Kashif Blog dot Com » Internet

Google Adsense Payment Notification

Kashif — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:38:00 +0000

Having able to earn money consistently from Google adsesne means that one is able to get consistent stream of visitors to his/her website(s) and that is exactly what I have been busy in. This month I get this again :

Unable to read what the above screen shot says, then read this :

You are scheduled to be sent a payment by the 30th of this month. If you’re receiving a standard delivery check, please allow up to 4 weeks for delivery, depending on your location. If you’re using EFT or secured express delivery, your payment should arrive by the 5th of next month. Learn more…

This is a notification that I have been scheduled to receive my hard earned earnings of the previous month i.e July 2009. Since my selected mode for receiving my payments is Western Union so depending upon my past experience I would hopefully receive my payments any where from 25th Jul(today) to 5th Aug only after I see a ‘Payment Issued‘ in my account history.

Google Adsense has done really well in sending payments to its publishers according to a fixed schedule. Still each month a very few publishers fail to receive their earnings. If you are one of those publishers then you should contact Google immediately or visit Google Adsense payment help section to find answers to your questions regarding Adsense payments.

Bing : Replacement for Live Search

Kashif — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:03:00 +0000

Formerly known as Live search, Msn search and Windows Live Search, is a replaced search engine by no other than Microsoft itself. Bing went live on 3rd June 2009 and the noticeable changes include:

Related searches
Search suggestions
Save and share search history

Bing is also considered to be the new and more organized form of Live search which is a lot more than just being a search engine.

So What you guys think about the new looks and name too ? Do share your opinions below.

April 2009 Google PageRank Update is Over

Kashif — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:28:00 +0000

At least for me it is over as I can see the new toolbar PageRank for my this and the rest of the sites. This update was expected to occur somewhere in the end of March 2009 but it started with the start of April 2009 when Google began updating PageRank of all pages in their database. So my prediction was close !

Not surprisingly, this blog dropped its PR by 1 and is now only PR 1. The reasons behind this drop in PR is what this post is all about.

I Didn’t Trade Text Links

Yes, that is absolutely right as I have never ever been involved in any kind of text link trading either buying or selling and I hardly make any link on this blog “Do follow” i.e search engine friendly. This is also not the reason why I lost my PageRank.

I Didn’t Do Sponsored Posts

Although I have thought of it several times but I have never seem to admire the idea of posting on my own blog on someone else’s will just for the sake of money. This is also not the reason for the drop in PageRank.

I Didn’t Post on This Blog Regularly

This can be one of the reasons as crawl rate decreases on sites that are not updated on regular basis. According to my posts archive, I have updated this blog only 12 times in the past 90 days which is way below the posting frequency that I had set for this blog i.e 1 post every 3rd day. But has the posting frequency got anything to do with PageRank ? I leave this question for those reading this post. Do comment below to share your thoughts.

I Almost Lost Over 1000 Back links

The main reason that resulted in the loss of PageRank is due to the removal huge number of incoming links to this blog. Those links were coming from a authority site (forum signature links) for a long time and I have removed them for the last 45 days which sent an alert to Google resulting in a lower PageRank.

What I have learned so far is that PageRank itself doesn’t hold much value if you are not getting enough traffic to your site. So stop worrying about PageRank and try to post some useful stuff for others as content is one of the most important traffic driving force that you will need all the time.

What Happens When You Hit The Send Button : Gmail – Behind the Scenes

Kashif — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:20:00 +0000

This is a video made by combining the best out of 1000+ clips sent by Gmail fans from all over the world. This gives a pretty clean and clear cut idea about how securely your G-email is when in transit lol .

Google PageRank Update is coming…

Kashif — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:06:00 +0000

Google usually updates PageRank every two to three months. The most recent pagerank update took place last year on New Year’s eve.

So it has been over two and a half months and I have a feeling that now is the time when Google will be updateing pageranks. So keep your eyes open.

The only advatage I find in having a high Google PagaRank is that higher PR pages get crawled more frequently and more deeply by search engines.

So are you anxiously waiting for this PR update or not ? Share with us in your comments.

Keyword Stuffing | Good or Bad !

