Ecommercepartners.net

“Google Base” is what it’s being called initially, and what it does.. well, no one really knows just yet. All we have to go on is a couple of screen shots made public by big G. Here is one of them and it looks to be a form for anyone looking to sell/rent a house or apartment. Can you say Craig’s List?

“We are testing new ways for content owners to easily send their content to Google,” Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said in a statement.“We’re continually exploring new opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time,” Rodriguez added.
Google has made it known they are interested in getting into classified ads (Craigs List).. Allowing individuals to buy/sell/trade with others. This would line up nicely with their efforts to break into the online payment industry (PayPal-esque) which would then have them directly competing with Ebay (a user puts up a product to sell, someone buys.. Google handles the monetary transaction for a fee) and even Amazon.com if you bring Froogle into the mix.
Moral of the story is.. no successful online business model is safe. If it’s making money, Google wants a piece.

Flock is a newly developed web browser based on the open source Mozilla Firefox code. Flock claims to be a browser built around social networking. People can blog from it and tag websites to share with other Flock users. With Flock, you can update your blog from any website. You can sign in to Blogger, Wordpress.com, Wordpress, Moveable Type, etc.; which is a very handy tool. There are also a few Flickr features built in as well. Read this article to get more background information.

In my humble opinion, it’s definately worth a download.

I was attempting to create ROR Sitemap for Ecommerce Partners website and I noticed interesting phenomenon. In the article SHTML Makes Updating Website Easy, I have added some example of the code in the content:

& lt ; a href – “index.shtml” & gt ; home & lt ; /a & gt ;

You will notice that after href I have a “-” instead of “=“. Initially, I had “=” after href but the link was not clickable as I had replaced “>” with “& gt ;”. I didn’t ever think that the link can still be spidered until I discovered it while creating ROR sitemap. I noticed that search engine spider was trying to crawl it and since it’s relative URL, it was getting in a loop. To avoid it, I had to replace “=” with “-”. If anyone has a more sophisticated solution to this problem, please let me know.

I tried putting the code inside a text area in a form. Also, I tried to insert it between <code> HTML tag. No success! The only way it was possible was by changing “=” to “-” after HREF. Any thoughts?

Same isssue was going on with the codes in this article, How to Add Alternate StyleSheets?

I came across this interesting idea/tool recently and thought i would share.. ever start reading a news article excerpt from say, nytimes.com.. and right as you’re about to get to the point of the story you realize you have to login to the website in order to read the rest?

Sure you have.. in some form or another, those free subscription sites have gotten in the way. Well, login no more forever..

BugMeNot is a pretty cool tool that gives you the access you need to such sites, without having to register and hand over any personal information. Check it out.

Here’s a tip on how to make the background of a div semi-transparent. It works in FireFox and IE. I had used this technique when I did the HTML for Soxx.com. I’ve no clue how to make it work in Safari and Opera. So, if someone knows please let me know. I’ll be happy to add it to this article.

As is par for the course.. Google looks to be in the midst of some major changes within their search results pages (SERP’s). This thread over at webmaster world was actually started way back on October 5th, as speculation began to arise. However, it seems that the much anticipated shuffle has finally begun..

The SERP’s will be changing in the coming days (as they most likely have changed already but will continue to go up and down). If you keep track of certain keywords you should defnitely be seeing some above average movement. Now we all just need to sit back, relax (or try to relax).. and wait for the Google dust to settle. This is the nature of the game as we learn to roll with the punches Google throws at us. The goal is to stay away from the knockout blow. Fight by the rules and you should always come out OK.

I’ve had this issue before and apparently other people do.
The issue is choosing the right color scheme for a website.

So, to help out I found a few online resources to help you choose the right color scheme for your website or marketing material.
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
http://www.returnofdesign.com/colors/

And one that I use very frequently: http://www.hypergurl.com/colormatch.php

However, before you go charging into choosing colors, be sure you understand the psychology of color. Check out the folowing articles for more information.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html
http://forceonemedia.com/resources/psychologyofcolor.html

This weekend will find the EU, the US and several other large and influential countries arguing over who should have control over the internet, ICANN in particular. If you’re unaware, ICANN is the administrative organization (not for profit) that governs internet real estate. ICANN “reports” to the US Department of Commerce, who, reportedly, has yet to overturn any ICANN decisions since their inception.

What’s of note, is, while the EU wants more evenly-distributed control among the countries of the world, they bring up an important point. While recognizing that the internet originated as a pentagon project, the EU also concedes certain countries and territories may attempt to use their control to limit free speech online (”google” Microsoft and China for some interesting news stories about bloggers and government control).

Obviously, this delves into the realm of politics and international relations, but I think it’s worth noting as a possible blip on our internet technology radar screens (especially since the EU claims, if no deal is reached, the Iternet would “fall apart”). Perhaps, as the EU also claims, redistributed ICANN control could help to level the economic playing field and expand the influence of countries less “fortunate”. The question is, what will happen, if anything, if ICANN is required to report to other organizations and government bodies?

The latest innovation to site search organization has come from Yahoo! It’s about time they did something useful before Google got to it. It’s called Site Explorer

What is Site Explorer? well, quoting directly from Yahoo!

“Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.”

This a great tool for keeping track of a websites saturation within the Yahoo! index. The excel export function makes lives even easier as now we have a tool to historically track results with the click of a button.

I say great job on Yahoo!’s part with this new addition.. Google, please do the same.. thank you.