Google Sitemaps for Video - Making your videos more searchable

It’s already on techmeme, but if you missed it, Google has launched a way for webmasters to let them know if you have video content on your website.

No longer waiting for google to figure out that you host your own video, or uploading your content to youtube etc just so that it appears on google’s video search result pages. It is now possible to simply tell google to crawl your video pages for indexing into video.google.com and possibly also universal search.

More on the google webmaster blog > 

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata

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Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

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Google bans the usage adwords to sell links/google juice

In an effort to further curb the sales of links and pagerank for SEO, google has banned all adwords ads that are used to sell text link advertisements targeted towards selling a shortcut to better google rankings.

Before:

After:

this change in implementation is in accordance with Google’s existing AdWords and Webmaster guidelines. The AdWords guidelines stated “Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of … search engine spamming,” pointing to the webmaster guidelines for further definitions of unacceptable techniques… and the webmaster help pages state “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.”

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

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Doubleclick Performics introduces new affiliate interface

The new Get Links interface enables affiliates to use links right away, rather than generating the links before using them.

In order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season, the new interface is being made available concurrently with Performics’ legacy links interface.

More details on the Affiliatetip blog by Shawn Collins

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CJ now offering direct deposit to more countries

Valueclick’s affiliate network, Commission Junction recently announced something that might delight many international affiliates - the inclusion of nine more countries to the places where CJ will send payments as direct deposits straight to the affiliate’s bank account.

This facility was previously only available to affiliates in the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden and the UK.
The list will now also include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada (USD option added), France, Ireland(CHF) , Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland

From the notice posted on the CJ account manager interface:

Commission Junction has updated our payment method options; publishers are now able to choose to receive payment via direct deposit in nine new banking countries. Direct deposit offers fast and free delivery of your commissions earned through Commission Junction. Payments are made after the 20th of every month.

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Amazon 2.0s it’s affiliate program even more, launches (monetizable) Widgets

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

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6PM on CJ - New, Improved commissions - $0.00 per sale!

I was about “bulk accept” new program terms for some merchants on CJ, when I decided to randomly click on a merchant’s name and see what the new commission structure was.

The Merchant I clicked on happened to be 6PM.com - the shoe and handbags merchant that’s been on CJ for a few years and has always had performed okayish - both networkwide and for me.

Looks like a lot of people won’t be promoting them any more. Take a look at the screenshot yourself before you hear about their new deal with CJ affiliates from me.

Yep, what used to be 13% per sale is now $0.00.

Makes you wonder how and why the network - CJ - is allowing this. how would they make money off a $0 commission!?

Maybe it’s just a mistake - even if it is, that means a lost commissions for 6PM affiliates Just emailed 6PM’s Affiliate manager to see if I get a response. If it is not a mistake, that means 6PM is basically - instead of shutting down it’s program, trying to see if they can get some traffic from affiliates - without having to pay for it.

Update: got an email just a few hours after posting this that their affiliate program has been suspended. Reason - the company is now being operated by new owners.

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Amazon has potential to become the next iTunes

Mashable reports that Amazon might be launching it’s DRM free music download service on or around September 17th. Armed with the music catalogs of music giants Universal and EMI and selling most tracks for 99 cents or less, there are some reasons worth considering on why Amazon could become the next leader in the music download space.

• Amazon already sells a lot of music and media on CDs, and has all the necessary infrastructure and customers for this new service.
• Amazon loves APIs and webservices, it won’t be long before developers and amazon affiliates will be able to create interesting apps using ECS (Amazon’s webservice for that allows developers to access their product-related data), who knows, someone might even create an iTunes plugin that integrates amazon to your iTunes/iPod.
• This is entirely DRM free music, which means it’s not windows-only unlike many many other iTunes competitors out there, amazon will be delivering a truly cross-platform music download service.

What do you think? Does Amazon have what it takes to become the next iTunes?

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mylivesearch beta goes live, doesn’t even support Firefox!

Just got my beta invite from my live search - a search engine startup that claims to be the “first true live search engine”.

I’d been looking forward for this beta launch for some time, and was pretty excited upon getting the email with a username and password to test out the brand new SE. I logged in from an ubuntu desktop with firefox that I use as my primary computer at work. What do I see upon logging in? not a search engine, but this:

Your browser/operating system is not currently supported by Mylivesearch.

Wow! a search engine is supposed to be the most basic of web-apps. heh, what are these guys thinking by not supporting, of all things, the firefox browser?!

Update: Just checked again from a kubuntu laptop with firefox, looks like they are supporting firefox now, but I still can’t search from the linux OS - Mac and Linux support, is coming soon, states the page I am shown in place of any search results.

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Gmail Competing with DotMac?

heh, A couple of days ago, Apple announced increased email (and iDisk) storage for .Mac Members - from 1GB originally to a new limit of 10 GB. Today, Google Blogoscoped posts that

Some (gmail users) are reporting that Gmail is now showing almost 9 gigabyte (9,030 MB, to be exact)

Makes me wonder why the gmail team would even bother looking at what is happening at .Mac - everything google gives away for free, .Mac is selling at 99.95/year - although some people, so heavily influenced by apple’s reality distortion, actually pay for it - that is a crowd too small to consider.

Maybe it’s just a co-incidence, nothing to do with what happened with .Mac a few days ago, but an interesting co-incidence nonetheless.

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