SEO, SEM, Web Design Blog

5 things you never knew about SEO/SEM

2008-06-02T23:06:00.005+05:30

1. Your success in SEO is directly proportional to language skills of your optimization expert. When building links: negotiating your anchor texts, text surrounding your link and the position of your link on another web site are aspects that define how much value (or link juice) its going to bring in for your website. A well defined and well negotiated link can be manifold more effective than "just any text linking to your site from anywhere".

2. Your rankings are only as high as the number of man hours put into your search engine marketing and optimization, under of course good management. A well optimized web site that ranks in top 10 on Google for highly competitive keywords has very uniform:

a. Incoming links from industry related websites - These links are generated by expert SEOs because of their connections in the industry and secondly because of their research, which leads them to websites that your competitors are linked from.

b. Incoming links from general authoritative websites like ezinearticles.com, bbc.com, wikipedia.org, associatedcontent.com etc. This obviously constitutes of writing hundreds of thousands of very high quality articles and submitting them to these highly authoritative sites. A point to note here is: If you start writing articles for a new website, you won't get as many views as a writer who has previously submitted hundreds of articles and one who holds an expert author status with these websites. So get hold of a company that has a good reputation of authoritative content building and start off asap. This is where your competitors are usually not looking.

c. Internal optimisation which includes keyword density, meta tags, title tags etc of your website's various pages. This again requires studying in dept whats working in your industry in which search engine and whats not. For example - Google doesn't give much importance to meta tags at all, whereas Yahoo or MSN do.

So you see, there's a lot of time that needs to be spent on your site's SEO. Imagine recruiting a person in UK or US to do this. He/she will probably do the same thing as an expert Indian optimiser, only costing you 3 times as much. Therefore you should know clearly what part of your SEO to outsource and what not.

3. The greatest web design on the planet is nothing without "calls to action". Guess why facebook.com is now the #1 website for social networking? Its because as soon as you login, the site tells you what your friends or connections have been doing. This makes you curious and you click on their profiles to know more. Then you come back to your homepage and you're given more interesting trivia. These are called "calls to action", that prompt you to explore more and stay on that website, thus making the site successful.

Believe it or not, your site is constantly tracked by Google with respect to industry benchmarks. You may have noticed the same industry benchmarking on Google Analytics. If your site is not able to retain users (which needs you to give appropriate calls to action), you're going down the rankings gradually.

4. When you let your users write the content for you, you rank higher on Search Engines. Wikipedia - Who is it written by? The owner? No, its written by the users and today it is one of the world's most used websites.

We performed an experiment to see whats more important - Incoming links or a site's content. Guess what we found? It was the site's content which was most important. One of our experimental sites called "delhi-university.in" today gets over 2000 uniques a day, ranks #2 for keyphrase "delhi university" worldwide and all it does it, posts new user content on the homepage, which because of its popularity is now every few seconds. Google crawlers visit frequently and the site gets over a thousand visits from broad tail keywords. It started with just one incoming link from our homepage. Beat that!

5. Every link is valuable. Most webmasters think NO FOLLOW links aren't valuable. Well get this - the site mentioned in the above paragraph was only linked to by Wikipedia with, as we all know - a "no follow" anchor, but from a highly relevant page. It still appeared on Google.co.in at #8 for that key phrase. In fact if your take any competitive market and analyse the incoming links of the top rankers, you'll see their participation on hundreds of forums with relevant anchor text and no follow links. Do they not count at all? They do and a massive deal at that.

Overview

Search engine marketing (SEM) and Search engine optimisation (SEO) are expensive processes, but the benefit of your site ranking on top of Google is potentially millions of users.

1. Get your site up there.

2. Mind your pocket while you do that. Outsource!

3. Once there, make sure your users help you stay there. Get them writing and discussing on your site.

4. Be viral. Get your users to help you get more users!

Modulus Systems in India is on top of SEO/SEM with over 100 clients from the UK and US. Why do you think they chose this company? Only because its worth outsourcing your link building and authoritative content writing to India. You pay one third the price and never sacrifice on the quality of SEO consultants.

