Internet Business Daily

Cloud Computing Basics
Google’s newest service it is offering is access to its “cloud.” Cloud is short for cloud computing, or distributed computing. Basically, how the cloud works, is by making lots of everyday home computers act like one giant supercomputer through the use of software, also called virtualization. This software, named MapReduce, is one of the main reasons why Google is so far ahead of its competitors. Instead of having to buy and maintain an expensive server that can support millions of users, cloud computing allows for lots of low cost machines to accomplish the same task. Whenever a machine breaks, it can be replaced without disturbing the cloud.

Cloud as a Service
Now that Google is offering its cloud as a service, everyone will be able to tap into the same machines that power such products as Gmail, Google Search, and Google Docs. There are both positives and negatives associated with this. Firstly, we will be giving Google even more information about ourselves and our websites. Like they need any more competitive data. Second, there will be limits on the amount of processing power each developer can use. To being, Google will offer 500mb and up to 5 million pageviews as part of its web app engine. Another negative is that there will most likely be little customization possibility.

On the positive side, developers will have the peace of mind to know their apps and websites are running on the most stable servers in the world. There will be virtually zero down time, and speed will be off the charts.

What Does This Mean?
Google is far from the first company to have this type of offering. Amazon already has a very similar and successful cloud service called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). From a business aspect however, this is still a very smart move by CEO Eric Schmidt. Google already has the “biggest” cloud on earth, and a transition from the desktop windows system to a fully online computer network is imminent. The money will be in which computer network all the information sits on. If I am Google, and I am hosting all of your information and applications, I can charge you to use it. Although Google says its purpose is to index, sort, and make easy to find all the information in the world, they want to be the gatekeepers and charge for access. Whether the charge is direct, or through the viewing of ads, Google still profits.

Just like Facebook, Myspace, and many other websites, YouTube has officially released a platform API. The new YouTube API allows for deep customization into websites. This strategic move takes one of Google’s most expensive acquisitions a step closer towards being the source for all Internet video. Here are some features of the API:

• Create a web front end to let people view videos about specific topics.
• Create a desktop application or plugin that plays videos in a customized environment.
• Add related, dynamic video content to your website or application.
• Customise the Flash player to fit the look and feel of your site, device or application.
• Add feeds of videos from each of YouTube’s 18 international domains.

I’m split between two features for my favorite. The fact that you can sign in and upload videos to YouTube from any site is amazing. This was a brilliant move on their part. The other cool feature is full customization of YouTube’s player. We no longer have to look at the ugly chrome control panel.

There are still many things I have wanted to see from YouTube, specifically its player. The player itself is missing many key features that various other sites have implemented with no where near the resources of a Google company. Some of these features include: in-video tagging, higher quality video, and hover-over controls. These problems are minor and I am excited to see the creative apps that people make with the YouTube API.

**UPDATE: (8/20/2007) – Here’s another linkback, thanks! Google Blog

(6/21/2007) – I received another review shortly after this so I figured I would just include the linkback in this post: Tax Rebate. Thanks for the review!

First Blog Review
I received my first blog review for a linkback. I started this program about 3 weeks ago and finally someone has noticed. I have received many linkbacks from sites listing all the sites that run programs like this, but unfortunately those are not my rules and will not receive a reciprocal link.

Free Link Back
Someone finally took advantage of this great program and easy way to get a free link. Since they are the first, I will dedicate this entire post to linking back to them so maybe other people will see how easy this really is. The review of my blog can be found at chemstudioweb.com, specifically at this location. I would like to thank chemstudioWEB for writing the review of my blog, it seems like he both enjoys and learns from my posts. He also listed some of my mini niche stores, which was not necessary but welcomed anyway…thanks again.

How to do a Blog Review for a Free Link Back
The rules are very simple and can be found at: Review My Blog for a Free Linkback. The basics are you have to write a review of my blog, and link to it at least once using anchor text from the following choices: Make Money Online, Learn Internet Business, Blogging for Money, and now SEO Tips. Use any one of those to link back to my site and you will receive a link back to your site. If the reviews keep coming in slow, ill give anyone who does it a dedicated post. Thanks again Chemstudioweb.

I’m just going to write this short post to tell everyone I just installed a new plugin called Popularity Contest, which can be downloaded at that link. It constantly monitors the popularity of each blog post (based on views I’m guessing) and ranks each one. This data can be found in the WordPress dashboard, and can be displayed in a sidebar widget as shown to the right. In addition, it shows the popularity of each post at the bottom of each article in percentage form. Thanks to Alexking.org for this one.

Instructions
1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload the plugin to your plugins directory on your server.
3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress plugins page.

Everything should be tracking now. If you want to display your top posts in a sidebar widget like I have, just create a PHP widget and include this code:

<li><h2>Most Popular Posts</h2>
   <ul>
   <?php akpc_most_popular(); ?>
   </ul>
</li>

This should display your top posts in a nicely made sidebar widget. Thanks again to the creator for this great plugin. The great thing about this feature is that you can show off your most popular posts, and therefore get more clicks per user when they see more articles they may want to read.

The future is here, and we can thank Microsoft for it. I know all the Apple fans will hate that statement (i’m on a 15″ Apple). It is true however, and Bill Gates is a very smart man. This is basically his goodbye to us from his dominance at Microsoft. Anyways to get to the point, the first thing I thought when I heard what Microsoft’s new “revolutionary” product dubbed Surface is, a very interesting theory popped in my head.

I blogged about what I believed to be the future of desktop GUI’s (Bumptop Desktop) in October of last year. This closely resembles the technology of Surface. On top of that this video was first released on Microsoft’s new video platform “Soapbox” (what the hell happened to that by the way?)

