Showing posts with label webworld. Show all posts
Dear Woman,
Like you, I have an unusual name. In fact, I've only been able to find one other person with my name and she works in the public schools in Philadelphia (last time I checked).
I really wish I had a chance to speak with you before you filed suit. It's not Yahoo's fault that your name turned up results for porn and malware. Yahoo only crawl's the sites that are out there, and that would have been easier to change than filling out legal paperwork.
When I got married and acquired the last name Johnson, I decided to have a little fun and get the first page of Google results to rank for me instead of the woman in Philadelphia. It didn't take long. The poor woman is now banished to the last result on page 3 of Yahoo and nowhere on the first 5 pages of Google (I got tired of looking).
"Nathania Johnson" is not exactly a competitive keyword phrase and neither is was your name, "Beverly Stayart." All you had to do was get a bunch of social media accounts and put your full name on it. That's what I did. Blogspot and Flickr are good ones. Heck, having an account on SEOmoz will rank. Commenting on popular blogs helps, too.
Buying the URL with your name in it and publishing some fresh content helps big time.
If you really want to go the extra mile, you could have gotten all your friends to link to those sites with your name being the anchor text. Don't do too many all at once or the search bots will get suspicious. Then again, they also wouldn't have cared so much about such a little searched term as your name.
Now, a search for your name is filled with a bunch of links to sites talking about your legal case. It only took a day for that to happen, but going forward, it will be very difficult to change that. Ask any company with a negative result in the search for their name and they'll tell you how difficult it is to change this. That's why we do posts on reputation management.
I'm sorry that your name returned porn and malware sites. There is a reason Yahoo is number 2 - and I mean a distant number 2 - when it comes to search engine share.
I'm afraid you're likely to use your case. But if your true goal is to have better results for your name, do read the posts you find here at Search Engine Watch on a regular basis.
Sincerely,
Nathania Johnson
Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have launched a social networking application that allows people to surf Myspace on their TV while watching it. This means people can read and reply to messages, comments and everything else without being at their computer. The new Myspace widget was announced ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, that took place in Las Vegas on January 8-11th. It will be available on any Internet-connected consumer electronics, such as set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and TVs, the companies said. Although no exact launch date was provided it is assumed that it will be released in the near future. Basically Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have developed a widget that will be able to sit at the bottom of your TV screen and used whenever you wish. It was developed by Myspace using a set of development tools that Intel and Yahoo have created called the Widget Channel. For anyone interested the widget channel was created so that applications can be made for TV’s that use information from the Internet to complement what is on the TV (e.g. a widget could allow someone to purchase a product that was on an advert from an online store without them having to go to a computer). From what I know this Myspace widget will allow people to view profiles and receive updates (messages, comments, etc) and reply to these updates accordingly directly on their TV screen, without the need of an Internet browser or having to refresh a page for updates to appear. To reply to updates you would use your remote to type whatever you wanted with an on screen keyboard. Now in my opinion I really hate this widget. It will either be a great development for them or just a flop, and I would guess that it will be the latter. Okay so I’m not one for sitting watching TV and being on the Internet at the same time, I like to concentrate on whatever I am doing, I mean while I am watching a TV show I don’t like being online as well (e.g. on a laptop) because I miss parts of the show and it just ruins it. It’s kind of like having someone come into the room and start talking to you when your obviously trying to watch something. I know a lot of people won’t share this opinion and do like to surf the Internet while watching TV, but most of these people have laptops or a computer near their TV so they are able to do this, and most wouldn’t like to be limited to only surfing one site (Myspace) while doing it. I think that this is just an attempt to try and make TV more interactive, but like the attempts before I think this will end up nowhere. Its either that or an attempt to try and combine the audiences of Fox and Myspace (both owned by Rupert Murdoch). Either way I really think it is pointless and they won’t get many people using it, but I have been wrong in the past. What do you think about it all?
* Keep the article body clean
For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by
tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article's body near the title in the HTML, we'll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.
* Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
If you reuse article URLs, our system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don't resemble a year (for example, 5232 is ok, but 2008 is not.) You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse our crawler, and we may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page. You can learn more about some of these requirements here.
* Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps us better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format we use for this data here.
* Check your encoding
We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don't do this. It hurts us.
* Make your article publication dates explicit
In order to help our crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body. Also, you can remove other dates from the HTML of the article page, and add the required
Note that the article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which we originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.
