More wierd than Cuil – Does search have a new darling?

So now we have a new search engine to add to the list. Though let’s face it, it’s not really much of a list is it? Google always wins hands down. But cuil.com, the new kid on the search-engine block comes from a long pedigree of search engine excellence. Long in internet years that is.

Products from the Cuil stable have been purchased by Google in the past so they are certainly respected and this time they’re not up for sale. You’ll hear a lot about them this week so I’m not going to just regurgetate what everyone else on the web is saying, but their entry into the market on the basis of tracking less of your data is certainly intersting and will appeal to a lot of people. Their claim to have indexed more of the internet that Google will also play well, but in my opinion is worthless as I’m not really sure more is what we need of most things.

So how do they stack up in search accuracy?

Well, it’s difficult to say. They launched and they crashed. Well not quite, but the demand for mission critical task of “Cuiling” (am I the first??) your own name  etc is so high that they haven’t been able to cope completely. But if you are patient enough you will be able to – it’s so hard not to write google here as a verb – search Cuil’s index.

So of course I searched for blueclock and for some reason there is a totally irrelevant picture of someone next to my company entry. Why? Who is this person? The additional information like pictures and categories that they provide is great but now I have doubts about their results.

Also noticable is the fact that they haven’t localised their search yet. So terms that score highly on google.co.uk but less well on google.com don’t do ever so well on Cuil. Relevance to the location of the user is something that Google excels at and it’ll be interesting to see how Cuil respond.

Other than people now associating this stange photo of someone I’ve never seen in my life with me, some other interesting side-affects for unsuspecting 3rd parties are the inevitable. There will be instantaneous fame for any villages called Cuil in Scotland and Ireland (try cuil.co.uk) and the impending server overload for any poor sod that has a domain using a easily mis-typable combination of the letters in Cuil.

Oh dear, someone is about to find out why shared hsoting packages are so cheap…

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , cuil, google, seo, serps

How to add Vimeo videos to a WordPress.com blog

One limitation of a blog hosted on WordPress.com rather than an installation of WordPress via a web hosting company is that any code that you paste into the editor that contains JavaScript or embedded objects is usually sanitised for security reasons. That’s fair enough and the editor does allow video from YouTube, Google Video and Daily Motion to be easily added.

It’s not a documented feature, but by using a similar convention you can very very easily add Vimeo videos as well. Why would you want to? Well, it depends on the audience for your blog, but the content on Vimeo is original and very high quality. It’s free to set up an account and you can upload 500Mb of video per week.

So how do you add content from Vimeo to your WordPress.com blog? Easy. First of all you’ll need the to get video number from Vimeo site. That’ll be something like www.vimeo.com/123456. Take the number from the end of the URL, the 123456 part, and then type the following in your blog post, replacing 123456 with your own video number. You also need to remove the spaces that I have placed after the opening square bracket and before the closing square bracket.

[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]

That’s all there is to it. When you preview or publish the post, the Vimeo information will be embedded into your post and will be ready for your readers to watch.

And so now you know, here’s a quick example of just how good Vimeo looks.

If you want to know more about the differences between a self-hosted wordpress blog and one hosted at wordpress.com you can get more details in this article at webglossary.co.uk.

Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , media, surfing, video, vimeo, wordpress

WidgetBucks Now Available For UK, Western Europe by August

On Monday I wrote about using WidgetBucks and WOOThemes as a possible alternatives to Google’s AdSense referrals scheme when it shuts down in August. Today, WidgetBucks announced that they will at last be extending their pay per click scheme to the UK so widgets now showing UK pricing.

WidgetBucks In Europe

Example of A WidgetBucks Widget showing UK pricing

This is perfect timing as it gives them an opportunity pick up new publishers in Europe. Even better news is that the widgets will be also be available in much of the rest of Western Europe in two weeks time. So by August, WidgetBucks will generate pay per click revenue for site owners with traffic from Western Europe and North America.

This is a significant step forward as previously if a visitor to your site was from outside North America the widget was replaced with a traditional ad and you were paid based on the number of impressions. Now visitors from the UK and soon Western Europe (full list below) will see the much more lucrative widget and revenue from WidgetBucks should start to increase.

Just to be clear, how you are paid and which ads are displayed does not depend on where you are based, it depends on where each visitor to your web site comes from.

Breakdown Of Countries Applicable for WidgetBucks

Visits from the following countries currently trigger pay per click widgets:

• USA
• Canada
• United Kingdom

Visits from the following countries will trigger pay per click widgets from August (2008):

• Belgium
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Sweden

Visits from the following countries will trigger CPM ads and pricing:

• Australia
• Austria
• India
• Ireland
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• Puerto Rico
• Singapore
• South Africa
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Arab Emirates

If you have a site that you’d like to monitise then check out WidgetBucks here.