Did Microsoft possibly create this video to throw off the scent of their R&D? What ever happened to this company? That would be genius if true, will Apple have a similar revolutionary product on the way (besides iPhone)? Here is the video of the BumpTop Desktop:

Video: BumpTop� Prototype 3D Desktop

**UPDATE: I switched back to my old theme, the web2.0 theme did not match the topic of IBD…oh and I miss the picture of Santa Cruz.

As I am sure most frequent readers have noticed, I have installed a new WordPress theme last night. I wanted to go in a totally different direction with this look, and I think I accomplished it. I went very Web2.0′ish with this theme so I hope people like it and don’t think it is not business-like enough.

Changes to Come
I’m still doing more custom coding and design on it to fit all my needs, but so far I think it looks great. I am going to have a logo designed for the top left, and either a picture or an ad in the 468×60 spot at the top center. I also need to add in my Feedburner plugin and a few other little things.

Sweet Link-Lovin
On a separate note, a couple people have been helping me accomplish my goal of getting the #1 spot in Google for Matthew Berman. I thought since they were giving me link love, why not share the love back. StuntDubl, and SEOMumbai are among the first to help me get #1 SERPS for Matthew Berman, and I will list more as they come. Thanks so much!

I have been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to keep up with everything going on in the Internet industry. I wanted to share what I have been reading lately. As I mentioned in my last post, I started using Google Reader to feed all the sites I read to one useful page. You can see what I read here. These are the articles I have chosen specifically to share with everyone.

Google buys Feedburner for $100mil
In addition to that, I would like to list a few stories that are worth mentioning. First is the Feedburner story. Google has finalized a deal to purchase Feedburner (which I use as my RSS feeder on this website) for $100million. This was a very smart move for Google for a few reasons. They already dominate the text ad market, and with the purchase of DoubleClick they will dominate the display ad market. RSS feeds are another outlet for advertisers, and Feedburner is the number one overall feed site.

.cm Domain Name Scandal
Another big story to break was the .cm domain name scandal. Basically what a domainer (wiki that term if you don’t know what it is) figured out is that the .cm domain names were just one mistype away from the .com money makers. The .cm domains belong to Cameroon, a country in Africa. Kevin Ham worked out a deal with the Cameroon government to send any traffic that went to a .cm domain that had not been registered to agoga.com, his website. This website would serve ads from Yahoo! and he made large amounts of money. He never actually registered any of the domain names, so he was free of any copyright issues. Smart man I must say.

These are the big stories I have been reading lately. Stay tuned for more noteworthy news.

News today came of Microsoft offering Yahoo! Inc. $50 billion for the purchase. This would mean that Microsoft basically owns Yahoo. This move shows how scared Microsoft really is of Google. Microsoft has a fraction of the online advertising revenue that Google does, and they want some of that action.

Google has also been making a move into the online application market. They are setting up to be direct rivals of software like Microsoft Office, and the many other desktop applications that Microsoft controls. Microsoft is definitely feeling the pressure of Google, which is good because MS has had a strangle hold on software for about 15 years now. Google has already been moving into the application market with online software such as Google documents.

Google’s baby is still adsense/adwords. When Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was asked to describe Google in a few words, he didn’t say search engine first. The very first thing he said was advertising giant. Something like 80% of Google’s revenue comes from adsense and adwords, and allows them to offer all of the free services that they do today. Microsoft has a fraction of this revenue with their version of adwords, Microsoft Adcenter.

This potential merger is history in the making. Even if the merger went through, Yahoosoft (hehe) is probably still not even as powerful as Google. I do not like one company to have all the power, so I am going to sit back and enjoy the show as Microsoft and Yahoo try to compete with the new giant of IT.

Google has finally fully updated their PageRank for all sites. Internetbusinessdaily.net has moved up 1 position to PR4! Juicefeed.com finally received a PageRank and surprisingly has jumped to PR4 after only being online for about 2 months.

A bunch of my mini-niche sites also got PR3, which is good. They include: Cheap Dishwasher, In Stock Wii, and DSC Cybershot.

A better PR (PageRank) will give my sites more traffic, better leverage on link exchanges, and better search results. Check out your site’s new PR, but be sure to check the difference between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com! You can goto Google’s webmaster tools to set the preferred domain to make them have the same PR.

What Is PageRank?
I was just looking through all the stories I have been digging lately and noticed that my profile page has a PageRank! What does that mean exactly you ask? Well PageRank (PR) is the ranking system Google uses to determine how “important” a web page is. Every page that Google spiders get a PR, whether it is 0/10 (most pages) or 8/10 like Digg’s homepage. The higher the PR, basically the more traffic Google sends you.

Since I’ve been a digg user for quite some time, my profile page as been assigned a PR4. Granted this isn’t great, but it’s something. I can absolutely use this to my advantage.

How Can I Use This?
Since I control every single link that appears on my profile page, I can submit my own stories and they will all appear on my page. Without going too much into how Google ranks pages by linking, having my links on my PR4 profile page looks good in the eyes of Google. All I need to do now is create links to my article pages with the keywords I want. Even if the stories don’t hit homepage, at least they are on a PR4 page.

Downside?
There are a few downsides I see. First of all, you need to leave a link up long enough so that Google can come around and spider it. This means that if you digg a bunch of other people’s stories, your links will disappear quickly. Another possible problem is that Digg assigns a no-follow tag to the links and Google won’t count them. As far as I can see, they do not do this currently.

So without being too spammy, which is pretty much an oxymoron using this method, try it out!