After having taken offline the only tool on Live.com, the link operator, in March this year, Live is back with a promising announcement. They’re putting together Webmaster Portal, a special place for webmasters where there will be tools and information about Live SEO. Initially, here’s what we’ll get:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

The tools are expected to be available publicly this late Fall, but you can sign-up for the beta program right now if you want to dive in right away.

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It’s a twin underwater turbine generator that should generate about 1.2 MW of electrical energy. The generators are to be located off the coast of Northern Ireland, and will be a significant demonstration of tidal power conversion technology.

There had been many variants of tidal power turbine plants over the years, ranging from floating pool collectors, closed off bay hydro-power plants, to wind-turbine like systems such as the one mentioned to be installed in Northern Ireland. The problem so far has been limited power generation and rather large construction cost. Additionally, there are ecological problems, as these machines render a significant surrounding area very unfavorable towards wild life.

Marine Current Turbines, a company based in Bristol, UK, which is the author of the underwater turbine project in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, claims its turbines will not effect the ecosystem in any significant way. Effect on the ecosystem is a common problem for all tidal power turbine projects, and has thus far been probably the biggest obstacle for this technology. The turbines themselves, are to be very similar to wind-turbines, with impeller diameter of up to 20 m, and no more than 20 RPM. The twin turbines will basically sit on a wing hanged on a huge pillar embedded deep into the sea bed. The whole setup will rotate to capture the current as it hits the turbines, and thus give optimal performance at all times.

This is a test project, but Marine Current Turbines is planning on building turbine farms later on, that altogether could generate up to 20% of UK’s electricity needs, which is impressive.

[ Via Newsscientist ]

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Facebook seems to be planning an ad platform that would use a system similar to those already used by other search properties, such as Google, to show targeted ads on its pages. Basically, marketers will be a chance to show ads based on the information users reveal about themselves on the Facebook site. This is a priority plan for Facebook, and the first basic version of this system is to be unveiled late this fall. The plan itself is still in a very early stage though.

Facebook hopes to refine the upcoming ad system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in before they have actually mentioned an area of interest in their profile or actions on Facebook. Facebook acknowledged the plan but didn’t specify any details about the new system. There are indications from people familiar with the plan that the company is aiming to create a similar system to Google’s AdWords, allowing advertisers to place ads next to regular search results.

There has been a lot of hype about Facebook, with opinions ranging from “it will only get bigger” to “the hype will die down”. This new move by Facebook clearly shows the way the company is aiming to go. Indeed, with the number of new subscribers growing every day, and with some 33 million users already, Facebook has something to look forward to with the new ad plan. There is a lot of revenue potential, and with proper targeting, meybe some really good results for future advertisers on Facebook.

Via Wall Street Journal and Reuters.

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Microsoft announced it will release Content Ads within its AdCenter to users in the US. Microsoft Content Ads is a system that allows you to place content targeted ads on the Microsoft network. The Microsoft network includes many sites such as MSN Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows Marketplace. Microsoft says they will include other properties in the MSN network over time. Users will be able to control the price for the ads as well as where they will appear on the network.

This may be a very interesting development, since now Microsoft will be offering something Google has done for several years with AsSense. This move puts Microsoft in the ballpark with Google, which may in turn produce positive developments. The two will have to compete for user attention which in the end will benefit the end users.

Read in more detail on AdCenter Blog.

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There is a new great addition to Google Earth called Sky. The Google Earth team have decided to let us look away from our planet, out into the open universe. The latest version of Google Earth, version 4.2, now includes Sky, so go download it and take a peek.

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Ok, so Yahoo Search decided to try and make our lives a little easier by offering a way to tell Yahoo Search that dynamic parameters in the URL (the ?’s and &’s and this=that) can be ignored on request.

Today comes a new wave for search engines with the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer. The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

Hm, nice. But it gets even more interesting. You can actually give the dynamic URL parameter you want Yahoo to crawl your page(s) with. For example, leave the parameter “?show=full” in the URLs to be crawled.

• Login to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search.
• Add to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
• For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a ‘Dynamic URLs’ tab.
• On this tab you can enter parameters you want us to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
• Once you enter the parameter, we’ll show you the # of URLs we estimate will be affected.
• After you confirm the action, we’ll modify our crawler such that every time we see a URL from your site with that parameter, we’ll automatically rewrite it within our system as per your instruction.

