Amazonaws S3 and EC2 are transforming the landscape for small businesses.  Take cheap hosting from a reseller to host your business site and enhance this with cheap storage and video serving space payable on demand to Amazon.

Now they are enhancing their EC2 services as this recent news release shows.

“We are excited to introduce Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that gives you an option to make a low, one-time payment for an instance to reserve capacity and further reduce hourly usage charges. As with On-Demand Instances, you will still pay only for the compute capacity that you actually consume, and if and when you do not use an instance, you will not pay usage charges for it.

Customers of all sizes continue to enjoy our existing, pay-as-you-go pricing for On-Demand Instances, but some have told us that they are ready to reserve capacity in order to achieve even lower costs. Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or if and when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.

Reserved Instances are complementary to existing Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances and give businesses even more flexibility to reduce computing costs. Because Reserved Instances function identically to existing Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, you can now plan for an anticipated amount of capacity using Reserved Instances and then instantly spin up On-Demand Instances if your compute needs exceed you reserved capacity. Of course, you can also choose to handle all of your capacity needs using only On-Demand instances or only Reserved Instances — it’s entirely up to you. Reserved Instances are available in 1-year or 3-year terms.”

Obviously you need to do a small calculation to check that the cost of the up front payment is covered by the ongoing savings on the amazonaws usage charges.

Video is comming and low cost high bandwith is enabling a rapid adoption for the masses. In the new environment some businesses such as CISCO are experimenting with less rigid, formal video clips.

Have a look at http://blogs.cisco.com/consumer/comments/cisco_behind_i_will_survie/ where you can see Gloria Gaynor in a totally new light. Well done CISCO.

There is always a debate on whether these are worth investing in or not.  Whatever the side of the argument you are on it is worth having the ability to create and display these tags well.

WordPress is a wonderful tool but has some out of the box deficiencies.  The creation of meta tags is one but this can be addressed by adding plugins which extend the functionality of the core package.

One plugin I have adopted is the excellent Headspace2 which is modular and gives you the ability to control many aspects of your code as seen by the search engine spiders.

Have just fitted it and am test piloting the plugin for a while … I will report back in a week or so on progress.

I am always looking for ways of reducing the time it takes to do tasks, particularly repetitive tasks.

Yesterday I came across this post on the Halotis blog which advised on how you could use the imacros add in for your browser to automate a lot of those boring tasks.  The post even goes on to advise how you should consider extending the basic automation to include the scheduler so that you never forget to run those automation tasks.

Looks good – I’m going to try it and will update you on progress later.

If you are aware of Twitter you may think is is a great opportunity but how can you get off the ground.  This is the usual problem in internet marketing,  if you are famous you can continue to be famous.  If you are starting out you will find it hard to get off the bottom of the pile.

If you have a look at this post called Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey you can read how you can remove all the pain and effort by using a Greasemonkey script that they have developed to automate your Twitter posting.

The author states that ”

After you’ve followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We’ve found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren’t mutual. If they’re not in to you, then it’s time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers.  After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I’m coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I’m no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!  ”

I haven’t tried this yet but it looks well worth a shot.

20 great websites for any developer recommended on this external website.

A good start point if you are starting to move down this road.

read more | digg story

This link connects to information on software which can help you build your own (Yahoo) Answers site.

ANOVA answers software, the first script that allows webmasters to build answering communities online where users can ask questions and answer in text, audio and video.

If you have some time for R&D you ought perhaps try this and see if you can develop the next mega social site.

read more | digg story

This article recognises that AdWords organization will either help you or kill you. Make sure you organize your adgroups or else risk getting Google Slapped.

In short a properly structured adwords campaign will outperform a badly structured one and time is money with advertising as you pay even if you have no success.

read more | digg story

Often it is valuable to summarise the content of a web page or article and outline the most common keywords.  This can be useful in categorising articles but it would require the author to indicate which keywords are appropriate.

This could be a poor strategy as some authors will not want to take the time to do this and others could use false keywords as a form of spam not related to the article content.

Fortunately there is a PHP class that will allow a site owner to create automatic tag clouds or article summaries for their site. Use of software will save time and improve accuracy.

This PHP class, written by Ver Pangonilo from the Philippines analyzes the article text and determines keywords based on the frequency of one or multiple words. You can influence the outcome by providing the parameters you want to filter by:

• minimum word length
• minimum times the word appears
• minimum length and occurances of words for 2, and 3 word phrases
• minimum length and occurances of 2 and 3 word phrases

There are many keyword services which sell you keyword volumes for developing your online campaigns.

They are probably worried today. Google has decided to release accurate information on actual search volumes in their keyword tool.

Saw this item on Digg which spilled the beans.
Google Releases Keyword Tool External with Accurate Search Traffic Numbers

Google released its new Keyword Tool External tool which relays Accurate Traffic Data for Keyword Terms!! Learn More

Have a read and grab the data quickly!

read more | digg story