January 11th, 2008 by Chrystie
Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. Between work, hobbies, and the daily ‘must reads’ my Bloglines reader is always chock full. As I rule, I bookmark articles and blog posts that I find interesting. I also tend to jot down new websites and ideas into a black notebook, my ‘internet black book‘. This week, I thought I would bust out my notebook and share with you the sites which have picqued my interest.
Picnik: A free and easy online photo-editing tool. Picnik allows you to upload and edit photos from your desktop and Flickr & Photobucket accounts. With Picnik you can crop, touch up, resize, and eliminate red eye, all from the same easy console.
TubeMogul: This one is cool, especially if you are into making and sharing videos online. TubeMogul enables you to upload your video and distribute it to the top video sites, including You Tube, Google Videos, and MySpace, simultaneously. If you’ve tried uploading a video to more than one video sharing site before you know how long it can take. TubeMogul allows you to upload the video just once, yet distribute it to all of the major video sites without having to upload it multiple times.
ScribeFire: (Thanks Matt!) This is an amazing time saving tool for those of you who contribute to multiple blogs. ScribeFire is a free Firefox Plugin which allows you to blog from one main console and then have it published to one, two or all of the blogs on your blogging list. Once installed, the ScribeFire icon will appear at the bottom right hand side of your screen. Anytime you come across a story or photo you want to blog about, click on the icon and it will open the ScribeFire console on the bottom half of that very same screen. NO more going back and forth between pages!
Now that I’ve shared my list, I encourage you to introduce me to other sites that YOU think are cool or innovative. Leave a comment!
December 18th, 2007 by Fred
One nice thing that always follows major conferences is the AV brought home by the different companies in attendance. While you can never recreate the exact feel of being somewhere, often it’s the conversations that are the most valuable and exclusive, hands-on interaction with some of the biggest people involved with the search world. Matt Cutts, as the champion of open-Googleness, posted a bunch of audio-video featuring him throughout the conference. While I can appreciate him clearing up issues about sub-directories and subdomains (also talked about today in the Natural Search Blog), one thing I think is a great primer on this whole search marketing thing is his SEO tips for small business owners recorded by Reachd.com.
Now video is not a good quick reference, but sometimes it’s great to have someone just explaining something in natural language (provided you at least have a basic understanding of robots, URLs, keywords, etc.). In a surprisingly information-packed ten minutes, Cutts touches on the founding principles of SEO (good user-focused content, crawlable navigation and keywords) as well as touching on local search, sitemaps, and video.
A worthy use of a few minutes, whether you’re being floored by these shocking truths or pleasantly reminded that you’re doing things the right way.
November 28th, 2007 by Fred
A few months ago, Democrats were grilled by the people in a CNN debate with questions provided by YouTube. Now the Republicans finally have their chance, as tonight they go before a crowd in Florida with the second YouTube presidential debate.
The debates are almost two months overdue, with an originally scheduled date of September 24th, but after some hiccups getting all the candidates on board it now appears that the wide berth of Republican contenders are ready to declare their social media savviness and take part in this unconventional debate.
The debates ought to prove interesting not only because of the likelihood of some cheeky questions and fiery debate, but also due to the general heat that’s increased in the presidential race over the past few months. With Iowa only five weeks away, and New Hampshire, Michigan and dozens of other states following quickly, this presidential debate is a critical appearance.
While it must be a chagrin to traditional media-philes, there’s no way to understate the importance of the web on the campaign trail. With over 75 million American voters taking up the way in their search for political news and information on candidates, and paid search, Facebook, viral campaigns and now YouTube all playing a key part in how electable candidates appear, the age of the Elections 2.0 is thoroughly here.
October 9th, 2007 by Fred
Google, in their never ending mission to expand their sphere of influence and develop new revenue streams, has launched an innovative new spin on video content embedding they’re calling Video Units.
The new program takes the limitless content from YouTube and offers it to AdSense publishers, who can embed it in their site with a lean code snippet. The content of the videos can be hand-picked by the publisher, chosen from a variety of categories, or determined by Google with its complicated relevancy algorithms. The videos display in a very customizable players and feature contextual ads at the top of the video and as text overlays in the video content (similar to the contentious ad overlays YouTube added to their website a few months ago). Not only do publishers get free, easily customizable video content for their site, but they get a cut of the ad revenue, which is also split between Google and the video’s creator.
The program is an absolutely brilliant move by Google, as it has the potential of expanding the YouTube brand massively, as well pushes forward embedded video content on sites internet-wide and will be a great testing ground for how these kinds of ads are accepted by users. And while I’m sure the content providers are carefully screened at this point for quality control (as well they should be!), it may end up becoming a great method for independent filmmakers to get additional revenue for their work.
