Netscape announced it will be moving its social news section to a new web address - www.propeller.com . While the new address is still not working, Netscape said it’s “working behind the scenes” to make the transition to the new site seamless. The launch of Propeller.com will be announced in time on the Netscape Blog.

Netscape social news allows users to share and communicate with each other around the news stories of interest. Netscape portal has also changed address and can now be seen on netscape.aol.com.

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Operating a dynamic website? This might be interesting. The duplicate content issue is a well known problem when it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked in the search engines. There are many solutions such as URL rewriting (mostly on Unix/Linux, alhtough there are ways to make it work on Windows), sessions and cookies, URL parsing which is pretty much a variation of URL rewriting…

There is a post about this on Google Webmaster Central. The thing that caught my eye in the post is the following:

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Item (2) is interesting. Unless you actually show different content when your page receives a different value for a parameter, which pretty much means there is no duplicate content, why would Google need to select what it thinks is the “best” representative page for a particular URL cluster. Yahoo allows webmasters to tell it what their choice for the representational URL is. By relying on Google to choose the “best” URL you actually give up any control that Google just gave you:

1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters — keep the URL as clean as possible.
2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can’t guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap’s URL in search results, it’s helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

So if I am not guaranteed to have my URL choice shown in search results, what’s the point of having the option to explicitly state that URL in the submitted site map? Kinda reminds me of the door dilemma - “damned if you enter, damned if you don’t enter”.

The whole story revolves around having your incoming link juice distributed over multiple variations of what’s essentially the same URL. So 100 links towards a “clean” URL will be distributed to all the URL parameter variations, and decrease incoming link value, which is not what you want, especially after all the hard work associated with link building.

In the end, it all comes down to is to try to use URL rewriting even if it takes a hosting solution change. Everything else is an unsure fix, complicates any site development, and will produce unwanted results later.

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Here’s a pop-quiz - how well do you know your SEO stuff? There are 75 multiple choice questions. The score you achieve will give you an idea about the level of your SEO knowledge, although you’d really have to take the quiz when you are concentrated and rested, after wake-up coffee After having completed the quiz, you’ll be presented with a list of all the questions with correct and wrong answers (wrong answers accompanied by right answers naturally), and in fact, this is the most important part of the whole thing, apart from link-bait content which will bring links to SEOMoz. Copy/paste or save the page and you’ve got yourself a neat list of good SEO best practices for future reference and education (you get links pointing to online resources about some of the concepts in the quiz). Great stuff!

SEO Professional - 74%
Are you an SEO Expert?

I haven’t had my wake-up coffee yet when I took the test

Well, gotta go study. How about you, what was your score on the SEO quiz?

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Yahoo! Small Business rolled out a new feature that will make it easier for customers to submit and authenticate their web sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Pretty much all you have to do is enable “sitemap.xml” and your site gets submitted to Y!SE automatically.

All new stores and existing stores that have “sitemap.xml” enabled will also have access to a toolkit within Site Explorer. After a few hours from enabling stores will have the ability to locate indexed pages and the links that point to them, and also to delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs.

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Would you hang out in a big entertainment mall, having the freedom to download music, video and other digital content for free onto your favorite storage device, while sipping on a smoothie in a relaxed environment equipped with iMac hubs? Sounds cool. This is a new concept introduced by HMV as it makes a move into the future with a whole new approach. The new megastore will be a place where people can enjoy all the latest digital content and be entertained. A collapsing CD market has brought a drastic drop in HMV’s profits, so this is a refreshing change that HMV hopes will help boost its revenue. After six months of tweaking, the new solution has been opened as a “compelling multi-channel social shopping space and experience”. The new store, measuring some 8,000 ft² (750 m²), contains digital sale-spots that enable the customers to download songs and videos for free, onto their portable memory devices. The content can then easily be transfered to mobile phones, MP3 players or PCs.

There is the “social hub”, which has iMacs which are available for visitors to use for browsing the latest music and entertainment web sites. A mini Apple store will sell latest iPods and accessories. Digital radios and DVDs, as well as other accessories, are for sale with special deals for HMV customers exclusively.

In case you get thirsty or tired, there is the Lovejuice bar serving freshly made smoothies at spot that has been created especially for laptop users. There is plenty more in store, which you can see here in more detail.

Will visitors actually spend money in this place remains to be seen. There are plenty of services on the Internet selling digital content downloads, and you can get them from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection. HMV’s approach is better in my opinion, than making even more CDs with questionably useful content, as is the case with the latest music industry idea called ringles.

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Would you buy a CD with three singles and a ring tone? The music industry certainly hopes so. It has decided to wake up and do something old new. The latest thing to hit the music stores will be the ringle - a CD format containing three songs (a latest hit, a remix, and an older track) and a ring tone in slip-sleeve cover. The new product is expected to retail for $5.98 or $6.98, and that means about a 33% profit margin, with wholesale price at around $4.

