Let’s say you have a 15 minutes long video interview but you just want to point someone to a certain question which is at 11 min 24 sec. All you’ll have to do is to add this bit at the end of the video URL:  ” #t=11m24s ” , where “t” it’s obviously “time”, “11m” the minute of the video and “24s” the seconds.

Here is an example with one of the latest Matt’s videos which is 3 minutes and 30 seconds long but we just wanted to go at 2 minutes 06 seconds :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMfWPWUh5uU#t=2m06s

Where you used to search for an exact neighbourhood Chinese, now you can just put in Chinese restaurant and be inundated with results. All of these results may be great if you want a tour of all the Chinese restaurants in a given area, but not so good if all you are searching for is Mr Pang’s. You do have the option to then refine your search using the exact area and the exact name and when you do, you get a change in the dots.

Although initial searches may bring up a lot of stuff that you won’t need, a lack of dots on a particular business could help those looking to start up something new. If there are less dots for shoe factories, for example, then this might be the place to start hitting the leather. The new version may attract some spam but it may also bring some gold for those businesses that are prospecting an area.

Synthasite, for those who haven’t heard, creates web building tools to be used by people who are looking to develop an e-commerce site – these sites are powered by Paypal and need little technical knowledge to set up. The company say that their aim is to help people set up websites so that they can join the e-commerce trend. You do have to wonder how realistic all this is when businesses around the world are either closing, or laying off employees on a daily basis. Where are the future customers of these future e-commerce sites expected to come from.

If you want to try YouTube in your marketing efforts then you will be more successful if you have a catchy title and use your keywords carefully in your description. For many people YouTube has become one of the webs favourite social sites and if you want to get your videos noted and ranked then you should participate in the community.

Google’s video gives you a taste of the social bar in action along with installation instructions. Google announced the launch of the social bar on its new social web blog, which tells people, “News and updates about Google products that are helping to make the web more social” For some reason, Google sees it as their mission to help internet users to socialise. Whether this will be a success remains to be seen, some sceptics think that Google should leave the social side alone and get on with what it knows best about search. It would seem that Google’s social bar is seen as just another step in the process of trying to perfect their search product.

If you think that all this makes the whole process seem oversimplified, then you would be right. In the current climate it is all too easy to get carried away by the day to day tasks of keeping your business running at a certain level; when this happens there is little time for innovation. When you don’t have time for innovation then you leave the field open to your competitors. The only way around this, is to try and set aside a little time each day to work on your search campaign, otherwise, it will be some brand other than yours that is perceived as the industry leader.

From an seo perspective, the shorter and simpler you make the URL, the better it is. Take this site for instance, http://zyas.org, it really couldn’t be any less complicated. No matter what your website is about, the short and simple rule always applies. If you are lamenting the fact that you’ve got yourself a long and complicated URL that can’t be changed, then think again. There are special tools available on the internet, in fact wordpress has one, that will let you reshape your URL into something short and simple. Do this and your site will fare much better in the seo stakes.

One of the problems with eye tracking studies is the fact that not everyone moves their eyes at the same rate or focuses their eyes in the same way, which raises questions as to how interested the person really is in a particular area. What Google is trying to ascertain are which search results tend to attract a user’s eyes more than others. Results so far, are similar to the results of any aspect of onscreen reading, the eyes focus on the first lines and attention begins to dwindle as the eyes go down the page.

Contrary to popular opinion, results also showed that people’s eyes tended to focus less on images and more on text. Search results loading time can have an effect on a user’s focus and that can lead to greater attention on the first line. How useful the results are remain to be seen.

Some people logged into GWT and sent several messages to Google staff asking what the hell is that, some others joined the webmaster forums trying to find an answer, probably thousands called their web hosts screaming on the phone, others just quickly remembered there is life outside Google and used Yahoo or MSN…some people celebrated (Yahoo staff) some others probably had suicide attempts (Google crew)…and so on…

Today Google, the indestructible search engine, got sick and suddenly the internet froze for about 45 minutes. Today Yahoo and MSN probably had the biggest traffic since the pre-Google era. Was the “This site may harm your computer” bug just an error or was it planned? Oh, yeah…I’ve heard this question already…don’t know what to say…perhaps we should try to understand the winners and the loosers of these 45 minutes.

Google is getting weirder everyday and that’s a fact. First they penalised lots of old and trusted sites, replacing them in SERPS with silly MFA’s and spammy blogs, then they started to manually adjust the Page Rank of just about any site they liked, cutting even more for themselves at Adsense and now they screw up big time with their beloved search engine. Here is a picture for eternity…oh man, I enjoy this one!

Google may harm your computer

Now let’s see the winners and loosers of this funny bug. Certainly the happiest on the web were Yahoo and MSN as they’ve got quite a lot of traffic. The other big winner of the day is Google, right Google. How come? Well, I forgot to mention that the only sites without the “This site may harm your computer” tag during these 45 minutes were the paid ads so obviously the people clicked on all the paid ads like mad since they were the only “clean” sites when googling for something…all the others being potentially infected, right? I’d say Google made big money these 45 minutes, not sure if the advertisers may be considered winners, some of them probably made a nice profit while the others lost big money just because people clicked their ads to see if they are fine and why they are fine comparing to their own sites in organic results.

Loosers of the day? All the publishers since their websites “may harmed your computer” so no visitor was able to check them out and obviously you, me, and all the other people willing to chill out in front of the computer. Other loosers? The honest businesses selling their products or services through one or more websites.

Right…I have another picture for you.   The USA.gov site may harm your computer! Hehe…I would expect to see that little tag on Google.tb but not just everywhere!  Google.tb? The taleban version of Google eventually…

USA.gov may harm your computer

Another great thing about Chrome is the address bar doubles as both an address bar, and a search engine. If you type an address directly into the Chrome address bar, you’ll be taken to that website immediately. However, if you type a few random search terms, such as “IM Clients”, you’ll be taken to a google search page with the results of your search.

Chrome also features a homepage which remembers your browsing history and keeps your most accessed sites on the front page in the form of a thumbnail. You can easily access these sites by clicking the picture on your homepage. In addition to this sort of “speed dial”, Google Chrome also keeps track of your bookmarks, your recent searches, and your most recently closed tabs.

For those that might worry that the speed dial method of keeping track of visited websites is a bit scary on shared computers and such, Chrome allows you to create a tab which can then be designated as “Incognito.” Any website that you visit in this tab while it is in incognito mode is not recorded on your computer, any where. This is great for keeping surprise purchases and other things from loved ones whom you might share your computer with.

I think Chrome has a great future as long as Google won’t go on the “don’t be evil” route as they did in Knol’s case and several other times. Obviously they’ll have to keep on improving as there is still a big difference between Chrome and the other two giants : IE and Firefox.