Google Sitemap Generator Software for Windows

Google, the Internet′s most popular search engine, has launched Google Sitemaps (Beta). This is a new inclusion service designed for webmasters and website owners. Google Sitemaps enables you to proactively and automatically submit information about your website to Google to notify and direct their crawlers.

It is meant to create a more accurate index and deliver better search results of your website. To participate in Google Sitemaps service you need to place a XML formatted file on your webserver. This file contains a list of all URLs (sitemap) of your website along with other information such as when content has been modified, the update frequency and the priority of a particular page.

How to create XML formatted sitemaps of my website automatically and notify Google?

Google provides a Python-based script for basic use and suggests "We hope others will develop and share tools that generate sitemaps for various scenarios". VIGOS has met the challenge and here is the much-demanded tool, just one week after the unveiling of Google Sitemaps:

VIGOS Gsitemap is a 100% FREE, easy-to-use but versatile Windows sitemap generator tool to help webmasters and website owners to create, edit and submit sitemap information in adherence to the Google Sitemaps protocol.

Download VIGOS Gsitemap for free and start optimizing your website by improving its coverage and freshness in the Google search index!

Over 96,000 users have downloaded Gsitemap so far.
Give it a try, it's free!

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Why Content is King In Web Design

Would it interest you to know that most web users don't come to your site to appreciate the attractiveness of the design? That's not to say that an attractive web design isn't important.
However, the majority of site visitation happens because the consumer was motivated to look at your site to see if you could give them a reason to purchase from your ecommerce business.

The web is based on small resolution sizes. The words read online aren't even as clear as newsprint. The pictures are often low resolution and a computer screen can tax the best of vision.

One of the most cost effective applications this information can produce is that you may not need a website filled with all the toys such as Java Script or Flash design. These tools add spice to your website, but can often detract or even annoy visitors who are simply looking for information they expect to find on your website.

A well ordered website can reap incredible rewards for ecommerce business. Effective bullet points, keywords or phrases accented in bold type and an easy to navigate page may have a greater impact on your ecommerce web design than anything.

What this may also mean is that the web design options you can chose from may expand.

You see, if you know what will help make your site better you can self-direct the development of the site through template rich designs that allow you total control over the text in an easy to use environment that does not require the use of complicated code or extended training seminars to use.

Obviously many web design experts would rather have you seek an alternative using their personalized service, but in the end you have a stronger interest in the success of your website than a hired web developer.

If you can utilize the tools available to make your site user friendly and highly scannable you will likely find you can achieve your own success in web design.
Content writing for web pages is not the same as writing for any other type of content. Thoughts must be compact and content must be scannable.

This means when you write for the web you must help your reader find the subject they are most interested in using a sub-heading or indexing system that allows a quick scan to determine if your web page contains the information they need.

Even if your website does not contain the exact information your visitor wants they may be pleased to know it didn't require extended reading to make that determination. In turn the visitor may venture to other pages of online content to determine if you have the information they need elsewhere on your site.

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Time Warner's Talk of AOL Spin-Off Stirs Hope for Internet Unit's Future

Analysts said the two companies were ill-suited from the beginning. AOL's role had never been clearly defined. And Time Warner's recent move to replace AOL's top two executives had been widely seen as indication that major changes were coming for the struggling Web portal.

A quarterly report filed yesterday contained the first explicit acknowledgment that Time Warner's relationship with AOL, once the powerhouse of the Northern Virginia tech community, is nearing its end.

"Although the Company's Board of Directors has not made any decision, the Company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner's stockholders, in one or a series of transactions," Time Warner wrote in its report to investors.

Tech industry pundits saw the potential move in relatively positive terms for the former dial-up Web access giant, which trails competitors like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in Web search traffic and advertising.

"At least this gives AOL some independence from a bad situation," said independent industry analyst Rob Enderle. "Where they are right now is purgatory; right now they're stuck. With Time Warner putting them on their own, there's a chance that they'll be able to rebuild a business."

Tuna Amobi, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, agreed and said that a split from Time Warner could free up AOL to strike a wider range of strategic partnerships. "On balance it's a good thing because it allows AOL to be valued as a stand-alone entity," he said. "There is no benefit for them to be part of Time Warner."

