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.

Tags: amazonaws, s3, ec2

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.

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

read more | digg story

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

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

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

WordPress is a blogging platform which can be extended through plugins to make it whatever you want. There are literally hundreds of plugins – thats why this post helps as it points to to some of the best.

Check it out and see which could help you.

read more | digg story

Whilst Google’s terms of service prevent the disclosure of precise click through rates it appears that the comparative performance assessments are allowed.

The ads linked unit and the text unit had very similar performance levels, both these units were positioned on the left-hand side of the page.

The image unit was positioned on the right-hand sidebar near the bottom of the page and as such, would have been expected to perform worse than the other units. Notwithstanding this it actually had a click through rate one fifth of that of the other units and carried advertisers with a lower click cost.

Google publish heat maps of pages showing the best place to position your ad units, these results are consistent with this thought the very poor performance of image units is surprising. Needless to say my first action now is to substitute on any image units I am promoting with a suitable text unit.

The experiment was interesting that, given that it has highlighted a loss of income, I am not going to delay by continuing it any further.

Tags: adsense

Search results have become random. Some sites disappear from the index and then reappear. Results from Google search engines around the world are different for the same enquiry. Sometimes sites loose hundreds of pages from the index overnight and they have not yet returned.

Whilst this is a poor service and Google should have done better the issue highlights a very basic business principle. Do not put your business at risk be having too large a percentage of your business flowing from one business partner.

Last week Marks and Spencer suppliers in the UK found the same issue had impacted them when they were asked to cut their costs by 20 percent to improve Marks and Spencer margins. Did the company consider the impact on its suppliers, I doubt that it was a major consideration.

On the Internet there are several search engines and MSN and Yahoo should not be overlooked. These engines are investing to improve their performance and are a valuable source of visitors.

Increasing site visibility by linking with other sites enhancing your Link Popularity , increasing the exposure of your url in your advertising communications and online marketing through email, PPC and banner campaigns are all opportunities that should be actively explored.

If you depend too much on Google search results you may regret your decision with the next Google infrastructure or algorithm change.

Tags: Yahoo, MSN, bigdaddy, search engines, Google

This is hot news as Google has not been keen to disclose adsense commission structures before and this has held back some sites from participating in the program. The costs of Internet Marketing with Pay Per Click programs is known but why join the publishing club when you have no idea of what the rewards will be and whether you will be fairly remunerated.

The article further states that the revenue from the search sites brings Google more revenue that the Adsense program as a result of this commission distribution.

I suspect that larger sites receive more commission and the smaller sites less with the 78.5 percent being the average. Notwitstanding this it appears that webmasters should give serious consideration to gaining additional revenue from participation in the program.

You have little to loose. Google distributing the lions share of the revenue and retaining less than 15 percent of the income in exchange for delivering contextual adverts to your site.

Tags: google adsense, adsense commission, adsense commission payments,

Further to this the sitemaps can be updated and keep Google aware of all the pages in the site and, most importantly, when changes are made to specified pages to help improve the efficiency of the Google visits to the site and subsequent indexing.  The goal is to improve your search engine optimisation activities.

In the last few years Google has loved Blogs as they have used the ping mechanism to advise external services and indexes when an update has been made to the site. In this way Google can ensure that it visits a Blog when there is new content and not waste a visit when there is nothing new. When your search activities are carried out on the scale of Google’s wasted visits cost money.

Sitemaps help to enable a similar method of working for more traditional web sites and might lead to Google prefering sites which post sitemaps in its new service rather than ‘not cooperate’

Tags: google sitemaps, webmaster, submit, siteurls, visibility, website pages,

So if we are why are many blue chip companies stuck in the past? Look at their corporate site, many are still trying to come to terms with the Internet as a channel and do not seem to recognise that the customer will choose which channel they use and when. That is to say the customer will move across channels and we need some semblance of channel integration.

Moving on from that as communication bandwidth increases for less cost the functionality in this online channel, and the opportunities, are increasing by the week.

Noting this where are the best practice corporate sites using video clips and podcasts to drive excellent customer service and gain competitive advantage?

Thin on the ground I think.

Tags: narrowband, broadband, podcasts, corporate, internet channel,

American research by The Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Media Metrix established that in during a typical September day approximately 59 million people (41% of internet users) used a search engine.

I have also heard that 75 percent of online journeys start with a search engine.

If you have a teenager it seems to me that there is a fruitful career looming in search engine optimisation. Forget sending him or her to the city, the new fronteer is opening and experts in search engine marketing will be in short supply.

Tags: email, popular, online, internet, comscore, media, matrix

The statistics are: -

Papers 63% spend 10% viewing time
Television 30% spend 35% viewing time
Radio 4% spend 25% viewing time
Internet 3% spend 30% viewing time

There seems to be a large opportunity for someone here. There is also a big threat to those newspaper businesses out there who are not engaging their readers.

Tags: internet, household, marketing spend

Not only is the size decreasing but paper based circulations are falling as people move online for information.

The American trade magazine ‘Editor and Publisher’ reported that circulations fell for 18 of the top 20 US papers.

It strikes me that we could be reaching the point where these publishers have to rething their business models and put far more effort into their online news editions.

Writing for the internet is completely different from a paper page. Online sites need to carry far more than a copy of articles in the daily paper.

Do you see the revolution arriving?

Long live online !

Tags: newspapers, decreasing, circulations, online, information, american trade magazine