A quick short post on some research sites for good keywords.

Click here to continue reading "Best Keyword Research Sites"…

Today I want to recommend a superb thingy for firefox users- Firefox Universal Uploader. If you often upload videos or images to sites like youtube, flickr or facebook, this addon can smoothen the whole uploading process. Currently, the plugin supports following sites:

1. Box.net 
2. Flickr
3. Picasa
4. Youtube
5. Facebook
6. Webshots
7. OmniDrive
8. Smugmug

The functions are quite comprehensive. Key features include:

1. Firefox Universal Uploader can show the local folders and remote folders which enables you to upload files by single click;
2. Ability to upload any number of files at a time;
3. Upload files to multiple Web sites using a single interface (using only one extension);
4. Ability to add multiple accounts and upload files to each account independently.
5. There are also site specific features, such as managing tags for flickr images.
6. On top of the user-friendly interface, there is also a process bar which lets you track the uploading status.

For download, go to this address: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4724

Until next time.

Better known as the textual version of YouTube, Scribd allows users to share documents online and exchange their comments on submissions. The site also provides analytical data for your document, such as number of votes, views of the work, web referrer and geographic location. Below figure shows the people count over the past year.

Click here to continue reading "A new and fast-growing web 2.0 property - Scribd"…

Looking for the best list of web directories?  There are countless directories online, but few can provide values to your site. I have found below site which has a decent list of sources.

http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly-list.php

One think you need to know: a directory with high pagerank on the front page doesn't imply the same PR in category pages, where your site link is found. Sometimes PR can be zero when there are large amount of pages. Be sure to check the pages if you want PR boost.

A 9-year-old child is supposed to learn the natural language first. Now in this story the girl has mastered a computing language (VB6, indeed). Incredible.

Read the news here.

Read the story here. But better treat it lightly, as it sounds like rumor only. There is also a discussion at digitalpoint.

If it were true, this would kill off the needs of buying links to boost pagerank. Selling links would be less lucrative. But honestly speaking, getting a top rank does not necessarily require high pagerank. In these days, keywords density and competitiveness are major factors to deciding ranking in SERPs. Appropriate use of long tail keywords can rank you in the first page with zero PR.

Well I don't think the story is true.

Complete story here. Unlike facebook which allows APIs built within the canvas, OpenSocial  provides a list of APIs that assists in building social networking applications on the web. The three common APIs define profile Information (user data), friends Information (social graph) and activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff). According to google, users will also share money with Google. But the details are not known.

OpenSocial goes live recently. Check it out: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

p.s. Why not another facebook? Simply because google already has orkut.

Wuala is a new way of sharing files, which utilizes peer-to-peer technology. Being a P2P service like BitTorrent, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large online storage network.  Under the network, Wuala users agree to share some of their hard disk space in exchange for space on other people's idle drives.  In return, Wuala rewards its users that stay online and the rule is simple: the amount of storage users have access to is equal to the amount of storage from their own drives that they've set aside for the Wuala network, multiplied by the average percentage of time that their machine is online.

In short, you use a desktop application to allow for drag and drop sharing and it let's you trade your disk storage for additional online storage. Great idea, but some may start to worry.

Is it secured?  Will my privacy  be intruded?

In fact, security is one of the major focus in Wuala's view. The whole network builds on a technically sophiscated infrastructure - it employs 128 bit AES algorithm for encryption and the 2048 bit RSA algorithm for authentication. All data is partitioned and encrypted, to dispel concerns about privacy or irresponsibility.  Thus if you crave privacy and don't want to share personal videos and photos over through sites like youtube and flickr, Wuala is a choice.

btw .la extension represents Los Angeles, which is the first city to be awarded an Internet address.

While it is not too bothering, the message from rapidshare is worth a note here.

Dear Customer,
Herewith we advise you of an upcoming change in our storage management.
This message refers to your RapidShare premium account:
ID: -
Current expiration date: -
Current e-mail address: -
On November 10th, we will launch our storage revision program.
Accounts that use more than 20 GB of storage will be marked as "XXL" accounts by our system.
If any files associated with an "XXL" account have not been downloaded within the last 90 days ("inactive files"), those files will be deleted automatically.
As soon as the account's storage is less than 20 GB, no further files will be deleted.
Of course, no active files (i.e. files that have been downloaded at least once during the last 90 days) will be deleted. This means, we still offer unlimited storage for active files.
Your account's current storage utilization is over 20 GB, which means your account will be marked as "XXL".
Please check your account for files that you no longer need and remove them.
This helps to avoid the deletion of files you would like to keep.
You can check your current storage utilization at any time in the premium zone, right above the files list.
Thank you for your attention.
Best regards,
RapidShare AG
Management

If you are tired of manual submission to social bookmarking sites, SocialMarker will save your sweat and time, by automatically submitting your page to 32 social bookmarking sites - almost handsfree.  It greatly speeds up the submission process.  SocialMarker will also allow you to submit them without retyping the description, title, key words and URL. 

In firefox, you can utilize the SocialMarker Bookmarklet, which makes life even easier.  Place SocialMarker Bookmarklet onto your Firefox toolbar. Go to the article you would like to submit and click the socialmarker bookmark. Enter the necessary fields and you are literally done. By default, title and tags should already be filled in by SocialMarker.

Here is a list of sites supported by socialmarker.

There are also alternatives: socialposter and onlywire. The latter features a dedicated firefox plugin, but the number of sites is far fewer. Socialmarker is my definite choice for submission.