Still, both analysts pointed out, the problems at AOL are deep. The company's revenue fell 20 percent last year to $4.2 billion, a drop AOL blamed on a decline in Web advertising. Time Warner said it was AOL's poor performance that led to the media conglomerate's 14 percent drop in revenue during the most recent quarter, down from the year-ago period.

The company also laid off thousands of workers over the years in an effort to reduce expenses. This year, AOL reduced its headcount by 700 workers, or 10 percent.

When the two companies merged in 2001, the idea was that the then-giant AOL, boasting 22 million paying subscribers, would benefit from owning rights to Time Warner's vast portfolio of content, ranging from CNN to People magazine. At the same time, Time Warner, whose attempts to enter the Web era had resulted only in failure, was expected to lend stability to a fast-growing Internet company. Few benefits ever arose from the pairing, and even AOL founder Steve Case, once a champion and driver of the merger, has been saying for years that he believes the two companies should be separated.

"The worst place to be is in the middle of the road, and that's where AOL has been the last few years," said Case, who left the company in 2005.

With its "buddy lists" and "community sites," AOL invented some of the concepts of online social networking that are at the core of the Web's hottest companies right now, he said recently. But the company failed to adequately capitalize on those ideas, as sites such as Facebook have signed up hundreds of millions of new users in the span of a few years.

Former Google executive Tim Armstrong was named to the top leadership of the AOL unit in March. At an all-hands meeting that month with AOL staff he exhorted the company to "get America back online" and said that AOL's Dulles office, the company's original headquarters, would be at the heart of a new wave of innovation.

"There are some real, incredible things happening under the surface that people don't realize about AOL and I think those are the things we are going to build on," he said at the meeting. "I think the road to putting America back online starts right here in Dulles, Virginia."

Yesterday afternoon, an AOL employee at a nearby Ashburn bar expressed hope that the company would find its direction again under the new leader and sounded unfazed by the latest news of Time Warner's intentions. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

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Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data

Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government Web sites.

The tool, called Google Public Data, is the latest in the company's efforts to make information from federal, state and local governments accessible to citizens. It's a goal that many Washington public interest groups and government watchdogs share with President Obama, whose technology advisers are pushing to open up federal data to the public.

Google is one of a number of Internet properties, including Wikipedia and Amazon, that has been trying to make it easier to find government information on the Web.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has urged agencies to write their own "wikis," or self-edited entries, that can make government information and processes more accessible to the public. Amazon created an open data repository so developers and researchers can share data and collaborate on sifting through it. Google's Washington employees have spent the past two years visiting government agencies to urge them to make their Web sites, records and databases more searchable.

The E-Government Act of 2002 required government agencies to make information more accessible electronically, but users have complained that many agencies do not organize their Web sites so they can be easily indexed by search engines. And some agencies, Google has said, embed codes in their sites that make certain pages invisible to search engines.

"Information from government sources has been one of the thornier areas," said David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, which includes the federal team. The new tool "is taking data, reformatting it so it's immediately consumable . . . so people don't have to go through rows and rows of data."

With Google's new tool, a Web user can search for a specific piece of data -- unemployment rates in Maryland, for example -- and a box appears at the top of the search results displaying the available relevant public data.

Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, a project within the Sunlight Foundation that uses technology to improve government transparency, said he's encouraged by Google's new tool, although he has not yet used it.

He cautioned, however, that there is no guarantee that government data is free of typographical and other errors.

He added that specific pieces of data could be misleading without a full understanding of how it fits with other information that may not be visible. For example, a Google searcher may not know enough about campaign contribution laws to spot inaccurate data entries or statistics.

Data tools should allow user feedback, Johnson said, to alert agencies to flawed data. Sunlight Labs is urging Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to implement a feedback loop on Data.gov, a site he has proposed that would catalog public data.

"There's a lot to be wary about," Johnson said. "We don't live in a world free of typos."

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Gmail Emoticon Help to Convey Emotional Content

Google has again improved its Gmail service by providing a bevy of new emoticons for users to insert in their emails. Gmail users now can click on to the emoticon button that sits along the same row with other text editing buttons to insert some funny and related symbols. Just click on this, and users will find a huge drop-down selection of emoticons, icons, and other animations for them to choose from to convey their emotional content in the emails.

Literally, a picture tells a thousand words. An emoticon is always one of the efficacy ways to express the senders’ feelings and emotions. Unlike Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, etc, Gmail is a bit behind to make this “smiley faces” a key feature. Before this emoticon feature was added into Gmail, users who wanted to add emoticons to their emails need to find their own way, e.g. add and install scripts to Gmail.

