HTML5 features

I am not going to do a HTML4 vs HTML5 comparison study here but would like to emphasize on the major changes that HTML5 is bringing in. In short, the following is the summary of features that HTML5 boasts (of course, I am yet to really experiment with coding part of it):

• HTML5 will be a self sufficient language that avoid the need to have browser plugin based rendering technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight etc
• The HTML5 code would actually reflect the structure (XML) of the page and hence there will be minimal inline styling and tags such as div will be used for demarcating clear logical sections. Moreover, there will be more realistic elements such as section, article, header, footer than finer granular elements
• Powerful vector graphics support via HTML tags and this is part of the DOM (Document Object Model). No more Flash like technologies required for graphics
• HTML5 inherently will support audio, video element types and hence there is no need of an embedded media player object and umpteen number of file types
• Powerful GeoLocation APIs to exactly pinpoint the location from where the user is browsing – even when browsing from a mobile phone
• No applets and ActiveX objects required in your browser and hence lesser security threats
• Offline caching features to support offline browsing (mainly meant for enterprise mobile applications)
• Uniformity of the language offers ease of coding and maintenance. At any point of time there’s only one type of source code i.e. HTML5 (and JavaScript as well)
• HTML5 offers backward compatibility HTML4

In short, a more powerful Web language is in the offing that can really wipe out Adobe Flash. As you probably read recently, Apple has already said that they will NOT support Flash in their mobile platforms.

How can HTML 5 change blogging?

First of all, there will be major changes to your WordPress (or Blogger) platform itself to support the HTML5 rendering. I am not sure when these platforms will start changing, but I expect it to happen within an year from now as browsers start supporting HTML 5.

Theme developers will find it exciting to develop their more structured themes in order to help integrate content seamlessly into styles. The amount of code to be written will surely reduce and debugging time will be lesser as well due to highly structured blog content as rendered via HTML5. There are already some themes available with HTML5 support but I personally believe that having blog templates alone in HTML5 may not be sufficient unless WordPress reorganizes the content editing features better.

Bloggers will find it easier to integrate content such as Video, Audio into their blogs. Moreover, providing powerful blog post support content such as graphics, diagrams, charts etc will become very easy with HTML5 support that’s provided by blogging platform. This should make bloggers’ life easy. And providing unique and customized content for readers based on their location will be another easy possibility via geo location identification (well, that’s too much to ask from WordPress though)

Content uniformity will ensure that you don’t have multiple media types, flash etc on a single page. Even advertisements and any other third party content will only have HTML5 and JavaScript alone at the end. This is expected to make the browsers render content faster than today’s rendering speed.

And hopefully, the bloggers will be provided with a much more simplified blogging platform interface so that they can really focus on what they are good at i.e. blogging.

I also have some concerns. I am not really sure (or understood) what will happen to the HTML 4 tags that you have written into your blog posts. Due to backward compatibility most of it should get rendered properly however, it depends on the WordPress team as to how proper migration can be guaranteed. The last thing bloggers want is re-editing all their posts.

HTML5 Browser Support

At the moment, Microsoft seems to be leading the pack in terms of HTML 5 browser support with the Internet Explorer 9.0 pre-releases already showcasing HTML5 support. Safari 4.0, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome already have the HTML 5 Audio and Video support. Geo-location APIs are already supported by Firefox (and not other browsers as I understand).

Looking at the way things progress, we should see almost all leading browser applications having 100% HTML5 compliance a few months from now.

Conclusion

As a programmer (and blogger), I am truly excited about the changes that HTML5 is bringing in. I am hopeful that, soon I will be able to write some HTML5 code around themes or plugins in order to experiment with the same. The HTML 5 draft specifications will be soon becoming the recommendation from W3C and that will form a major landmark for the web for years to come.

Exports, in this context, is anything like money received for online services, blog income, sale of products on eBay etc. Basically what it means is that you have to disclose and withdraw your income as and when it is received and you have to swipe your credit card for any new purchases. The details of the new RBI regulations as listed below:

(You might have already received this communication from PayPal India)

• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.
• While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business (Note: This was already in place)
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.
• If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.

In brief, whatever you earn online cannot be ‘recycled’ but withdraw immediately to your Bank account. If you want to use PayPal for paying your online purchases or services consumed, but you have to use your credit card. Basically, the government can now not only track how much money you made, but also make sure that you don’t keep that forever in your PayPal account and consume later at your convenience. They are quite smart, aren’t they? The other advantage for the RBI is that the money received in USDs or other foreign currencies will be converted into Indian Rupees at much the same exchange rate as it was received. This will certainly bring in a lot more stability to the Forex system though it can be hard on the online freelancers. For the income tax department, it is going to be as good as TDS (Tax Deducted at Source) and the entire online story works pretty well for them.

