First thing to do the ‘undercover work’ is to have some sleeping accounts. Just go to the sites listed below and register for an account. You better start making those on beforehand, even when you don’t have a clip to seed. You can put some ‘general’ funny clips on the account and pretend to be a regular user. It’s good to have a history on a site. The longer the better. It’s good to have some activity on that account as well, it will add up to your credibility. Write down all the usernames and passwords and then head over to the Hey!Spread website.

With a simple login, you get access to their service, name your movie, tag it and start the uploading. Hey!Spread will upload your movie to:

• Sclipo
• Sumo
• Sevenload
• Youtube
• Google
• Dailymotion
• Blip
• Metacafe
• Yahoo
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Vimeo
• Revver
• Veoh
• Vsocial
• Photobucket
• Putfile

All the links above go directly to the registration page of the sites, so in case you don’t have a username/password on that site yet, you don’t have to look for the signup page.

Hey!Spread also allows you to add a watermark to the video file, in case you want to brand it for an official release or something. As soon as you start uploading your file, all you have to do is sit back and relax. The only thing you have to wait for is the processing time of each individual video site. When everything is uploaded, you get the URL to the location of the uploaded clip. Just copy-paste that list, put it in an e-mail or a Word document, and go check the views if you need to harvest the results.

As a bonus, you can use the Hey!Spread API which allows you to propose Hey!Spread in white label as a innovative and addictive feature to your users or clients. Allow them to mass-distribute video content over the best video platforms at any time, but still be the solution provider that came up with this brilliant plan for your customer!

Have fun.

It basically pings a lot of services you already knew of, but now in one time. The only thing I find useful about it is that it gives you a sort of overview about the backlinks you have.

The tool is definitely made to make money, because the links to Google’s AdSense and TextLinkAds that are given after the analysis are referrer links. First they measure how much you’re worth, then they tell you how much you can make, and then they offer you to sign up. Clever.

Via: Seth Godin

Other tools previously featured on Marketing Thoughts:

• How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

I asked Randy to give me three good reasons why R|Mail is better than FeedBlitz and here’s what Randy had to say:

Many FeedBlitz users say it doesn’t work and they never get their emails

A FeedBlitz publisher gets your email address when you subscribe, you are giving up your email to both FeedBlitz and the publisher, he can unsubscribe you and he can subscribe you to other mailing lists without you wanting that

FeedBlitz is confusing. You can’t just go to http://www.feedblitz.com/ and subscribe to something

He also added: if you read the FeedBlitz blog, then you’ll find a few times every month where the end user asks why his stuff isn’t working – they don’t even bother responding

here * here

FeedBlitz is actually broken and many users are switching to Rmail. Recently I’m gaining about 100 subscriptions per day. Here’s some posts that I’ve found on the FeedBlitz problems.

* here * here

And if you read the FeedBlitz blog, you’ll find the last 2 weeks that it’s mostly entries about why their service is not working.

* here * here * here

Further, if you read the comments for the last two months on their blog, you’ll see people complaining that they are not getting their emails.

* here * here * here * here

So, that’s why I’m very happy with R|Mail, with the speed it delivers the news and the ease of use. If you need a trustworthy service for your readers, I’d put my money on R|Mail and give it a go. You’ll see.

R|Mail Subscription page
R|Mail Blog
R|Mail Stats

It looks like this:

Get your own on RSS-2-Gif

Weird thing is: if you want to right-click and save the generated image, it says it’s a .png file. Hmm. That doesn’t match with the concept, but let’s not start nagging about that.

You can edit the generated HTML code and cut out the promotional image for RSS-2-Gif, but to be nice, I’ll add their button here anyway. What you see below is normally added in the middle under the light blue image that displays your feed items. I think they should work on a more sophisticated way to promote theirselves because the button isn’t really fitting in right with the rest of the project. If I’m going to use this in my e-mail footer, it’s going to be without the button. I mean, they already have the text in the generated image of my feed items, no?

1. www.photoblog.be : $875,601.54
2. www.brusselsjournal.com : $810,679.44
3. www.mess.be : $623,816.70
4. veerle.duoh.com : $597,847.86
5. www.el73.be/drunkey-love : $362,434.68
6. www.tenderfeelings.be : $186,862.74
7. blog.coolz0r.com : $160,329.36
8. www.dopplerradio.net : $154,119.42
9. www.zattevrienden.be : $139,441.38
10. fantomaster.com/fantomNews : $132,102.36

For the record: I’m not selling yet, but it’s ok if you want to invest :)

Pro Flickr users can try out a set of 10 cards for free (if they’re part of the first 10.000), otherwise it’s going to cost you $ 19.99 for 100 cards.

