The famous auction site eBay is banning the sales of virtual goods. The decision applies on characters, currency, weapons, attire and accounts of online games such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and others.
The decision to pull these items was due to the ‘legal complexities’ of listing virtual property.
The company has been removing offending auctions for just over a month and if the seller tries on multiple attempts to sell virtual goods, their eBay accounts are being removed.
The company says it will specifically exempt Second Life from that policy because they are unable to decide whether Second Life should be regarded as a game.
The decision to exempt second life can be connected with the fact that, the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is an investor in Second Life owner Linden Labs . Also Second Life has some elaborate intellectual property rights policies in place.
[via CNET]
Technorati Tags: ebay, virtual goods, second life
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Adsense Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. Adsense section targeting can be used to get ads more relevant to the post content.
Target Adsense is a plugin for WordPress that provides more control over how google_ad_section targeting is employed on your WordPress blog.
Features:
- Easy installation and set-up (just drop in, activate, and set your options)
- Option to wrap all posts and pages with ad section targeting tags
- Button ImageOption to add button to the post and page editor which allows easy ad section targeting within the post [button shown to right]
- Upgrade notification: this plugin will let you know (in the plugin options screen) if a new version is available
You can Download Target Adsense Wordpress plugin from here.
You can read this page on Google Adsense Help Centre to know more about adsense section targeting.
Technorati Tags: adsense section targeting, adsense tips, adsense
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Sweden is opening a Virtual Embassy in Second Life. The virtual embassy is being built by the Swedish Institute. Swedish Institute is an agency of the Swedish foreign ministry tasked with informing the world about Sweden.
The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would instruct visitors how to obtain such documents in the real world and act as a link to web-based information.
Many big business companies have already opened their shops in second life but Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life.
[via thelocal.se]
Technorati Tags: sweden embassy, second life, virtual, online
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Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube spoke at World Economic Forum and said that the wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its users.
“We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said, as quoted by the AP. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.”
While details about the program are not exactly known as yet, the program will be introduced slowly over a long period of time.
This is an interesting news for video creators who are already uploading videos on YouTube and would like to make money out of it. About 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.
With the announcement, YouTube joins the list of the iCompanies, enterprises that include their community into their economic ecosystem.
[via GigaOm]
Technorati Tags: youtube, revenue, youtube revenue
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There is a whole movement of webmasters and bloggers. People who hate the “nofollow” attribute.
When Google and other search engines encourage using the rel=”nofollow” attribute for preventing spam and Wordpress and other blogging platforms append nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc).
These bloggers are happy to pass on some of their page rank.
No NoFollow Wiki gives some reasons against the use of nofollow.
1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is semantically incorrect
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion
I have found many bloggers who don’t use “rel=nofollow” on commenter url’s. Web Entrepreneur Yaro Starak is one of them. Also found this Deutsch List of No-NoFollow blogs.
If you plan to remove nofollow from your wordpress blog. Download this Wordpress plugin or use this wordpress hack.
Technorati Tags: no nofollow, nofollow
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To combat spam, some days back Wikipedia started adding nofollow tags to all external links.
For those who don’t know , “nofollow” is a link attribute which tells a search engine that it should not follow the link, so the link will not get pageRank or any other benefit for being on wikipedia.
If you want to fight back, Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson developed a small WordPress plugin which adds rel=’nofollow’ to all outgoing links from your blog to Wikipedia.
I have installed the plugin, what about you ?
Here is a test link to Wikipedia.
You can download the plugin here.
Technorati Tags: wikipedia nofollow, wikipedia nofollow plugin, wordpress plugin
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