Microsoft announced the release a couple of new things yesterday - an accreditation progam called AdExcellence (similar to AdWords certification on Google), adCenter add-in for MS Excell 2007, and Webmaster Center (which has already been opened to the public a few days ago).

AdExcellence is a certification program designed to provide agencies and advertisers the opportunity of becoming certified adCenter experts and professionals. Upon successful completion candidates get a certificate and accompanying certification graphics for use on own websites.

The Excell 2007 adCenter add-in is a fully integrated tools for marketers allowing keyword research for targeting the most qualified traffic for their websites. Keyword data accessible from the add-in comes from the adCenter Keyword Services Platform (KSP), and the add-in itself will be available for download in early January 2008. The add-in basically uses web services to access information from adCenter, through KSP, although I imagine there could be far richer ways to integrate adCenter through Excell. Google has released AdWords Editor a while ago, a tool which enables marketers to control everything regarding their AdWords campaigns using a standalone desktop application. Microsoft seems to be working on such a tool for its AdCenter, but we have yet to see when such a tool will be released.

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So many times over the past years, this has happened. An SEO campaign aimed at improving a site’s performance on Google yields unintended (good) results on Live Search (MSN) and Yahoo Search. In fact, on many occasions, the site ranked better for the same keywords on Live and Yahoo than on Google. It’s quite clear that search engines, although different, are quite similar in many ways to other. Google is by far the most popular (about a 60% search share belongs to Google), but both Yahoo and Live Search can bring in significant traffic, some would even say traffic that converts better (due to the demographical structure of their respective user bases).

It occurred to me that companies could do SEO for Google even though ranking well in a particular search niche might be extremely hard to achieve due to the sites that are already occupying top spots, but SEO for these spots and keywords on Google may actually yield top spots on Yahoo and Live Search. Having top spots on these two for identical keywords, for which the competition is simply too strong on Google, can significantly compensate the lack of presence in the top results on it. This is something I noticed through experience, which naturally doesn’t mean it happens as a rule, but it’s definitely something to think about. Aiming at tough search terms on Google, in this case, is a valid effort if it gets you better results on Yahoo and Live. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to get top results on search engines other than Google. Homework still has to be done, and weeks and months of work still have to be invested for long term results.

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NASA has launched its redesigned site, the 5.0 version. I must say it looks good, although JavaScript intensive to the point my laptop processor cooler is spinning out of this world (yes all the space pun is intended ). NASA is celebrating its 50th anniversary next year, so the new site has been released to introduce content in web 2.0 fashion, and in my opinion they’ve done it. Apart from everything else, there is also a bookmarking widget that allows site content to be shared and bookmarked on the most popular social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and also on My NASA. There are plenty of details that I liked very much, like the icons in the right sidebar and the accordion sections featuring latest news and content, but it’s best if you see the new NASA site for yourself.

The has many neat web 2.0 implementations using script.aculo.us and Prototype. More about the technical side of NASA’s new website can be found on Ajaxian.

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iDesktop.tv is pretty much a web site a different approach to creating the user interface for YouTube, but unlike YouTube, iDesktop allows viewers to save the video clip in any of the numerous formats offered - MP4, AVI, 3GP, 3GP2, WMV and EXE. The interface is much nicer in my opinion, but that’s a matter of taste I guess. I especially like the slider which controls how many video boxes are shown on the screen at a time - minimum three large boxes, or maximum 33 (at least at my screen resolution of 1280×800). The interface look is customizable, so users can add the personal touch to their profile. Usage experience is quite nice, with the whole interface resembling a desktop application. This is what they say, in 50 words or less :

“iDesktop.tv is an amazing modern dynamic web application for searching, watching and downloading YouTube videos. iDesktop.tv allows you to manage that content in many possible ways. With its incredible design and flexibility, it is one of the richest web applications for managing video content.”

iDesktop’s interface is what gives it juice, but it’s still pretty much a YouTube front. If the service expands with some unique features in the future or integrates other sources of video it will probably get a lot of attention. Good job so far!

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