What does it mean for all of us?

As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, one needs to strictly pay taxes for what they earn. Henceforth, you will be frequently monitored for your online activities that make money. You will be in the RBI’s radar surveillance much more than those who make money in INR (e.g. Google AdSense income paid as Indian Rupee checks) because you are earning Forex sitting here in India.

In my opinion, all other money transfer services will also be brought under these rules as well. However, I am a little bit concerned about the compliance date for the current balance in PayPal India account. Not sure if there’s any date before which you have to withdraw it all. Any idea, folks?

Happy Money Making!

This is definitely a great move. As I have always maintained, the online income earners need to comply to government rules and regulations while making money. In principle they are bringing in foreign exchange (Forex) to India that’s not accounted for and sometimes not taxed.

New requirements by PayPal India

The purpose of withdrawal of money – or in other words source of income – needs to be declared only when you withdraw funds. The following are the reasons available as options now and they have a beautiful description of the same in a help screen. Bloggers are supposed to choose Freelance Journalism as per the description given there in.

In addition, as of yesterday each PayPal India account holder needs to provide the following information to keep your PayPal account active:

1. Your Mobile phone number
2. Your PAN Number

At the moment, they seem to allow skipping this screen but I am sure this will be made mandatory soon. The mobile number will be used for clarification by banks as how the money was earned and the Income Tax PAN (Personal Account Number) id will be used to track your income records and financial transactions.

[There is a bug in the screen that asked for the PAN number. Last night I entered my PAN number but it did not accept it stating that the format is not correct. Looks like they are still testing or fixing it]

What does it mean to bloggers and Internet Marketers in India?

Well, many student bloggers may not have a PAN number yet and some of them who are not adults yet will not be entitled to have one. In principle they cannot use PayPal in the near future.

Those who are already having a PAN number, can now conform to RBI regulations and be decent Indian citizens to pay taxes for everything that they earn. I know a lot of them won’t like it but that’s what you are expected to do. Evading taxes won’t help you or the country!

If you think that you can now switch to other online payment mechanisms, even they will be forced to conform to RBI rules soon enough. Moreover, I feel that all those online forex trading sites will be monitored for their illegal activities from the Indian soil (I hear have some of them have customer relationship offices in India)

In principle, be decent and pay taxes for whatever you earn online!

I am Happy!

Being somebody who pay income tax for each and every rupee earned – via employment salary, online income, bank interest, capital gains etc – I am really happy with this move by RBI. Such norms and rules are required to make our financial system stronger and well regulated which is one of the reasons why the Indian economy didn’t quite have a recession while others suffered! This will also help all of us to become good netizens!

Happy Money Making and Don’t forget to Pay your Taxes!

The compete profile of twitter.com shows a 2% decline (Nielsen and MarketingVox reports 27% decline!) of traffic in October whereas the trend has flattened out since June itself. This is not a good sign at all as majority of the leading social networks (except Orkut, may be) are still keeping their traffic growth in the positive zone.

The current state of twitter traffic (compete profile and Alexa page views profile) actually depicts the typical Jim Collins s-curve at its ‘Grasping for Salvation’ stage where most companies – after scaling high – prepare for the inevitable (Read: How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins). I am not saying that twitter is any mighty house yet but it can become a mere mite if something is not done about it soon enough.

A lot of twitter fans believe that, unlike facebook or myspace, the traffic profiles do not convey much since majority of the twitter traffic comes from twitter client. There’s no base to this theory as twitter clients existed and were really popular even before September or October. Moreover, there has not been any revolutionary client in the past two months that took away all the traffic from twitter.com website. And the increase in twitter directories and retweet widgets should have actually driven more traffic to twitter home.

SocNets applications are a lifestyle thing while the social networking as a concept will become more and more popular. If you have a social networking product and if you don’t continuously evolve the same at the pace at which people expect it, they will just dump it. Basically there is no particular patronage attached to it unless you provide good value addition and overall packaging of feature (photos, status updates, games, surveys, collaboration, third party application integration etc). Twitter doesn’t boast any of these and its inherent limitations might as well become the cause of its downfall.