Have an experience with outsourcing? Comment below.

Reset CSS - Thats how you create browser independent web design

2008-05-31T18:21:00.006+05:30

If you're a web designer, you probably know what browser compatibility testing means. With Mozilla Firefox, Opera and other browsers holding a 14% share of the web browser market (and increasing), creating designs just for Microsoft Internet Explorer is not enough. Well, even if you did, which version of IE are we talking about? Exactly!

Once in a blue moon we come across sites that look amazing on IE, but very misaligned on Opera or Firefox and vice versa.

Anybody heard of Reset Stylesheets?

Reset stylesheets are normal .css files that can be used on html pages to neutralise the browser's rendering of tags. The default styling of HTML tags is removed and you literally start from scratch. A normal .css file is then used to re-define all HTML elements that you want to use on the web page.

Note: tags like input, a, textarea etc still work as normal. In other words, it doesn't change the function of tags. So on a page thats been reset using reset css, you won't see any difference between H1 and H2 text, but an A tag will continue to link.

Yahoo have created and adopted what they call YUI base CSS. Its supported by all A grade browsers covering 96% of their users.

How to use Reset style sheets?

To use, you link it in the page's header like any other stylesheet. Then, when you create your stylesheet, you can choose how each element should look. For example, you can switch the BOLD on and define what the padding, spacing, size etc will be.

If you want to try out a Reset stylesheet, I'd recommend you go and try Yahoo's YUI base CSS.

There are however, advantages and disadvantages of using Reset CSS.

Advantages of using Reset CSS

1. Helps designers create designs that look same or very similar on all browsers.

2. The designer is in control of exactly how everything should look. You can customise every aspect of HTML elements.

3. Helps professional designers save time. No need to re-write CSS for every new design. Once you've recreated HTML elements the way you like them, adding advanced CSS functions and re-creating perfect HTML pages becomes easier for all your new designs.

In brief: Your HTML page becomes a clean slate and you can do whatever you want with it.

Disadvantages of using Reset Stylesheets

1. The complete removal of all HTML tags produces a lot of work to start with. Every element needs to be defined in your new CSS. This may take some getting used to.

2. The imperfect solution: As Yahoo puts it: "It works for 96% of our users". So this still isn't the 100% solution. Using Reset CSS will definitely help your site look very stable and uniform across most browsers, but you still might have to carry out cross browser testing afterall.

Our overall point of view

There are people who love Reset CSS and there are those who don't. I don't recommend this for beginners, but if a job calls for it, we use Reset css here at Modulus Systems.

Most of the time, you'll be okay using normal css and get away with a little bit of cross-browser testing. If you do plan to create a site that actively uses ajax, javascript or any other form of on-screen processing, Reset css might be a good idea.

Ajax/ AJAX – An Introduction

2007-10-09T16:47:00.000+05:30

Ajax/ AJAX is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a Web 2.0 technique employed in developing interactive web applications. Web pages that have been developed using Ajax exchange data with the server behind the scene. Consequently, every time a user makes changes, they are incorporated without reloading of the whole web page.

Asynchronous: XML data loading and normal HTML and JavaScript web page loading are asynchronous. In other words, they do not interfere with each other.

JavaScript: JavaScript is a programming language. Ajax function calls are created using JavaScript.

XML: Data exchange in Ajax takes place in XML format.

Advantages of Ajax

1. A web page developed on Ajax has higher:

o Speed

o Interactivity

o Functionality

2. The HTML of a web page can be accessed/ produced in the browser itself. Thus, Ajax effectively decreases the bandwidth consumption.

3. With a jumble of techniques and languages, Ajax gives programmers the freedom to adopt and adapt features as per their requirement.

