March 20th, 2007 § § permalink
It seems like Google considers the refferals a relative success and they plan to go beyond their products and add new advertisers:
Many of you already use referrals to direct users to your favorite Google products. Now, with our new referrals beta, you can select products and services from our base of AdWords advertisers. This is good news for those of you who have wanted to use referrals in the past, but couldn’t find a product to match your site’s content. With the referrals beta, you can search for products that match up directly with your site’s content. And you can customize your referral units to match the look and feel of your site, making it easier than ever to find a referral ad that fits in seamlessly with your site’s design and content. (source)
If you are interested you can apply to be a beta tester for this program
March 6th, 2007 § § permalink
A new option for sellers to expose their products for free: Live Product Upload from Microsoft; From product description:
What it is
The Live Product Upload, a free service for merchants interested in making their product catalog available in Live Product Search. This easy-to-use gateway is designed to enable online retailers to:
• Showcase products on Live Product Search
• Upload accurate and up-to-date product data directly into the Live Search index
What it does for you
Here is a quick glance of functionality accessible through this service
Catalog Management
Upload you product catalog in any of the formats support, i.e. text or XML through either HTTP upload or FTP. Products can include images, description, price, and links to web addresses on your site. You can upload any number of catalogs with no specific limits. Once your catalog is successfully published and has passed the validation steps it will be searchable through Live Product Search.
Easy Signup
You will need a Live ID (formerly Passport) to login and signup. Fill out a simple application that describes your business and optionally fill out more business details.
Reporting
Keep up to date on the status of your catalogs and keep track of your products on Live Product Search.
Incoming search terms:
January 7th, 2006 § § permalink
Spotted via Guillaume and Search Engine Watch the new Yahoo! product line: Yahoo! Go
The product line continues to target the desktop (after the good start made with the aquisition of Konfabulator – now Yahoo! Widget Engine) but also goes to new areas like TV and mobile.
What Guillaume missed from the screenshot is that beside a Vista like sidebar (or Google Sidebar), Yahoo! Go Desktop features a nice browser window with Yahoo shortcuts. This might be the work of the XUL hackers wanted on the Jeremy Zawodny blog last year (It has tabs and I bet a one month payment that is not IE based).
The time I am writing this post the apps are not available for download but Search Engine Watch says:
The suite will be formally announced by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel at CES keynote today
Additional Resources:
December 18th, 2005 § § permalink
Microsoft Office 12 Beta mailing list just announced a list of blogs written by Microsoft Program Managers:
Why this release is so cool? Here is what Paul Thurrott has to say on it:
Making a bold move–rather than “painting the pig” as they had with previous versions–Microsoft elected to dramatically change the Office user interface for the first time ever. It seems the menu and toolbar-based interface had become obsolete somewhere along the way.
Don’t forget to check the screenshots galleries also.
Update:
To make it easier for you tro subscribe to the blogs above I have created an OPML file conatiuning them. Use this link or point your aggregator to http://razvan-antonescu.info/office.xml
November 30th, 2005 § § permalink
Today, Mozilla.org launched a new generation of theor popular browser Firefox.
Together with this came a new GUI for the website, and a pack of new extensions that use the new renedering features of the browser.
From the feature list:
- Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
- Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
- Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
- Improvements to popup blocking.
- Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
- Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
- Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
- Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
- Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
- Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
- New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
- Many security enhancements.
Incoming search terms:
