Free Web Insights

Adobe Systems are teaming up with Google & Yahoo to make content that is mixed with Flash easier for search engines to index. This should have a big impact on how Flash pages/content is sorted & ranked buy those search engines. The great news for sites with existing Flash .SWF files is they won’t need to make any changes to the pages or code, all the work will be done by the spider programmes from Google & Yahoo!

Great! But what does it all mean?

For the end users, it means more relevant search results, according to Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Flash at Adobe. “The perfect page for you may have been out there, but it was all Flash content, so it had low search ranking. This will mean it will have a high ranking.”

The problem for search engines finding Flash-based pages is due to the dynamic nature of Flash, and pretty much any Web runtime, said Everett-Church. A HTML file is a flat file with links, while a Flash .SWF file has various states. Based on user interaction, you could go to different parts of the Flash file. When a search spider reaches a HTML page, it goes through the tags but discards SWF file references. With this new indexing method, when it finds an SWF file, it passes the job off to an optimised search program to examine the SWF file’s contents.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google, in a statement. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help website owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Google will be going live with the new SWF indexing technology this week, while Yahoo plans to release it at an undetermined point in the future, according to Everett-Church. He expects this change will have a big effect on search results. “There is so much content out there that has been indexed but not to the thoroughness that was possible,” he told InternetNews.com. “It will take a while for Google to spider all the SWFs out there, but as it goes you are going to see a big effect. One is that there will be more search results, and the ones higher up will be the ones with the great experience you’d expect with a Flash app.”

In the $1 billion law suit accusing YouTube of copyright infringement, Viacom won’t be told the names of users who watch video clips on the Google owned site.

Viacom, are suing YouTube for $1 billion, saying that Youtube became the size that they are now by allowing TV shows produced by the media giant on their website.

The High Court Judge overseeing the case originally ordered YouTube to hand over their entire database of records which would include usernames, IP addresses and viewing habits.  This would allow Viacom to prove that copyrighted material, such as ‘Spongebob Squarepants’ and ‘The Daily Show with John Stewart’ were more heavily watched than the amature clips that YouTube promotes.

To protect user privacy and preserve the integrity of the website, YouTube argued that the user id’s and IP addresses were unnecessary and that viewing habits could be analysed without this data.

Any data released to Viacom will be under a court enforced confedentiality order and Viacom has said it will not use any of the data to persue individual users.

Read More

Magento is a great new piece of open source eCommerce software, and they are soon to be releasing an update Version 1.1.

We here at NetInsight believe that Magento is the leading light in open source ecommerce and can’t wait for the new version to be released, they had added a number of new features to the already substantial list which just keeps pushing this great platform away from the competition.

Here’s what’s new:
1. Performance Improvements: Since the 1.0 release we have been working on improving the performance of Magento and the 1.1 release will see further gains (as much as 40% performance improvements in the catalog and sales modules).
2. Admin UI improvements: Changes will be made to only load data when necessary, improving the responsiveness of the Admin Panel.
3. Web Services API: A highly requested feature which will make integrating Magento with 3rd party software much easier. The API will be added for the catalog, customers and sales modules.
4. Virtual Products: These products which do not require shipping information and/or inventory management add to Magento’s product types by allowing for store owners to more easily create and manage products.
5. Customer Defined Product Options: This functionality will allow customers to define text, images, etc. for products.
6. Bundled Products: One of the most exciting features, this will allow store owners to create built to order products and will further extend the product options available in Magento.
7. Improved support for EU and Canadian taxes: The tax rules and functionalities for EU and Canadian taxes will be added to the Core, which should be especially exciting to the Magento community outside of the US.

Check out the video from two of the developers Yoav Kutner and Chris Marshall:

NetInsight eBusiness Consultancy

Search giant, Google are currently testing one of their newest toys to enter the social networking arena.  Google Friend Connect will allow you to add social features, provided by Google and their OpenSocial developer community, to your own website with a simple cut and paste.

Still in the testing phase at the moment, this promises to be a revolutionary step in the way we use social networking. With absolutely no programming experience necessary to add these features to your site, anyone will be able to create their very own social network website based around their favourite topic.

NetInsight eBusiness Consultancy