VigLink: Fire & Forget Solution To Turn Outbound Links Into Affiliate Earners

VigLink is a new service with venture capital backing from Google that aims to make it easy for publishers to earn through affiliate programs. It promises to turn any outbound link on a web site into an affiliate link after the installation of a small bit of JavaScript code.
VigLink is in the news today primarily [...]

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Add Your Own News Topics to Google News

Google News just added a neat new feature that can help you keep track of news that’s of interest to you, alongside the rest of the day’s regular news item.

Clicking the new “Add a Section” link brinks up the following page that allows you to add pre-programmed news modules, or build your own. When you build your own, you’ll be presented with the following options:

Section title: The title of your section. This will appear in your Personalized Google News Homepage.

Search terms: Keywords that define your section. Be relevant and creative, and be sure to separate your keywords with a comma. For example, if you’re interested in news about entrepreneurship, you may want to include several phrases such as “startup”, “entrepreneur”, “venture capital” and “innovation.” We make it easier for you to enter these phrases as you type by suggesting related keywords to add.

Edition: Language edition of Google News from which your articles will be selected. For example, a “Football” section with the US as the preferred edition will look very different from one with UK as the preferred edition.

Source location (optional): Restrict to sources from a particular geographic location. For example, if you are interested in the real estate market in Ireland, you could add a restriction to only show news from Irish sources. This is an optional field and nothing needs to be entered. Currently we allow restricting only at the state level within the US or at the country-level outside the US.

The new section will then get added to your personalized Google News homepage and will look something like this one I created for PubCon news:

I was going to recommend this as a way to add reputation monitoring to your Google News page, but after testing, I discovered that the new module is somewhat limited–you can’t include exact matches or negative keywords. So, you’ll just have to stick with Google Alerts or Trackur.

PS. From what I can tell, you have to view your Personalized Google News homepage, before you can see the “Add a Section” link.

The New Technorati Thinks It’s a Blog

Have you ever seen one of those people who spends so long studying a group, they begin to believe they’re part of the group? If not, you can now: Technorati has launched a new design/mission/layout, and it looks like the once-awesome blog search engine has been assimilated. As they put it:

While we’ll still track and link to the top blogs, posts, and tags, the unique content written by hundreds of bloggers will complement what the rest of the world is saying. In addition to this, each of our channel editors will be writing a daily column called Blog Focus, in which the top story of the day is told through the eyes of the blogosphere’s varied and eclectic authors.

That’s right: now instead of just following and measuring blogs, Technorati’s now going to be writing them, too. As they announced last month, they’re taking applications for writers for “blog reviews, news, tag page articles and commentary on any of these subjects, or most anything else interesting and well-written,” though there’s no mention of payment (aside from “the more you contribute, the more you’ll get back”). However, this probably isn’t because they’re strapped for cash—they just raised another $2M in venture capital. CEO Richard Jalichandra says this last round of funding should get them and their blog ad network to profitability.

Other changes in this redesign include changes to the Top 100, probably the most popular feature on Technorati. Says TechCrunch:

Until today, the top 100 blogs were determined based on unique links from other blogs during the previous six months. The top list was fairly static. Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.” The result, says the company, is a lot more volatility in the lists as blogs surge up and down.

Yeah. Translation: people thought the Top 100 was impossible to break into and not current enough.

Other changes include the capability to publish your content directly on Technorati, and the layout of the Technorati Topics pages, including the content published on Technorati.

Technorati had two redesigns in 2007, but since then they haven’t made any drastic changes as they declined in popularity and relevance (unless you count jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.) Mostly they’ve focused on creating an ad network in the interim.

What do you think? Is this change enough to save them from oblivion? Or are they a useful tool, despite losing out on the hype cycle?

Google Jumps On2 Video Compression; Sends Google Radio into a WideOrbit

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but there’s a chance we’ll soon see the end of pixelated videos on YouTube. Google has today announced the acquisition of On2 Technologies and its portfolio of video compression technology. The $106.5 million deal could signal that we’ll soon see better compression technology used at YouTube– which means those videos that look great on your desktop, will still look great when they get to YouTube.

“Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google in a statement. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2’s team and technology will help us further that goal.”

But wait! We’re in a recession, how can Google afford to pay $106 million for compression technology? Easy! It just offloaded the remnants of its failed Google Radio division to software firm WideOrbit. According to TechCrunch:

WideOrbit is taking over several assets of Google’s radio business, namely Google Radio Automation, Maestro and SS32 automation products. The company, which is backed by at least $34.5 million in venture capital, commented on the closing of the deal saying that it was looking to expand its product portfolio and taking over Google Radio’s assets was a key step in that process.

So to recap: video is still hot, radio, not so much.

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OpenX Raises Another $10M to Help in Its Efforts to Bring Down Google

It seems that OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan is doing something that he struggled to do at Yahoo–compete with Google.

The ad technology provider and marketplace has just announced a third round of venture capital with $10.4 million being added to the war chest, courtesy of DAG Ventures.

The company is certainly doing well to fend off Google’s own Ad Manager product–claiming an impressive 300 billion ads monthly on more than 150,000 websites across the web. The money will help OpenX further expand both the downloadable and hosted versions of its ad server, while continuing to grow its recently launched OpenX Market.

So, how is this small start-up able to stand head-to-head with the search giant? Simple. OpenX isn’t trying to fight Google on its strengths.

The threat of Google’s entry into the sector has prompted OpenX to tout its independence, neutrality and openness as distinguishing features, although Cadogan stressed that its ad server product is also more customizable than Google’s. “We couldn’t outspend them, so we’re trying to create a different value proposition,” he said.

Sounds like a good plan. In fact, with more and more start-ups taking the same approach, it makes you wonder if Google could end up the way of Gulliver.