roy | 
08 11th, 2008| 
JetBlue started charging for pillows and blankets this week. And Delta Air Lines announced that by 2009 it will provide wireless Internet access to all of its 330 domestic planes. By the end of 2008 it will have 75 planes outfitted for Wi-Fi web surfing. It seems that most customers prefer Internet access over satellite television, or current movies and entertainment. The smartphones, iPods, and other hand-help Internet devices business travelers carry seems to be driving this trend of connectedness. It used to be you could use the Internat at airports, hotels, and coffee shops but not during air travel. This development extends the “always connected” world to air travel, once an escape from email, and researching on the web. The Delta service will be priced at $9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95 for longer flights. The Delta Internet service is provided by Aircell, a network of 92 ground antennas across the United States that connect with jets and airplanes flying on domestic flights. On board the planes, the Internet signal is broadcast using a wireless router, similar to what a home or business would use on the ground.
Searching video using speech-to-text technologies is the latest in the high stakes video search market from Google, Blinkx, Truveo, Mefeedia, and EveryZing. The video advertising market is projected to grow from $410 million in 2006 to $4.3 billion by 2011. Google is using speech recognition technology on its YouTube website. Blinkx creates indexable transcripts of video and reads the text that appears on the screen. Truveo, owned by AOL, indexes Flash video and Javascript videos. Mefeedia relies on users favorites lists, or channels to suggest videos to other people subscribed to the channels. And EveryZing, like Blinkx, analyzes the audio and converts it into searchable text. EveryZing focuses on professionally produced content such as news casts.
There’s a debate about which is better: books in print or reading something online. What we read and how we read it has changed dramatically in the Internet age. You could say that reading anything (usually on the Internet) is better than reading nothing at all. But reading a real book can be a lasting aesthetic experience. How we read something, in print or online, is actually less important than what we read. There probably isn’t much difference in reading a great book on paper or on the Internet. And of course it’s probably better to ready a great book than the average article you encounter on the Internet. Perhaps the most important skill, no matter what you read or where you read it, is your ability to examine and understand the material you have read, no matter how great or trivial it is. We don’t automatically assume that writing in print is great, so don’t disrespect something you read just because it is on the Internet. Learning to assess the relevance of what we are reading, no matter what we are reading, is what is really important.
As a TMobile user that needs a new phone, I was interested to see that TMobile has invented a new version of the Sidekick Smartphone. This phone has email, Instant messaging capability, a slide out keyboard, camera, video capture, and blue tooth audio. I am a former very dissatisfied Blackberry owner from 2004 and I feel that the Blackberry was never a good phone. People complained constantly that they could not hear me when i was talking. While the Blackberry has dominates the business world, the Sidekick will probably dominate the skate parks where teens hang out. Teens are probably most interested in this type of phone because you can order your own custom shell for a cost of $15 each, or $20 for two. But I think I may like it too. Each Side Kick costs $150.
The wii effect is causing a lot of gamming companies to make their gamming systems to use motion sensory, because of Nintendo’s big hit with the wii. This new system is called the V.Smile V-Motion Active Learning System. The V.Smile incorporates motion educational gaming and fun for young children aged 4-8 years old. It costs $70 and is available at www.vtechkids.com. You can also buy a battery pack for $10. Each video game costs $25 and is compatible with old V.Smile video games.
Google is one of the most popular search engines (if not the most popular) available today, however Yahoo wants to change that through Build Your Own Search Service or BOSS. With BOSS Yahoo executives are hoping that in letting other people use their severs to create their own search engines more web searchers will turn away from Google. In a search through one of yahoo’s new associates, like me.deium, someone would be able to see links to YouTube videos, PC desktop backgrounds, and other interesting sites before the other typical sites that google would bring up. The creators believe that this is a more efficient way for users to access the information they actualy want. Building your own search service does not come cheap. It is estimated that it will cost 300 million to create your own BOSS.
Traffc means people clicking on your website. Higher traffic means more people see the product, service, or strengths of your organization. Without traffic, nothing else matters but to get high traffic you have to do everything else right. High traffic from organic search engine results pages depends on high rankings, because higher ranking websites get more traffic. High rankings depends on frequent indexing because frequently indexed websites rank higher. Understanding these connections is half of the battle.
The cheapest way to high ranking web pages is to practice all of the SEo techniques listed in this blog. Pay special attention to theming the content on the web pages so search engine spider-robots will correctly categorize and subsequently reward these pages with high rankings. Unfortunately, this takes time and the feedback loop is slow. Changes you make now, may or may not make a difference in a day, a week, a month, a year, or ever. It’s really had to know which changes affect which positions, and sometimes sucess can be fleeting, and you may undo the good work you have done. Free organic rankings are rewarded to websites that have many inbound links from high quality websites with related content, and where the content of the pages are uniique, organized content that is frequently updated. That’s a tall order but that’s what is required. If you follow this advice, free organic listings will eventually come your way.
There are other options for less patient people but they cost money. These options are: pay-per-click, paid placement, and paid position. Pay-per-click means that you pay everytime someone clicks on your search engine results page listing. Paid placement means that you pay for the placement of a listing on another website, typically a web directory. If the web page linking to you in a paid placement is a high quality website (with many inbound, ontopic links itself) then its paid link to your website will hold more weight and ultimately push up the rankings of your website. Paid position, which is less popular, means that you pay for a particular position, like #1, everytime someone searches for a particular phrase.
You can also pay to have a website indexed which affects the organic position of the website. This service is called “paid inclusion”. Paid inclusion means you are paying to be included in the index of the search engine but no particular position is promised. Since paid inclusion does not guarantee a position, the optimization of pages (especially theming) is still very important. Well optimized page will rank higher. Poorly optimized pages will rank lower.
The most popular paid inclusion service is from Yahoo. MSN recently discontinued their paid inclusion service but they will probably replace it with another. Google does not have a pad inclusion program, however, Yahoo and Google offer a way to recuest the indexing of specific pages. The Google service is called webmaster tools. There will be more on paid search options in the next post.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) contains many opportunities for keywords such as the title tag, heading tags, meta tags, text, css object names, ALT text, and javascript object names. It is also important to write clean and efficient code so search engines will find and index the text on your pages more quickly. The percentage of the web’s content that is indexed is in the single digits, less than 10%. Many websites are indexed daily or even hourly, while other websites are indexed monthly, or less. From an SEO perspective there are three major inter-related work areas in optimizing the HTML for a website: frequent indexing, higher rankings, and traffic. Frequent indexing means that search engine spiders-robots visit often to see if any of the content on a webpage has changed. Higher rankings result are usually the result of a well-written, well-organized, and well-linked website (from other websites). Good traffic is the result of ranking well on popular keywords which depends heavily on being optimized correctly for these keywords, and well indexed so the search engines are aware of the unique content your website has. The next three posts will address each of these areas in depth: frrequent indexing, higher rankings, and good traffic.