WP Robot helps you build up your content

If you’ve spent too many sleepless nights trying to build up enticing content intended for your site’s visitors, you know how much of a toll it can take on “the rest of your offline life”.

Since none of us, in their right mind, that is, wants to waste their life away publishing content which might be found elsewhere, for free, a WordPress plug-in like WP Robot might save you so much time, it might even end up saving both your bank account and your family (since you’ll spend way more time, with those you love).

There’s no way spending hours in front of your computer will ever make sense so let WP Robot get your RSS content from leading sources like eBay, Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Oodle and Twitter or from lesser known sources which you’re quietly leveraging into a value added archive which will grow more enticing, over time, especially when the original sources stop carrying the content, in which case, you need to “pull” the full articles and not just the exerpts.

Either way, WP Robot gets your content on auto-pilot.

Even when you sleep, WP Robot grows your article base to make your web destination as useful and interesting as possible. All that without requiring your presence. Ah! Blissfully perfect!

Of course, keeping an eye on what’s being posted with WP Robot is a must because you don’t want the content to display badly. Furthermore, you absolutely want to correct some chunks of content in what’s being reposted to maintain quality, diversity and rather importantly, uniqueness.

If you still have a few hours to kill, you may even decide to write up a few articles, on your own. Since you have so much automated content being published, your manual articles will help distinguish your web site from all the other who don’t have these “unique” wise words!

Is WP Robot for you?

The real question is: how can it not be? Seriously, posting content is such hard work, you deserve a “WP Robot break”, once in a while. How about now? Now would be a good time for you to bank on the combined SEO-power of WordPress and that of WP Robot’s ability to pull in RSS content from some twenty (20) major sources.

At around 200$ for the entire plug-in (with the modules), you’re bound to quickly recoup your investment. Just open up a niche site and see your advertising revenues soar. You may even advertise your own company, in these otherwise newly generated free content destinations.

With WP Robot, you buy peace of mind with a plug-in which delivers results. This is impressive given the plug-in connects with several platforms which don’t necessarily allow extensive RSS grabbing (for re-publishing purposes).

So there you have it: WP Robot is a web editor’s best “discreet” helper to get your newly acquired content published, on a regular basis.

What’s so special about Microsoft’s Bing search engine?

Microsoft tried, with overall mild resolve, to compete with Google and Yahoo! in the search engine arena. Its Live Search service, by all means, didn’t deliver the kind of user experience that generated repeat uses. So they killed that service.

That’s right, the Live Search service is gone!

How’s that for big news?

But there’s even bigger news. The old “live.com” service is officially set to be replaced tomorrow by a new search service called “bing.com“. Another 4-letter .com which is easy to remember and cool to bookmark. That’s pretty much as far as the similarities go, however.

The Bing.com search engine is built, from the gound up, so to speak, to be completely different than Live.com in the sense that it’s more mature and precise. A lot of testing went on using the Live dataset so expect to find in Bing what was available through its [now retired] predecesor.

Steve Ballmer said this about its new web destination: “Bing [will] enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.” at last week’s All Things Digital conference, in Carlsbad, CA.

And gosh, is Ballmer ever fired up about Bing!

According to Microsoft, in addition to offering search by category, Bing will offer…

• more relevant search results;
• snapshots of search results’ Web pages;
• color-coded search results; and
• search tools on the left side of the page.

This new search engine is also set up to organize query results in relevant groups rather than as a series of links. Google might want to pick up on this! So, for instance, a search for “travel to Seattle” may return Seattle destinations like hotels, restaurants and museums as almost a guidebook page. The same search on Live generated straight individual links that users had to go through one by one.

Microsoft has looked for ways to improve its search advertising revenue for years and maybe Bing will give them “more bang for their money”. It’s hard to imagine that advertisers will be leaving Google and Yahoo! for Bing anytime soon but overtime, maybe some people will get curious and want to see if Microsoft go its new search service right, this time around.

Everyone “in the know” regarding the search engine wars was aware that Microsoft’s search market share had been slipping for more than two years. It struggled to make its online advertising unit profitable but that wasn’t going too well. According to comScore, Microsoft maintains a meager 8.2% share of the market for core searches compared with 64.2% for Google and 20.4% for Yahoo!.

After trying a few searches in Bing’s “preview” search service for “new technology“, “local pizza“, “alternative cancer treatments“, “free education” and “open source scripts” yielded impressively relevant results which actually made sense. The pay-per-click results were generally related but not always useful. Maybe when Microsoft convinces more advertisers to sign-up, those results will become more interesting.

