Ash K. Gilpin

Valentine’s Day is just over a month away but according to new research from Yahoo! Personals, the most visited online dating service, Cupid is charting a tricky course for the next few weeks.The study shows we are now in National Break-Up Season, the period between the December holidays and Valentine’s Day when people are more than twice as likely to think about breaking up than at any other time of the year.

January, with all its focus on resolutions to be healthier, richer, and happier, naturally leads couples to take stock of their relationships and think about whether they are with the right person.

“‘Find a new love’ is up there with ‘lose weight’ and ’save more money’ as a New Year’s resolution,” said Anna Zornosa, vice president and general manager, Yahoo! Personals. “People tend to ‘put up’ with current relationships in order to have a partner for holiday gatherings, but once the festivities are over it’s time to decide whether to fish or cut bait.”

Are you currently in the market for meeting a new special someone?  HRDating.com is a small and growing online dating service.  Another site you might have heard about is PlentyOfFish.com.  Love could be just a click away.  Enjoy and good luck!

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, Sharp Electronics Corp. took the crown for introducing the world’s largest, a behemoth 108-inch liquid-crystal display that most people probably couldn’t fit through their front door.

Sharp and its rivals also announced technological improvements to how LCDs render high-speed movement, cutting down on the staccato image trails that have so far made LCDs less smooth than plasma models.

“LCD TVs have become larger and are now competing aggressively in screen-size segments that were formerly the exclusive domain of plasma and rear-projection televisions,” Sharp chief executive Toshihiko Fujimoto said. “There’s no question that LCD TV is fast becoming the dominant flat-panel technology.”

Last year, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled what was then the world’s largest flat TV, a 102-inch plasma model.

Sharp and several rival brands such as Samsung, LG Electronics Inc., Toshiba Corp., Royal Philips Electronics NV, Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.’s Panasonic said they doubled the frame rate per second on LCD screens from 60 to 120, which makes fast movement seem to go by more smoothly.

Toshiba and Sharp explained this was done by calculating what should go between two frames.

Sales of flat panel TVs in the United States are expected to total 13.5 million in 2006, with three-quarters made up of LCD TVs and the rest plasma, the group said. Total sales are expected to reach nearly 20 million this year and more than 25 million next year, with LCDs continuing to dominate.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in his keynote at MacWorld in San Francisco, announced the new iPhone cell phone.  The iPhone is an impressive, and expensive, device. It comes in 4 GB and 8 GB models and costs $499 and $599, respectively. It includes a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a virtual keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera, is Wi-Fi enabled and runs OSX. Cingular is the carrier. The desktop-like interface and user experience looks to be a killer. This might actually take the mobile email revolution another full step forward from what Blackberry has done. Standard web sites can be viewed via the Safari browser (and soon, I’m sure, Firefox). And there are a number of nice touches as well, including a motion sensor that rotates photos when you turn the phone, and voicemails displayed visually that you can click on and listen to. As we all expect from Apple, this is a seriously buttoned up device.

This is an update to my posting about AGLOCO.  In a few more weeks, AGLOCO viewbar should be up and ready for download.  Once you download, you will be able to start making money for just surfing the web, as you normally do, and from your friends doing the same that I have signed up under you in your network.

The hardest part about AGLOCO is getting people to sign up for it.  Most people are reluctant because they think there is some catch to it.  It really couldn’t be more harmless.  If you want to make money for simply surfing the web give AGLOCO a try, you can sign up here - it’s completely FREE.

Yahoo has officially bought MyBlogLog.  The size of deal has not yet been confirmed, but is rumored to be around $10 - $12 million.  MyBlogLog will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network and because of such - will probably allow users to log in via their Yahoo IDs which should help expand its user base, significantly.

Yahoo! Inc. recently launched Yahoo! oneSearch, an entirely new search service designed to give consumers exactly what they want on their mobile device — instant answers. oneSearch leverages Yahoo!’s deep experience, investment and expertise in search on the desktop as well as relationships with leading content providers to deliver an unmatched mobile search experience for consumers.

With this launch Yahoo! expands its mobile Internet leadership.Yahoo! oneSearch is available to consumers through the Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 beta. By the end of January 2007, Yahoo! plans to make oneSearch available across the company’s Mobile Web and SMS services. Yahoo! oneSearch will roll out in additional country and language versions in the coming months.

As the saying goes, an image is worth a 1000 words, but this is not the case for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While this is true to you and I when we are attempting to compare a list of very similar cameras, or reading a map, search engines are able to discern very little from most web site images. However, this article should help you to provide more to a search engine as it attempts to index the images, text, and other data from your web site.

Rescue words from images
First and most importantly when you can rescue words from the images do so. Since the value of an image to an engine is significantly less than normal text, this is a good place to start. It may mean that you include a tag if the entire or most of the page is an image. This may mean that you strategically take text that is in the image or flash content and place in normal text on the page.

Use the Keyword in the name of the image
When naming an image, the use of the keyword in the image name is beneficial. This can be helpful for image searches on an search engine, as well as to help the engines to understand the idea that an image may be trying to provide and it may provide a better understanding of the page’s overall theme. So, something like eyepinch-web-hosting-services-icon.gif would be an improvement if the old file name was icon.gif. (.gif or .jpg does not matter, so use the image format that makes sense for your image.)

Place the image caption next to the image
Place a caption next to the image, with the keyword in close proximity to the image on the site.

Place the keyword in the text content that surrounds the image
If the image is placed in the body, and surrounded by text content having the keyword physically close to the image - this will also have benefits.

Use Alt attributes
The use of Alt tags as part of the site design is important. While it is postulated by many SEOs that search engines rarely use Alt tags purely for ranking purposes, many agree that it more likely that Alt tags are used by search engines to gain a better understanding of a page’s target keywords or theme.

Use Title attributes
Using the title attribute can further describe your image.  Unlike the Alt attribute, the Title attribute can be read and displayed on Firefox whereas either can be displayed in Internet Explorer.

Use the Longdesc attribute
The longdesc attribute tells the search engine that a particular image has more information related to it on another page.  The value for the longdesc attribute will contain the url to the page with this more detailed information.

AdBrite is testing out a new video ad service that looks very interesting. It contains features such as:

• 1. Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free
• 2. Brand your videos with your own custom logo “watermark”
• 3. “Split-screen” ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience
• 4. Sharing features promote your site when your videos get “viral”
• 5. Earn money from your videos, even when they’re embedded into other peoples’ Web sites

InVideo looks like quite a compelling service. Why make nothing with YouTube when you can make some cash with InVideo? Popular videos can end up making a killing as other websites and blogs start to embedded the videos.

Amazon.com has launched their own independent shoe and handbag niche website, Endless.com. Shoes and handbags will still be available on Amazon.

Endless provides an enhanced browsing experience for shoe buying, compared to what Amazon.com does. For example, the visual search is real nice — you can keep refining your search by price, style, color, size, or brand. Endless.com’s focus is on free overnight shipping — they have a countdown clock on every page letting you know the next delivery date.

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that the next version of Adobe Production Studio, the integrated video and audio post-production tool set that is part of the Creative Suite family, will be available for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Film, video and web professionals currently using Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on the Mac will soon be able to harness the power of completely new Macintosh releases of Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD and Adobe Soundbooth — all key components of an upcoming milestone revision to Adobe Production Studio. The software will have its first public demonstration during the Macworld 2007 Conference and Exhibition at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, January 9 - 12 (Booth 901). The next release of Adobe Production Studio is expected to ship in mid-2007.