Welcome to the Escape Blog

eBay have just launched a new shopping site, eBay Express. It’s just like eBay but without the bidding.

Both brand new and second hand items can be listed and everything is sold at a fixed price.

It looks good, but what impact will this have for the online auction site which already has a ‘Buy Now’ feature? We don’t know either but we could be witnessing the beginnings of a significant shift in how we shop online. Who knows, perhaps this could even signal the end of the current online auctioning trend? Only time will tell.

You can check out eBay Express here.

Nice and quick little overview here from Pronet:

1. Casinos have no windows because they don’t want gamblers getting distracted. Just like casinos, you want to remove the cool features and unnecessary links on your website so visitors don’t get distracted and start wondering off.
2. Free booze and rooms is a great way casinos attract people. Offering some sort of freebie on your website is a great way to attract and retain visitors. Once you have them on your website then you can try to convince them to purchase something.
3. When you first walk into a casino slot machines and tables are in your face. Make sure your call to action such as a "buy it now" button is visible and in your visitors’ face.
4. Casinos have a specific atmosphere that causes people to be energetic and gamble. The gambler is usually making decisions based on emotion instead of logic. With your website you want to create the same effect through design, color, and content. Make these elements play on the visitor’s emotions so that he or she spends their money without thinking about shopping around.

Emotion

Is it fair to say that this is not taken into consideration (still) by so many companies. Does anyone care at the corporate level? They should! Or, are they still fascinated by the number of pages of dull and un-engaging copy they can have?

I found this very useful page if you want to know more about pinging.

They did. They Googled it.

Google announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.  Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

If you use Typepad (and we do) for your blogging, there are some features that can really add more benefit to every post you create.

These may seem fairly obvious to ‘power users’, but they will add real value for general users and for your business, enabling people to find you through your blog.

Keywords and Trackbacks

The tip I want to cover in this short post is in terms of building back links to your site - through search.

Some of the hidden gems are very easy to find and can become part of every post you make. First of all you have to ‘Customize the display of the page’ and add on the additional features of keywords, technorati tags and trackbacks:

When you have done this, your page should look slightly different with some additional boxes down the bottom of your posting page.

Keywords and Technorati Tags should relate to the subject of your post. Don’t go for too many, the chances are your post is specific - stay specific.

Technorati track over 56 million blogs and as such, is a very popular tool for blog search. It makes sense to combine every post you create with them. You can also create an account with Technorati and ‘plug in’ your blog to their system.

Trackback URLs to ping will also send your new post directly to the engines that register your blog posts, Technorati being one of them and also (new to me today and the reason for this post) Google Blog Search.

All you need to do is enter the ping addresses in the trackback addresses, in this case:

• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Better Search

Simply by tracking back every time you post an article, these search engines index your pages quicker. The tags and keywords will make your post more specific. So, if someone is looking for what you have (specifically), there is a much greater chance that they will find you!

From E-Consultancy

More than 50% of Myspace’s US visitors are now over 35 years of age, according to a report that shows the site’s appeal to older internet users is increasing as its mainstream popularity grows.

The research, by comScore Media Metrix, shows the site’s
teenage visitors form a much lower percentage of its audience compared to last year, while over four in ten Myspace users are now between the ages of 35 and 54.

Eleven percent of its visitor base is 55-plus; almost as large as its base of users in the 12 to 17 age bracket (11.9%).

Makes you wonder where MySpace will be in five years time. If the reason it became cool, was because it was relatively exclusive, what happens when it gets taken over by the mainstream? It’s no longer cool? Show me a teen that doesn’t want to be cool.

Will these online ‘cool brands of the moment’ become like Marks and Spencers in the future? You get to a certain age and suddenly it’s okay to shop there. Or, will we see a web 2.0 crash and burn?

That said, their Alexa Ranking tells a story! No wonder Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for the company.

Many companies would like a content-management system (CMS). It saves paying the designer, or web company, money each time they want something changed. It makes sense.

However, one of the key areas of misinterpretation, as highlighted by Vitamin, is the concentrating on the System, rather than the Content.

A good content-managed system is what it says - the management of the content and content comes from people. The Escape is content-managed but it is not by a system, it is by coding (it gives us more control). It also helps us with semantic markup.

So, rather than maybe investing thousands in a content-managed system, why not invest in the people? Teach them about content, about structure. Remember it’s quality, not quantity that counts.

If you’ve ever tried to use Adobe Illustrator (and the like) to create simple vector art, you should appreciate these amazing illustrations by Wizard 2.

Thanks Basang Panaginip

At the risk of every post being about Google, news today that the Search Engine Giant may be buying video sharing website YouTube for a reported $1.6 Billion.

Launched in February 2005, YouTube has grown into one of the most popular websites on the web, with 100 million videos viewed every day and an estimated 20 million visitors each month.

A problem for Google if they do buy the company, is that a great many users put up their favourite music videos and film clips, for which they have not gained copyright approval.

We have had great fun with You Tube In the past and have used to to run our videos through, saving on our server bandwidths. I am sure there is a business model that makes money behind all this but they let you do it for free.

See our World Cup Competition Video and The Result Video - very funny if I do say so myself.

The word on the street is about Powerset, a Silicon Valley outfit, currently working under ’stealth’ developing their new generation of search engine.

Powerset wants to let people use natural language when searching,
including some words that search engines ignore today (what founder
Barney Pell calls “stopwords“).

It’s a big ask and I can remember when suddenly people stopped using Yahoo to use Google (or did they?) - it was quick.

If the product is good, and the word spreads - you never know.

Ref. Techcrunch