If you carefully analyze the traffic to twitter.com, you will see that the interest in twitter actually declined since facebook introduced status updates that you can reply to. This actually made more people stick to facebook and even shift to completely. Another important aspect is that most of the referral traffic to twitter is actually coming from facebook and hence most people have integrated their tweets to facebook. Moving to facebook completely may be the the natural next step.

The inconsistent messages on monetizing twitter has not actually done any good to the overall cause. At the moment they are contemplating corporate twitter accounts and that may be the last experiment as well.

Overall, I have nothing personal against the twitter technology nor do I have anything against those who positively benefited from twitter. This is my second (negative) post on twitter in two weeks because I am still thinking what kind of value proposition it can come up with to make people stick to it for some more time.

Happy Tweeting (if you love it, that is)!

If you haven’t checked your technorati authority or rank recently, I suggest that you do it now. This blog’s new Technorati authority is 414 and the rank is 16154. Let me explain what these numbers mean to us.

Technorati authority and rank

Unlike the older algorithm, the new technorati authority is a value between 0 and 1000 – the higher the value, better the authority. The authority of a blog is calculated based on its linking behavior, blog category and what the blogosphere as well as the other media is talking about the same over a finite period of time. This time frame is not 6 months like it used to be in the older algorithm.

I hated the older authority system because people could manipulate it by link exchanges and blogroll entries. Also, since the six month window was always predictable, you had a chance to link back from sites that were going out of this six months (or 180 days) window. A lot of smaller blogs without any good content used to manipulate the authority.

One more important thing about the new authority system is that a blog can have more than one authority if it falls in multiple categories. For example, if your blogs come under ‘Technology’ and ‘Business’ categories, you could have two authority numbers. Unfortunately, the category is not something that a claimant can select.

Technorati rank is basically your blog’s rank among the authority of all blogs in the technorati directory. 1 is considered the highest rank and these numbers don’t duplicate as in the case the authority number. i.e. a number of blogs can have the same authority but no two blogs will have the same rank in one category. By the way, just like the technorati authority, you can have multiple ranks based on your listed category. This blog’s rank of 16514 means that it ranks at that position among the 853,799 blogs indexed, at the time of proof reading this post.

How to get high technorati authority & rank?

As I mentioned earlier, the blogroll linking does not play any role in deciding your technorati authority. However, deep linking has a bigger role here when you consider links from other blogs. The other aspect is the external non-blog links such as social media – social bookmarking and RSS directory links to your blog posts.

Becoming a ‘technorati fan’ of some blog was a major thing in the past and that was a deciding factor for determining the technorati rank. However, the little heart symbol indicating the love received (Check it here) is no more displayed while technorati claims that they still count the love coming in from 100s of thousands of technorati badges in the blogosphere.

Another important thing that may be counted is the comments on your technorati listing. Just like Alexa – which has visitor comments on your site info page – Technorati seems to count the comments on each claimed blogs in your account in order to determine the ranks (By the way, if you want to comment on this blog’s listing on technorati, please do so by visiting this link. This favor will be returned unless your blog has some rated or illegal content)

Flaws and incomplete features

Though, technorati has been working hard on their new site, features and ranking algorithms, there are still a lot of concerns. I heard a lot of complaints that some accounts have lost their claimed blogs or they are unable to claim them. Also, technorati is yet to provide a consistent mechanism to choose tags about blogs. At the moment, one can put anything out their at the risk of loosing the authority or rank.

But I really liked their new search mechanism which is a lot faster while searching for blogs as well as blog posts. Earlier, the search and the general performance of the technorati site was pathetic.

Summation

Though ranking systems such as Alexa and Technorati have their pitfalls, at the end, the stake holders (venture capitalists, sponsors, advertisers, co-bloggers, potential buyers etc) of your blog need to have some way to assess the authority of your blog. Technorati, at the moment, is one such mechanism and hence any step towards improving the system needs appreciation.

Over to you…

Have you checked your technorati authority/rank lately? If so, please share it here. Also, please provide your valuable inputs on how you see the new system going to work or even any means to tweak it.

Blogosphere rocks!

Majority of the brands and corporates these days have fan pages, rooms, profiles etc on SocNets and their PR people are pretty active there as well. This trend is not something specific to any industry and hence if you are looking for a PR job you need to be a good blogger and/or micro-blogger (See the chart below).

SocNets for marketing & advertising

There are a number of reasons why Social Networks are fast becoming the place to do marketing as compared to other online advertising channels (search marketing, email marketing, forums, websites, blogs).

Firstly, most of the computer users these days use some kind of social networking sites and the average time spent on Social networks is increasing day by day.