* Keep original content separate from press releases
If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you'd like us to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. As you may know, Google News labels press releases distinctly in order to alert our users that the article they're about to read is a press release. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they're labeled correctly. You can learn more about this attribute here.
* Format your images properly
To help Google News identify your images and crawl them along with your articles, use fairly large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make sure to place them near their respective article titles on the page and make the images inline and non-clickable. Images in the JPEG format are more likely to be crawled correctly.
* Article Titles in Google News
In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don't hyperlink the headline on the article page - after all, your reader is already there! And it's always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.
If you found these suggestions helpful, you might also want to check out our more generalWebmaster Guidelines. The Webmaster Guidelines aren't necessarily specific to Google News, but much of the wisdom you'll find there can help make your site Google News-friendly. Our Publisher Help Center contains lots more information about many of these topics. And you can always check out the Google News Help Forum to give us feedback on these suggestions, and share other tips and advice with webmasters and News users.
As someone who sells SEO as a service it is often not in my best interest to tell people they can do SEO on their own. But it's true. Just as changing the car's oil, fixing clogged pipes, or painting a house are all relatively easy, most business owners can SEO their website on their own. All it takes is some knowledge and time. If you want to optimize your site yourself then you need to simplify. A lot of what you'll learn about SEO can be complicated. Especially when you start reading about .htaccess, robots.txt, 301 redirects, absolute links, and so on. This is all good information to have but you don't always have to start there. If you're doing it yourself then start with the things that you can do yourself. Don't get caught up in all the complicated issues that go beyond your knowledge or ability to implement. The more difficult technical tasks may still be necessary down the road, but for now, do what you can with what you have. Here are some things that you can often do easily enough on your own: 1) Customize all your title tags. If your site is big this may take some time. If its dynamically generated then you may want to have your programmers implement a template that pulls in and inserts keywords based on the page. 2) Customize your content. This can be especially important if you sell products. Don't settle for stock descriptions, and take the time needed to write somethign different for each of the 20 products you have that are simply different versions of the same thing. This customized content is essential. 3) Get content on all of your pages. If you have category pages that link to products or other information pages, put at least a paragraph of text on each page. 4) Link, link, link. Add links throughout your content to other pages and products of your site. Link back and forth between pages, add links to related products, link to your blog and from your blog. 5) Blog. Write content that your visitors will love. Don't just use your blog to pimp your products or services. Write helpful tips and tutorials or provide insight that your readers can use. It's only when we over-think SEO that it becomes more complex than it needs to be. There certainly are aspects of SEO that require a technical mind and someone savvy enough to implement it. But there are plenty of areas that can be done in just an hour a day. Do what you can and leave the heavier lifting to someone who has the machinery to do it.
Knowledge can be found easily enough for free, and time, well, that's not something you likely have an excess of. Fortunately, SEO doesn't all have to be done at once, it can be implemented a little at a time, as you have time.
I came across news this afternoon about the LiMo Foundation endorsing the Open Mobile Terminal Platform specification, and I realized that I didn't care. It's probably big news, but I couldn't get excited. I feel the same way about most things that come out of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), but probably because the ASF isn't one for making big announcements (except when it collects cash from Microsoft). Even so, I know the ASF is a hugely important organization. Its only "problem" is that it lacks an active public relations team. But I doubt it sees this as a problem. The Symbian Foundation, too, shows promise, but it has also been somewhat quiet. Now contrast these organizations with the Linux Foundation, Eclipse, and Mozilla. All three provide effective, though different, examples of what an open-source foundation should be doing. They're active. They're noisy. They're influential and even critical to the development of key open-source projects. What do they have in common? Well, each has strong leaders, both technical and business management. Each has a limited but important mission. (Here's the Mozilla Foundation's mission.) Each has the trust and funding of key constituents that contribute both code and cash. And each publicly advocates their projects. I've suggested before that Eclipse offers a vision of open-source development to come. If anything, this belief grows daily, but it's not just about Eclipse. Foundations offer a way to make open-source development more corporate (organized in such a way that commercial vendors can participate with fewer reservations) without becoming commercial, a turn-off for many would-be code contributors. Understanding how successful open-source foundations function, and why they succeed while lesser peers fail, is therefore critical to understanding the future of open-source development. Mozilla, Eclipse, and the Linux Foundation offer glimpses of good things to come. As for the other open-source foundations...I think they still have work to do.
Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports: The Google Hot Keywords blog widget [link to Google’s page] can show you what is in fashion now, and what other people are interested in. It’s appealing that you can view buzzwords from the previous day or the previous week. I am sometimes surprised to see that such words are so popular! Personally, I like the “fortune-teller” feature from the previous week’s ranking. When I click on a keyword, I am quickly taken to Google’s result page and so I enjoy the feature. I might not have noticed them by myself, but now I understand that these things are what people care about. I am participating in CyberBuzz’s campaign. Asiajin says, “CyberBuzz is one of the biggest pay-per-post agencies in Japan and are known for their high payouts,” with some posts getting “$100 for a single entry.” Asiajin explains “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ’ad’ tags ... [at the bottom], which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers,” adding “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” TechCrunch comments, “It’s interesting to see that Google, a company that not too long ago radically took action against PayPerPost bloggers in the US [see Google’s Matt Cutts’ post], today thinks the concept is suitable as long as it helps them advance in Japan”. By now, Google Japan issued an apology. Asiajin translated the post: Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.
Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight -- spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web's most fertile (and least likely) application platforms. Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control. "It's so simple and easy to access, people are thinking of more and more uses for the platform," says Dan Wasyluk, creator of the Twitter-based Snipt service. Wasyluk launched Snipt last week as a way to let programmers share short snippets of code over Twitter. Launched in 2007, Twitter quickly became a darling of the life-and mind-casting interneterati. But some saw boundless possibilities in the 140-character limit, and what was a slow trickle of innovation is now quickly elevating what is essentially a micro-blogging service into one of the internet's most important technologies, along with instant messaging and e-mail. Though it's main use -- sending and receiving short messages to your social network -- is often dismissed as time-wasting trivia, Twitter's potential as a broad internet platform is just beginning to be fully realized. Twitter has grown into a ubiquitous presence -- you can send tweets from your phone, your desktop and your browser -- that has potential to not only facilitate communication among humans, but even to make machines do your bidding. Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they're thirsty. The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant's soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered. Using Twitter's application programming interface (API), a programmer with even a modest amount of experience can create a webapp that gathers public data from Twitter, or uses it to send links, commands or bursts of information. "[Twitter's] open API is a huge reason it has grown into such a platform," says Wasyluk. File sharers were the first to rush in. The photo-sharing service TwitPic, one of the oldest Twitter mashups, lets users send pictures to their followers by storing a photo on its servers, then passing the link around on Twitter. Now there are newer apps like Tweetcube and Twittershare, which let users share larger media like MP3s and videos. Twitter's limited format of short, text-based announcements are a natural match for sites like TrackThis, which you can use to get status updates on FedEx and UPS packages, and Tweetajob, which job seekers can use to get real-time updates about new job openings. Anyone who needs help quitting smoking can use Qwitter to monitor their progress. Those looking to lose weight can turn to TweetWhatYouEat or TweetYourEats. Hardware hackers have put a new spin on the Twitter mashup -- as it turns out, just about anything that can be plugged into the internet is capable of talking to Twitter. Programmer Ryan Rose rigged up his washing machine to send him a tweet when his clothes are done. He just follows his machine's twitter account (it's PiMPY3WASH) and he knows when to go downstairs and move his undies to the dryer. Linux hacker Shantanu Goel set up a video camera and some motion-sensing software on a PC connected to the internet. If anyone breaks into his house or goes snooping through his room, the software detects the movement and sends out a tweet. Tech-savvy environmentalists can install Tweet-a-Watt, a gadget that plugs into your wall socket and connects to your wi-fi network. Once a day, the pocket-sized device broadcasts stats of your daily energy usage to Twitter. Whether that sort of transparency results in embarrassment or bragging rights can be determined by a system like the one created by Justin Wickett. The Duke University student wired up his home so he couldturn his lights on and off remotely, just by sending a text message to Twitter from his mobile phone