Go to Moo! | via zog

• Pros and Cons
• Tips for Google Analytics Installations
• Reports
• Conclusion
• Appendix A – Google Analytics Install Guide for Lead Generation Web Sites
• Appendix B – Google Analytics Install Guide for E-Commerce Web Sites
• Appendix C – Google Analytics Help Center Links

The track-ability of Internet Marketing is one of its greatest assets. The first tracking tools for online marketing campaigns were focused around banner ads. Today they range from email marketing tools to ROI (return on investment) tools.

Download it here (.pdf, 226 Kb)

Also check out their SEO white paper library, in case there’s something else you want to know more about.

Thanks, Tom

First of all, there’s the images. I always center my images with a simple <div> tag, and align them so that they kind of fill up the space. With the Live Writer tool, I can’t seem to have the image centered. The ‘inline’ function lets me slide the image between words, but that’s not what I’m looking for. So I’m hoping the Live Writer team will provide some simple align tools in the next update, just like they do in Word (left, center, right – easy as that). I don’t really want to work with the custom margins either, although it’s really cool that you can customize the position manually. But for me: plain and simple, and automated, thank you.

Of course it’s great that you can have your images with some nice effects, but here too I have some desires. I normally upload everything to the subdomain slash images folder (blog.coolz0r.com/images), and it’s great that the Live Writer tool allows me to set up a custom FTP job. Awesome. But. Apparently, as I’ve experienced with the previous post, the source pad of the image is no longer /images. It’s been changed to /images/BerlitzBabel_E4DD/image.jpg.

As far as I can tell, a new folder is created with the title of the post. So instead of uploading it straight to the images folder and adding it to the existing images, I now get an entire new structure (tree) in the images folder. Hmm. I ran through the setup settings again, and I clearly pointed it to the right folder, and I can’t seem to find the settings where it says it will create a new archive for every individual image, so I can’t turn it ‘off’ either. 

Then there’s the cool ‘Insert Map’ tool. Superfine, no doubt, but I don’t seem to get it to work right. I can browse to my house, find it on the map, but when I insert a pin and add a picture from Flickr to it I get a link like this:

Then when I don’t attach a picture it looks like this:

Weird. Must be something I’m overlooking, I can’t figure it out. I always end up somewhere in the middle of Flanders, even though I pinpoint my exact location. I’ve removed the pushpin because that also got totally misplaced and the Flickr image I attached didn’t load, even though it’s a valid image URL. Some work needs to be done here, guys!

As far as the complaints from others about the tabbed interface: I like it the way it is now. In WordPress, I don’t have tabs either. You can write, save, publish. I’ve never been editing multiple posts at once, and I’m not planning to do so in the near future. So it’s fine when that a new post pops up when I’m finished with the old one. Maybe a small detail: When I click new, instead of discarding the post I just published the Writer tool opens a brand new window, but the old post needs to be closed manually. Perhaps it can be fixed to open a new post in the same window and discarding the old post at the same time?

Other things I came across that I like:

• The extra editing options when inserting an image in the ‘effects’ tab when you click the ‘+’
• The option to add a watermark to the picture
• The fact that you can customize the image size, with constrained proportions
• The built-in spelling checker (don’t know if it’s multi-language) and the ease of adding words to it

That’s about it for this review I guess. If anything shocking comes up, I’ll post it, but for now, all I can say is you’ve just got to try this for yourself and enjoy!

The only downside is the compressed source code, which makes editing afterwards in WordPress a real pain, because it’s so unstructured. There’s also quite a lot of &-nbsp stuff that I usually avoid, which I can’t stop from being used. But those are minor details.

Download it here

Let’s have a quick run through the setup screens:

So, after the setup you’re all ready to to start blogging. One thing I noticed is that the installer file didn’t put a shortcut on my desktop or in the quickstart, so you’ll have to create a shortcut manually from within your ‘all programs’ folder. The interface looks like this:

Although you’re presented with a WYSIWYG editor, Live Writer also includes other views including HTML source-code editing and web preview mode. There’s also something really cool you can do with the images:

Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page.