Kashif — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:19:00 +0000

I was checking my email this afternoon when I came across a link exchange request from a webmaster. So I visited his/her website and not surprisingly could not digest the content for more than 10 seconds. The above screenshot I have posted is taken from the same site and is from its header section. This site is about “Making Money with Google Adsense” and just like most of the other link exchange requests I receive, this website also has nothing relevant to my website (Food related) for which he or she sent a link request. But the purpose of this article is not to highlight the factors involving successful link exchanges but it is about “keyword stuffing” which the owner of the above website has done to such an extent that it urged me to write about the importance or more specifically the consequences of keyword stuffing on web pages.

Keyword stuffing is adding repetitive, relevant or irrelevant keywords on a web page in such a manner that it does not result in any added value to the site or visitors to that site. It is only indented to gain higher rankings in search engines. But search engines have become smarter these days and do not take long to identify “black hat SEO“ techniques such as the one being discussed. Search engines like Google not only ignore such websites but also remove them from their index and thus putting an end to that website by imposing a ban. A lesson to be learned is from Alex Chiu example who also adopted this SEO technique and his site was later penalized by Google.

Get Access to Millions of Old Photos

Kashif — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:31:00 +0000

Recently Google and LIFE together in a joint venture have compiled and published a huge database of millions of old and never to be found images. These images are availabe to public online via Google Image Search. The ability to search and find old photos of people, places, events, sports, culture etc makes this service unique, interesting and very useful specially for old image collectors.

How To Search Only Old Photos ?

Just add source:life at the end of your search term in Google Image Search and your search would only yield old images from LIFE Image archive. For example if I want to find old images related to baseball then you would have to enter baseball source:life to get old images related to baseball. Or you can visit Google LIFE image archive page to search only from LIFE archive photos. All the LIFE photos are hosted on Google.

LIFE archive of photos provide all kinds of photos (black and white as well as colored) that were taken centuries ago and were never published but now they have been degitized and made available to public. Pictures can be as old as from the 1970s and can be as recent as pictures taken to date. These photos are provided for free personal and non-commercial use only. When you click on a photo it opens in a new window along with some other interesting information about the photo. That information incliudes date the picture was taken, name of the photographer, actual size of the picture, related pictures and a short description about that picture.

Remember that not all the photos contain the above mentioned information but most of them do. If you happen to find a really old image that you have been looking for and consider it very valuable then you are also provided option to order a framed image of that photo for as low as $79.99 .

Track Clicks On Outgoing Links with Google Analytics

Kashif — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Google analytics has been my one of the top website analysis tool that I often use to track not only my site(s) traffic but also find out how visitors are navigating through my content. I have been using it for over a year now and so far it has helped a lot in making my content placement even better. I can easily find out how many hits I get to a particluar page and various other stats.

This post is all about how you can easily track clicks on your site outbound links i.e the links placed on your site that point to other sites. These can be any links for example ,text links within your web page body, blog roll links in sidebars, image banner links etc. By default Google analytics does not povide number of clicks on outgoing links so we have to add a little piece of JavaScript to the links that we want to track so that whenever those links are clicks, analytics is notified and it tracks that link. For example we want to track click(s) on text link which has the HTML code :

OutLink

After adding the tracking JavaScript code, the above link becomes this :

pageTracker._trackPageview(’/Links/outlink.com’);”>OutLink

See the text (‘/Links/yourlink.com’) . This is your custom tracking text that you will later use to track the above link. For example the above link is in my blog roll so I make the text (‘/Outgoing/Blogroll-Link.com’). If you have various different locations that you want to track make sure you assign them names that you can remember easily. Now that you have added the code log in to your Google analytics account and the left menu click Content>Top Content. This will open that stats of you your top conetent pages. Now go to the bottom where it says Find page as shown in the image below :

In the search box enter the text ‘/Outgoing/Blogroll-Link.com‘ and it will show you stats on all the links that you have added the JavaScript code. Remember that Google analytics does not show realtime stats and stats are updated after 24 hours so you will be able to see the click report after a day or two.

