Google announced a new strategic inititaive for development of electricity from renewable energy sources. Electricity produced this way would be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The initiative, refered to as RE<C, is to be focused on advanced solar power, wind power, enhanced geothermal systems and other breakthrough technologies. Engineers are getting hired as well as energy experts to lead research and development work for the RE<C. In 2008 Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development in renewable energy resources. They are also contemplating investing hundreds of millions in renewable energy projects that will generate positive returns.

Larry Page, Google co-founder, said:

There has been tremendous work already on renewable energy. Technologies have been developed that can mature into industries capable of providing electricity cheaper than coal. Solar thermal technology, for example, provides a very plausible path to providing renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are also very interested in further developing other technologies that have potential to be cost-competitive and green. We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there.

Read more about this on Google Press Center.

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Live.com announced on their Live Search Webmaster Center Blog that Webmaster Tools is now officially open to all webmasters and professionals. Webmaster Tools was until recently in “private beta”, and only those who registered earlier could get an account and use the tools. If you haven’t registered for the private beta, now is the chance to open an account and start using Webmaster Tools. There isn’t too much to see there right now, and everything pretty much boils down to being able to check for crawling errors and submit a sitemap for faster/easier crawling. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on the site in the future.

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This is different, I must admit. A self powered dynamic architecture building. The video is catchy enough by itself, but the technology explained, if indeed it comes to life, will be a breakthrough. I especially like the energy supply solution - wind turbines embedded between floors in horizontal planes. The power generators will be able to output about a minimum of 40 MW of power, enough to power several buildings. The first, in a series of buildings to be built around the world, will be erected in Dubai (refered to by some as the “city of the future”). Well, they’ve certainly got the cash to make it happen.

The dynamic architecture concept was introduced by David Fisher, a Florentine (Florence, Italy) architect.

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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted this interesting video presentation featuring Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team), in which he explains in detail a typical search result. At first I thought this is pretty much a basic explanation for those still not familiar with the way Google shows results, but I discovered this video is actually very useful even for those more experienced, if you know how to listen that is. I like the part about snippets and the additional info within it and how they capture that info from a web page.

Here’s the link to the post. This video is the first of more to come in the future.

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Which blogging platform do you use? If you’re using WordPress, like I do, than it would be useful to know some tips on how to make sure your blog content is more visible to the search engines. Joost de Valk wrote an interesting post on his blog discussing things to do to make your WP blog more SEO friendly. These are the tips discussed:

• Improve your titles, meta descriptions, and “more” texts
• Pick the correct permalink structure and slug
• Improve your template
• Remove duplicate content
• Interlink related posts
• Create linkable content!

Read in more detail on his blog. I especially liked the remove duplicate content advice. It seems simple enough, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a great portion of bloggers ignore duplicate content on their blog because of lack of understanding the way WordPress creates categories. Joost aims to continue this post with another one discussing the next step in WordPress SEO, so there will be more tips coming our way.

The fact that these are WordPress tips doesn’t mean they are not useful for other blogging platforms. On the contrary, almost all tips discussed can be implemented on blogs powered by different blogging software.

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I read a great post on TechCrunch about how to optimize your viral YouTube videos to achieve high popularity. The author, Dan Ackerman Greenberg, shares some very interesting tips on what needs to be done to make your video stand out from all the rest, and there are tens of thousands of videos uploaded (!)daily. After reading this, I realized it’s not very easy and requires some in depth knowledge and skill. Here a few teasers as to what is talked about in this post:

• Not all viral videos are what they seem
• Content is NOT King
• Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
• Title Optimization
• Thumbnail Optimization
• Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
• Releasing all videos simultaneously
• Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
• Metrics/Tracking: How to measure effectiveness

Whoa! SEO is complicated, but this is getting there. I am sure this is not even close to everything there is to say about this subject. With the expansion of web video as a marketing tool, there will surely be a lot more to learn about this in the coming months and years.

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Flashphone is a Russian based service that offers users free phone calls over the Internet using their Flash web-based software. Free calls can be made towards a limited number of countries, listed on the site. The list is quite large, although I couldn’t find Serbia on it, even though it’s listed in the country list when registering to use the service. The service is still in Beta so there will be more developments over time, and I’m guessing the list of countries available for free phone calls will expand.