You may also appreciate the “quick information” that’s displayed at the right of the hyperlinks [and descriptions] to give you a sort of preview of what you’ll find, at any particular web site. Here again, Google and Yahoo! should send a few spies to check it out.

We’ll need at least a few months to see if Bing has what the users are looking for but until then, it’ll be interesting to see what the competition does to make sure they stay on top.

Tags: bing, about bing, bing.com, bing search, bing search engine, microsoft bing, steve ballmer, ballmer about bing, allthingsd, all things digital, live, live.com, search engine war, google, yahoo!, competition, users, visitors, internet, web, online

A new look for the Twitter interface

For many people, Twitter has grown to become a sort of vital link between them and a fast-moving world.

While Twitter isn’t everyone’s proverbial cup of tea, with its onslaught of “just happening” posts, millions of users seem to be doing just fine, with it. These users will be happy to learn that the nice people at Twitter have released a new, lighter, quicker, prettier and simplified version of their web site.

The most significant changes, however appear to be in the sidebar. The tabs from above the sideline have been moved to the right side. In short, if you haven’t been by there in a while, now might be a good time to check the place out.

For those who are politically inclined…

The US election fever doesn’t go unnoticed, on Twitter. Far from that, actually, since the posts just keep pouring in on Twitter’s specially deisgned 2008 Election page where you can view a live stream of “what’s hot now”, from the entire twittersphere.

It’s hard to imagine anyone would change their vote based on something they’d have learned from Twitter’s live election feed but still, some posts are funnier than others.

Aside from politics, it also seems that Twitter is used by business types who need to coordinate some of their actions between each other but it’s still an “edge” thing and hasn’t translated into a significant phenomenon, yet.

For those who still don’t quite grasp how this free service can make their life better, here’s Twitter’s take on itself: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” — so there you have it, Twitter is about (relatively) effortlessly staying in everybody else’s loop.

Technology gurus have coined Twitter’s service to be a micro-blogging platform where brief text updates, usually comprising less than 140 characters, are posted in the same way a blog post would… only a lot shorter.

Reading other people’s “twittered life” can be amusing, for a while. After that (short) while, it can quickly get boring, pointless and futile. Seriously, it gets there fast. Nevertheless, “twittering friend circles” seem to be blissfully happy with this free micro-blogging service which, for these users, currently feels both trendy and (of all things) useful.

Maybe long blog posts, like this one, are becoming “too long” in a world which has become somewhat overloaded with content featuring varying levels of “value”. Perhaps micro-blogging, Twitter-style, conveys enough value (for enough people) to turn into a genuine “solution” for insanely busy, yet wired, people.

The future of Twitter (and similar services) will be decided by Netizens like you because where you click is, ultimately, where the online world may be heading.

Tags: twitter, twitter’s new interface, new looks for twitter, new templates, simpler themes, election fever, live feeds, micro-blogging, microblogging, microblogs, microbloggers, short blog posts, instant distribution, information overload, valuable content, online trends, netizens, web, choices

The Oracle and BEA middleware

Have you been following the Oracle and BEA saga, lately?

It seems many concerned customers are still unsure about what the recent acquisition of BEA by Oracle means to them but until the air is cleared out regarding this major transaction, perhaps a good way to make sense of it all is to take a look at the merged middleware offerings.

For good measure, we’ll also take a peak at service-oriented architecture and developer tools but the bulk of the offerings remain confortably nested in middleware so here’s a look at what you can expect.

Middleware

• Application server
  • Oracle JRockit - The industry’s highest performing Java Virtual Machine now built into Oracle Fusion Middleware;
  • Oracle JRockit Real Time - Deterministic-GC and Latency Analysis Tools help monitor and tune applications;
  • Oracle JRockit Mission Control - Tools to monitor, manage, profile and eliminate memory leaks in Java application;
  • Oracle WebLogic Server - Fully-featured, standards-based application server delivering compliance with open standards, multi-tiered architecture and support for component-based development;
  • Oracle WebLogic Application Grid - An extreme scale-out grid platform.
• Identity Management
  • Oracle Entitlements Server - Externalizes and centralizes administration of enterprise entitlements, simplifies authorization policies and enforces security decisions;
• Transaction Processing
  • Oracle Tuxedo - Platform for building large-scale distributed enterprise applications that enable businesses to reduce development and deployment, while preserving existing assets;
• User Interaction
  • Oracle WebCenter - Open, comprehensive and standards-compliant user interaction product suite providing web integration and interface services for deploying a broad range of solutions;
  • Oracle WebCenter Interaction - Formerly called BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, it’s an integrated, comprehensive collection of components used to create enterprise portals, collaborative communities as well as composite and social applications;
  • Oracle WebCenter Services - Integrated set of products designed for creating dynamic user work environments that take advantage of SOA while enabling business users to bring complete context to their daily work tasks;
  • Oracle WebLogic Portal - Formerly BEA WebLogic Portal, it’s a portal framework for creating highly interactive composite applications in a SOA environment with an integrated set of design-time tools for Java developers.

