What is it like buying a gift card for the face-value and had to pay extra for the handling? Check this blog post on Church of the Customer Blog.

Handling fee, or manhandled?

The interesting part is, the business owner herself has posted a comment clarifying the issues.

Are you still going to ignore the power of social media?

I think you remember the last article I published on my blog about the good landing pages. This new list of best practices will be helpful if you are writing for the web. Be it websites, landing pages or html newsletters.

1. Construct paragraphs with two or three sentences. Make the first sentence interesting.
2. Use simple sentence structures.
3. Use bullet points and ordered lists.
4. Try to limit your list items to 7.
5. Write only one idea per paragraph.
6. Start with the conclusion, and then elaborate the point. Essays will not work.
7. Use active voice in the communication.
8. DO NOT write for the search engine robots. Write for the normal users.
9. Try not to use self referential phrases like “Click Here”, “Follow this link”, “this website” etc. Rather, use the hyperlinks effectively.
10. Avoid overuse of all caps and text decoration
11. Alert users when linking away from the current page
12. A few links to pages with supporting content will be good. This can establish the credibility
13. Try not to overuse “clever” or “cute” headlines. Headlines should be the summary of the page content. Unlike print, the web headlines may appear without the content, like search engine results.
14. Try to give 2-3 word description for all the images used.
15. Content should always have the most updated information.
16. Content should be free from typographical and grammatical errors.
17. Try to take advantage of the semantic web.  Try to provide good tags for the content you write.

I think I have covered almost all the points. Correct me if I am wrong!

YouTube  has introduced  interactive  annotations  for their  videos about two months back, I think. But this is the first time I am seeing someone using it for advertising. Check out the new video from Samsung.

Follow your instinct

At the moment, the number of viewers are just over 6000. I think it will definitely go up.

So, here we are starting the SEO course. I was getting so many requests in the past to put together something like this. Because of my tight work schedules and trademarked laziness, I could never do one yet. Later I figured out that answering numerous e-mails, IMs and phone calls will take more of my energy than putting together something like this. So, here we go…

I have started optimizing websites for search engines back in 2004. I was at a learning phase at that time. I have learned, tested and formulated different SEO techniques from then. But the most interesting thing about SEO is none of those techniques will always work. You need to keep it updated all the time. Unless, you will lose all your hard earned rankings on search engines.

But that doesn’t mean that you need to keep yourself away from SEO techniques. Why? There are many reasons for doing SEO for your website.

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Two new products from Adobe. A video player and an online TV channel.

Adobe® Media Player provides the users control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline.  You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience.

If you are little technical, Adobe Media Player is nothing but a cross-platform desktop media player and feed management application built on the Adobe AIR™ runtime. It supports the playback of content ranging from low bit-rate videos to high-definition full-screen content. Based on Adobe’s Flash platform video formats, Adobe Media Player can play and manage FLV assets (On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark codecs) and a variety of possible container formats for H.264 codec (such as .mp4, .m4v, .mp4v, .3gp, and .f4v) that are stored locally on the viewer’s hard drive or delivered via the Internet using either progressive or streaming delivery.

Adobe TV launches with more than 200 videos across four channels: Photographers, Designers, Video Professionals and Developers.

The videos star a variety of “Adobe evangelists, leading trainers, subject matter experts and luminaries,” teaching classes on the Adobe suite of design programs, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator and others.

I think it is too early to say how many video fans are going use these technologies. We’ll see that in the coming days.

What’s in it for advertisers?

Adobe Media Player supports banner advertising and all sorts of in-stream media. (Implementation is not that simple and requires some coding skills.) Ads downloaded into the files can be changed when the computer is online and even when its not connected as ads can stored in the computer and released at determined intervals.

This is a massive step forward in video advertising that will help push the video advertising economy forward in a dramatic way. This development, coupled with the new IAB digital video advertising standards will pave the way for more and more money to enter the Web video space.