There is a limitation to using the service. Each user gets three calls per day, with each call limited to three minutes, for now according to the site. The interface is quite simple - it looks like standard mobile phone layout (numbers and function buttons). Even though the design is a bit too simplistic, I don’t find it to be disagreeable. The fact that it’s web based and relies on software (Flash) available on almost all computers attached to the Web, makes Flash Phone quite interesting. Having to have your browser open all the time in order to make calls may be a small negative characteristic, but at the same time I don’t think that is a big issue. In the end, you have to launch something to use the service, so it may as well be a browser, why not? Skype is different in that aspect as it is a separate application that requires installation on the system, and is platform dependent (special versions for different OS), while Flash Phone is web based, and thus platform independent. All you need is a properly setup headset and microphone, and you’re set.

The service currently has some 1850 registered users. I’m expecting this number to grow drastically as the services gets coverage over the coming weeks. If it proves to work ok, I see no reason for it not to gain a lot of popularity. Well, of to use my three calls for today!

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Content presented through Flash is always inferior to content presented through standard xHTML regarding search engine indexing and ranking. Search engines like and are able to index content in textual form. Flash has always had this drawback, since its content is compiled within the SWF file and is thus unavailable to search engines. There are methods for bypassing this problem, most common being parallel xHTML and Flash content, where the actual indexable content is shown inside the source code of the page formatted using standard xHMTL, while it’s visually presented through Flash to the website visitor. The search engine sees the source and indexes it, while visitors get the benefit of rich visual presentation from Flash. Theoretically, as long as the content presented through both methods is coherent (similar/same), search engines will not give you any trouble. I read a post on Ajaxian today about what’s possibly a break through regarding the Flash content indexing problem.

SWFAddress, a developer library made by Asual, makes it possible to do deep linking within Flash content, or in other words it is possible to link to specific state of a Flash object on a page. There are plenty of example on Asual.com, so I won’t go into too much detail here, except to emphasize the SEO example which shows how SWFAddress helps developers get their Flash content indexed by search engines. The address is formed in a specific way, which with the help of the library, gets interpreted by the application, and returns the appropriate content which is embedded somewhere inside the Flash object. The example URL is:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/
Within it, there is the “portfolio” subsection which in turn has its own subcontent, for example subcontent “1″:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/1/?desc=true&year=2001

I am not sure, but I suppose the URL tail (#/portfolio/1/?desc=true&year=2001) gets passed as parameters to the application residing under “/seo” with the usage of mod_rewrite, and according to these parameters the application serves the proper state of the Flash object, this time pertaining to Portfolio number 1. Although the URL could have been formed a bit better, like:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/1/desc-true-year-2001
for example, to avoid passing of parameters within the URL, which search engines, although getting better at, don’t really like to parse that much, the whole thing works well. Asual give search engine search examples with these pages indexed and shown in search results. So, it works. This is great news, since the Flash content indexing issue has bothered developers for a long time, and has prevented some interesting and informative sites from getting indexed by the search engines.

Head on over to Asual.com and take a look at the examples (and there are plenty of them for different technologies).

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Suffering from computer desktop clutter? This is definitely not the way to handle that problem, although it’s quite an imaginative way of physically storing documents in your workplace. I guess if you have a wall big enough, and a reasonably dynamic document generation, this might actually help you organize your documents. The whole thing is their idea, and you can actually buy these wall desktop folders for 29 EUR (about $38) If nothing else, this would be a great way to bring a little life into the old office.

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TokBox announced a new development. They now offer a group chat option for up to 6 simultaneous connections. This is currently available on Meebo. A change like this is welcome, especially after a great start by TokBox in mid-October.

There are a couple of other changes as well, such as improved video settings, immediate callback function, higher definition image quality, improved stability and speed.

TokBox already has an API which allows site visitors to talk to each other through the hosting site, without software downloads. If the API includes the group chat feature any time soon, than it will become a whole lot more useful.

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