Service-Oriented Architecture

• Oracle SOA Suite - Suite of products that help build, deploy and manage deployments ranging from department-level to enterprise-wide systems.
• Oracle Service Bus - Accelerates configuration and deployment while simplifying management of shared services across the SOA.
• Oracle BPM - Modeling, implementation, execution and monitoring of end-to-end business processes.

Developer Tools

• Oracle Workshop - Extends Eclipse and Web Tools Platform with tools for Java, Java EE, Object Relational Mapping, Spring and Web Applications.

Quite a line of products, to say the least!

As you can see, Oracle has been busy integrating the BEA products to provide a unified line. It will take some time to getting use to but over time, customers using these technologies will benefit from enhanced data management technologies.

To make sense of this extensive line of products, Oracle provides documentation, sample code, technical whitepapers, demos and viewlets, internet seminars as well as discussion forums directly relating to Oracle products, on its own web site so you can also review them, if necessary.

This world-class combination of data management products is a fine choice for the Fortune 500 but it could also help you mid-sized or smaller company, just the same.

Tags: oracle, oracle middleware, oracle fusion, oracle databases, oracle development, oracle tools, oracle products, oracle technology, oracle network, soa, developer tools, internet, web, weblogic, portal, web server, webcenter, oracle tuxedo, oracle jrockit, java development, bea, bea aqualogic, jvm, java virtual machine

SugarCRM helps your customers

If you’re looking to make your customers happy by always calling them at the right moment, by planning ahead of their needs and by accompanying them in their projects, then using the SugarCRM Suite should make perfect sense to you.

Either hosted by Sugar or downloadable as an Open Source PHP / MySQL script, many experts consider that this Cupertino-based company is offering the next generation of CRM, today. For anybody managing customers, that’s enough to write home about.

In a nutshell, SugarCRM is rethinking how technology can help companies manage customer relationships.

More specifically, Sugar delivers a feature-rich set of business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales performance, improve customer satisfaction and provide executive insight into business performance. This already sounds good but two new much anticipated modules are available and they’re bound to further help manage your customers.

First, the Knowledgebase helps customer support and engineering teams better manage and share structured and unstructured information. Knowledgebase allows users to create frequently asked questions (FAQs), manage files and search (and rate) content – all in one easy-to-use interface.

Secondly, the Customer Self-Service Portal allows companies to provide self-service capabilities to customers and prospects for key marketing, sales and support activities. Customers can log cases, upload relevant information and track cases to resolution without ever having to pick up a phone.

The SugarCRM Suite delights customers of all sizes across a broad range of industries. If you’re already one of them, now would be a good time to take a good look at how these new offerings can integrate with your business objectives, customerwise.

Tags: sugarcrm, crm, customer relationships, customer management, knowledgebase, self-service portal

Revenue Pilot’s new features

According to Salomon Smith Barney, the Internet search and related services has been estimated to be around $2.6 billion back in 2004 with an annual growth rate of over 20% through 2008.

We’re almost halfway through 2007 and according to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray‚Äôs Senior Analyst, Safa Rashtchy, the paid search market has already reached nearly $7 billion in worldwide revenues, growing at a compounded annual rate of 35 percent.

As you can see, as more online advertisers are turning to performance-based online advertising solutions to fulfill their cyber-marketing objectives, pay-per-click search is quickly growing as -the- marketing solution of choice.

Revenue Pilot, based in Brooklyn, NY has earned itself a solid reputation over time, namely because of their respectable array of serious advertisers and on-time payouts to the publishers.

To make their pay-per-click ads even more convenient to display, for the publishers, Revenue Pilot has recently added new linking methods, such as:

• JavaScript Array
• TextFeed
• Dynamic Popouts
• Popouts
• Dynamic Layer Ads
• Floating Ads
• Interstitials
• Error Pages

Getting the codes to technically display Revenue Pilot’s ads through these methods (and others) is really easy but if you’re looking to seamlessly blend RP’s ads in your pages, the most efficient way to do it is through the “XML feeds” since they allow for virtually limitless visual customization.

