected. This happened in an around 17th October, 2006 as I got it from the cached snpshot of the page. An interesting fact in this regard is huge size of the hacked page which is almost 330kb compared to the normal size which is less than 10kb. Blogsearchengine is not the only site defaced by the notorious hacker. I did a Google search and found several other sites also got defaced. Here are some .. www.yaci.net, www.waterfilterstuff.com, www.manilayachtclub.org/guestbook/, www.puz.hr/forum/. Sites getting hacked by Mosavi1986 shows a similar message throughout and the message looks like this. Blogsome also got hacked in a similar way a few days back as was told by Ramnath. We know little about the hacker though.

Why are these sites getting defaced?

These sort of attacks are known as DOS attacks (wiki ref) and “are very hard to defend against” says The Uvular R, the site admin of Blogsome.com The hacker targets the configuration.php file and increases the size to large extent. According to Amos Wong, sites are subject to these sort of attacks if the permission of the configuration.php file is set to 777 or 666. According to him it should be set to 644 instead. Phew .. too simple isnt it!!





 

Google hugs Jotspot

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Contributed by: ramnath on November 3, 2006  |  Comment
Google hugs Jotspot
Jotspot, the programmble wiki (an opensource platform where anyone may add or edit pages with little technical knowledge) is now part of Google Inc, creator of one of the largest search engine in the internet. This has been officially announced by Jotspot as they say .. “the deal is officially closed“. This happens just a few days after Google aquired Youtube.com

But why is the deal?

Joe Kraus in this post sheded some initail light on this question all of us have in mind. He along with Graham Spencer co-founded Jotspot after they left Excite. In his post he made it clear that Jotspot and Google share the same vision of building platforms for people to create, manage and share information online. Jotspot was also very eager to join hands. As Joe says ..

Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

A more detailed explanation can be found at this page where Jotspot makes it clear that ..

Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Groups.

So to conclude the acquisition is all about building a more community oriented online collaborative platform. You may also get some detailed discussion up here and here. So the big question again looms high .. Whoz next??





 

Wordpress 2.0.5 Ronan released (a brief wrap up)

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Contributed by: Prashant on November 1, 2006  |  Comment
Wordpress 2.0.5 Its almost 3 months now and we got 2 new releases in quick succession. First off we saw the Wordpress MU 1.0 and bbPress (a software used in forums as in phpBB but with the touch of Wordpress) released. And then Matt announced the realease of Wordpress 2.0.5 which comes with a lot of bug fixes including some security fixes. Hence, thousands of Wordpress users can now lead a more bug free blogging life :) . Ramnath says .. “Blogsome still uses WordPress 1.5.1-alpha which is way too old but still we manage to lead a happy life, thanks to all the support we get round the clock.”

The release of WP 2.0.5 has two unique highlights:

1. The new release is handled by a new 2.0 maintainer, Mark Jaquith who joins the team comprising of Matt and Ryan.
2. The release is nicknamed Ronan. The reason Matt says ..

We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.

You may download the latest version and upgrade your existing software. Find a review of all the bugfixes up here (mostly minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization says Matt).

Related Tip: How to pre-publish your blog posts?





 

How to shut down the internet

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Contributed by: alexb on  |  Comment
No internet ! A few days back I got a mail from one of my old friends Albert (currently in his 90’s). Here is a small excerpt from the mail ….

.. I am totally frustated with this internet stuff. I see my grand daughter spending hours and hours infront of her laptop and I have no idea what she really does! Can’t we turnoff the internet anyway? ..

Well yup there is a wayout I guess ;) Just follow these simple steps:

1. Click this link.
2. Click the red button. Once you see the message that says You have now safely shutdown the Internet
4. Shut down the laptop.
3. Enjoy your life!

Hope you enjoyed the tip Albert :) If you know some more way outs, just drop a line.




 

How to check login status in Wordpress blog

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Contributed by: ramnath on October 31, 2006  |  Comment
Prashant
asked 		My blog runs on Wordpress. I like to play with my blog template. I am not a tech savvy guy like you but I love to customise my blog and add new features just like this blog. I will like to know how to check if I am logged in or not and show the status in the sidebar like in this blog. My blog is hosted at Blogsome.
Ramnath’s
tip 		Hi Prashant and welcome to the WebTips community. You need not be a ‘tech savvy guy’ guy to continue your blogging efforts. But you know some basic things. Ok heres the tip you asked for ..

Login to your blog cpanel and go to Manage and then to Files The file you see (index.html) is the main template and this is where you operate the whole look and feel of your blog. Inside body tag just add this smarty code:

{capture name=islogin}{wp_loginout}{/capture}
{if $smarty.capture.islogin|strip_tags:'0' == "Logout"}
Logout link (/wp-login.php?action=logout)
{else}
Login link (/wp-login.php)
{/if}

From now on if you are logged in to your blog you will see the ‘logout’ link and vice versa (just like the one at the top nav bar of this site). Save your work and see the result :) Let us know if you have any further queries.





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