After Google acquired the online video website, YouTube the search engine giant has not made a move on how to gather revenue from the said website. YouTube is a free online video sharing service which thus would mean that no revenue is coming in for the search engine giant and that it only incurs liabilities due to the fact that operational costs are being incurred daily. After staying dormant and being a none income generating arm of Google, YouTube has now recently started to rake in some revenues. One of which was the incorporation of advertisements in YouTube videos. This program by YouTube is to allow uploaders in YouTube to incorporated ads in their uploaded videos where both YouTube and the uploader would benefit from as the latter will also get a share of the revenue based on the clicks done by viewers on the advertisement; the service is similar to that of Google’s adsense service.
Recently, Google has launched another YouTube service that is expected to help increase the revenue for the online video website. This is by launching YouTubes’ online video rental service. During a ten-day trial period viewers or subscribers were able to see how the system works. Those who will be renting from YouTube’s online video rental service will be able to rent various Hollywood movies and even episodes of TV programs which they can view or rent from a 24 to 72 hours period. The rental cost for a video would range from $0.99 up to around $3.99. However, as of the present time such online video rental service from Google is only available to users in the United States and announcements are yet to be made on when it is going to be available in the United Kingdom. The launch of the online video rental service was made even more viable by the fact that there are around five hundred partners who have joined the rental program.
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Palm, a company that first pioneered in the development of mobile devices have made itself available for sale to the highest bidder. With the emergence of different companies that develops mobile devices Palm has experienced a plateau in the growth of the company. This is one of the speculations why Palm have made itself available for sale despite the fact that the company has performed well in the development of mobile smartphones such as the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. With this news of making Palm available for sale and after weeks of speculations HP have recently announced that it is willing to spend top dollars in order to acquire the Palm company. On a recent announcement also HP is currently developing their version of the slate tablet pc by Apple known as the Ipad and with it comes another expectation that HP’s objective on acquiring Palm is to acquire or use the expertise and experience of Palm in the field of mobile devices as HP’s leverage in the mobile market.
Palm is a pioneer in the development of the smartphones and it has been given good reviews on its weOS mobile operating system. Despite these praises and good reviews of the Palm smartphone and operating system products the company failed to capitalise mainly because of the fact that the market became a lot more competitive due to the emergence of Apple’s Iphone, Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s Blackberry.
Due to Palms decline in sales and its worsening financial status HP gave a $1.2 Billion dollar lifeline
Staying true to its commitment of acquiring small companies to boost their own services, Google, has recently acquired BumpTop. According to Google executives they are on the verge of improving most of their online services as well as other services that they offer such as that of in the field of mobile phones or smartphones. Google’s acquisition of small companies started during the last quarter of last year and it has continued on to this year. Google committed to acquiring one small company a month and such acquisition of a small company coincides with the improvement of their existing features or even their future anticipated products. One example of such acquisition is that of the acquisition of BumpTop which was recently done by Google. BumpTop is a small Canadian company that develops three-dimensional (3D) interface for Windows and Mac PC’s.
It was announced by BumpTop executives during the weekend through its website that they will stop selling their software and will stop providing updates. Clients of BumpTop who availed of their paid version were redirected to their company support page. This company was founded in February of 2007 and it was funded by angel investors and venture capital firms Growthworks and Xtreme Venture partners, it was said to have received an investment capital of $1.65 million. The acquisition was first announced in the blog of Mark R. Mcqueen the president and chief executive of Wellington Financial. According to him, Google acquired BumpTop for $35 million and while the total investment of the company amounts only around $2 – $3 million. Google did not give any comments regarding the acquisition and any details regarding on why they have acquired the company. However, speculations arose that BumpTop’s technology and capabilities may be utilised by Google as part of its on-going improvement and development of their smartphones that is incorporated with the android operating system or it may also be utilised to help develop the interface of Google’s own version of a slate tablet PC.