4. Ajax enables a programmer to have a neat separation among different elements of a web page.

o Data/ content to be uploaded: XML format

o Structure/ Format of a web page: HTML/ XHTML made available in the DOM

o Style (images, fonts, etc.): CSS

o Functionality: JavaScript/ HTTP/ XMLHttp

A few things to be kept in mind while using Ajax

1. The request-response interval should be minimal, with clear feedback to the user.
2. Back button and bookmarking are issues that have to be taken into account for dynamic web pages to be developed on Ajax.
3. Data that has to be indexed needs to be provided in a search engine friendly format. This is because search engines often skip JavaScript coded content that in turn is a main element of Ajax-based web sites.

Also read on MS blog:

Web 2.0 - The Latest Buzz in Internet Technology

Web 2.0 - An Effective Business Tool

Web 2.0 - The Modern Success Mantra

What are Google Bombs?

2007-09-26T13:11:00.000+05:30

When a group of people use a specific anchor text to link to a particular web page in order to shoot up its Google ranking, the phenomenon is known as ‘Google Bomb’ or ‘Googlebomb’.

The first known Google Bomb in the history of the web world was the one used to raise the Microsoft homepage through the keywords “more evil than Satan himself”!

Why is this done?

Googlebombing is done:

• as an underhand Search Engine Optimization technique done for fun.

• in order to promote some ulterior motives against a person or an organization.

• as a political manoeuvre.

The logic utilized behind Googlebombing:

Google search engine algorithm gives a higher rank to a page which has consistent anchor text in its backlinks.

Googlebomb Watch:

Googlebomb Watch is Google’s answer to Google bombs. It keeps an eye on old and new Googlebombs.

Google checks the anchor text of all the incoming links to a web site. In case the text is not on the web site, then that particular link is downgraded or ignored.

Modulus Systems’ Journey to the top of Google – Part I(iv)

2007-09-26T11:33:00.000+05:30

Incoming Links and Miscellaneous Related Factors

This is the last article in Part-I which constitutes our portmanteau before getting on with our journey to the top of Google. In the previous articles, we have covered in detail the Keyword Analysis and Meta Tag Analysis of Modulus Systems' website.

In this article, we’ll have an overview of backlinks and anchor text analysis.

Backlinks or incoming links are links scattered around the web that are directed towards your website. The number and quality of backlinks plays a major role in determining the relevancy and hence popularity of your website on search engines. Moreover, the anchor text is also a critical entity wherein the more relevant keywords are used as anchor text, the better the chance of search engines crawlers indexing your website. In fact, Google takes account of anchor text in the incoming links to ascertain the Page Rank of a web page.

Backlink Anchor Text Report of Modulus Systems Website:

We checked the anchor text of incoming links to our website through an Anchor Text Analysis Tool. 55 percent links have the anchor text “web design India”, whereas 49.6 percent of the backlinks have “modulus systems” as anchor text. The remaining few incoming links have a number of permutations and combinations of keywords such as “web design”, “website design”, “website designing”, “website designers”, etc.

Incoming Link Related Data:

The Challenge:

• To improve the number of quality links to the website.

• To diversify the keywords used as anchor text.

• To improve the Page Rank of the website.

A Must Read:

• Introduction to the research

• Meta Tag Analysis of Modulus Systems website

• Keyword Analysis of Modulus Systems website

Conclusion to Part-I

We have specified our challenges with respect to every aspect of the web site. Now, we are all set to take them up one by one. In the coming months, be on the lookout for amazing facts on our blog that unveil the strategies of getting a better rank on Google.

Bon Voyage!

Modulus Systems’ Journey to the top of Google – Part I(iii)

2007-09-24T16:54:00.000+05:30

Keyword Analysis

In continuation with our research on getting on top of Google, here is the keyword analysis of our website – http://www.modulussystems.com/. Also read our last report on the Meta Tag Analysis of our website.

Present Keyword Rankings on Google:

Google Trends:

Following is the comparative report of keywords search more often in comparison to each other:

In addition to the above facts and figures, we have a detailed report of keyword density on our website - a yardstick to measure our progress in the coming months.

The Challenge:

• To increase the keyword density on every page with respect to relevant keywords.
• To optimally use the most searched for keywords vis-à-vis Google Trends report.
• To bring a higher ranking for all the keywords.

