How about a 1 TB hard disk on your personal computer?

Since apple announced the new iMacs a few hours ago today, I couldn’t help checking out the apple website and see what cool new features and sexy new looks the new iMacs have.

of all the fancy stuff, one thing in particular listed on the imac’s tech specs page is something that I think would be ultra-cool to have in a new computer –

The 24 inch model has

Optional 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive

I must have re-read that sentence like 5 times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, a 1 TB hard drive running at full 7200 rpm speed? Cool!

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Amazon.com - THE Web 2.0 success story

Not Google, not Facebook, I nominate Amazon for the best Web 2.x Success story award.

The betting before Amazon.com posted second-quarter earnings was that it couldn’t live up to the 80% uptick in its stock price so far this year. But the rising number of short-sellers who have been hoping for Amazon’s comeuppance took it in the shorts instead. Amazon’s stunning 257% jump in profits on a 35% rise in sales surprised even the bulls. Its stock is up more than 8% almost 12% in the initial minutes after the market closed.

Amazon Blows ‘Em Away Again - BusinessWeek

Of course, the reason Amazon is my favorite web 2.x -enabled company because it adapted itself so quickly and so perfectly to the changing internet, that it would have gone unnoticed if their earnings didn’t reflect all this growth. They have been into open web services, affiliate marketing, user generated content, and all the web 2.x buzzword things since even before those words were first used.

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Avantlink offering API

Relatively new affiliate network with some cool merchants, Avantlink, just pushed out this press release.

Online marketers that qualify for AvantLink have free access to the tools, which are standardized across all merchant programs. Affiliate API modules currently include AffiliateReport, AffiliateReportRss, GetLinkCampaigns, ProductPriceCheck, and ProductSearch.

Which means they’re basically offering everything in the api that an affiliate could ask for!

Congratulations to avantlink on the launch.

As of right now, we have CJ in the top tier of affiliate networks with a functional API, Avantlink, a mid-tier network has one. Who’s next? Shareasale, I’m hoping…

I’m mostly certain linkshare is going to not upgrade what it calls an api to what an affiliate network’s api should be.

More on the avantlink api here.

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Blogging turns 10 today!

That’s According to the WSJ:

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

Happy Blogiversary!

(from the six month old blog - FinalTag.com to all Bloggers and Blog readers worldwide!)

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Affiliate marketing 2.0 needs innovation - not clones

TechCrunch Reports that a web 2.0 digg clone for deals - Trezr.com is selling on eBay.

Trezr has a rather clever way of making money, by monetizing outbound links through affiliate programs with Commission Junction, Linkshare, Amazon, and Performics. However, the site hasn’t generated significant traffic since launch at the end of last year.

The reason why they haven’t generated traffic enough to be able to run the website - is because there are TONS of such similar websites on the internet. There’s dealigg, chitika just launched a website that does exactly the same thing, there are at least 4 or 5 such other “digg clones for deals” that I won’t even try and remember the names of - have come and gone in the last two years. These things can’t work - certainly can’t be superhit ventures unless something that is very unique and very useful that is being offered.

Web 2.0 success is based on one rule - Innovate, don’t clone.

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SEO 2.1: Speak clearly, rank higher on google’s SERPs

According to the Red herring blog, Google’s Marissa Mayer said at a silicon valley conference yesterday that the search giant is using google’s automated free 411 service - 1-800-GOOG-411 - to strengthen their software’s voice recognition capabilities and eventually use speech in videos to enhance video search results.

Eventually, google aims to further improve video search by adding visual search to the mix - in which google’s indexing software “searches through the images in the video for patterns, matching faces to another image, etc.”.

History repeating itself? Google was the first search engine to ignore author generated meta-tags in “Web 1.0″ pages and rely heavily on pagerank instead. In video, Google seems to not want to rely on user-generated tags to index video as soon as they have the capability for a more advanced method, which they are already developing.

More on the Red herring blog

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How about an Ebay/Yahoo merger?

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

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eBay to sell radio ad spots

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

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Godaddy to adopt registerfly’s domains

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

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Microsoft genuinely trying to change the world…

Video: Surface computing from Microsoft. One can see unlimited possibilities once this thing is out in the market and ideas as applications are built on top of this platform.

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