Some keywords appear to be more lucrative than others. For instance, the “casino“-related paid search results seem to deliver the highest payout, for the publisher. Other competitive keywords inlude “mortgages“, “credit“, “finance“, “gaming“, “insurance“, “security” and “travel“.

In fact, if you deal in any industry where those keywords are applicable, it might be a good thing to sign-up for your very own publisher account where you get a healthy 60% from every “valid” click.

From my experience, dealing with the Business Development people at RP has been a very positive experience and for anyone with the need to monetize their good ideas, it may just be what the “doctor” ordered ; )

Tags: revenue pilot, pay-per-click, online advertising, tech, web

WhyPark adds value

You’ve already seen the semi-generic domain name landing pages showing a relatively standard mix of category links leading to a second page featuring the related pay-per-click links.

Guess what? Some web visitors are getting smarter and they close the page when they see these pages. Why? Because they fail to see any value in them. Of course, to be fair, there is value because the sponsored links usually lead to excellent content but for your average visitor, that may not cut it.

Aware of this “value hunting” trend gaining ground, a company called WhyPark is going one step further by adding relevant -and valuable- content articles to keep the landing visitor interested. Having a “lander” feature standard Google AdSense ads alongside interesting articles can help build some level of “brand loyalty”, something which “traditional” landing pages hardly can.

The revenue model for WhyPark is different because they charge about 100$ to store up to 100 domain names and then leave 100% of the advertising revenue to the publisher. Furthermore, every new publisher referred (and signed-up) lands a sizeable commission in the domain owner’s pockets. This alone should quickly cover the initial registration fee!

Domain name owners enjoy a high level of control over the keywords, advertising codes, the meta description and even the statistics tracker code which means a publisher could choose to use Google Analytics to follow the visitor trend for a given domain.

Newbies will be happy to hear there is no HTML, FTP or programming knowledge required to use WhyPark‘s service. Furthermore, there’s nothing to download or install. The fresh articles, related to your domains, are supplied at no extra charge.

Their newest feature might also be their most popular. It’s now possible for publishers to create their own custom layout using simple placeholders to give each of their landing pages a unique look. Alternatively, publishers are still free to use the pre-built stock templates.

Tags: whypark, landing pages, domain parking, domain names, web

How much to ask for your names

Many domain name owners, especially those that have been around for the last decade or so, regularly receive offers for their best names, wether they’re advertised for sale or not.

In most cases, a short message comes in the domain owner’s e-mailbox asking if the domain is for sale and if so, how much is asked for it. The first answer is usually along the lines of “No, this domain isn’t for sale but just out of curiosity, how much are you willing to offer to get it?” and the prospective buyer usually plays it safe but asking for the domain owner to actually name a price.

This kind of situation is somewhat frustrating because if the right price came to be offered, many domain owners could decide to sell even their best names but since negotiations are so tough, using e-mail messages, more often than not, nothing happens and whatever was discussed is quickly forgotten.

Experienced domain name owners know very well that serious buyers usually identify themselves clearly and this is mainly to make sure they won’t be sued, after they purchase a domain, for misrepresenting themselves. Imagine if your competitor anonymously came in and offered you money for one of your valuable domain names and you let it go only to find out, later on, that you’ve been conned. This would be enough to sue your competitor for misrepresentation so the serious buyers, even if they happen to be your competitor, will be smart enough to identify themselves.

In the event you’re comfortable with the other party you’re negotiating with, it’s probably smarter to discuss money matters over the phone, unless you’re really uncomfortable doing things this way. The obvious “double advantage” is that you can quickly decipher all the non-verbal information that’s nowhere to be found in e-mail messages -and- you can openly negotiate at the speed of speech. Numbers can fly a lot faster, this way. Of course, before agreeing to anything, you always say that you’ll think it over and call back to confirm.

Now, let’s think about that “perfect selling price” for your valuable domain name. You could rent it or install an ad for the potential buyer on it but in most cases, it’s a buyer and seller context so we’ll explore this common scenario.

Asking a million dollars for a domain name can be fine, in certain cases, if you consider the following:

• The value of the domain name renewals, since it was purchased – if it’s 10$ per year times 10 years, well, that’s 100$ right there;
• The domain-related value of whatever was made available through the domain name – for instance, if you operated a 500k$ a year toy store, you may value your name at a percentage of that amount, maybe even 100%;
• The vanity value of the domain name – keep in mind that anything that’s bound to be considered popular is a candidate for a vanity value premium, which can add up pretty quickly;
• The technical value of the domain name – if it’s short, generic (found in the dictionary), commonly used, widely known or easy to type, your domain name can be considered technically superior to other and may therefore carry a higher price tag;
• The multiples potential uses for the domain name – it’s amazing how some domains can be used in relation to a variety of themes so if it’s the case for your domain, you need to factor that into the price;
• The online popularity of the domain name – refers to all the places that link to the domain name and that have, through their own system, ranked it favorably. This needs to be considered in the selling price.