Adsense Ads Back On Blogger|Blogspot Blogs

Kashif — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Yesterday when Blogger.com, one of the top free blogging service provider owened by Google, made some updates to their system it resulted in a temporary broken connection between Google Adsnese and Blogger. As a result of this glitch, almost all the blogs that were hosted on Blogger.com and have Adsense ads on them started showing only PSA(Public Service ADS) which unfortunately generates revenue neither for Google nor for Adsense publishers.

Immediately after this issue was spotted by publishers, they reported this in various forums and groups, including Official Adsense group, so that Adsense team could take immediate action and restore the ad serving to all Blogger blogs. And they did what was required. They fixed this problem and have now started serving Adsense ads back on all Blogger hosted blogs.

I just feel sorry for some bloggers who had lost some serious amount of revenue and were severly effected by this temperoray glicth.

Google Moving Feedburner Feeds to Google Feedburner

Kashif — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:35:00 +0000

You may now view and manage all of your feeds and their settings by visiting this address:

http://feedburner.google.com

You will no longer be able to sign in to feedburner.com, but that’s okay: from now on, there is no reason to do so. Also, your old FeedBurner feeds, found at feeds.feedburner.com, will automatically redirect traffic to their new addresses on the feeds2.feedburner.com domain. You may still want to update any links or buttons on your website to use the new feeds2.feedburner.com address.

I got this message in my inbox after I initiated my feeds transfer from Feedburner account. Google had already acquired Feedburner long time ago on 1st June ’07 , as announced on Feedburner blog. Now Google is moving all Feedburner feeds to its own server and by the end of Feb’09 if you do not manually initiate the feed transfer from your existing Feedburner account then you would be contacted by a Google guy (not Matt) who would request you to do so.

There will be a slight change in the feed URL but this is nothing to worry about as your previous feed will be automatically redirected to your new feed. After you have successfully completed the feed transfer you would receive a confirmation email message similar to the one that I got. You can then login to your new Google Feedburner account from Google.com>My Account where you will notice a new addtion to Google products.

So go ahead and transfer your Feedburner feeds to Google !

Make contact form with Google Docs

Kashif — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:04:00 +0000

With Google Docs you can not only upload or edit documents and spreadsheets but you can also make highly customizable forms that you can email or even embed in your website so that user can input data directly into the form which will them aulomatically be loaded and saved to a spreadsheet that can easily be accessed via http://docs.google.com. Embedding custom forms on websites and blogs is a nice idea specially if you are have a tough time fighting email spam. In this way you will not have to make yoour email address availably publically and special automatic email harvesters will not be able to steal you precious and personal email addresses.

This quick tutorial will show you how easy it is to create a form with Google Docs. First use the above link to login to your Google acount. If you do not have an account then create one as it will not cost you a penny. Now I assume that you have registered, logged in and opened your Google Docs page. From the menubar select New>Form. This will open a new window with an untitled form that can be cutomized easily at your will. You can add many data input fields from that window. The fields currently being offered are:

- Text

- Paragraph Text

- Multiple Choice

- Check Boxes

- Choose From a List

- Scale (1-n) – Used for rating

Here is a sample Form created just to let you know how would the form look like after you have saved it. All the fields in the form are customizable with the exception of ‘Powered by Google Docs’ and ‘Google TOS’ links. Feel free to comment and play with the sample form

Extract URLs From WebPages in 1 Click

Kashif — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:10:00 +0000

‘Selected Links‘ is simple yet very effective link extractor by Mikos. It is a free link extractor which has the ability to extract hyperlinks from a web page. Just select the desired section of the page with the help of your mouse cursor and this tool will display the URLs and their respective anchor texts. Besides the ability to extract text link, it can also be used to extract image URL.

I have only tested this tool on Microsoft Internet Explorer. Here is how it works. Install this tool and restart your IE browser. Then select the text link or the entire text with your mouse and make sure it stays selected and highlighted like the way shown in the image below.

Now goto Tools menu in IE and click ‘Selected Links’. The following screen with all the links in the selected text and their respective anchor texts will appear.