Modulus Systems’ Journey to the top of Google – Part I(ii)

2007-09-22T14:46:00.000+05:30

Meta Tag Analysis for GoogleBot

To begin with, we analyzed the meta tags of three main pages of our website. We chose one page each from three levels of the site – the homepage, the products page, and the article page (inside the services page). This has been undertaken through widexl meta tag analyzer tool with respect to GoogleBot – Google’s spider that crawls over web pages in order to index them.

Tier 1: The Home Page

Tier 2: The Products Page

Tier 3: The Article Page

The Challenge

• To optimize the use of keywords in the erroneous meta tags in order to make them more Google robot friendly.

• To decrease the load time of the article page.

Modulus Systems’ Journey to the top of Google – Part I(i)

2007-09-21T23:31:00.000+05:30

The other fun-filled day at MS we decided to chart the progress of our website – www.modulussystems.com on Google – the undisputed king of the search engine world. At present, our Google rankings are as follows:

We are beginning today – September 21, 2007 on a long haul ahead, wherein we’ll experiment with strategies and techniques to get a better ranking on Google.

We thought we would begin with putting together every bit of information relevant to this. The starting point has the following flag-posts:

1. Meta Tag Analysis

2. Keyword Analysis

3. Incoming Link Analysis

4. Other Miscellaneous Factors

As we move ahead, we plan to keep a track of cause-and-effects, wherein the figures given in the various articles in Part 1 of the series will act as coordinates to compare our progress with.

So come along, let’s set off for the first leg of our exciting journey on Google…

Pondering over Podcasts?

2007-09-21T13:09:00.000+05:30

What is a Podcast?

A single digital (audio/ video) file or series of digital files that can be distributed over the web, which in turn can be played by users on their computers or media players, is known as a podcast. The process of undertaking this is called podcasting and the host of a podcast is known as a podcaster. The first podcasts were developed for Apple iPod – a world renowned portable media player.

What a Podcast does?

Simply speaking, what a podcast does is to broadcast content over portable media players. The good thing about podcasts is that they can be syndicated (and thus distributed) via Atom and RSS feeds, subscribed to by users and when the content is upgraded, it can actually be downloaded automatically! Moreover, you have the freedom to listen/ watch a podcast whenever and wherever you want!

Podcasting covers programs on a whole range of subjects, be it a commercial or a non-commercial venture – videos and audios on any topic under the sun, advertisements, cartoons, music, business presentations, etc. In a way, podcasting is the Internet version of broadcasting or telecasting programs on radio and TV respectively.

Anyone for Etymology?

There are two schools of thought on this. One opines that the term ‘podcast’ is a blend of “iPod” and “broadcast”, as one can actually broadcast stuff on a portable media player.

Others believe that a PODCAST stands for Portable On-Demand (broad-/ tele-)CASTing of files over the Internet.

What all do I need to be a Podcaster?

All you need to be a podcaster is a recording device – a microphone for audio/ a digital camera for video; audio/ video editing software in your computer; and lastly, a website to embed your podcast feeds to. It’s as simple as that!

How does a Podcast benefit me?

• You can subscribe to podcasts of your choice, which will be downloaded automatically.

• You can enjoy your favourite podcasts anytime according to your convenience.

• You can be popular via the podcasts you create!

For the business minded…

• A podcast can increase the online visibility of your business.

• You can communicate about your products and services to a wide network of people.

• You can become a trusted advisor to your clients and potential customers.

• You can be a subject matter expert in your line of business, and this in turn will fetch you more customers.

• You can establish a communication network with your target customers.

• You can be a resource base for online users who desire to know more about your products and services.

• Podcasts can be a very effective brand marketing strategy.

• And last but not the least, you can put an innovative and contemporary touch to your existing business.

Some websites that host podcasts

There are a lot of websites that offer free or paid hosting of your podcasts, such as Blip.tv, Libsyn, Podbean, Podcastfm, Switchpod, Jellycast, etc., to name a few.