Next, the predicted and actual growth of online advertising on Social Networks is pretty encouraging numbers. A year ago, when I wrote about the social network advertisement model, the advertisement share on SocNets was just 5% (of the total online ad spending) and now it is already 20% (Read this report)

Thirdly, the social networks seem to be the only place where people spend more time even when there’s recession related woes. Also, when compared to email and traditional chat systems, SocNets provide an easy mechanism to discover new people and connect better. This viral nature of social networks adds to the advertising effectiveness as well.

Finally, there has been exciting reports from companies like Dell ($3mn in sales via twitter) who are making the best out their Social Network campaigns. Many of these offers and goodies news (tweets) may be spammy in nature but at the end they create more sales and leads.

Conclusion

In short, SocNets are inevitable channels for your marketing campaigns. It is not just for the corporates. Even bloggers have started building their SocNet fanpages and a twitter profile is something like a must-have for every blogger. Via active presence on your Social Network-Media-Microblogging channels, you can definitely generate more traffic to your blog, sell your products and services more effectively and increase the conversion rate of your promotions.

Happy SocNet’ing!

On further reading on the web, I figured out that there’s a need to distinguish between ad sizes based on the program. For example, if an image ad is effective on a particular size and aspect ratio, it does not mean that an AdSense text block of the same size is effective.

More effective ad sizes

According to this particular report by Dynamic Logic, the image ad sizes of 234×60 (half banner) and 180×150 (small rectangle) are more effective than leaderboards and large rectangles. The reason being the fact that larger ad sizes causing more ad blindness. We all know how easily the web users ignored traditional web banners (mainly 468×60) and now the leaderboard is joining this ignored list as well.

Text ads v/s image ads

However, when it comes to PPC text ads (e.g. Google AdSense), by looking at what people say and my own AdSense channel reports, I tend to believe that large rectangles and skyscrapers actually have better CTRs. So, you need to clearly distinguish text and image ads when it comes to filling your available screen real estate effectively.

Why people went for bigger ads, in the first place?

As a matter of fact, the monitor resolutions, sizes and display hardware capabilities have been growing drastically in the past several years. This essentially led to the need for having bigger ads (468×60 to 728×90 for example) and even whole page ads. However, in the other direction, mobile technologies and minis started growing as well which demanded for various types of small ad sizes. On top of this, with aspect ratios changing, nobody was really in a mood to utilize the entire available screen for website design. This phenomenon is what is probably resulting in the ineffectiveness of these bigger ads now.

However, the OPA (Online Publisher’s Association) seem to be going ahead with their plans to introduce even bigger ad sizes. As the report reads, the big publishers such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times & ESPN have agreed to publish the following three extra large ad sizes:

• The fixed panel, a 336-by-860-pixel banner. Wider than standard skyscrapers, it follows users as they scroll down the page
• The XXL, a 468-by-648-pixel box with an expandable video option
• The pushdown, a 970-by-418-pixel unit that takes up over half of a page before rolling up

The above decision would essentially mean that we can start seeing AdSense ads that your current blog design cannot accommodate and I wonder if it is a good trend at all! I mean, are we talking about more ads and less content space?

Over to you

In the past, we experimented, struggled, Googled for information and arrived at certain ad sizes (UAP – Universal Ad Package sizes) that we thought are the best to improve our AdSense and private ad sales income. However, there will be a few things that could change in the near future. My questions to you are:

(1) Are blog themes, unlike generic websites, designed to accommodate the best possible ad formats?
(2) Which AdSense block size is the most effective on your blog for text ads?
(3) Which image banner has the maximum CTR on your blog?
(4) Do you think that the three XXL sizes proposed by OPA will pick momentum?

Happy Blogging!

The latest innovation from the Google Labs is what they call the Google News Timeline. I am not a big fan of Google News as such but this one looks really cool. With Google News Timeline, you can see all the news that you want datewise in a simple user interface which is highly customizable.

The mark of every Google Labs project is simplicity and ease of access and Google Timeline is so good at that as well. When it comes to customizing, you can add your custom queries, news search items, blog news etc to the timeline which makes it even better than typical news bars or even RSS readers in terms of readability. You may check out Google News Timeline to experience the latest means of reading news.

Google Similar Images

Yet another Google Labs innovation that is made available recently is the Google Similar Images with which you have the possibility of visually refining your search. This means that one doesn’t have to go through several pages of image SERPs before retrieving the image that he/she wants. Basically, every search result page on Similar Images comprise of groups of related images (with visual similarity) by clicking on which you get further related groupings. Crawling and indexing these images may not be a big issue but scanning them to ‘visually group‘ them probably involves some technology.

