I read a post on Linux Devices showing what is going to be a new UMPC on the market very soon. It’s the Cloudbook (or CE1200V), manufactured by Everex. It’s basically a 7-inch screen ultra-portable computer, with some impressive characteristics, if they prove to be true. It’s going to pack a 1.2 GHz ultra-lov voltage processor and a reuglar hard disk. Unlike the EEE PC I wrote about weeks ago, which has 4 GB of solid-state disk (SSD) space, the Cloudbook will have 30 GB hard disk. According to Linux Devices, there will be a developer version of the new product, featuring a touch screen interface. The regular Cloudbook will ship mid-January for about $400, while the developer version will ship a bit earlier, probably at the very beginning of January.

I must say this UMPC looks a bit better than the EEE PC. Firstly, the screen actually occupies more space on the inside of the cover, while the EEE PC’s screen has big fat margins around it. The overall look is also more appealing, to me anyway, but I guess it’s best to wait for actual action shots. Here’s a couple of pictures I picked up on Linux Devices:

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YouTube announced the expansion of its Partner Program to include anyone from Canada and the US that has accumulated significant popularity with their video content on YouTube to join the program and share part of the revenue generated by ads shown with the videos. The program is to expand further in the future to include international members as well.

If you have some interesting video content that you think can generate enough interest on YouTube, now is the time to do something with it. Also, go through your old 8mm footage and transfer that to digital format as well. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something worthy of several thousand views on YouTube.

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Facebook is certainly all over the news these days, especially concerning privacy issues and some changes on the site oriented towards monetization its member potential. It’s been a while since I posted anything about Facebook as I think there’s simply too many unimportant news about it lately, that even the occasional good stuff gets lost somewhere in the midst of it all. Besides, there are plenty of blogs concentrating on Facebook, which channel pretty much all information you’ll ever need to know about it.

One such blog is Inside Facebook, where I read a post written by Justin Smith about 24 ways to use Facebook for marketing purposes. He takes a detailed approach to explaining pretty much all Facebook tools and how they can be used for viral marketing. Even if you’re only trying to get some idea about FB as a platform, this is useful because it gives a kind of an overview broken down into specific parts with short explanations of how each tool works. I was hoping for some more specific details based on marketers’ experience on Facebook so far (having followed some coverage on this recently, these experiences are mostly moderate if not poor), which would give a more detailed picture about the usefulness of certain interaction channels on Facebook compared to others, but none were given. Like Justin pointed out, it’s still a bit early and there is still plenty to learn about Facebook as a marketing platform in order to be able to judge its performance more objectively.

One thing is for sure, Facebook members are from all over the world, in growing numbers, on a platform that enables companies to communicate with everyone on a more personal level. With about 58 million members from almost every corner of the planet, this community should be considered in a company’s marketing plan. Trouble is, the specific way communication takes place on Facebook, through specific tools, represents an obstacle some companies still find hard to overcome, but since more marketers are getting involved in Facebook campaigns every day, the combined experience will soon be enough to get a stronger signal on the marketing radar.

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I’ve just read a great article on Wiep Knol’s site, in which he combined opinions of 17 link building professionals who have expressed their thoughts on factors that determine the value of a link. Every factor has been judged on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “no influence” and 5 being “very strong influence”. Each factor is assigned a final mark that represents the average from marks given by all participants. The article is abundant with explanations and comments, but most importantly it is a mixture of opinions by so many established link building experts, which should be an interesting read for anyone involved with SEO and link building. Oh, and finally, everyone seems to agree that Alexa rank is not important, or very remotely important at best, as a link value factor.

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Lachlan Hunt from ListAPart wrote a post explaining the new HTML5 specification with small examples of what is to come as changes are introduced into the existing HTML4 specification that has been around for ten years. What we can expect are more descriptiive tags, that should arguably make our lives easier. From what I saw the new tags are well thought out, although they are pretty tied to the usual blog-like site massively adopted today. Here’s a scheme of a layout done using the new tags:

It’s clear the new tags can replace the usual DIVs. The new tags allow for a prestructured markup and elements on the page with predetermined properties that will allow for more consistent design. Along with tags pertaining to text and images, there are also new tags that deal with video and audio content. This may prove to be a great development, since embedding multimedia content into a web page can be a somewhat tiresome job. There is plenty more information on the new HTML5 specification and examples here and here. Of course, Lachlan’s post is also great because it gets down to it in a more concise form. I have already mentioned HTML5 with the client-side data storage HTML5 based API some time ago, so take a look at that as well.

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Google has released an API that allows us to embed charts into our pages as simply as making an HTTP call to the API which generates a PNG image using parameters passed in the call. Here are some example of what can be done:

More information about this API here. This is a simpler, very useful alternative to a more complex, but surprisingly powerful, jQuery library called Flot which uses “canvas”.

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As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

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OpenID started months back as an idea about sharing personal information on the Web. The project grew meanwhile, gaining support from numerous industry giants like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.

The new release, announced yesterday, involves two new specifications - OpenID Authentication 2.0 and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 as final specifications. Many open source libraries are already shipping with the new implementation of OpenID.

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After many months of silence, the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 (or IE Next) is coming soon. In a somewhat arguably humorous post, which discusses the possible name for the next Internet Explorer version, we are given a hint that the new browser will be released soon. As far as the features, well, we’re going to have to wait the next announcement, hopefully more serious than this one.

“You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.”

I don’t think silence was the right way to accompany work on the new IE version. Microsoft has even asked for webmasters to give feedback about the features for the new browser in the past months, but haven’t publicly given any notion as to what the new browser will be housing under the hood. Better late than never, I guess, but I wish we could at least know what to expect. Are we looking at a standards fully compliant browser, or another Microsoft vision of how things should be. In other words, are developers going to have to spend additional hours tweaking code to work in IE8, if that indeed is going to be the name for the new version. Bill Gates seems to use “IE8″ in his communication with the team, so I guess IE8 is the new name for it.

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It seems Microsoft has fixed the MSNBot issue, where the bot crawled sites calling non-existent files and accessing content through bogus search queries that had nothing to do with the actual content. In their blog post, the Live Search team have explained a couple of other issues they’ve been working on resolving:

• AdSense/Overture reporting
• Distorted site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic
• Polluted HTTP logs with inappropriate terms
• Microsoft wasn’t responding to questions

See the entire post here.

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