NOTE: Podcasting is a Web 2.0 technology.

How safe is Orkut, or for that matter, any other socializing website?

2007-09-21T11:11:00.000+05:30

The latest “in” thing at MS in the present date is Web 2.0, Web 2.0 and… well, Web 2.0!! This morning I was pondering over the ways in which this technology has become such an inevitable part of our lives that we don’t even realize we are a part of it. Take Orkut for example. It is the rage these days, especially among the young crowd. No doubt it has shrunk thousands of miles between loved ones, be it across the seven seas, but somehow today, the only thing that is flashing across my mind’s eye is the stories revolving around murders and conspiracies ignited by Orkut that were on TV some time back.

As an Orkut user, I want to know the do’s and don’ts of it. And I’m sure numerous others like me are concerned all over the world. So, here’s an attempt at answering my own question in the comment posted to the article below.

The Crime Scene

Orkut is a highly popular socializing portal today. Naturally, it has gradually become a target for anti-social entities in the like of hackers, spammers and freaks. The current scenario is such that the number of cases of information theft, cloned and fake profiles is on the rise.

To save ourselves from being ignorant victims, there are certain things we should know.

Orkut is offering an array of functionalities:

• Personal Profile wherein a part of information can be made public or kept private.
• Profile Photo which is viewable by public.
• Photo Album which is viewable by public.
• Scrapbook with messages written by others for you. This is viewable to public.
• Testimonials which your friends write for you. This is also readable to public.
• Friends’ network which are available to public.
• Communities which are also available to public.

Orkut doesn’t offer:

• Protection of your profile from anonymous visitors.
• Protection of your scrapbook from anonymous visitors and scraps.
• Protection of your photographs from anonymous viewing/ downloading.
• Protection of your friends’ network and communities from anonymous visitors.

In a nutshell, your openly available personal information provides ample scope of misuse by others.

What attackers can do?

• Phone numbers can be misused for a number of purposes.
• Email ids can be hacked or spammed.
• Photographs can be misused.
• Personal data can be used to clone profiles.

Tips on protecting yourself from being a victim:

• Do not write your personal phone numbers anywhere on Orkut.
• If you have to send your personal details like phone numbers and email ids, use messages (these are personal) instead of scraps.
• Do not upload personal photographs in the album.
• If you have to upload your photos, use photos that have a long shot instead of close-ups.
• Never ever put your passport size photo as it can be easily forged.
• Be careful while adding a stranger to your friends’ network.
• Accept testimonials from people you know in real life.
• Go through a testimonial carefully before approving it.
• You can even delete a testimonial after having accepted it.
• Keep deleting scraps from your scrapbook that have personal information about you or your friends.
• Join a community only if you need it.
• Do not run after increasing the number of friends in your list or the number of scraps in your scrapbook. More the number, more insecure you are.
• Do not provide your pin code to public. It is very easy to locate you from this information.
• Never discuss intimate details about your family and friends anywhere on Orkut.

Always Remember: Technology per se is not good or bad, it is users themselves who make it so.

Web 2.0: The Modern Success Mantra

2007-09-20T01:16:00.000+05:30

During one of our brainstorming sessions at Modulus Systems today, we sat down to discuss what exactly makes a website Web 2.0; is it the concept of user interaction, or is it just use of a different generation of technologies, or is it a society thing, where interactivity of users is necessary?

After a long session and many to and fros, we all agreed to one factor that definitely separates a Web2.0 site from the crowd of look alikes. Earlier, webmasters used to add content to the website for others to read and respond. Probably ModulusSystems.com is an example.

A web site can be called Web 2.0 when it has all, or "almost all" content added by its users.

Examples are youtube.com, myspace.com, facebook.com, digg.com, orkut.com and others.