Now you have all the URLs. You can copy individual link or click ‘Copy All’ to copy all the URLs to your computer by pasting them into a text file. You can also click ‘Open All’ which will open all the links that this tool has extracted. Though this is not a recommended action specially if it has lots of links to open. Your browser might slap you for doing that

Why the need of Text Link Extractor ?

As a part time SEO (for myself only) I find my self in situations in which it is required to save hundreds of links from a webpage. Those URLs are in web directories that contains huge listings. So I found this tool very simple and effective for manual links extraction. Remeber that it is not an automated link extarctor and you have to select text link or entire text manually and then fetch their links.

Want to give this tool a try. Dowload Selected Links.

Character and Word Count Tool

Kashif — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:45:00 +0000

Word Count Plus is a free word counter add-on created by Mozdev that you can add/install to your FireFox browser and leave the counting to this tool. With this extension installed, you can count any number of words on a web page. No need to download any other word count software for this purpose or visit any of those free online word counters because you can count words simply by selecting them inside your browser.

Just select the text (words/lines/paragraphs/headings etc) with your mouse cursor and this tool does the following for you:

- Count words
- Count Characters (Hovering the cursor on counted words yield characters count)
- Add the counted words to other counts (Yes it will do the addition for you)

Words count is shown in the status bar of your browser just like the way shown in the image below:

Counting words and characters come in handy on lots of occasions specially when writing and checking specific length articles. This tool will also come in handy if you are an SEO because a lot of times you would be writing meta tags, page titles and other such tags in which length of words/characters is an important aspect.

New Year Greetings:2009

Kashif — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:19:00 +0000

Year 2008 is about to end tonight. So in case you are here I wish you all Happy New Year.

Now back to business lol. Just wanted to share with you that the last Google PageRank update which was about to happen at the of December 2008 was not noticed considerably. Although some people still claimed that their website PageRanks have changed but a full scale toolbar update will most probably take place in January 2009.

This delay in PageRank update is most likely because of X-Mas and New Year holidays and festivities.

So do not stop building links for your websites or blogs and keep improving your link popularity by building quality links that are relevant, highly ranked and if possible are one way links.

Uptil now I have posted a few dozen directories in this blog where you can seasily submit your websites and blogs and get free one way links. The submission process will take less than 5 minutes. So in case you missed those previous posts, see the list below for all the free one way link directories.

40 Free Link Directories

Free One Way Link Directories [1-10]

Free One Way Link Directories [11-20]

Free One Way Link Directories [21-30]

Free One Way Link Directories [31-40]

Feel free to share and comment.

How to Check Your Internet Connection Speed

Kashif — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:12:00 +0000

Have you ever tried to find out whether you are getting the same internet connection speed which your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has promised. The question arises how can you find out exact connection speed ? Usually a single internet connection is shared between multiple internet users due to which you might not be getting the same speed mentioned in your package.

There are many ways and online tools available for testing and checking any internet connection speed. The test results will indicate download and upload speeds of your internet connection. Download speed is the speed at which you can transfer data from a web server or simply internet to your computer. Like saving an online image or music file from a website to your hard drive. On the other hand upload speed is the speed at which data can be transferred from your computer to a web server or simply internet. Attaching anything to an email message is an example of uploading data from your computer to your web email service.

List of Free Online Internet Connection Speed Tests

Checking internet connection requires calculating its download and upload speeds. Below is a list of some reliable and widely used online tools where you can check and find out how fast your internet connection really is.

1. SpeedTest
2. Speak Easy Speed Test
3. Audit My PC Speed Test
4. Internet Frog Speed Test
5. Visualware Speed Test

Feel free to comment and share !

Back up Your Blogger|Blogspot Blogs on Hard Drive

Kashif — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Blogger is a free blogging service provided by Google via Blogger.com. Recently Blogger team released this new Import/Export feature which also allows its users to make a back up copy of their entire blog on their hard drives. This feature is accessible via Settings> Basic> Blog Tools> Export blog.

When you use the export feature to download your blog to your computer, the blog is downloaded in a (.xml) file. This does not removes your blog from Blogger.com and your blog and all its posts remain live and online.

Why Should I Back Up My Blog ?