Filed under: Benelux, Online Advertising, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, europe, GBP, referrals, sterling, WidgetBucks, widgets

Alternatives to Replace Google AdSense Referrals Income

At the beginning of the month, Google announced that they would retire the referrals section of AdSense. For existing referral ad publishers, this means that any AdSense referral code will cease to generate income for them at the end of August.

It’s all part of Google’s restructuring after the merger with DoubleClick. Unlike previous changes to Google’s advertising plans, this hasn’t been met with a great deal of opposition from web publishers as it generated very little income for anyone.

But if you were using referrals ads to get your readers to sign up for things like Google software bundles or AdWords then you’ll soon have a bit of space freed up on your site and may be looking for alternative options to just adding another block of AdSense ads.

My Alternatives To AdSense Referrals

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different affiliate schemes out there and which one you choose will be dependent on the type of site that you run. I have a few monetised sites (oooh, don’t ya just hate that word) on the web and here are two advertising schemes that I use that have shown positive results so far.

The first is Widget Bucks. I’ve written about them in the past and if you are running a product based web site or technology focused site that has a lot of traffic from North America then this one is certainly worth a try. They produce very eye catching widgets that are simple to place on your web site and can be formatted to a whole range of sizes. The reason that I mention North American traffic is because their current payment model is pay per click for ads displayed to visitors in North American and per thousand impressions for visitors outside of the USA and Canada. [UPDATE, pay per click now extended to Europe]

Widget Bucks is starting to prove itself by making a small a daily income for me, but not not in the way I first expected. The bulk of my income from them has actually been created as trickle down referral income from ads placed on other people sites. When you display ads on your site, there is a small tag-line which promotes the service and anyone who signs up via this link then becomes one of your referred customers and you receive 5% of what they earn for 12 months. The 5% comes from Widget Bucks not from the person placing ads on their site so their income is not reduced.

You have two options for placing ads. You can either select a category of ads such as laptops, cameras, GPS accessories etc or just go down the contextual route and let Widget Bucks figure out what ads to place based upon your content.

WOOthemes WordPress Theme Club

The second suggestion is a new site called WOOthemes which is backed by some very well know designers and I’ve included it in this post because although it is very new, it has shown very good click through rates so far and it looks very promising.

WOO is run a WordPress theme club, offering access to a selection of really top notch WordPress themes for between $150 and $375 dollars depending on the length of your subscription. When you sign up to the club, you receive all of the current themes and they guarantee at least one new theme every month.

The themes come with good documentation and they are created by well know designers who have good reputations to maintain so the standard of the themes should remain consistently high.

Affiliates receive 20% of any new sign-ups, but the real strength of the scheme is in the opportunity to earn continuing fees from people that renew their subscriptions.

So if you have been using AdSense’s referral products there are plenty of good alternatives out there and you may as well start replacing your referrals codes before they are retired in a few weeks.

Finally, if you have been using AdSense referrals and the data is important to you then make sure you download the report information after you replace your ads as the referrals potion of AdSense reporting will no longer be available from October.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Reviews, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, referrals, themes, WidgetBucks, woo, wordpress

iContact – Free Fridays #16

iContact is more of a “one to watch” than a fully fledged application at the moment. It’s a desktop application available for Windows which can be used to access your GMail or Google Apps contacts database.

I say it’s not fully fledged as it lacks one very very important feature. It’s read only so you can’t edit your contacts yet. The developer does have this on his to do list and the ability to change and add contacts via iContact will be in the next release.

iContact Main screen

In the meantime though it’s still a worthwhile application, especially if you’ve just recently imported a load of contacts into GMail and things haven’t worked out quite as expected.

iContact Preferences Pane

The interface is very clean and the sensitivity of the search can be refined in the preferences. You can choose the sort order of the contacts and a handy feature is the option to display contacts that only have email information in a different colour, helping you manage duplicates.

Hopefully this will develop into a fully fledged application in the very near future with built in de-duplication and the useful record merge function found in Apple’s Address Book programme.

You can download a copy of iContact for free at www.dataload.com/icontact/

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management , contact management, gmail, gmail contacts, google apis, icontact

The iPhone will now be available on July 11

Make up your mind Mobistar.

But the good news is that it looks like the 3G iPhone will definitely be available in Belgium on Friday. It’s unbundled and at €525 it looks pretty costly, but there’s a good price comparison at this site.

Let’s see what price packages and incentives BASE and Proximus can come up with.

You can get the full details from Mobistar at:

EN phone3g.mobistar.be

NL iphone3g.mobistar.be

FR iphone3g.mobistar.be

Filed under: Apple, Benelux, Web Browsers , 3g, GPS, iphone