We visited Alexa.com - A website that ranks websites based on how many people use them. What Alexa does is, it encourages you to install the Alexa toolbar on your browser. At present it supports Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. This toolbar sends small snippets of data to the Alexa server, telling it which websites the user is surfing and by gradually increasing their rankings. Today millions of users use the Alexa toolbar to view international ranks of websites and in return give away their surfing details, thus contributing to making Alexa ranks of websites even more genuine. However, I do not believe that a web site ranked 344,000 is necessarily visited by more people than the one ranked 350,000. It purely depends on people who have the toolbar installed, and not everyone in general. Thats one reason why US websites have higher ranks than websites from the rest of the world.

Having said that, I do believe that for the top few websites, Alexa rankings do tell a near-accurate story.

Here's the list of top 10 websites according to Alexa:

Out of the top 10 websites today, a massive 5 are Web 2.0 sites and rest are search engines. If you take the top 15, you'll see another 4 out of 5 joining the list.

Web 2.0 is the new success mantra and with new user-user interaction websites launching everyday, I'm sure some cool Web 2.0 projects are under development somewhere, waiting to come out and add to our present world of optimised surfing - The Web 2.0 way.

Anyone for Social Bookmarking?

2007-09-19T11:40:00.000+05:30

Social bookmarking is an exciting and quite powerful tool of Web 2.0. The system through which internet users can save, share, organize and search web pages is known as social bookmarking. Users can save links to (or ‘bookmark’) their favourite web pages. They can do so for their own use or for sharing with an e-community – an online community of people or groups. The individual concerned or the persons who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them as lists or tags arranged either by chronology or by category or both.

Social Bookmarking Websites

In order to create social bookmarks, one needs to sign up with a social bookmarking website. Social bookmarking websites are sites which allow users to save their favourite web pages as bookmarks by adding tags of their own making. Individual bookmarks can be designated the status of public or private entities. Moreover, there are some bookmarking sites that keep checking the saved URLs from time to time and let the user know when a particular link has stopped functioning.

Visitors to a social bookmarking site can search for content through a number of registers such as keywords, tags, recency and popularity. Social bookmarking is a secular service, open to one and all.

Major Players in the Social Bookmarking Field

In the web world, social bookmarking is quite a recent phenomenon. It dates back a couple of years from now when sites like del.icio.us and furl came up. At present, numerous social bookmarking sites have mushroomed the internet, each with their own unique features. Some major names in this field today are digg, reddit, linkroll, de.lirio.us (an open source version of del.icio.us), technorati, blogcatalog, bloghub, citeulike and simpy.

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

• Users can access their bookmarks more easily as the tags are all generated by themselves.

• Users can access their bookmarks from any computer in the world.

• Users can collaborate with each other by sharing important information.

• Users can promote their business amidst millions of people across the globe.

• Users can direct more traffic towards their websites.

• The link popularity of a particular website rises as search engines do index these incoming links to it.

Are you game?

Folksonomy Unveiled

2007-09-18T15:37:00.000+05:30

What is Folksonomy?

Folksonomy is the process of collaborative creation and management of tags in order to categorize content on the web. Also known as social tagging, social indexing, collaborative tagging or social classification, folksonomy is a taxonomy that is managed by users themselves. Folksonomies became popular with the advent of social software applications in the like of social bookmarking sites. Websites that utilize folksonomy are based on Web 2.0 principles that facilitate easy participation by users.

Origin

Folksonomy = Folk + Taxonomy

The term “folksonomy” was coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004 during a discussion on information architecture mailing list.

What are Tag Clouds?

A system by which the classifying tags are presented to the user in a visual format. This is done in such a way that the most used tags in a particular folksonomy are shown in a bold size.

Folksonomy versus Taxonomy

Folksonomy essentially subverts the status quo of taxonomic classification in the earlier w3 setup. It breaks free from the hitherto monopoly of search engines to provide the user with resources of information. Sites based on folksonomy provide facilities to the user for creating and utilizing tags. In fact, folksonomy creation and search parameters are quite different from those of taxonomies in the World Wide Web protocols.

Merits of Folksonomy

• It becomes easier to search for and navigate over content.

• Categories of information are more accessible to end-users.