- Blog gets deleted : You or someone else accidentally deleted your blog and now all your blog posts are gone and you have to write them again which might take a lot of effort if you have an old blog.

- You want to recover deleted posts : In the past you deleted some of your blog posts that you thought were of no use at that time but now you require to recover that post.

- Just back up : Just to be on the safe side I recommend that you make backup copies of your blog(s) on routine basis. If you post on regular basis then weekly backups might as well be a nice option but if you do not post that often then you can plan to make a backup copy of your blog at least once each month.

Entrecard is a Waste of Time

Kashif — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:08:00 +0000

This might sound a bit harsh but the fact is that I did not found Entrecard to be very effective. I joined their network in May’08 so for the past 7 months, I have got up to 700 hits from entrecard site with an average bounce rate of over 85% and according to my Google analytics stats, the average time these 700 visitor spent on this blog was not even 20 seconds. This is even worse than traffic from social bookmarking networks but when I went deep into the stats I found what was the real culprit behind this.

Entrecard was supposed to be an advertising network for bloggers which allows bloggers to advertise on other blogs and gain few extra traffic from other blogs but the only traffic one gets is from entrecard site and that also from other entrecard users having a quick look at your blog before sending an advertisement request.

One Day Advertising : Not Very Useful

This is the most sick part which I never liked about entrecard. The entrecard ad that is placed on other blogs is only displayed for one day and after your time is over the next ad in the queue will replace your ad so you have to send in another request to advertise on that blog. This requires your precious time in visiting entrecard website on regular basis and sending advertising requests to other blogs so that your ad can be spread across as many blogs as you want or at least that is what most of the entrecard users think.

What I Gained From Entrecard

In contrast to this bad experience with entrecard I gained some good relationships with very interesting and talented bloggers and I got the chance to view some really cool and exciting blogs for which I will definitely visit entrecard website in future.

Conclusion

If you have a very new blog that you just set up few day ago then Entrecard might benefit you a little for gaining some exposure but for a person like me that keeps evaluating services on regular basis, entrecard does not deserve to be on my blog anymore as the time I spent on Entrecard could have been used to further optimize my blog and focusing a bit more on increasing link popularity of this blog but I lost some valuable time and have learned my lesson. So good bye Entrecard !

6 FireFox Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins for Developers

Kashif — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:45:00 +0000

Got tired of hitting the browser refresh button each time to preview the updated page or to see how the changes look like to a web page that is being developed by you. The problem with most of the WYSIWYG web page editors is that they usually stuck most of the time and they do not give you the real or exact picture of what a web page would really look like when viewed in a browser. There are various auto refresher tool available that will do the job for you but they cost too much for a very simple yet tedious task. To get an auto refresh tool for free I use Firefox web browser which gives me the ability to install third party add-ons for performing various tasks, one of them is to automate the refreshing of a web page. I have been suing FireFox for a long time now and the only reason for using it on the first place was that it provided tabbed browsing experience which was not available in other web browsers at that time. The tabs allow me to work more efficiently without messing up my desktop with dozens of browser windows.

Coming back to automating the reloading of a web page, below is a list of few of the best FireFox plugins that will perform this task for you. Get any of the one that meets your requirements.

	Hacking Firefox: More Than 150 Hacks, Mods, and Customizations (ExtremeTech) (Paperback)
	Firefox Hacks: Tips & Tools for Next-Generation Web Browsing [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

List of Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins

1. Tab Mix Plus [download plugin]

This is one of the top FireFox plugins that has lots of features with which you can do a variety of things in your FireFox browser tabs. One of them is to set the reload time of any or all tabs in your browser window. Then after the selected time ends, the selected tab(s) automatically refreshes and loads the updated page.

2. ReloadEvery [download plugin]

In this plugin, you can select the auto reload time anywhere from 5 seconds to 15 minutes or you can add your own refresh time. Very handy tool when you want to view a web page that has data which changes very often(for example stock rates, live scoreboards etc).

3. Lathe2 [download plugin]

This one is very simple and straight forward. Just select the time interval and the page will reload automatically after that time.