Over and above that, you can add as much “profit money” as you want, when selling your name and frankly, as long as the buyer is ready to pay, you can freely upgrade your pricing to fit his lofty means.

Once the conditions satisfy both parties comes the payment part. Escrow services usually work well for large amounts of money but they can be quite costly. If the buyer seems respectable, you can always go with a direct bank deposit followed by a transfer of your domain name as soon as the money has been secured. You can throw in a friendly lawyer’s letter explaining this, for good measure. Smaller transactions can be orchestrated through a payment processor like PayPal.

Serious buyers usually ask to be kept in the loop if you’re not interested in selling quickly. It’s always nice to know one of your names holds that much value for them.

Last but not least, respect your gut feeling. If you feel selling a given name, even for a hefty price, might turn out to be a bad idea, especially if it’s expected to rise in value in the coming years, perhaps you should play it safe and listen more closely to your inner-voice. Inversely, if you feel good about a deal, go for it!

Tags: domain names, selling domains, domain prices, price for domain names, web

List of generic TLDs

There’s a lot of business happening in the .com namespace and it’s only natural since this particular domain name suffix is the most popular, on Earth.

The .com domain name suffix is one in a short list of generic top-level domains which are intended for particular classes of organizations. These gTLDs are three (3) or more letters long and are named to identify the type of organizations they represent.

The IANA confirms that the following gTLDs currently exist:

• .aero – for the air transport industry;
• .biz – for business use;
• .cat – for Catalan language and culture;
• .com – for commercial organizations but unrestricted;
• .coop – for cooperatives;
• .edu – for post-secondary educational establishments;
• .gov – for governments and their agencies in the United States;
• .info – for informational sites but unrestricted;
• .int – for international organizations established by treaty;
• .jobs – for employment-related sites;
• .mil – for the US military;
• .mobi – for sites catering to mobile devices;
• .museum – for museums;
• .name – for families and individuals;
• .net – originally for network infrastructures but now unrestricted;
• .org – originally for organizations not clearly falling within the other gTLDs but now unrestricted;
• .pro – for certain professions;
• .tel – for services involving connections between the telephone network and the Internet (added March 2nd, 2007);
• .travel – for travel agents, airlines, hoteliers, tourism bureaus, etc.

The .arpa suffix is sometimes considered to be a gTLD, it depends on who you ask.

The following gTLDs are in the process of being approved and may be added to the root nameservers in the near future:

• .asia – for the Asian community;
• .post – for postal services;
• .geo – for geographically related sites.

As you can see, .com is just one of the domain names, albeit a dominant one, that you can promote your organization with. Major companies nowadays own almost every “dot” for their names because so many people tend to naturally type them in.

Experts argue that adding too many domain name suffixes in this coveted gTLD list will dilute the tremendous power of .com and balkanize organizations switching to .museum, for instance.

To this day, however, most organizations that own and operate a lesser known gTLD domain name usually have their own .com, mainly as a precautionary meaure because that’s what visitors tend to use the most.

Tags: gtld, generic domains, domain names, web, .com, dot com

Easily translate your web content

If you already operate a web site displaying English content, maybe it’s time to consider translating it to expand your potential readership.

Translation of your English content to other popular languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, German, French, Russian and several more, makes your collection of wise words a lot more accessible to visitors who may understand English -but- will usually prefer their own native language.

You’re free to translate every single one of your pages manually but that could prove to be unbearably time consuming. Instead, you can use largely automated solutions like the Wesbsites Translator. Currently translating from English to twelve (12) popular languages, this PHP-based script takes the sweat out of internationalizing your textual content.

Such an awesome translation script can help muster even more Google AdSense revenue from advertisers in other languages which were, until you translated your content, not interested in being featured in your “English-only” web pages.

Your visitors will surely appreciate the convenience of reading your content in their own language and even if it’s not a high-level professionally executed human translation, it’s still very, very good. Talking about value, this is probably the lowest price ever for such a useful automated translation script.

Those who travel a lot already know that English is a fine language to master, on the road, although in a world where the internet knows no boundaries, perhaps it’s time that your web content became available to many more potential readers, thanks to the Websites Translator.

Tags: websites translator, translation, languages, english, php script, web