Once you’ve inserted the picture, Writer provides contextual editing tools to modify size, text wrapping, borders, and apply graphic effects. Writer also allows you specify a smaller thumbnail to that will link to a larger image for detailed viewing.

Photos can be either uploaded directly to your weblog provider (if they support the newMediaObject API) or to an FTP server.

I really like the effects and I’ll be testing it in the next posts on this blog. Another superfly feature is that you can enter a Map from Windows Live Local, all you need to do is enter an address, and it’ll put a nice integrated map in your post. Saves you a lot of time and makes it really accessible. I’ll be testing that as well really soon.

Overall feeling: as far as I’ve tested it (I’ve done about everything except publishing) the look and feel is really good. I think I’ll ask the admin in the agency I work at to install it on my laptop so I can play with this tool on the train while commuting. It kind of looks like ‘Word 2007′ and makes you feel at home. I like that.

Nathan did an extended ‘first-impressions’ review as well, so you might want to read that too. We’ll write more about it tonight or tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

Normally everything was under embargo, and I would have had enough time to test it all, but apparently some moron at ‘Inside Live’ decided to go live already, causing all the other bloggers that were included in the list to drop everything they had in their hands to go live as well. Thanks a lot, f*cker.

Live Writer Team Blog + Links

UPDATE: Jason has a review up as well. Check it out.

The first tool, a quite popular thing based on Technorati’s API, was created by Dane Carlson from the Business Opportunity Blog. I’ve been checking it once in a while but I think it’s not really working because even though my ranking on Technorati is now around 2.800 (a small 20.000 spots higher than back then), my blog is still worth $38,388.72. The amount never changed the past months, not since the tool was launched. Weird.

Now with the Pingoat tool, my blog apparently values $2074, at the time of writing, also based on the Technorati API. I don’t know which formula is being used, but the difference is quite significant.

It’s not that this blog is up for sale. By all means, no. Unless you pay me $50.000 which would make me reconsider. But it’s funny to know how much you’re worth. Must be the blogger-ego thing. One of the projects I found a link to via Pingoat is Blogsrater, which seems to be a very large archive of blogs. I submitted myself to see what it’s all about. I’ll get back to that when I have an update.

Besides this monetary validation, also check out the other Pingoat tools.

What it means:

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.

• H1 is brighter than H2, which is brighter than H3.
• TABLE is brighter than TR, which is brighter than TD tags.
• Images and flash elements appear as 70% white.
• New HTML tags like STRONG and EM is brighter than older ones like B and I
• UL, OL and DL is brighter than their LI, DT, DD
• DIV layout is brighter than table layout

Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

WEB 2 DNA via zog | 7seconden

File Transfer

With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable. Learn more

Voicemail

If a friend isn’t around to answer your call, now you can leave a voicemail. You can even leave voicemail messages for your friends who don’t use Google Talk–they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file. Learn more

Music Status

Listening to music while on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you’re listening to by selecting “Show current music track” in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does! Learn more

Nice :) Really nice!

To get the .flv file of any movie from YouTube, GoogleVideo, iFilm, PutFile, Break or about two dozen of other sites, go to the site of KeepVid. Copy the link of the page with the video you want on it and paste it in the field on top of the page at KeepVid. Then select your source and click ‘download’. The field you’ve just pasted the URL in will become empty again.

A little bit below that, a ‘loading’ text appears and will change to >>download link<< when it finishes loading. Right-click the link and select 'save as'. If it's your first time downloading an .flv clip, change the name of the clip to whatever you want to name it and add .flv directly behind it. Set the file format to 'all files' in the drop-down menu. Click 'save'. The file starts to download to the location you've selected.

Now you've got the .flv file. If that's enough, you can download the FLV Player and enjoy the movies offline. (I’m using the one from Martijn de Visser, you can choose any other player, it depends on how you want to experience your viewing)

However, in the case of our creative director, the file needed to be embedded in a presentation, and he wanted a .wmv file because he knew how to work with that. Ok, no biggie. Here’s how to convert it:

Download CinemaForge and install it. (it’s free) – Open it through “start menu > all programs > cinemaforge” and select the source file and destination filetype. Enter a name for the file and click “Encode”. If you want to play around some in the options, do so. Standard options worked fine for me.