Next Yahoo shows us why this may be useful for webmasters:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

See in more detail on Yahoo Search Blog.

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Google Maps has announced a new development. You can now embed a Google Map into a web page in 3 easy steps, similar to the way you embed YouTube videos.

Adding a map to your website or blog is now as easy as embedding a YouTube video. No programming skills are required, and there’s no need to sign up for a Maps API key. All it takes is three simple steps…

1. go to Google Maps and pull up the map
2. click link to this page and copy the appropriate generated embed code
3. paste the code into your page’s HTML code…

… and that’s it!

For example, I wish I was here:

View Larger Map

Yep, the SES San Jose.

In more detail on the new Google Map feature.

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The space agency and the Internet Archive said Tuesday that they plan to scan and archive more than 12 million NASA photographs and 100,000 hours of film and video footage for free access online, under an exclusive five-year agreement. As part of the deal, the Internet Archive will host the media album on a new Web site, Nasaimages.org.

NASA and the Internet Archive announced they plan to make available for free access on the web more than 12 million NASA photos and some 100000 hours of film and video recordings. This is to happen under an exclusive 5-year agreement. Part of the deal is also that Internet Archive will host this media album on a web site called Nasaimages.org.

I can’t wait to see this, being an amateur astronomer. Many of these photos and videos NASA already showed to the public, usually after a couple of years, and these were all scattered on the numerous specific NASA sites. This is a welcome development and will give many more people an opportunity to peek into the beauty and the unknown of outer space, but also in the other direction, towards Earth.

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Yahoo has created abundance of mobile content. Just check out mobile.yahoo.com, and you’ll get the picture. The latest addition to Yahoo’s mobile portfolio is Actionality, a mobile game ad company. Basically, Actionality puts ads into mobile games and applications as they are being downloaded from the web to a mobile phone. Having recently announced its expansion of mobile ad services with the inclusion of Vodafone, Yahoo has made an even clearer move towards the mobile ad direction with the acquisition of Actionality. Whether the mobile advertising is yet profitable remains to be seen. Results have shown that so far mobile ad usage has increased but with very questionable results. The whole platform is still in its infancy so it may just be to early to judge on it yet.

Mobile advertising is certainly a platform that will experience growth, especially with significant improvements in the mobile phone industry. With the ever increasing demand for smart phones on the market, and growing advancements in that area (just look at the number of new smart phones that come out every couple of weeks and advancements in software platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile) mobile advertising will surely gain a lot of momentum.

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I read an article on C|NET News about a Harvard University professor, Dale Jorgenson, who said we are not in the middle nor are heading towards a new dot com crash. Professor Jorgensen gave a presentation in Aspen, Colorado in which he explained why he feels another dot com crash just won’t happen.

The character of innovation in the U.S. economy has shifted drastically. It’s shifted from IT production, which predominated in the boom, to the successful utilization of IT.

As much as I agree that we have evolved from being IT obsessed to being IT conscious, the fact still remains that many of today’s projects that utilize IT (such as social networks) produce results that are also working against stability. There are many IT utilizations today being sold for amounts reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, and new, sometimes ridiculous ideas, get financed with equally ridiculous amounts of money. Sounds familiar? People are getting more and more obsessed by creating something new in the Web 2.0 environment that would generate ad space which in turn would generate a huge revenue (millions of dollars, while giving proportionately little value). An explosion of social networks and rich content, each similar but slightly different than the other, while bringing numerous advantages (new development platforms, business models, technological advancements), also brings a few disadvantages (large number of similar web sites, with only a few bringing true value, while the others simply generate ad space). Heading for another advertising heaven frenzy, similar in result, but different in trajectory? I think we very well may be.

Basing an assumption that everything is swell because we have shifted from IT obsession to IT utilization may not be enough. There are only so many new revolutionary things that can happen during a web evolution cycle. I already touched on this in this post. Each time the cycle ends (presuming this theory holds water), there is a more or less drastic change or accumulated effect that will shift the web evolution trajectory (think of it as a growing zig-zag pattern), and each time we will have accumulated knowledge that will spawn new developments in the next cycle. C’est la vie or rather c’est le web!

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