Behind most of the things that Google innovates (and makes money), it’s simply the search index pages and actual search data. Did anyone else think of leveraging that raw data to these heights?

Let us wait for what has to come next from Google Labs!

If the current trends are any indication, it’s predicted that by 2013, the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) spending will hit $26 billion in North America by growing steadily from the 2008 figures of $13.5 billion. This is a good news for online entrepreneurs as they can build their businesses around companies like Google at least for the next five years.

More interesting facts about Internet, Google and Search

• An average American browses 115 domains per month
• Google continues to enjoy 72% of the search engine marketshare
• In a month, more than 140 million users utilize at least one Google service or site
• Even though we are in recession, the only thing that shows tremendous progress is internet search – high growth search terms being related to ‘coupons’, ‘unemployment’, ‘bankruptcy’ etc
• There are about 13 billion core searches per month made by all internet users

All these points suggest that, it is bright green once we get to the other side of recession. However, there are bad trends as well – some of them being short term issues (such as lower ad spending). Yet another climbing issue is the click fraud rate which is at all time high right now according to a ClickForensics report.

Overall, there’s enough business and money awaiting those who have long term plans. And one can safely build a business around Google and its echo system, for at least next five years!

References: Marketing Charts

The average ad rates have fallen by almost 50% in Q4, 2008 when compared to the same period last year. Websites of all sizes have been on the receiving end while the smaller sites (and blogs) suffered the biggest loss in the eCPM rates over the past one year. Business & Finance sector related ads, quite understandably, have been the worst underperformers.

More on the decreasing ad rates

The report suggests that there has been some positive trend in the last quarter or so but again that was mainly due to the festive season spending. If you discount that, the trend is still downwords and the worst may not be over for all of us.

The above picture explains why many of us – small time bloggers – have probably suffered more. We got to read some really interesting blog income reports for the last two months or so!

The ad rates trend is directly related to what is happening around us with respect to the global economy. For more details on this report please visit this Marketing Charts link.

Related Posts

Global recession and current state of the MMO blogosphere
Blogging tips for the current market conditions

Tail Piece: Wonder how those blogs with optimized keyword content, for debt consolidation, insurance, credit cards etc, are doing!

It seems Oxite was originally developed to power one of Microsoft’s own tech portal Mix website that looks funky enough. But is the Oxite blogging engine good enough to take on popular blogging (if not CMS) platforms like WordPress? I seriously doubt that.

Reasons why Oxite may not become an immediate hit

The following are my arguments against Oxite and Microsoft’s proprietary technologies in the blogging space:

#1 The Cost Factor: The SQL Server, IIS and Windows Server landscape is pretty expensive and whether you host it yourself or via Windows hosting providers, it is going to cost you a lot. The FREE download SQL Express editions are available to host the blog metadata but it can hold only up to 4GB of data and hence hosting providers cannot really use them.

#2 Not a preferred technology: The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) open and/or free platforms have already evolved into mammoth proportions and popularity that millions of people using them will hesitate to switch over. More over, the LAMP has been the foundation for platforms like WordPress, Drupal etc that are already established. Another reason to worry about is the number of people actually experienced in and willing to write .NET code (instead of PHP) to customize and extend the blogging features.

#3 Community: Of course, Microsoft has a great community (MSDN etc) and eco system around them but they have always been ‘grow and earn with Microsoft‘ communities and not those who are open enough to work with open source projects. Since MS is not used to this concept at all, they will have to really change their marketing strategies to established an open platform.

#4 Scalability: I am not sure how much will a Microsoft blogging stack will scale to support say a huge number of free blogs, for example, if they have to use this platform like WordPress.com free blog space. Personally, I hate ASP .NET though I have been a Microsoft platform based developer for many years.

#5 Microsoft’s hidden agenda: As usual, the hidden agenda behind any free Express edition or free blogging platform, could be the opportunity to sell more SQL Server licenses and web developer tools. The moment, people realize this, they might back out.

#6 Cost of maintenance and installation: I tried to get my hands dirty with Oxite this weekend and downloaded about 250MB worth stuff including Oxite code, SQL Express Edition (and its prerequisites), Visual Web Developer Express, .NET runtime environments. I failed miserably to set up the environment on my Vista PC due to .NET runtime installation issues. The same situation could arise with your hosting provider and your cost of maintenance could run through the roof.

