Kieran

I am a big fan of attending conferences and events that offer some value beyond networking - meaning the agenda, keynote and speakers offer something different, yet are highly informative. - Kieran

Youtube’s traffic growth over the years can be attributed to three main factors: 1) the ease of creating and uploading user generated content, 2) the appeal of watching UGC and 3) allowing visitors to embed video into their website. The ability to easily snag code and post the video content on websites, blogs, and social portals exposed the Youtube brand to a far greater audience then those that would have come directly to Youtube.com - in fact almost 44% of YouTube users are watching embedded videos. - Kieran

Every month the Oxyweb Blog puts out a “world map of social networks around the world”. The map is a visual representation of the most popular social networking services on a country by country basis - rankings are based on Alexa data. - Kieran

Google has been very busy the past week or so updating their Webmaster Tools functionality, the most significant addition being their new crawl errors feature - which by itself is a godsend. This morning Google added yet another feature aimed at helping webmasters make their websites safer. - Kieran

Last night MySpace officially launched their new advertising platform, myAds, which has been in the works for at least a year. MyAds is a self service, targeted ad platform, like the similar product offered by Facebook. - Kieran

TechCrunch just posted leaked screenshots of Brightcove's latest web-based video distribution platform - called Brightcove 3. The new platform will give video publishers more options and a better, more intuitive user-experience. - Kieran

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of WordPress as a CMS and especially as a blog platform. WordPress offers the best flexibility, user-interface and stability of any platform out there. On top of that, the real value of using WordPress are the enormous amounts of plugins available to help you manage, promote and do just about anything else with your blog. - Kieran

Earlier this year Yahoo bought web analytic service provider IndexTools, yesterday Yahoo announced IndexTools is now Yahoo Web Analytics and is being released into limited Beta. The new service will be deployed initially to Yahoo! Small Business customers and a select group of advertisers. - Kieran

Search Engine Land confirms what was mention in a Wall Street article back on October 1st - Google will soon offer RSS feeds for web search results. - Kieran

Everyone knows that online casual gaming is a huge and growing market - comScore numbers show 25%+ of people who use the internet play games online. Google just announced that they will be enabling online game developers and publishers to monetize their creations in a new way with AdSense for Games. - Kieran

Facebook went “live” today with Live Web Search functionality within their site search box. The integration was Facebook Searchpart of Microsoft’s $250 million investment in Facebook last year and has been long in coming. - Kieran

The overarching reason why companies and individuals create an online presence is to drive traffic to their little piece of the World Wide Web. The end goal — whether to sell something, share information, connect, etc. – might be different, but everyone is after the same thing: people coming to their website. Of course, driving the kind of traffic you are looking for to your website is no easy task and there is no simple solution. Even if you have a nice budget to spend on display ads, PPC, etc., that is not a sustainable model for web success. - Kieran

Ask.com, a distant 4th in the search engine race, launched some anticipated changes to their core search engine. The "new" Ask.com focuses not just on web results but also "structured" data within various categories. - Kieran

TechCunch is saying that that the off-again / on-again merger talks between Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL are on-again and the deal could go through as early as this month. The deal has been talked about for the better part of this year and it makes as much sense as ever for both struggling companies. Time Warner has been dieing to get rid of AOL since the 2001 deal completely bombed. - Kieran

David Provost, noted entrepreneur and expert on the Semantic Web (Web 3.0), recently published a report titled “On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry“. The report profiles 17 industry participants and analysis that focuses on: - Kieran

So a couple months ago I wrote a blog post about how Yahoo’s Domain Service is a Rip Off. Without going into too much detail the bottom line is that I had about 150 domains I have yet to move from Yahoo Domains to my other, cheaper and better, domain hosting companies. Well, back in July Yahoo made the announcement that they are now going to charge $34.95 for renewing domains - an outlandish sum considering every other domain service charges far less. - Kieran

The biggest issues most video uploaders have with YouTube has been their file-size limitations, lack of multiple upload functionality and restrictions on inputting metadata during the upload process. Well, those issues will soon be a thing of the past…today the YouTube team has announced the release of their new video upload interface into public beta - the new video file uploader had been in private beta for a few months. - Kieran

Google took the offensive today in defending its partnership with Yahoo by launching a “Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement” website. YahooGoogleFacts.com (nice domain) sole purpose is to squash any fears about anti-competitiveness / ad monopolization the partnership would create through putting all of the details on the table. - Kieran

To mark their 10th anniversary, and trying to do more good and less evil, Google has announced a new “social good” initiative titled “Project 10^100″ or 10 to the 100th power. Project 10^100 is about reaching out to the community to come up with ideas that will change the world in a positive manner. - Kieran

Not so long ago the Google let the world know of an upcoming AdWords Quality Score adjustment / improvement. Well, today the announcements came out that those changes are going to go live over the next couple days. This change will impact ALL AdWords accounts, so if you do anything in Paid Search you should take notice. - Kieran

Looks like printed newspapers are not going away…they are just going be searchable on Google.com. The search giant is partnering with various print / media companies from across North America to digitize millions of archived newspapers and making them all searchable. Google has allowed visitors to search a limited amount of old newspapers since 2006 through their partnerships with the New York Times and Washington Post existing digital archives. However this new initiative, which was announced today, will greatly expand the amount of content in their archives. - Kieran

[wpcf] - Kieran

Yahoo announced a couple days ago that they are working with Intel on a new initiative, called Yahoo Connected TV, that aims to make TV more interactive. - Kieran

It seems as though no matter the conference, the meeting or the website everyone is talking about online video - specifically how a company can utilize the power of online video to drive organic website traffic. Online video has moved past the short-form user-generated content (UGC) and grown to be an accepted and viable business function for media companies of all sizes. Now, more then ever, companies are making their professionally produced content, both long and short-form, available online. Combine that with the proliferation of video destinations like Hulu.com and this becomes a truly unique time when it comes to online video. - Kieran

We all know the story of how Friendster, one of the original stars of Social Networking, had a meteoric rise and then watched MySpace and Facebook steal all of their thunder…and traffic. However, even though Friendster has been relegated to the “2nd tier” of social networks they are still one of the top traffic generating websites online (see charts below) and are dominant in the highly coveted Asian marketplace - a region where MySpace and Facebook have yet to gain serious traction. - Kieran

We all know the story of how Friendster, one of the original stars of Social Networking, had a meteoric rise and then watched MySpace and Facebook steal all of their thunder…and traffic. However, even though Friendster has been relegated to the “2nd tier” of social networks they are still one of the top traffic generating websites online (see charts below) and are dominant in the highly coveted Asian marketplace - a region where MySpace and Facebook have yet to gain serious traction. - Kieran

When you go to Microsoft’s Live.com search engine starting today you will see something different. Live Search is now showing a full background image behind their minimalistic search interface with what they are calling “hotspots”. These hotspots (s - Kieran

When you go to Microsoft’s Live.com search engine starting today you will see something different. Live Search is now showing a full background image behind their minimalistic search interface with what they are calling “hotspots”. These hotspots (s - Kieran

On a regular basis I am asked what online sources I use to gather news & information related to what I do. This is a loaded question considering my personal “blog roll” changes on an almost daily basis, in fact the only thing that does not change are - Kieran

When you are fighting for your life you need to do anything you can to save it. Yahoo executives, who are fighting for their jobs, are using their most valuable asset - the Yahoo.com Homepage - in their fight against Carl Icahn. - Kieran