Yahoo has acquired online ad exchange company, Right Media, for $680 million, a move that shows Yahoo is not resting in the wake of Google’s purchase of banner ad company Doubleclick earlier this month.

Right Media is notable because it is an ad exchange, where buyers of Internet ads (publishers) and sellers (advertisers) can find each other and negotiate prices with the efficiency created by a large marketplace. This is significant because it is more transparent than Google’s platform for publishers, Adsense — and could therefore give Yahoo a small advantage in its battle against the Google juggernaut. See coverage of Right Media, when it got a $45 million cash infusion from Yahoo and Redpoint Ventures in October. Right Media had previously raised an additional $7.5 million from Redpoint (see the coverage).

It is growing quickly, and in October boasted two billion ad impressions a day being bought on it. Chief executive Mike Walrath told us at the time it is the largest such marketplace. It takes “less than 10 percent cut” as middleman from each transaction, which is not enough to scare customers away, but still enough to generate a healthy income. Walrath said at the time his biggest competitors are Microsoft and Google.

The $680 million acquisition represents a major home-run for Walrath, who started Right Media in 2003. It is also a relief for venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, which has been searching for its first major win ever since the young firm opened its doors at the height of the boom in late 1999.

The deal lets Google purchase the remaining 80% of New York-based Right Media Inc doesn’t already own.

BlogForward Money

I’m pleased to announce my new wordpress plugin Mass Post Manager

This plugin allow to do the following things:

• Delete all posts and/or comments in selected category
• Move all posts from one category to another

Plugin was developed for may needs so its functionality is quite limited right now. Рowever i plan to add more and more features upon request.

Read more and download this plugin here

We glad to announce update on Post Filter Wordpress Plugin.

This plugin is a good help for bloggers who want to use external tools or write via wordpress without boring external images relinking/uploading and content cleanup. This plugin cleans posts and caches remote images on the fly.

Compatibility

Tested with Wordpress 2.0 and higher; Requires GD for resizing images on the fly. Version 1.1: Now uses curl to download files, you may specify list of extensions to download.

To download please proceed to original page

Features:

• Download and cache all external images to your wp-content directory so this post will reference them locally and you won’t steal someone else’s bandwidth;
• You may request to auto resize images (if you blog is narow!) and add them into Wordpress attachments area;
• You may request to strip all id, style, class attributes so you will not follow other site’s classes and styles;
• Specify extensions to filter (added in version 1.1).

Product reviews are typically a welcome nugget of knowledge when trying to make a critical purchasing decision, but we’d probably succumb to just picking a power supply at random before actually wading through 105 reviews to find out which one was king. While this could all very well be a completely impractical prank, Stéphane Charpentier of France’s MatBe has apparently put just over one hundred PSUs on the testing bench in order to find out which is worth your cash, and he went through a variety of flavors and wattages to make sure the very one you were eying was thoughtfully included. Without getting into specifics, Akasa’s Power80+ took home the gold in the nonmodular category, Antec’s Neo HE notched first place in the modular realm, the Fortron Zen won in the fanless arena, Cooler Master’s Real Power Pro ruled the “powerful” division, and Antec’s Earthwatts proved the most “valuable.” Of course, there’s a good bit of detail surrounding the 100 other losers in the crowd, so if you’re down with skimming through 140 pages of PSU reviews, the read link awaits your attention.Read the review

[Via Inquirer, Engadget]

So, about Javascript and Python. The short of it is that Python’s inner workings are much more complicated and its interface is much less complicated to use. Of course, we put up with Javascript because it reaches places Python can not.

The first difference between Python and Javascript is the type system. I’d say that it’s a difference between Object Oriented and Prototype Oriented, but that would be superficial. The difference is in how programmers choose to craft and reuse their objects and types, not the range of possibilities. This has broad implications for learn-ability, readability, maintainability, and sanity.

In Python, like Javascript, an object is an associative array. In Python, in particular, an object is a hash table. The distinction is that in Python, member selection and item or attribute indexing are distinct services. You can override selection and indexing separately. In Javascript, the distinction between indexing and selection exists for numerically indexed Arrays, but not lexically indexed Objects. Python’s dict type has an associative array for its members and another associative array for its items. This, I find, is wise; the key domains of both attributes and items are open, permitting you to use any key as both a member and an index without a name collision.

Read full article here [The Sourcerer]

Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees.

MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses.

Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.

Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free.

The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees.

We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space.

A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line.