Black hat SEO techniques are basically not allowed in the field of search engine optimisation. This is because of the fact that the techniques and strategies being employed in Black Hat SEO violates or surreptitiously circumvents the different ranking criteria set by the search engines in their algorithm. Although, using a black hat techniques may be able to give desirable search engine optimisation results to your website such is just temporary and the effect could be long-lasting. Search engines have placed different tracking codes that will be able to detect the different black hat SEO techniques that an unscrupulous SEO agent used and once discovered such could lead to the banning of the website as well as the suspension of the website. So why learn about Black Hat SEO Techniques? Many SEO consultants and SEO companies are keeping themselves updated on what is considered to be a black hat technique and a white hat technique in order for them to avoid unknowingly utilising any black hat technique which could greatly affect the ranking of their target website.
One of the new methods being utilised by some unscrupulous SEO agents is what is called as the SEO Blog Spamming technique. We all know that blogging is one of the best way to incorporate content into your website, however, because of the other features of blogging such as the ability to comment black hat techniques especially in link building is being abused. Many users post comments on blogs in order to post several unrelated messages and that such messages usually pertain to promoting a certain website. This technique is considered as a spamming technique or a black hat technique due to the fact that content must be relevant and that linking should be natural, in this type of black hat technique the posting of comments and the adding of links is considered as unnatural and unrelated moreover such was posted using different spamming softwares.
For most SEO companies and SEO consultants Google is known for its simplistic approach. Seldom does Google change anything in their website. Users are usually treated to a simple website that allows the users to enter their search string or query and the search engine company would just return the results of the users’ search. This simplistic approach is still maintained by Google despite of the fact that they have recently added some improvement or changes in their website. The first change that the Google website has undergone is the redesigning of its logo. The logo before was just a plain colorful set of text which identifies the search engine giants’ company colors, today however an improved logo was released, it still maintains the color and of course the size and font type of the text, what is notable however is the incorporation of design properties such as a beveled characteristic and the incorporation of text shadows.
It was not only the Google logo that was updated by the search engine company, another update was that of the new results page in the Google website. When the results of your search are displayed, originally the web page is just a plain results page but now a new side bar is evident on the left side of the results page. The sidebar shows different links that will allow users to navigate through the different types of searches in Google. Different search features such as images, videos, books among others are now present in the sidebar as well as links for related searches and suggested searches.
SEO companies and SEO consultants believe that these changes coming from Google is an indication of more changes to come. Especially so that they have acquired several small companies where some of which are experts in developing different widgets’ and other features that may boost the Google search engine.
One online fad nowadays is informing people or friends what you are doing at the moment. This sharing of information was achieved through the microblogging site Twitter where you are given one hundred and forty characters to convey your message in real time. Although the microblogging site has taken off and has started to acquire a lot of users, another company is starting to gain momentum in terms of users in the field of real time messaging and Geolocation, this is the company, Foursquares.
Foursquares cater to users who would like to inform people what they are currently doing and where they are doing it. A user may inform his or her friends that he is in eating a sandwich in a specific deli on a specific location. Currently, Foursquares has an estimated one million users and the company owner Dennis Crowley was offered by Yahoo $100 million for it, which the former turned down. Having realised the fact that this method of delivering information is already gaining some momentum, Facebook has already started developing their own tracking application, but the biggest indication that the field of Geolocation information is really gaining some interests from the public is the fact that Google have turned its focus on redeveloping their Google Latitude service.
Early last year Google launched the Google Latitude and it has gained more than three million users, however, most of these users were just those who registered but never actually got to use the Google Latitude accordingly, this can be seen on the fact that such users does not have any “friends” in Google Latitude. Google however reportedly started focusing on the development of the Google Latitude which is seen by Google bolstering the check-in feature and the location history of this Google Feature and due to the fact that Google has a vast map data from its Google earth and Google maps the Google Latitude is also seen to automatically add locations. Google latitudes’ evolution or development is one that users, SEO companies and SEO consultants should watch out for due to its marketing potentials in the future.