A few good points about Oxite

Since platforms such as WordPress already set standards, Microsoft seems to have worked hard to make available all that WordPress already has on Oxite as well. So you can expect all basic features such as posts, pages, comment moderation, widgets, gravatars, pingbacks, trackbacks, admin panels etc on Oxite blogs. In addition Oxite boasts the following advanced or cool features.

• Multiple blogs per single installation of Oxite. We are yet to verify how it works and will provide updates later if my landscape works. If this is true they can easily come up with a Blogger or WordPress.com soon
• Advanced CMS options: Since it is more than a blogging platform, all features required by a Content Management System can be expected in Oxite. Please note that WordPress is yet to become a good CMS system that has advanced versioning features, document management etc
• Improved Syndication: This could be a really cool feature that Oxite provides RSS feeds at the page level which is a must to use it as an advanced publishing system
• Browser Integrated Open Search format: This sounds like another great feature whereby your blog search can be actually triggered from the browser’s search box itself. I have no clue on how it works, let’s wait for more information!

What could work?

I do not believe that Oxite, with all its proprietary baggage, will be able to make it big in the free blogging engines space especially with whole lot of established players around. However, hardcore Microsoft technology powered businesses might use this platform for their corporate portals, employee blogs etc. The other option for them is to make it as part of MSN live space, for example, and hope that it would not end up like Yahoo 360. But if they are positioning it as a great Content Management System and if it has good features, they could be really successful in that domain.

Blogs already running Oxite

on10 is one the other blogs (along with Mix itself that is running on Oxite already. Please note that since this is only an Alpha release of the product, at the moment only a few Microsoft and partner sites are using this new blogging & CMS platform.

Yahoo initially plans to roll this out to their small business (Yahoo hosting) customers along with the existing users of IndexTools prior to acquisition. In addition, a few beta testers and selected publishers get to use the released version until the product is ready for mass shipment later this year or first half of next year.

The Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) solution is claimed to be more or less <>real time analytics as compared to their competitors such as Google Analytics or Sitemeter. We need to wait and verify whether this claim is true. Regardless of that, Yahoo might steel some marketshare from the current leader (GA) in this segment and also Sitemeter, which has already lost huge user base to Google Analytics. YWA also claims features such as advanced campaign management, merchandise reporting etc. The complete set of YWA features is available at this link. Yahoo’s move to roll out the analytics tool may be with the intention of collecting more intelligence on ad campaigns, search behavior etc rather than gaining a lot of marketshare here. This will definitely help their ad business in the coming years.

The only problem that we had with Yahoo has been their prolonged development and testing cycles due to which most of their programs stay in the beta state for a number of years. We have seen this issue with Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo AMP. This does not mean that other vendors don’t release beta products but they make it available for a wider audience.

Over to you…

I would like to know which web analytics program are you using currently and whether you are happy with the same. And are you a Google fan or Yahoo fanatic?

First impressions

Though the installation file download size is claimed to be 470KB, in reality it took quite some time to actually download and install the product on my Vista laptop. Finally on the disk, it occupied about 65MB of space which is much more than what IE, Firefox or Opera would take. But the bad thing ends there as when I clicked on the quick launch icon it was like I switched on a light bulb. The application load was so amazingly fast!

And the very first thing that anybody would notice is the simplicity and the amount of browsing space available. The space utilization is excellent as they managed to club the tabs with the title bar. Now that’s a useful and innovative design! If you launch Google Chrome for the first time, the main area did not have much to show you. But the subsequent launches will be showing the thumb-nailed view of your most visited pages. The default page also shows a quick search widget for your history.

Another interesting thing is the usage of the address bar. When you start typing there you have a few possibilities there. Auto completion of previously visited URLs, possibility to search Google for what you typed in, or go to a closest matching URL/most searched phrase are the possibilities I saw. It is definitely a greatly usable address bar in that aspect.

And if you want to quickly visit a page that won’t leave any traces of doubt, there’s a feature called an incognito window that comes as a popup (tabs within this popup possible). The incognito windows will not leave any cached pages, history information or cookies on the disk unlike regular visits.

Other Major Features

One of the things that is exceptionally good in Google Chrome is the text zoom feature. A few posts back I talked about this topic in the context of blog themes. I was pleasantly surprised at the way in which this new browser handled text zooming. Also, the rendering and moving of windows, tabs etc is ultra smooth.

