Yahoo launched a new video platform

If you are website publisher, just like videos on the flickr’s new mobile site you will be able to use Yahoo’s video platform to convert your user’s uploaded clips into great looking, iPhone-ready video files.

On Thursday, Yahoo launched an updated version of mobile website for Flickr with the ability to playback Flickr’s short, 90-second video on iPhone and iPod touch. Various other devices like mobiles will also be supported very soon. Videos on flickr’s mobile site are processed using Yahoo’s new video platform, which works on the backend to transcode uploaded videos into the high-quality H.264 format. There is also a web API for feeding Videos into transcoder and for collecting the results.

After the demo session was held, some questions pass to the development team responsible for new video platform by flickr’s. Since the web API was being developed the various queries goes like this.
Will the transcoder API be made publicly available to webapp creators so they can include video in their creations?
What are the player software options developers have available to work with? Flickr in the browser is using flash now. The mobile site launches the quicktime player on iPhone. On the Nokia N-series it presumably launches the Nokia video player? Real players?
What other Yahoo properties will take advantages of this new video platform? News? Movie trailers? TV.Yahoo.Com?
Yahoo Developer Network Website will give details about the video platforms public availability.

SEO experiment keyword rich links webmasterworld member

A webmaster world member asks “Hi guys, I am doing an interesting experiment on two of my more throw away domains. The experiment is testing to try and determine more information about how linking to the homepage affects rankings. The testing involves various controls – linking to the root domain from the nav only using ‘home’, linking from the nav using ‘main keyword’, linking from nav using ‘variations’ of keyword, linking from content only (while nav links saying home) to home using ‘keywords’ etc, etc.
First, I should mention some points about the domain.
4 years old Owned by me Dedicated IP Canonical comdomized HTML only Ranks top 5 in Google.com for main, second and third keyword phrases. Total of 90 pages, all unique content (written by me)
Testing was done over a 3 month period, with grace periods in between testing.
Here is so far what I have found. Might tell us a little about the threshold and re ranking filters
1. Linking home from every page in content using the same keyword caused 6 page drop in rankings.
2. Linking home using keyword in nav on all pages caused the same drop.
3. Link home from every page in content using variations caused a 3 page drop.
4. Linking home from the first 10 pages listed in google.com for site:domain.com/* brought increased ranking (from 5th to 3rd)
What is really interesting is that I gotten this down to the ‘by page’ factor. When I *slightly* cross the threshold and add links to two extra pages, and then wait until they are cached, I tip the scales and drop, to page 6.
What is further interesting is that linking home from content using variations of keywords WAS quite effective to a point, after which the site plummeted.
As well, this might point to a ‘hard line’ being crossed in terms of threshold, at one point I had the website going between position 4 and 51-60 for the same keyword every second day (flipping back and forth)
My test will be about trying to -950 the website by being ridiculously deliberate in nav linking, and then seeing if I can reverse the results by removing those (and how long it takes for the trust to be reinstated to the website) “

Google calendar officially comes to Apple’s iCal

On Monday, Google announced full support for the CalDAV protocol along with the release of a small piece of software for Mac computers so that users can easily link up their Google Calendars with iCal applications.
In July, CalDAV was previously launched by Google; however still consumer had to manually add their calendars directly to CalDAV- supporting application like Mozilla Sunbrid and Apple’s iCal. The newly launched Mac utility named “Calaboration” let the user to plug in their google calendar username and password to send the Google calendar over to iCal. It provides the benefits of two way synchronization that mean what ever changes you make on either end will appear to both in every few minutes.
After all the changes made to Calaboration, when it was started it worked without any problem. With this current implementation, we are able to see other people schedules, as well as reply yes, no or may be to calendar invitations. The only problem faced earlier was syncing errors which mean it dint allow to write data to Google servers, which was remedied with a closing and reopening of the program after the initial CalDAV setup.
If you are sunbird user, you can grab the Calaboration. As there is a simple provider extention that does the same thing.

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