Yesterday tons of people wrote that my description of Facebook’s new status API as a “Twitter killer” was absolutely ludicrous. They claim that I don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter and how Twitter is much more than just status updates. Trust me, I fully understand the difference between the two services. I would argue that the ability to “follow” people you aren’t connected to and the ability to @ reply (”at reply”) to other users is just a feature. Whoever decided to take the day or two to make this product will be rewarded for taking the time as it will surely generate a ton of buzz. Any good product must satisfy the needs of the user and the first question to ask is if there is a need for a Twitter replacement. I’ve made some fundamental assumptions that suggests there is a need but feel free to argue otherwise. The average user probably wouldn’t switch products because they are fine using products that they’ve spent the time to learn how to use. I don’t think Twitter users are average though. I think Twitter is still used by mostly early adopters. If Twitter has in fact become mainstream then the odds of a “Twitter Killer” is much less likely. The need for a “twitter-like” product is clear but ultimately I would argue that much of what is provided by Twitter is simply a set of core features that can be easily replicated: While Facebook’s new status API will bring in a wave of new applications, the death of Twitter still requires the rapid development of a new product that is distributed through Facebook. Not all Facebook users understand why Twitter is so powerful, yet provided with a public timeline of their friends’ statuses, I believe they would rapidly begin to see the value. Will Twitter disappear tomorrow? Probably not, but there’s a huge opportunity to duplicate the majority of the functionality provided to Twitter users directly to Facebook users. I would argue that this product would make it easier for Facebook users to understand what the power of a twitter-like product provides and help bring such a service to the mainstream. Twitter clearly has an opportunity here though. They already have many of the features I’ve outlined but they don’t yet have the full Facebook integration that I described. At this point though, I still fervently believe that the status wars are not yet over and a new company could come into power.
Since the majority of people think that Nick’s smoking crack for calling Facebook’s new API a “Twitter Killer”, I’ve decided to outline the blueprint of a product that duplicates Twitter’s features yet uses Facebook as a backbone for each of these status updates. I’m going to call this product “FB Tweet” but you can call it whatever you want. I began programming it but decided that I was only putting my existing projects aside and ultimately it’s not worth the time for me personally.Is There A Need for “FB Tweet”?
FB Tweet Features
Conclusion
Different tracking services show different numbers when it comes to measuring which social network is most popular, but at least one now places Facebook with a significant lead in the US. Compete has updated its data for January, and the service now shows Facebook seeing a full 10 million more visitors each month than MySpace.
With Facebook growing another 14.9% from December to January, the site now reaches 68.5 million people each month, versus 58.5 million for MySpace. Granted, Compete is the only service we track showing such a disparity, though the gap is narrowing on other tracking services as well. Nielsen Online’s year-end numbers put Facebook’s domestic traffic within 3 million of MySpace, while comScore still has MySpace with a significant but shrinking lead.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s growth continued to accelerate in January. The microblogging tool grew 34.7% from the previous month, and a whopping 812.7% year-over-year. It’s still tiny compared to the two leaders though, reaching a total of 5.9 million people in January. Of course, that doesn’t account for all of the people that access Twitter solely through a third-party app.
Microsoft has revealed some details of a forthcoming service that will allow Windows Mobile users to synchronize information between their phone and the Web.
The service, called My Phone, will provide a place to store data such as photos, videos, text messages and calendar items. Users will then be able to share that data with others or use the service as a way to back up information on their phone.
A description of My Phone appeared earlier Friday at getskybox.com, but Microsoft pulled the site after several blogs wrote stories about it. Getskybox.com now redirects to a new URL that has much of the same description.
Getskybox.com went live earlier than planned, and Microsoft will offer more details about My Phone at the Mobile World Congress trade show in mid-February, said a Microsoft spokesman. The service will be available at that time as a limited, invitation-only beta, he said.
Microsoft already has a service that does something similar to My Phone. Live Mesh lets people upload photos and other information to a Web page and access the data from a mobile phone.
But My Phone may be different because it will automatically synch a wide array of information from phones. In addition, while anyone with a phone and a browser can use Live Mesh, My Phone will be limited to people using phones with Windows Mobile 6.
Gandhi is a blue, three-column wordpress theme with a left and right sidebar. It is a Search Engine friendly theme, with widgetized sidebars and footers and a smart Featured Posts Section.
Pranav is a three-column theme with a left and right sidebar. The theme is rich in colours and has a new look. Like my other themes, it is SEO-optimized, with widgetized sidebars and footer. It again has a great looking Featured Posts section with automatic thumbnail displays. The layout is completely configurable through the Theme’s options page.