Web 2.0 – An Effective Business Tool

2007-09-18T11:05:00.000+05:30

The entrepreneur world has always hailed the web as an important marketing tool. But the fact remains that it is quite hard though not impossible, for companies that are little-known to attract potential customers to their websites. Certainly, Search Engine Optimization techniques and things like pay-per-click campaigns lend a helping hand to entrepreneurs, still a vast pool of customers remains to be tapped.

That’s where a whole new world of technologies fits in the prevailing gap-tooth of marketing and business promotion. A static website of yore has evolved into a dynamic experience, keeping customers involved with the products and services on offer in a number of interesting ways – audio, video, images and a whole body of community-generated content. You name it; we have it – thanks to Web 2.0.

The new low-cost promotion tools powered by Web 2.0 help businesses reach out to customers on an ever-widening scale. Statistics reveal that more than 400,000 small and medium business companies all over the world are already using two of the best known new-age tools – blogs and webcasts. Another 260,000 businesses are taking advantage of podcasts. In other words, about 660,000 entrepreneurs across the globe are enhancing their business reach through the latest web developments.

The next in the line could very well be YOU!

Web 2.0 – The Latest Buzz in Internet Technology

2007-09-17T18:10:00.000+05:30

Following is an attempt at laying bare facts about Web 2.0 that are of help not only to professionals in this field but to laymen internet users as well. Being first in this series, this article will soon be followed by informational pieces that reveal the truth about some of the other mysteries of the internet fast emerging as a result of constant innovation in the web world. Happy reading!

Web 2.0 Defined

Web 2.0 is the second generation of web-based communities and services that promotes collaboration among users. Apparently, Web 2.0 looks like a new version of the W3 but in reality, Web 2.0 is an evolved way in which software developers and end-users partake of the web as a platform. Web based services such as social book-marking sites (for example, Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit), blogs (quite becoming a rage these days!), community sites (such as Orkut, Hi5), RSS Feeds, etc. being an offshoot of Web 2.0, have transformed the way the Internet is being used today.

Some more pointers towards Web 2.0

o Content is the focal point.

o Users can have complete control over their data and content.

o The web interface is interactive in nature and quite user-friendly.

o The facility of social-networking is available.

Technological Features

o Rich internet application techniques, mostly Ajax based

o Micro-formats and semantically valid HTML mark-up

o Cascading style sheets that demarcate presentation from content

o ‘Folksonomies’ (in the like of Tags and Tag Clouds)

o Syndication and aggregation of data through Atom feeds or RSS

o URLs that are readable by human users

o Wiki software that provides forums for displaying user-generated content

o Content publishing through weblogs

Latest in the world of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 now has gone global! It has expanded its wings from the cosy environs of the San Francisco Bay area to newer horizons worldwide. In the first half of 2007, the number of global deals on Web 2.0 has witnessed a rise of 14 percent. Moreover, Web 2.0 technology has increased the economic value of the web manifold.

Google Over the Moon!

2007-09-17T11:06:00.000+05:30

What?!!

Google has recently sponsored the Lunar X-Prize – awards worth $30 million for landing a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon.

The deal is that the rover will land on the moon and flash data and video back to earth. The first team to do so will bag a 20 million US dollar prize. On the other hand, the first runner up will get 5 million USD, and there will be one more bonus prize of the same value. A number of teams around the globe will be participating in the competition.

Why over the moon?

According to Google, this move will encourage breakthroughs in technology, at the same time inspiring the young internet-generation crowd towards undertaking more of technical challenges. This is also aimed at renewing public interest in the fields of computer science, engineering and maths.

Moon 2.0

The competition will have a great emphasis on the Internet, so the nickname Moon 2.0!

Implications for the Internet

The Internet will –

a) Bring the competition on a worldwide scale.

b) Provide cash to spur innovation and experimentation.

c) Drive dot-com tycoons into sponsoring the contenders.

d) Instigate the next technological revolution.

10- 9- 8- 7…

Well, the countdown has begun…

Modulus Systems Internet and Technology Blog

2007-09-16T00:00:00.000+05:30

Welcome to the Modulus Systems Internet and Technology Blog