According to Reuters, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which came up with ringle, and Universal Music Group are going to be the first to roll out ringles. Sony BMG will release 50 titles during October and November, while UMG will have somewhere between 10 to 20 titles ready by then. The “ringle” name has been approved by the Recording Industry Association of America, and there is an industry wide logo to help with branding. Only Sony thus far can distribute ring tones, while the other major players will have to seek deals with operators.

Music on CDs has been retailing for prices much lower compared to a few years ago, mainly due to various new ways of digital distribution (mostly through the Internet). Personally, I wouldn’t buy ringles for one reason at least - the ring tone on the CD and the couple of songs you will eventually have to move to your preferred listening device, whether it’s your MP3 player, or your mobile phone or computer. The CD will be virtually useless, except maybe as a collector’s item, or original backup storage. There will probably be millions of copies in the stores, and that’s millions of pieces of plastic, metal and other materials that will eventually find their way into the environment, if not recycled or disposed of properly. Would you buy ringles?

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Delicious has decided to change clothes and style, but is that all? There seems to be plenty more to this change than at first meets the eye. To sum it up, here is what’s new or changed according to Michael Arringtong over at TechCrunch:

• New Interface
• New Features
• Navigation
• Bookmarks
• Side Bar
• Action Box

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Energy from waves? Well, it’s quite simple really. The concept is that vertical motion of the waves is used to fill the floating hydraulic power plant with water which then interacts with a hydraulic turbine, which turns a power generator producing electric current. Finavera Renewables Inc., a company based in , has hit a significant milestone with the deployment and commissioning of the AquaBuOY 2.0 wave energy converter off the coast of Newport, Oregon. This represents a significant overall development, one that will allow for the completion of a bigger plan to introduce commercial exploitation of wave generated electricity in Oregon by 2010. Read the full press release here (PDF).

This may be a better alternative than the concept proposed by Marine Current Turbines, although their concept harnesses the energy of the underwater currents in the ocean. Aquabouy is definately environment friendlier, since it operates in the vertical direction, without the large disruption effect on the surrounding space (there are no huge blades turning in deep water without a protecting cover). Finavera plans to design generator arrays on the ocean surface, whereby a single production array could produce as much as 100 MW of power, which is quite impressive. Naturally, there should be close to no pollution at all, as the power units are quite small and simple.

It seems renewable energy has really gained momentum. The forthcoming months and years will almost certainly bring even more innovations in this field and give hope for a cleaner future.

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There are so many things going on on the Web right now that one can’t help but wonder as to what the future holds for the Web. Ranging from rich internet apps to on-demand content services and social networks. Will the Internet be a drastically different environment, say 10 years from now? Probably, but in which direction are we heading right now is hard to say. I hope we are heading for an improved web experience, an online environment in which we will enjoy the benefits of open platforms and integration, OS and device independence, and tourism in the Solar System (well, why not?). Maybe The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a good metaphor for an all-in-one future web derived device/platform (has everything, shows everything, knows everything, connects to everything).

Richard MacManus, over at Read Write Web, wrote a great piece on the future trends on the Web, in which he gives 10 trends he thinks are going to be interesting to follow in the coming years. I’ll just recap the trends in shorter form here:

• Semantic Web
• Artificial Intelligence
• Virtual Worlds
• Mobile
• Attention Economy
• Web Sites as Web Services
• Online Video / Internet TV
• Rich Internet Apps
• International Web
• Personalization

I’d also add:

• omni-digitization - bringing digital technology, and the internet, to every corner of the Earth; there have been many initiatives over the past years that are trying to bring the benefits of the Internet to people all over the world that are, economically or otherwise, information technology impaired.
• eco-friendlier IT - gradual transformation of all administration to a digital form that would eventually eliminate the use of paper and other natural resource dependent materials for accounting, administration, commerce…

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Facebook decided to make available Facebook user profile information to the search engines. According to the official Facebook blog, the amount of information that would be visible is less than a new user would be able to see in other profiles right after sign-up. Anyway, the idea is that Facebook wants to help people who are not on Facebook find you, and what better way than to allow search engines to index this information and show it in search results.

Public Search Listings will be allowed in a few weeks, but they will only be allowed for user profiles where the individual security and privacy settings have been set accordingly. Allowing your profile to be available to the search engines should help you be more easily found on Google, Live, Yahoo… Facebook hopes this will allow more people to get in touch more easily without compromising personal information.

Here is a screen capture collage that should help you see the upcoming change:

Facebook has been criticized for being a walled garden endeavor, which doesn’t allow API access to only a small part of its content that can be shown on other sites. Meanwhile, Facebook applications seem to be becoming the “next big thing” in social networking and the internet in general, allowing plenty of diversity, but within the Facebook platform. By allowing profile information to be indexed by search engines Facebook may have created yet another influx channel. There will be millions of pages in search indexes about Facebook users (and Facebook) for searches related to personal names and profiles. In the future, I expect Facebook will probably open other privacy regulated content for indexing which would yield another couple of million pages in search indexes.

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