MIMBO is a clean, customizable magazine-style theme for WordPress. It’s also a simple framework which can be modified with child themes
Hybrid News is a child theme of the Hybrid theme framework. It was developed to take advantage of WordPress 2.7’s threaded comments and sticky posts. It comes loaded with 10 widget sections and a front page featured article slider.
Majapahit is a free WordPress theme with magazine/newspaper style. It has 4 columns homepage, with expandable 6 category newsbox.
Simple, clean and yellow background, two column, widget-ready, and threaded comment ready.
Two column, fixed width, widget ready, gravatar ready theme with support for threaded and paged comments
A liquid, playful and simple two-column theme supporting widgets.
Two column theme with threaded comments support.
Single column, widget ready, gravatar theme
Just a few months back we told you about the launch of an updated version of the Yahoo! Calendar. The all-new Yahoo! Calendar Beta offers a host of great features like open standards (iCalendar), personalization with Flickr and drag-and-drop functionality to name just a few.
Since launching the public beta back in October, the Calendar team has been working hard behind the scenes to add more of the fantastically fabulous features (how’s that for alliteration) that you’ve been asking for. So it is with great pleasure that I can tell you they’ve just released some really exciting new stuff for you to enjoy:
- New Search: You can now search both Calendar and Notepad based on words in your event titles or notes.
- To-Do Lists: Now you can have multiple to-do lists (i.e. Personal, Work, etc.), and you can share to-do lists just like you can share your calendar. And if you don’t like to-do lists, you can hide them (just click and drag the to-do list to close it).
- Print: There’s a new print button that allows you to print your Month, Week or Day view.
- Right-click: A new right-click shortcut menu lets you add and view events, plus more. Give it a try!
Sounds pretty good, right? I especially like the new right-click menu to easily add an event to my calendar. If you haven’t tried the All-new Calendar Beta yet, maybe now is the time. You can move yourself over to the new calendar by following this link: http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com
Samsung unveiled the Mobile Applications Marketplace, a storefront purposed with peddling Samsung-friendly Windows Mobile and S60 applications to consumers while making developers some more cash than they otherwise might. It’s an admirable idea at face value - but is it the beginning of a terrible trend? Centralized application stores are nothing new - third parties and carriers have been providing places to purchase mobile software for ages. After the Apple App Store began reporting monumental numbers, however, there was a significant shift; suddenly, those responsible with making the handsets tick wanted to be the ones vending the wares. Google launched the Android Market. RIM announced the BlackBerry Application Center. Palm will be debuting the webOS App Catalog with the Pre. What do Apple, Google, RIM, and Palm have in common that Samsung lacks? They control the platform for which they’re selling applications. If you’re looking to start an application outlet, you need to be at the reins of the platform; if you don’t, you’re further segmenting an already messy market. With Samsung launching their own boutique, others will likely follow; suddenly we’ve got all sorts of manufacturers all peddling the exact (or nearly exact) same junk in a different way. Some might have an on-device store, while others rely on a web-only storefront - all of which would are likely to have completely different interface. Developers who choose to offer their goods through multiple outlets will need to maintain each one individually, monitoring sales and collecting revenue from each individually. Consumers never get the native, unified experience that makes the App Store so enticing. It’s a step in an entirely wrong direction. That’s not to say that the device makers couldn’t make things better, however. In fact, they’d have to be the ones to do it - but they’d have to work together. Nokia has been surprisingly mum on the S60 app store topic, and Microsoft’s nose is split between the Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7 grindstones right now - so those two are unlikely to have a fix-all solution for the current iterations of their platform any time soon. Thus, responsibility falls to those pushing the devices off the line. If you’re going to get knee-deep in app sales, guys, you need to form an alliance. One store, one common interface, one thing to pitch to consumers as the place to go. Should it happen? Certainly. Will it? Of course not. Every company involved is a direct competitor with the rest. By the time they worked out agreeable terms and managed to get it onto devices, Windows Mobile 7 (which will include SkyMarket, purported to be Microsoft’s official rebuttal) will have launched and penetrated enough of the market that developers likely wouldn’t be interested anymore. Oh well.