The search engine pioneer and the search engine giant’s battle of each other is of no secret. Yahoo has been regarded as a pioneer in the search engine industry from being one of the first modern search engines, during its early years and before the launch of Google, Yahoo has been the dominant force in the field of search engine. With the entry however of the now search engine giant, Google, Yahoo has since lagged to second place in terms of internet users’ share. At present Google still dominates the search engine users share taking sixty five percent 65% of the users share while Yahoo is still at second place with around eleven percent. It is because of this constant reign of Google in the first spot that Yahoo started planning out on how to deliver a blow that will topple the search engine giant. Yahoo’s recent strategy was to team up with another of Google’s competitor, Microsoft. With the launch of its new search engine Microsoft hoped to topple Google from first place but it never materialised and that prompted the two search engine companies to enter into a merger that will allow them to utilise each other’s’ resources in order to increase search engine user’s share. Months after the merger Google still is at the top and Yahoo is still at second place a situation that made Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to rethink their strategies, now, indications that Yahoo will battle Google head on are evident.
One of the biggest indication that Yahoo is targeting Google head on in its campaign is the fact that the Yahoo CEO has began to make some changes in the company. Moreover, she has set aside a $100 million which is to be used in her promotional plan, a plan, according to her, that will put Yahoo back into the map and back into the competition.
Twitter is considered to be one of the most successful microblogging company or microblogging website out there. This is mainly because of the fact that it has captured a lot of users, along with the increase in its users base Twitter has seen the opportunity of increasing their revenue. Among those ideas or strategies now is currently being employed by the microblogging site is the integration of advertisements in their tweets, deals with the different search engines were also done in order to enable the real time search capability of such search engines. The newest strategy that Twitter is now integrating is allowing users to embed tweets in their own websites, blogs or even other online media.
The formal acceptance of Twitter on embedding tweets on blogs, websites among others is hoped to enhance the media content quality of such blogs and websites. One main effect of embeddable tweets that may be significant to the different SEO companies and SEO consultants would be its capacity to contribute to the indexing of a website this is due to the fact that such embedded tweets are in text format which is thus readable for all search engine optimisation crawlers or bots.
In addition, the embedded tweets can also be utilised to enhance Twitters’ promoted tweets which was designed as an advertising platform. The embedded tweets may also be used by Twitter to measure the followers of the tweets and may even measure the importance or relevance of certain tweets wherein such data can also be useful in gathering data for its promoted tweets.
One of the foreseen problem for embedding Tweets may be on the question of maintaining privacy of those posting their tweets because the main possibility is a tweet may be displayed in several number of websites and blogsites.
Today we’re going to learn how to center your designs in your canvas, its incredibly easy and fast.
As a designer, sending designs to clients its important that your Photoshop canvas is perfect, using correct colours, sizes and ensuring that your design complies to modern day standards.
Firstly you are going to need to open your edition of Photoshop, we use Photoshop CS4 at SEO Positive.
Once you have opened Photoshop you will want to make a new canvas, make it whatever size you want. Once you have your new canvas open, you need to go to ‘view’ in the menu at the top of the screen and enable both snapping and rulers.
Once you have rulers enabled and snapping enabled you can center all your designs in Photoshop.
Click on the left ruler of the canvas and drag to the center of the page by eye, you should see the line jump when Photoshop finds the center of the page, once you have found the center of the page if you’re using Photoshop CS3+ press M form the marquee tool. Near the top just under the view menu click on the ‘style’ drop down box and select ‘fixed size’ set the width of your website’s design and any height you wish. Click on the canvas and you will see a pre-sized marquee appear, while you still have the marquee tool in use click and drag the marquee you’ve just made and center with your eyes again, and again you should see the rectangle/square ‘jump’ to the center of the page.