Another thing I liked so much is the Developer menu group that listed View source, Javascript console, Debug Window and the Task Manager (not Windows TaskMan). The page source viewer has color coding which looks very nice and this loads really fast as well. This simple logical grouping of menus, probably shows the amount of thinking that goes into the design of each Google product. Please remember that Microsoft is yet to figure out a way to simplify their Internet Explorer Tools Options page.

Google Chrome runs its individual tabs in separate process spaces. So if you keep your Windows Task Manager open, you can see a new chrome.exe getting spawned every time you open a tab window for browsing. Another thing – Every single time you click or open a new URL yet another chrome process is temporarily launched and this can be seen in the TaskMan as well. Despite some of these additional security measures (or otherwise), the browsing experience is extremely good.

Good, Bad and…

In fact, I did not find any real bugs with this beta release and that is something really great. The only time that the browse waited a little while was when it was looking for the proxy information, otherwise it was super smooth and no alignment, tag or style issues with respect to the content as well. I love this browser!

What does this mean to the browser market?

The emergence of the new browser means different things to Firefox and Internet Explorer. IE will continue to loose another portion of their market share. Firefox has been tied up with Google so far and they had managed to be successful together in the past two or three years. Now, we can see both taking different routes which might essentially kill Firefox in a couple of years.

And for Google, well, they could bundle their other services with the Browser as well? You never know. While Google keeps us guessing, you could download the new browser using this link and enjoy!

Google already had launched similar tools, in the past, such as Google Trends – and even Hot Trends under the same tool – that helped advertisers (and others as well) to understand the search trends from various geographic locations and countries. With the Insights for Search, however, Google is opening up their search intelligence database a little more by providing exhaustive analytical reports that anybody can consume.

Major features of Google Insights

The tool basically allows the user to search and see what the world is searching for and then do further analysis on that data.


The search data can be analyzed for:

• Major categories (E.g. top blockbuster movies)
• Seasonal behavior or time wise trends (E.g. best cars of 2006)
• Geographic distribution of search words (E.g. Olympics in Beijing)

The search items can be further filtered and explored for geographical region (countries and sub-regions), categories and time. Google has made their search intelligence available from as early as 2004 and hence the last four plus years of search data can be analyzed using this tool.

The resultant data is then rendered in neat graphs (See some samples below) that can be further explored by clicking the links and/or the map. Basic density chart and map is available for anybody but you need to log on to your Google account to see the numbers behind them. Pretty neat, isn’t it? Now, you could even play around with this search intelligence database to geographically target your advertisement or even, as publishers, handpick what you want to show.

The implications

Google seems to be taking one step at a time in a controlled fashion to provide value to their advertisers and publishers as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is their main revenue source. Other competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft have always been hesitant to open up their data and technologies when it comes to the search business. I think Google has taken the right step here to reinforce their market leadership and continue the growth path.

They are always good at putting their inventions to the innovation path and make more money, right?

The right people for the right business model
Technorati probably already knows in and out on what bloggers need in terms of monetization and they have huge statistics with them on categories of blogs, popularity, feed-driven traffic, number of pages served etc. As they understand the pulse of the blogger better than anybody in this world, in all probabilities this ad network will be a huge success.

Directly taking on Google AdSense?
While filling up the signup form at the Technorati Media site, the majority of the questions asked are not really personal information but more on what kind of ad network do you use currently (with special mention on AdSense), what is the CPM yield, what kind of analytics (read Google, Google and Google) platforms are used etc. It is very clear that they are keen on taking on Google with respect to the ad network as well as supporting tools.

Next steps
Let’s wait and watch… I am hopeful that the Technorati Media will do more justice to the professional blogger where as Google had this infamous ‘get-banned-anytime’ attitude and poor customer support. I, for one, have been waiting for almost two weeks now to hear from the AdSense customer support as my eCPM suddenly started showing zero, despite quality traffic and clicks. Also, I thought Google’s blogsearch could always be improved!

While the details (we only know that it is CPM based) of the newly-launched ad program are not available yet, I suggest that all of you sign up with this program as soon as possible, though you never know the outcome in terms of approval. I will definitely have a D$ Review written about the same if I get approved!

Good luck!

Internet based Ad spending still too low
The overall Internet based ad spending has increased only by less than 10% compared to last year – the gain being a loss for Newspaper advertisements alone. However, it is unfortunate that newer channels such as Social Networks have not picked the momentum as against the hype in terms of ad targeting and spending.