(1) 99Chats - Generate embeddable chat boxes for your website or social networking profile (Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 etc). Generated chats are customizable in terms of colors and size. Read more: 99Chats - Embeddable Chat Boxes For Your Website. (2) Feedrevolution - Simple website which could prove useful to music lovers, especially those who are always on the lookout for brand new music releases. Read more: Feedrevolution - Track New Music Album Releases. (3) NetflixInstantWatcher - Offers an alternative way to browse netflix movies, as they say, it is Netflix for impatient people. It categorizes the huge database of movies at Netflix which you can watch instantly. Read more: NetflixInstantWatcher - Browse Netflix Movies Faster. (4) TrackerChecker - Monitors over 500 private torrent sites and tells you where you can get an account. Read more: TrackerChecker - Lists Private Torrent Sites open for Registration. (5) WorldNamesProfiler - If you’ re interested to know where in the world all the other people with your surname live then check out surname map World Names Profiler. Read more:WorldNamesProfiler - Surname Map Of The World.
Check out some of the latest makeuseof discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For even more app reviews subscribe to makeuseof directory.
Oh Twitter, how versatile you are. There’s so much that can be done through Twitter, that Twippr.webs.com shouldn’t come as a surprise. With this new service for the increasingly popular (and almost, if not already, mainstream) Twitter, you’ll be able to send money, much like you would with PayPal.
All you have to do is follow the site through Twitter, send a message that says how much you want to send and to who, and they’ll take care of the rest, using your PayPal account. Why should you care about this? Well, because it’s basically the most useful Twitter apps has been created for a while. Without leaving your Twitter account, you’ll be able to settle debts, send money to your friends (what’s a better gift than cash?) and do whatever else you want.
It would be interesting to see other businesses adopt this model. For example, can you imagine doing your online shopping through Twitter? That would be huge, and Twippr is on the right path.
Most are saying that the cloud is the future. You know, the theory that you can keep all of your information online, in order to access it from any computer. Well, if you’re a believer in the cloud, then you’re going to love Hordit.com. With the site’s service, you’ll be able to store anything, be it pictures, spreadsheets, PDF files, links, articles, etc.
What does this mean? Well, that you’ll be able to keep track of your online life no matter where you are, all you need is an internet connection. Setting up the service is easy, all you have to do is sign up and start uploading things. Links and files are all neatly organized, allowing you to find them when you need to bring them back. The downside to this? The download speed seems to be a little slow for our taste, making downloading big files a bit of a hassle.
In no way should this deter you from using the service, as it’s one of the few sites that allows you to keep everything in store, without differentiating from files, links, and videos.
Toshiba Corp. is in talks to merge part of its chip operations with the semiconductor unit of NEC Corp., a person with knowledge of the negotiations said, as they struggle with slumping demand and prices.
The talks will likely focus on Toshiba spinning off its system chip operations and merging them with NEC Electronics Corp., a semiconductor maker owned 65 percent by NEC Corp., the person said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are not public.
Semiconductor makers have been hit by fierce competition and tumbling prices, while the global recession has added to their woes by weakening demand.
A Toshiba spokesman declined to comment.
Toshiba's chief executive, Atsutoshi Nishida, said on Thursday that too many chip makers, especially those who make system chips, are fighting it out in Japan and that they need to consolidate to win globally.
He said Toshiba, which is facing a record operating loss this business year, would consider spinning off its system and discrete chip operations.
NEC Electronics said in a statement that each company must prioritize operational reforms for the revival of the chip industry, and that it would push forward with its own restructuring steps including cutting costs by $890 million over two years and eliminating 1,200 contract jobs..
The Nikkei business daily said NEC has been talking with Fujitsu Ltd. as well about a merger of their chip-making operations.
Fujitsu has been looking for partners and other ways to turn around its chip operations, but a spokesman said nothing had been decided. He said he was checking on whether talks with NEC were being held.
In early trade on Friday, Toshiba shares were awash with sell orders at ¥350, down 9.1 percent from Thursday's close. NEC dropped 5 percent to ¥249 and NEC Electronics was up 0.3 percent at ¥608.
Fujitsu shares were down 4.5 percent at ¥422.
If you've ever tried to book a multi-destination airfare online or a round-the-world ticket, you know that it's not as easy as a basic point to point flight. In fact, travelers often tend to book more complicated airfares through a bricks and mortar travel agency or if they do attempt to book online, they proceed by purchasing individual sectors separately, possibly paying a lot more for one-way fares and forgoing frequent flyer points.