Once you have this centered, press V for the selection tool and click and drag two final rulers from the left of the screen to the left and right edges of the marquee, these should snap as well. Once you have done all this, press (on Windows) ctrl+D or on a mac cmd+D and you should see three lines, this is your center and edges of your design.
Today we’re going to go through handling user data and making it safe to use for MySQL. No video today as we have decided its not necessary for anything other than Photoshop, and we don’t want to waste your time watching a video.
Requirements for this tutorial:
- PHP Server to test with or local installation of PHP and Apache
- Basic knowledge of HTML
Lets begin with the form. Here at SEO Positive we only code to strict standards (strict DTD not Transitional) so all tags are necassary.
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action=""> <fieldset> <legend>Handling User Data</legend> <label for="user-data">Enter your data</label> <input type="text" id="user-data" name="user-data" /> </fieldset> <input type="submit" value="submit" /> </form>
As you can see, thats quite a lot of code for one form but I’m going to explain each element below.
The first element, is obviously the form opening tag which has 3 attributes as you can see.
- enctype
-
- enctype is the method in which the data is sent to the server, much like we write and read in English. Its a similar principle, default is “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”
- method
-
- The method attribute tells the server what type of data it will be receiving, POST or GET data, GET data is handled via the url and POST is sent in the background, default is GET
- action
-
- The action attribute is which file will be handling the form data, if left blank the page the form is on will handle the form
As you can see there is a second element to the form, a fieldset tag. This is required to conform with a strict DTD, if you are using a transitional DTD this is not a required element to your form, although I would recommend using it.
The third element to the form is the legend tag, which will appear in a bordered box as the title of the fieldset containing your form fields.
The fourth element is the label tag, this assigns a piece of text to the form field, the attribute ‘for’ is the reference to the form fields ID. Your form field must correspond to this ‘for’ attribute for the click of the label to focus on your field otherwise nothing will happen.
Then we come to our input field, this is a standard text field, the ‘type’ attribute can be a multitude of different things but for the sake of this tutorial we are going to stick to the type ‘text’, the ID attribute is set so that any clicks on the label tag above will cause focus on the field. And finally, the ‘name’ attribute is the name of the posted array element.
Now we’ve closed our fieldset we can end the form with a submit button, this has two attributes, type which is set to submit which does exactly what it says on the can. It submits the form, and the ‘value’ attribute which is the text within the button.
And the close form tag.
The PHP code that will handle this is below, with a breakdown of each line underneath it, much like the form example above.
if($_POST):
echo "<p>Hey! Thanks for this!</p><p>You submitted {$_POST['user-data']}</p>";
endif;
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The above code will output 2 lines of text containing your input data, the above code of course should be wrapped in <?php ?> and put anywhere you want on the page.
The if() line checks that’s there has been a posted variable, and will only fire the containing code if the submit button was pressed.
Echo, if you have seen our first tutorial is simply an output function and the string contains html and the posted variable again mentioned in our first tutorial using braces.
To make the posted data safe though, you could do something like the below.
if($_POST):
foreach($_POST as $postedValue) $postedValue = mysql_real_escape_string($postedValue);
echo "<p>Hey! Thanks for this lovely clean and safe data!</p><p>Your cleaned string is: {$_POST['user-data']}</p>";
endif;
The above example contains one new line, which has 2 functions in it to clean any variables posted to the server.
The foreach function takes 2 or 3 arguments depending on what you’re intent is. The first argument MUST be an array, otherwise the function will cause an error. And the second can be one of two different things.
Can be a name for the ‘current’ array object, or the following
foreach($_POST as $arrayObjectName=>$arrayObjectValue) //do something;
As you can see there is a strange => symbol which in this instance means the field name AND the fields value, which is great for automatic emails.
There are other tags that can safety guard any data a user inputs, see below for an example.
strip_tags($stringToClean, 'allowed tags, remove if none'); mysql_real_escape_string($stringToClean); addslashes($stringToSafetyGuard); htmlspecialchars($stringToSafetyGuard);