4. XRefersh [download plugin]

This plugin has not been very popular but it works as good as any other listed on this page. This tool automatically detects any changes on a web page and then reloads the updated page. This tool is very handy for web developers since they can easily preview real time changes that they make to the code of a web page.

5. Page Update Checker [download plugin]

This one works in a slightly different way. It checks a web page for changes and if it finds that a web page has changed, it notifies the user via a sound or a small icon. You can set the monitoring time so that it automatically checks the web page for updates after regular intervals.

6. Check4Change [download plugin]

This one works the same way the Page Update Checker works but you can specify certain portions of a web page that you want to monitor changes /updates. Select the section of the web page that you want to monitor for any change and simply select the time interval for this plugin to check for updates and if it occurs, it is indicated by a variety of ways.

Hope some of these plugins will really can in handy in your web development tasks. Feel free to share these with others.

What is Link Popularity

Kashif — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0000

photo by seocompany

Link Popularity

By definition, link popularity is the measure of both quality and quantity of hyperlinks or simply inbound links pointing to a web page from various other web pages that might be in the same domain or from other domains. It is just one of the factors that many search engines like Google,Yahoo and Msn take into consideration when they evaluate the presence or ‘popularity‘ of web pages so that they can be ranked accordingly.

Lets take an example by considering a scenario where a number of people fight compete for becoming the top 10 potential Presidents of an organization which manufactures baseball bats. Open polling takes place where Managers from various departments of the same organization and also from other organizations cast their votes. Now I being a part of that organization , is assigned the responsibility for evaluating the weight or ‘authority’ of each vote and then select 10 candidates and assign them rank 1-10, depending upon how much authoritative votes they got. I did all the ‘analysis‘ and then assigned all the candidates their well deserved ranks. The ones that were ranked low were because they got:

1. Too many votes but not from relevant organizations
2. Too many votes but not from organizations that are very new in the market
3. Very few votes

And the candidates that were ranked high was because they got:

A. Many votes from organizations having the same trade (baseball and/or related to sports)
B. Few votes but from well established organizations

Conclusion

So to take a website on top spots you do not need massive number of inbound links instead, one needs to develop certain popularity level for his/her site which depends upon:

1. Quantity of inbound or one way links
2. Relevancy of sites linking to your site
3. Authority of sites linking to your site

Link Popularity mostly depends on the above three factors. So next time you create one way links for your site, keep these in mind.

Feel free to share this article with others.

Customize Your Gmail Looks

Kashif — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:51:00 +0000

Gmail is free a web based email service provided by Google. It is simple, fast and not too fancy like other free email services available. It was launched in 2004 and was only available on invitation by existing Gmail users but in 2007 it was opened for all and I have been using it for over a year now and have never experienced any difficulty in accessing my emails. Its current email storage capacity is over 7 GB (1 GB = 1024 MB) so that is lots of space for storing all types of media attached to any email.

Today when I opened my inbox I noticed that Gmail now has more custom designed themes which if applied can change the looks and feel of your inbox. Have a look at the following screen shot. There are 31 different themes available (including the default theme) .The good part is that none of these themes will cause your browser to crash or slow down your Gmail loading time.

Few of those themes are designed in a way that they look different at different times of the day depending upon various factors that include sunrise, sunset and weather. You will only need to select your region(Country/City) when applying any of the above mentioned themes.

So Google mail or simply Gmail is not just a secure email service that helps you fight email spam but it has to offer much more than just sending and receiving emails. Its recent release of voice and video chat for its web based chat system is already catching lot of attention.

New Improved YouTube Search Bar

Kashif — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:47:00 +0000

Update : This new enhancement made by YouTube team seems to have raised a lot of objection and has annoyed most of the people who are embedding YouTube videos on their websites and blogs. YouTube staff has noticed this immediately and have slightly modified the way this search bar appears and it will not be on top of the embedded video all the time instead it will only appear when the mouse cursor is hovered over the video and will disappear immediately when the cursor is taken away from the video.

I don’t know whether this new enhancement made in YouTube videos is getting any attention or not but it seems like a very nice addition to any YouTube video that is being used on any website other than Youtube.com itself. In the past webmasters need to place a custom designed search box (shown above) on their sites so that their visitors can search for YouTube videos from that site but this is no longer required as any YouTube video that is placed on any other site now has its own search b ar as pointed in the image below.

