New Inline Video ads on YouTube

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

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PRWeb Announces “Blog This”

PRWeb, the online press release distribution service has announced the launch of “BlogThis” - A new tool that allows bloggers who comment on PRWeb news releases on their blogs to blog directly using PRweb’s interface.

A new “BlogThis” button is displayed next to every press release on prweb.com, upon clicking which, one is asked their blog type, url and username/password - this leads to a simple wordpress-like text box where a blogger can write the contents of their blog-post. Click post, and you’re done. PRWeb posts your post to your blog with an image, link and a track back to the original PRweb story to your blog like a good third party blogging app. The only drawback I can see is not being able to choose catagories/tags while posting.

Click here to read the press release

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Got a Wii? Addicted to RSS? Get google reader on your TV

Details on google reader’s blog, here

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Amazon’s A9 in a brand new avatar

Looks like Amazon’s A9 has re-incarnated. When they had abandoned the fantastic A9 toolbar a few months ago, I thought that they would also slowly kill the search engine.

That, evidently is not the case. Amazon has given A9 a complete makeover and is now calling it’s web search technology - where users can search multiple search engines in multiple frames - ajaxified, “opensearch” . It is being called opensearch because, it seems, that amazon is offering this search aggragation technology to developers as a web service under the creative commons liscence via opensearch.org

A9 now also has a product search feature built as an option right into the main search query box, one that searches Amazon for products, no surprise there!

Also being promoted heavily on the new main page is click river - amazon’s version of adwords which has been around for a while (that lets advertisers advertise on amazon pages and A9)

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Green or red?

The design team @ ideas(outright) created some logos for this blog earlier today.

I have two options .. Green and Red.

What do you think suits better to the blog template? I am totally confused.  Keeping the green as of now, but a part of my mind says the red might just fit better…?

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Coupon Affiliates - now on twitter!

Just stumbled across the twitter profile of DealTwit. A Coupon code microblog on twitter that regularly twitters coupon codes from e-retail merchants - one can ask for a specific merchant’s coupon code by sending a direct twitter and DealTwit promises to respond.

Dealtwit is the second “revenue” twitter microblog I have seen, the first being Twitterlit - who is “Twittering the first lines of books so you don’t have to”.

Smart affiliates have finally begun monetizing twitter, and they are doing it in very creative ways. This is good stuff, Affiliate marketing 2.0.

I’m not sure how much success this can be, Dealtwit only has 17 followers as of now, Twitterlit, on the other hand, has as many as 109 followers, both have taken the right step in a direction. These guys are branding themselves. The days of anonymously marketing merchants are going away as more and more affiliates realize the importance of building a brand and eventually monetizing it.

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Openoffice.org to port a mac-native version soon

Great news for mac users! The open source office suite is coming to a Macintosh near you, Sun is planning to port a native version of OO.o for aqua.

When I was on a mac, I used neo office, a distro of OO.o tailored for the mac, but I guess having the original would be a much better idea. Neo office did crash often and was in constant beta. I am not on an ubuntu box which comes pre-installed with the Openoffice.org suite of apps - a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation app and a database app - all of them, even if they’re not as user friendly as MS office, are very stable and get the work done, I suppose an aqua open office would be much better to look at than the one on ubuntu or windows.

From the announcement on Sun’s blog:

Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun’s point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.

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Yahoo testing a “Web 2.0″ style design for it’s SE

John Battelle posted this screenshot of yahoo search results, sent by a reader from the UK, to his blog. Apparently, the new design can only be seen as of now, from a
UK ip address on yahoo’s international website (not the UK version).

Yahoo has been “ajaxifying” it’s layout quite a bit lately, but this new design looks like a major change in what hasn’t changed in many years.

Now I guess one should expect a modern look at a search engine that offers RSS feeds for search result pages!

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Yahoo’s new Robots-Nocontent tag

…lets webmasters tell the search engine which parts of a web page contains it’s main content and which part is ment for, say navigation, ads, etc.

If adopted by the webmaster community, this should greatly help improve the quality of search results at Y!’s search engine. (and should also work as a nice SEO trick!)

More details here

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it’s important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.

(From the post on YsearchBlog announcing the tag)

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The evolution of FinalTag.com - New packaging, Same great taste!

When I first started this blog, it was to be just a personal blog where I would post some technology and internet related posts.

But as it happens with blogs, Finaltag.com evolved into a place where I started journaling important events, news, ideas and opinions related to the world of e-business in general and e-retail, affiliate marketing, on-line advertising, web 2.0 etc. in particular. This is now what the blog stands for, and hopefully will for some time.

From “About on the side bar”:

[Finaltag.com is a] Weblog where Pranav Chavda journals the evolution of e-business, e-retail, internet marketing, etc…

With the evolved mission and definition, the blog now also sports an evolved (and much cleaner) look (thanks to Lucian Marin for the template used here called “The Journalist“) I did the logo myself using Gimp (for the first time ever) to match the theme, but we will hopefully see a better logo soon.

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