To ease the burden and encourage travelers to stay loyal to their global frequent flyer program, Oneworld -- which includes American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LAN, Malev, Qantas and Royal Jordanian -- has introduced a special section on its website (www.oneworld.com) to make a multi-stop trip on its ten member airlines a seamless booking experience. The round-the-world booking tool allows you to plan and/or book either a round-the-world trip or a multi-city itinerary through six continents with multiple segments and relatively few restrictions.
Before you get started, you will need to have Flash version 9 or higher installed on your computer (or be willing to download it through the link provided) and allow pop-ups/cookies (I learned the hard way. because if you don't allow pop-ups, you will lose all your research when you try to make the booking). Also if you don't think you can complete your itinerary in one session (or are browsing for a later booking date), make sure to save your itinerary, either to your computer or to the Oneworld website, if you want to access your work again later.
You can also choose to save your itinerary and send it directly to your favorite airline or travel agency if you would prefer to book directly through them. To start, choose whether you would like a round-the-world search, round-the-world search plus booking, or a multi-city itinerary. Then, the first screen that comes up is a world map with hundreds of destination dots (unfortunately the screen isn't large enough to show the entire world so you need to know your geography a bit and scroll across, up and down). You begin by choosing your departure city and then click on subsequent cities that you want to include.
A great feature that I particularly like is that you can actually identify whether you wish to fly between sectors or will travel by surface, for example you may want to fly from Boston to London, then to Prague but want to drive to Paris before flying to Spain and then home. You then choose your flights based on airline (if multiple airlines service that route) departure time and flight time. Check seat availability and type of aircraft you'll be flying -- even your terminal departure and arrival locations appear so you can be fully informed.
You search for flights by dates but if you'd like to change the date, you don't need to scroll back or enter all the information again -- just a simple click on the calendar and you can change your dates for any sector. You can click on the "Fare Estimate" tab at any time to gauge the cost of each sector of a multi-city itinerary or the total. Prices are obviously the same as those offered on the individual airline's websites, in fact when you click on "make a booking" at the end of your search, you will be taken to your local country's Oneworld alliance member's website (in our case, American Airlines) to complete the booking.
The multi-airline, round-the-world ticket, or Explorer as it is known, is Oneworld's most popular product. The Explorer generated the largest portion of the $725 million earned by the alliance last year. There are certain restrictions with this ticket, but the website walks you through the process with ease. Cities on the map that are valid appear as green dots, whereas cities that are invalid (not part of the fare regulations) appear as red diamonds. You will notice that once you have chosen a "green" city, it will turn red as you cannot visit the same city twice. If a direct flight is not available between two cities chosen, the website will route you through a central hub automatically.
The Explorer allows you 16 stops traveling to at least three Oneworld continents, or four from the Southern Hemisphere and Africa. Your route from one continent to another must move forward in a continuous westward or eastward direction, however, there are no backtracking restrictions so you are free to roam locally at will within a continent as long as you don't go back to your point of origin. I chose this (dream) sample itinerary and the entire process took me approximately ten minutes to complete: Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, Sydney to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to New Delhi, New Delhi to Amman, Amman to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Rome, Rome to Madrid, Madrid to New York and then back to Los Angeles.
A four continent trip like this one in economy class is priced from $4, 400 plus taxes (this actual itinerary, traveling in April and May 2009 totaled $4,922 including taxes), a three continent itinerary is priced from $3,900 plus taxes, five will cost you $5,100 plus taxes and the big daddy of them all -- the six continent adventure will set you back around $6,000 plus taxes -- a bargain considering that it the ticket is valid for a year and you can fly in and out of 16 cities around the world. All up I found the research and booking process using the Onworld round-the-world- tool rather simple, once I played around with it for a while.
My only hiccup on the above itinerary is that I needed to forgo one of my desired destinations (Tahiti) as it was not covered on the route I was taking, and a few cities I chose within Europe required flying through London and I could only fly through London once so I had to remove them. Otherwise, the world was at my fingertips and within a reasonable budget. It seems that the "Oneworld" alliance is living up to its name, creating one website that gives you world access.
I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that's worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you're currently on. It works remarkably well--at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page.
This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit. What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb's index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site's standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate. There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit.
For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar.
You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser's address bar. SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you'll like. Combined with this you'd get another avenue of exploration.