This search bar is displayed before the video starts, disappears while the video is playing and re-appears when ever the video is paused or it ends. This is the same search that is provided on Youtube website and by typing in any search terms you get the same results that you get from Youtube.com !

The results are displayed in the same way with a short preview of each video.

You can also customize YouTube videos for your website or blog in a variety of manner by modifying its dimensions and adding different color borders. Click here for more details.

Gmail’s New Voice and Video Chat Features

Kashif — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:55:00 +0000

Google has officially announced the release of voice and video conferencing feature for their Gmail users. With previous Gmail chat, users can only send text messages but mow Gmail users can talk to each other via voice chat or even see each other via video chat feature. This is similar to Yahoo and Msn chat messengers but Google says that they are the first one to integrate all the instant messenger features in their web based email.
What New You will be Able to do With Gmail Chat

You can have no more reasons not to have a Gmail account as now you will be able to run Gmail chat in pop-out windows or you can even scale the web cam view of your friend or colleague to full screen during Video chat.

System Requirements

At present Gmail voice and video chat feature is only supported by Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista and can only run on Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.0, IE7 and Google Chrome web browsers. If you fulfill the above requirement then all you need to do is download a one time Gmail voice and video chat plug-in. After installing the plug-in you will have to restart you browser and now when you open your new Gmail chat, you can see a new link in your chat window which says “Video & more” just like the one shown below.

In the coming days, Google will roll out this new Gmail voice and video chat functionality to all its users across the globe. I am yet to test these new features in Gmail and if any one reading this have done so then do share your experience by filling the comment form below.

Feel free to share this with others.

Enlarge and Rotate Online Photos

Kashif — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Have you ever come across a web image that you want to zoom in without leaving that page or you want to rotate that image either clockwise or counter clockwise. Now you can zoom in/out and even rotate any image present on any web page without moving your head. For this you need to have Firefox browser which allows you to install addons which you cannot do with other web browsers like IE . Although the ability to add thirty addons has been causing few problems in Firefox browser but these were small bugs in the code due to the incompatibility with browser newer version only.

Now you I assume that you already have Firefox and now you will be needing two separate addons, one to enlarge photos and the other to rotate them.

1. Image Zoom :
This lets you zoom into photos on any page up to 400%. Zoom in and out then just right click and reset the image to its original size. Very handy tool specially when you need to zoom in and read text on images that are not large enough. It can also be used as a fun tool.

2. Rotate Image :
This addon will assist you in viewing images that are put up in wrong directions and with this tool you can easily rotate them in either direction. You can also set the rotation angle anywhere from 0 to 360 degrees.

Feel free to share these two tools with others.

Analyse your blog worth with dnScoop

Kashif — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:53:00 +0000

Do you have a blog which has a decent Google page rank , lots of backlinks , high Alexa rank and is some what popular ? Or you have a new site with almost no backlinks , no page rank and a very low Alexa traffic rank . Doesn’t matter if its new or old because you can get the value ( estimated ) of your site from a free website value estimation tool called dnscoop.com

It gives an estimated value of any domain based on some of the following factors :

- Age of domain
- Google Pagerank
- Alexa rank
- Number of inbound link ( or simply backlinks )

Based on the above factors , it generates an estimated value of any site. According to this tool , Kashifblog.com has a worth of $900 . Google.com having over 900 billion backlinks has a value of over $1.7 billion . I think that is pretty low from big G standards .

So how much your site worths ?

Google alerts now for Feeds

Kashif — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Previous Google alerts were only sent via email as updates but recently Google has made it available via feeds as well . You will no longer have to worry about your mail box filling up with email messages from Google . As now you can set as many alerts as you like ( keeping in mind that there is a limit up to 1000 alerts per email address ) .

When you sign in to your Google alerts account and edit or create an alert , you will now see that when you click on the delivery option , you are provided with an option between email and feed .

I personally feel this is a cool feature and as said by google officials , a highly requested feature as well .