And there you have it. Easy as that. Have fun taking back the web !

1. Blogging Quotient
2. Domain Quotient
3. Technical Quotient
4. Linkslut Quotient
5. Stats Quotient
6. Usual Suspects Quotient
7. Frequency Quotient
8. Immediacy Quotient
9. Originality Quotient
10. Sex Quotient
11. Exhibitionism Quotient
12. Lemming Quotient
13. Closet Quotient

My code:

My blogger code: B6 d++ t++ k+ s+ u- f+ i+ o e+ l- c– (decode it!)

Why this code generator?
Geeks have one. So do hairy gay men and their admirers. Isn’t it time bloggers have a code to describe themselves as well?

Get your code here

VidMirror delivers an alternative for the (sometimes) ‘not loading’ videos on a blog. With VidMirror you can easily switch to the site where you mirrored the video, so your users and visitors have the ability to swap to another service if a certain service is responding too slow or if a video has been removed for some (or no) reason (depending on the service you use).

VidMirror has been custom made, shortly after the trouble I had with YouTube. That’s one of the cool things about Jason. You just wish for a thing, and the guy comes up with some brilliant plan and then actually codes it. I can’t believe nobody hired him yet.

VidMirror delivers code for: YouTube, Google Video, Revver, Veoh, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Flurl, Zippy Videos, OurMedia, PutFile, StreetFire, TinyPic and vSocial. That should cover all your problems very nicely. It looks like this:

But if you head over to Jason’s blog, you can see how you can embed it in your css and have a nice frame around it.

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;
• RSS for search results;
• community feedback buttons throughout the site;
• expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
• expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
• expanded profiles;
• featured blogs for 12,000+ keyword search terms covering over 500 broad topics including baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.;
• a brand new back end that scales.

I’ve had my beta invite since somewhere in November and I must say, it grew fast and I’m quite impressed with the end result. I think I’m going to use Sphere a lot more often. Sure there were some small problems in the beginning, but those are all gone now. You really should check this out !

Most important are the featured blogs for over 12K keywords. That’s really impressive. The other thing I like a lot is the fact you can subscribe to RSS feeds of any search result and that podcasts and other media are immediately included and linked to your search query. This is about the most complete niche search ever. If they should start a ranking system, I bet they could easily leave Technorati behind.

Try Sphere

When you save new bookmarks, you can share them with people in your network simply by clicking on a username. That user (or users) will then receive the sent bookmark and be able to view it by clicking on “links for you” at the top of the page.

Good to know. So now I don’t have to use ‘for:username’ anymore if I tag my posts for Randy or anyone else?

What FeedWhip does should be offered by any decent marketing agency to its customers.

Feedwhip is a service that detects changes to web pages. Feedwhip’s users are notified about these changes whenever the change matches criteria they specify. Feedwhip works with just about every web page on the internet, whether or not it provides an RSS feed.

You give Feedwhip the address of a website you’re interested in. Feedwhip will then check that website on a regular basis, looking for changes. When a change is detected, we’ll send you an email describing the change.

When you set up your subscriptions, Feedwhip also provides you with many options to determine what kinds of changes you’re informed about: big changes, little changes, or changes that involve links or images. You can even filter changes based on whether or not certain words are present.

It’s pretty cool they also scan for non-RSS sites and the changes in that site. Makes you wonder if they’re also going to look at the graphical side and details (lay-out, logo update), and not only the textual modifications.
Only one way to find out.

There are pros and cons about this tool. I can imagine a lot of bloggers aren’t in favor of a custom feed scraper tool like this, because it easily allows people to ’steal’ content and republish it on any page on the web, monetizing the labor of others. On the other hand, you can turn it into a nice collector of your own feeds from various social bookmarking sites or maybe even Flickr or YouTube. I haven’t tested it yet to see if it scrapes AND displays images as well or only text. It’s on my ‘to do’ list.
UPDATE: It only displays text links from the YouTube Feed. No thumbnails from the movies. Too bad.

Try this

Customizing this candy is easy, just follow the buttons in the top right corner. you can switch to a white background, switch to bigger text, close the media feeds and open a search form. To make you very happy, there’s a button that lets you switch to ‘buzzmania mode’ which in fact equals pleasure overload. 3 times the buzz, on the same page.

Check out Popurls.com | via MicroPersuasion