This huge selection of emoticons has enhanced Gmail users’ experience tremendously. This colorful and funny emoticon feature currently only works in the latest version of Gmail, and it is available for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 browsers. Users can upgrade their browser to take advantage of this new feature in the event they want to enjoy it.

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How to Hide Data in Notepad

When you create a new file and type some data, one unnamed default stream is created to store all data written to the file. Since NTFS file system in Windows 2000 or above has supported Alternate Data Streams, so you are allowed to create additional streams for text file. All data stored in the addition streams will be hidden and none of us will be able to read the data when opening the file. This may be useful when you would like to hide some sensitive info from being read by others when sharing the file to public.

To create hidden data in the text file, follow below steps:

1. Open command prompt, you may change to any directory as you like to create the text file.
   
2. Type notepad MyFile.txt:StoreHiddenData then press enter. MyFile.txt is the text file you are going to create whereas StoreHiddenData is the alternate stream name.
   
3. A message will be pop up “Cannot find the C:\MyFile.txt:StoreHiddenData.txt file”. Do you want to create a new file?”, click OK button to proceed create the new file.
   
4. A notepad will be pop up. Type any data that you want to be hidden from others. Save the file and you are now successfully creating hidden data for this file.
   

The hidden data you have created will not contribute to the total file size. Just open Explorer and look for this file, you will observe that the file size is still zero. Now you can go ahead to type some data and saved it as usual. Good thing is, it will not affect the hidden data that you have saved earlier. On top of that, you can display or delete all the hidden data you have saved previously. However, you must download and install Streams application before you can do so. To delete hidden data, go to command prompt and type more

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Google Scuttles Ad Deal with Yahoo

Google pulled out of a proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo yesterday after the Justice Department signaled it would oppose the deal because it could help the dominant Web company become a monopoly.

The forced abandonment of the deal represents an embarrassing setback for Google. It also damages the comeback hopes of Yahoo, which saw the deal as a way to boost revenue after rejecting Microsoft's takeover bid this year.

The Justice Department said an agreement between Google and Yahoo would probably harm competition for Internet search advertising.

Under the deal proposed in June, Google would have provided advertising for some Yahoo searches in the United States and Canada. The companies would have shared the advertising revenue, with Yahoo estimated to receive as much as $800 million annually from the agreement.

Google runs the dominant search engine, while Yahoo's and Microsoft's search efforts run a distant second and third. Microsoft, as well as some advertisers and consumer advocates, protested the partnership, saying it would let Google control a majority of online advertising and could lead to higher prices for advertisers.

"It's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said on a company blog.

"Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement."
The decision represents a stark turnaround for Google, whose executives dismissed any possible antitrust problems.

But in July, the Justice Department issued "civil investigative demands" for information from the companies involved, a sign that a formal investigation had opened.

At the same time, several states announced that they were reviewing the deal.

"The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition -- lower prices, better service and greater innovation," said Thomas O. Barnett, assistant attorney general in charge of the department's antitrust division.

Google had argued that while it dominates search advertising, it does not dominate all online advertising.
But the Justice Department concluded that Google is the largest provider of both Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication, with shares of more than 70 percent in both markets.

"Yahoo! is by far Google's most significant competitor in both markets, with combined market shares of 90 percent and 95 percent in the search advertising and search syndication markets, respectively," the department said in a statement.

Microsoft, which has said it is no longer interested in acquiring Yahoo, fought hard to prevent the partnership between its two top competitors.

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said the decision is "significant for advertisers, publishers and consumers, who voiced overwhelming concern about this illegal deal to law enforcement and policymakers."

Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, said the partnership would have given Google too much influence over the online advertising market.

"It was truly a negative for the marketing community, and it represented a concentration of power that we found unacceptable," he said.

In an effort to address concerns, Yahoo had proposed an amended agreement that would have limited the length of the deal and the number of search ads Yahoo could outsource to Google.

The last-minute changes did not save the deal, and Yahoo played down the effect of Google's withdrawal on its strategy.

In an e-mail to employees yesterday, Yahoo President Susan Decker said she was "disappointed" that Google ended the agreement instead of defending it in court.
Still, she said the deal was "just one of many efforts that we have underway to accelerate our strategy."

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