A new version of wordpress, the script this blog is running on, is preparing to be released. The 2.7 Wireframes version comes with a lot of new features, that allow you to change your admin interface structure, fixes some bugs, but I’m sure that like any new version that comes out, it has many other new bugs. I will not install it yet, but wait for 2.7.1 or so, that should be more bugg-free. Read more

Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads. I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. [...]

StumbleUpon has just released a new toolbar-free version, but until now it’s only available to certain users, including me. So, if you don’t see it, don’t panic, probably they are currently testing it and it will soon be available for everyone. The new version features a star rating for websites and a button you can place on your website where users can vote you directly. The button also shows how many votes the page has. Take a look at it: Finally, they seem to have understood that people don’t like [...]

It has been a busy summer for me. Firstly I had the exams after I finished highschool, then I had to go to apply to the universities in Bucharest, the capital. Then I was living in Pitesti. Fortunately everything went excellent and I passed them all and got admitted to the university. After that I though I deserve a vacation and went to Greece ( Thassos ) for a week. After that, I had another problem: to rent an apartment in Bucharest, it was really hard to find the one [...]

Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that. From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are [...]

We all know that Digg’s algorithm is very complex and they are changing it frequently, so that spammers cannot get their stories popular. Digg states that all the content is only promoted by users and they have nobody implied in the process, but this doesn’t seem to be true. I have been an active Digg user for a while and I know a lot of other users, including power users and others. Also I read a lot of blog posts about Digg and other’s thoughts. I will try to share [...]

A simple SEO guideline says that you should end your urls in .htm, .html or make them as mine. Some do not follow this and end them in .php, .asp and other programming languages. It might not be as good as the ones ended in .html, but Matt Cutts say they are and there’s no problem. Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it [...]

Google has just added a new feature to the Trends tool. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what a lot of us were expecting: the search volume in numbers. Now it shows how much a keyword is searched, in comparison to the average searches since 2004 until the time you perform the query. For example if today the keyword ‘iPhone’ has been searched two times more than the average times it was searched daily from 2004, Google Trends will show ’2′. Along with this, now you also have the possibility to download the [...]

ReadWriteWeb has written a very interesting post about Mixx. Now it’s one year old and traffic seems to grow really fast, but still can’t be a liable competitor for Digg, receiving less than 5% of Digg’s traffic. Still, it seems to be on the good road and might grow, especially that Digg is full of spam stories, flames and unsatisfied users.

Google made an announcement that they opened the Adsense network to other third-party advertisers. This is good news for both publishers and third-party advertising network. Publishers have more monetization possibilities and advertising networks deliver more traffic to their advertisers. Currently, this only works for image ads, so you will see no change if you are opted out. If you are currently using or going to use image ads, then you have to update your privacy policy to let your visitors know about the third-party ads you’re serving. We’re happy to [...]