Social Network ad-spending projection
To make things worse eMarketer has come up with their downward projection on US social network ad spending – they now say that 2008 figure stands at $1.4 billion as against the previous projection of $1.6 billion! This number contributes to roughly 5 percent of the total ad spending on the Internet. The YoY growth projection in this segment is not very interesting either and so is the case with long term projection whereby it will still have ONLY 5 to 5.5% share of the overall Internet spending – which translates to $2.5 billion out of $50 billion by 2011.

Probably, the prolonged US recession and forthcoming government change is affecting new investments in this area as well?

Social networks & blogs still growing…
What is good to see, though, is that there is no slowing down in terms of the target audience for this particular ad channel. The latest (April ’08) reports show that LinkedIn grew by a whopping 361% year-on-year where as Wordpress and Blogger grew by 160% and 40% respectively in terms of unique audience. The number one position in the social network space is still safe with MySpace, followed by the number 2 Facebook. Top blog site in terms of unique visitors is still Blogger, followed by Wordpress and TypePad (Source: MarketingCharts.com)

I strongly feel that there is still a lot scope for channel advertising with social networks if innovative methods are brought in. It will then be a money making opportunity for all of us for sure. I also feel that it is too early to predict the ad spending for long term in this segment as the technology shifts are taking place at a very rapid pace.

Microsoft Vista sales campaign

Can music really sell something that is already proven to be a failure, at least in the enterprise context?

Yahoo Publisher Network has been sitting on the beta stage for a while now. After half a decade into operations this program is still available only for US publishers. However, it seems, Yahoo has been working on a solid ad management platform (code named Project Apex) to lay foundation to their new efforts to become the advertisement channel of choice.

What exactly is AMP?

AMP – Not the same as Yahoo AMP M8 – is an integrated platform for advertisers, agencies and publishers that will significantly reduce the complexities of ad buying and selling. Regardless of the channel, demographics, target audience type or geographics, the AMP intends to provide a unique interface to search, select, connect, negotiate, approve, design/test ads, sell and buy and it claims to have fully automated processes. As per Yahoo’s President, Susan Decker, it is going to be the generation next platform to match the ever-changing dynamics of the online advertisement market.

Preview

I took a short look into the new platform offering (video alone) and was pleasantly surprised by its user interface. The amount of optimization available for publishers and advertisers is excellent. As a sample scenario if a particular advertiser wants to drive a campaign for certain geographic locations and say 2mln impressions, all that he has to do is to pick the locations from the chart and he gets a consolidated list of all publishers with available impressions, ad spaces and per location. He can then pick a few of them and play around with the numbers to get a total of 2mln. He then, just need, to submit the list to start the campaign! It’s as simple as that, at least in the demo.

A lot of people think that Yahoo is trying to imitate its biggest competitor, Google. But I guess, Google does not have such a simple but powerful solution that knits together the advertiser and publisher so well. I always thought that Google hides a lot from publishers.

For those who are interested, the Yahoo AMP! preview video is available here

I hope that AMP will not sit on beta the way YPN did…

PS:- Probably this is another tip for bloggers ‘Keep your drafts in tact, at least for a few days after posting’

Now, what does this number translate to? More than 20 million registrations, if you consider the recent growth rate, facebook is all set to hit the 100 million mark in less than 18 months (Refer to http://www.marketingcharts.com/ data). That kind of a user base will give facebook a unique advantage – after Google – to target that many readers with their ads. After three year of operations their revenue is standing at $150 million and that could potentially reach $1billion in the next 18 months!!!

This $1 billion comes ‘free’ as they don’t engage with a publisher network. Banner ads that are part and parcel of free member sign up is bread and butter for facebook. However if they have to match Google’s kind of revenue (even without SEM) in a few year’s time they need to engage their members better by offering them the a variety of other services – say blog/web hosting, huge storage space, more online applications etc. Another potential for facebook – and hence for members or publishers – is to charge the System Integrators that use their Web 2.0 applications to connect to facebook accounts. An improved ‘Adwords’ can be easily invented by facebook for their advertisers using the Social Network Marketing (SNM) and not SEM.

Among the social network sites, I think facebook is all set to make it BIG in the next two or three years! I only hope that they will come up with an ad publisher program to help us to make some money as well. Also, those who lost opportunity to see the Google growth story from ground-up, may wait and watch how facebook plays the game!

According to Ms. Karla Escolas from Chitika Customer Relations, the new product will be intelligently optimized in a way that CPM ads will be displayed only when it can get paid more than the CPC ad in the same slot thereby increasing the earnings potential of blog publishers.

While adding another product to the suite is a good move, one might wonder why Chitika has to venture into the already packed CPM market where there are many established players. Let’s wait and watch!