I had heard about the so called Internet back then but only had my first experience surfing the net in 1995 when I was in the University.

I found things via links from other people sites. Link pages were well valued those days because they helped people discovered the hidden gems not searchable by even the most powerful search engines during those days.

I used Veronica to search the web and Archie for FTP search. Then Yahoo! came along and became the dominant search engine. Other search engines followed suit including Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, Northern Light, InfoSeek before Google arrived at the scene in 1999/2000 I think. It took the center stage ever since because of its clean homepage and relevancy.

My first website was in The Tropics of Geocities. It was fun learning HTML and coding the design by hand, never realised I would be doing that sort of things for a living later.

One of my earlier comments on the web can be found at Durian Online. It got me feel a little nostalgic just by reading it. My others foot prints seemed to have drifted off into the Internet oblivion.

How was your first experience surfing the Internet?

[via Google Blogoscoped]

The following video from the Oprah Shows talks about how Google is the best place to work in the US according to the Fortune magazine.

You can also upload your own video and create a branded video channel that you control. Here’s an example of a Video Channel created using Magnify.net

Magnify.net provides upload, storage and free bandwidth. You’ll be able to create your own video community and generate revenue through Google AdSense or Revver.com.

So how do you actually make money from this?

Members make money from 50/50 revenue sharing on the advertising displayed on your Magnify.net site. The type of advertising messages shown on Magnify sites are

• Text Links and Banner Ads Magnify shows contextual advertising messages in the margins of some pages.
• Integrated Advertising Some videos syndicated from third-party hosting services contain integrated advertising. (For example, videos hosted by Revver include an advertisement after the end of the video.)
• Video Pre-Roll A few Magnify sites are currently testing a pre-roll offering that plays a 10-30 second video advertisement before some video views.

So to earn money with Magnify and AdSense for example, you can enter your AdSense affiliate ID in Magnify members area. Your AdSense affiliate ID will then be used half of the times that a AdSense ad is shown on your site. The overall revenue share is thus 50% to you and 50% to Magnify.

Your AdSense affiliate earnings are recorded at Google, reported through Google’s AdSense affiliate interface, and paid to you directly by Google according to their terms and conditions.

You can use your own domain name for your Magnify site to further integrate your video channel with your own brand. This is what Shawn Collins did which allowed him to create Affiliate TV literally in minutes.

Some of the features include the ability to customize your video pages with built-in templates and admin tools, add a blog into your channel, view site statistics, and more.

Some Google AdWords users may already be familiar with the trick described in the video which is basically teaches you about split- testing to improve your ads CTR (click through rates).

Check out this related article I wrote earlier about identifying successful ads using Statistical Significance.

While I’ve discussed some of tips here at Sabahan.com, Jim’s post covers most of the topics and more in one location.

There are many variables that you can tinker with to improve your ranking in Google, and reading the article will ensure you are heading in the right direction.

However, contrary to what Jim said, I think RSS feeds link are not ‘totally useless’ and therefore using the nofollow attribute would not be advisable.

Place the attribute rel=”nofollow” on links that are totally useless for search engines such as to RSS feeds for the blog and comment links. In case you want to remove the nofollow on the comment links make sure you check the author links before approval as it is important that you don’t link to bad sites from your blog.

Some of my readers found my blog via the RSS feeds of my blog which were indexed by Google. Preventing Google from indexing these links means one less funnel for potential readers to discover my blog even though these links are probably placed into Google’s supplemental index.

I am using WordPress default setting – with nofollow attribute – for other RSS feeds such as those for comment and author URL. To counter this effect, those who managed to get into my Top Commentator list will still be able to enjoy the link juice here at Sabahan.com because there’s no nofollow attributed in there.

In a related news, Gray Wolf has posted an interesting video at YouTube to help make your WordPress blog search engine friendly.

You can check it out below:

• Select a location and switch to satellite view
• Zoom in as far as you can, and click “link to this page” at the top right
• Now replace the “z” parameter in the URL with a higher value, e.g. 20, 22, or 23, and wait. Some locations will now show more detailed imagery

That’s amazing don’t you think? You can find the unzoomed map here.

You can check The French Errans website and Geotrotter for more stuff like this.

While I find this capability interesting, it could raise privacy concern at the same time.

There’s no shortage of creative people who took advantage of this situation and create video clip jokes and posted them on YouTube like the one below.

Tell me what you think.

His method is not new but it’s nice to see someone documented it in a way like what Vishen did.

It’ll work better if you have an existing list of contacts to email to where you can jump start the promotion of your video. If you blog is already popular, your existing readers could boost your video popularity as well. This will cause your video’s popularity on YouTube to go up faster.

Once it becomes one of the top watched videos of the day, more and more people will start watching it.

You can include your site URL on YouTube page showing the video and more often than not, some viewers will end up visiting your blog.

They are pretty targeted bunch and since your video has done the job of preselling your products or services, monetizing this traffic would not be too hard.

Vishen claims that they are making 76 cents for every person who watched their YouTube video. That’s pretty good when you compare with how much you earn per click on average from AdSense.

Back then, there was not a lot or cursing or swearing or scream full go to hell one would expect to find online. The reason being I think,the Internet demographics back then was very much different from it’s today. The average surfers were mostly IT professionals and those from the academic communities.

The Interface was text based and best described as pre-historic but still it’s amazing in those days.

They were right to say this thing would change the world. It certainly has changed mine. Without the Internet I would probably working somewhere in the middle of the South China Sea LOL.

While it was reported that it supports Internet Explorer only, I was able to browse and view the videos with Firefox.

I find the interface quite intuitive where I can watch and browse from the same screen.

Check out MSN Soapbox here