[via Techcrunch]

1. Engadget: A tech blog with news on the latest gadgets, gizmos and tech news. Rather a lot going on, on the front page, with dozens of outgoing links to other blogs on the Weblogs Inc network. First impression: Cluttered.
2. Boing-Boing: A completely random blog/magazine with no apparent focus on any one thing (nothing wrong with that). Dozens of posts on the front page, hemmed in tightly by what I assume are ads. First impression: Fluid width design anyone?
3. Gizmodo: It calls itself the gadgets weblog, and appears to be just that. Nice clean design, good use of images,  sensible number of posts, uncluttered. First impression: I like it.
4. TechCrunch: A blog that concentrates on the latest  internet products and companies. A clear WordPress blog with only 6 posts on the front page (which encourages you to read further) and some interesting articles with news of a new WP plugin that I like the look of. You would think he’d keep his version of WordPress up to date though… First impression: Green! But I think I’ll subscribe.
5. The Huffington Post: Unsurprisingly laid out like a newspaper, the blog is tucked into a narrow column, although it does exist in it’s own right on another page. News and opinion on any topic you care to mention. First impression: I hate the homepage layout-it may work on paper, but not on my screen.
6. Lifehacker: Recommends the software, downloads etc. that help to make you more productive. A relief on the eyes after the Huffington Post, and an engagingly written, interesting blog. First impression: The blocks of ads overlaps the sidebar. First thing I noticed I’m afraid.
7. Ars Technica:Everything technology related, with articles on IT, gaming, internet and related law. A little cluttered, with few images and the right ’sidebar’ is way too intrusive for my tastes. First impression: Is this on Blogspot? (Sorry, it’s the template).
8. PostSecret: People write a secret of theirs onto a postcard and mail it to the blogger, who posts it up. The most drab template you can imagine, on Blogspot of all things and yet utterly compelling. Unequivocal proof that content is what counts, and a couple of blogs further up the list could learn from letting the content of the posts speak for itself. First impression: Wow.
9. Daily Kos: Hard to sum up in a few words, but comes across as very personal given the number of different contributors. A political blog very firmly centered on the US, it is nevertheless an interesting read. A clean simple layout, which allows you to concentrate on what’s been written. First impression: Simple, and straight to the point.
10. Michelle Malkin: Very little actual writing, just an awful lot of cutting and pasting. Probably appeals to the opposite camp to Daily Kos, I should imagine they lob dead woodchucks at each other over the Technorati fence. First impression: Blockquotes ahoy!

I suppose you’ll be wanting a point now? Discuss here

Highslide JS is a piece of JavaScript that streamlines the use of thumbnail images on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

• No plugins like Flash or Java required.
• Popup blockers are no problem. The images expand within the active browser window.
• Single click. After expanding the image, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without restoring the image.
• The approach uses two separate images. No heavy full-size image packed into thumbnail display size! The full-size image is loaded in the background either on page load or when the user clicks the thumb. You specify this option in the script’s settings.
• Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

Get it here

WordPress by default doesn’t come with any sort of web site reporting tools (and it really shouldn’t). So if you want to know how many people visited your site, which pages they viewed, or where they came from, you’ll need to either rely on your raw web logs or use an online tracking service provided by a third party. There are many different third party web tracking services out there, but the two free and popular third party solutions that We highly recommend are Google Analytics (for web traffic) and Feedburner (for syndicated traffic).

Joe Tan created a WordPress plugin to check  web stats pretty regularly. This plugin allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area. It adds a top-level Reports tab and when you click on it, you’ll get a quick 7 day overview of what’s going on with your site (pageviews, visits, referrers, etc). You’ll have to login to Google Analytics or Feedburner directly if you want more detailed stats.

As you might expect, you’ll need either a Google Analytics or Feedburner account before you can really use this plugin. At the moment, these are the only two services that are supported, but I may consider adding some other services if it’s feasible.

Author: Joe Tan (Thnks Joe!)
License: GPL
Features:

• Provides you with a birds-eye view of what’s going on with your site
• Retrieves data from Google Analytics and Feedburner
• Reports are represented visually with graphs
• Choose the reports you want to view
• Ability to automatically install the Google Analytics tracking code for you, along with optional outbound link tracking.
• Automatically check for updates to the plugin

Installation:

1. Download and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload the entire “tantan” directory to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Login to your WordPress admin, click “Plugins”, and then activate the “WordPress Reports” plugin.
4. Click on the new “Reports” tab, and click “Setup” subtab.
5. Follow the on screen instructions and enter the proper details for each service.
6. You’re done! Click the “Reports” tab again to view the traffic summary for your site. Sweet!

Download the plugin

Source

Jenstar and Shoemoney presents the best tactics for generating revenue from Google Adsense an the Yahoo! Publisher Network.All right, we admit that we followed this Search Engine Strategies session as much for our own sake as for the benefit of our readers. We make active use of contextual pay-per-click ads to cover our bills, and listening to experts like Jennifer Slegg and Jeremy Schomeaker is always a pleasure.

We were not disappointed. Jennifer gave a poplar and to-the-point presentation of what to look out for when using Google Adsense or Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN).

Here are some of the points