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One of the things that managed hosting offers is the monitoring of all your servers. This is done to make sure that there are no interruptions to the connection and operation of your website. Also, technical support is available anytime you need it, especially in case of server downtimes.

As an added extra, the resources of your server will also be carefully monitored. This will ensure you that your applications or programs do not consume too much memory to avoid lag times. Each of these alerts and notifications are usually sent via email.

Managed hosting will also monitor your log files regularly. This will make sure that your site is monitored each day for intrusions and hacks. This will free your mind of any security threat that is posed on your site.

Not only does managed hosting protect your site, they also protect your files as well. The hosting service will be the one to filter all the software in your website for defects and the hosting service will also protect your files from certain viruses.

These are some of the essentials offered by managed hosting to ensure that the operations of the business are on going.

Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account, and this is why it now attacks VoIP phone service Skype by turning Gmail into a regular phone.

All you have to do is to install a voice and video chat plug-in, and you can use your computer’s microphone, loudspeaker and — if needed — video camera to communicate. And yes, a dedicated head set with mike is useful.

Now, Google’s voice and video chat has been around for a while, but its usefulness has been limited. You could only connect with others having a Gmail account. Now US users of Gmail can call anyone with a phone anywhere in the world.

The Google Blog says:

“Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.”

So far Google Buzz hasn’t made much of an impact on the Facebook crowd. May the Gmail phone make Skype users switch to Google? We doubt it, but Gmail users who have not been using Voice over Internet services before, may start using Gmail Phone, and that will tie them even closer to Gmail as their default communication tool. That would in itself be a success for Google.

Google reported that they had clocked 1 million calls made through Gmail during the first 24 hours.

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

This week the world lost another search engine giant. Yahoo! in the US and Canada has switched over to using the Bing database, and the rest of the world will soon follow. This means that the North American market is now totally dominated by Google and Bing.

This does not mean that Google and Microsoft have achieved global domination, though. Yandex is, for instance, the big player in Russia and Baidu is dominating the Chinese market.

Still, this does not bode well for search engine innovation in what we used to call the Western Hemisphere. There are no alternative big search engine players left in Europe any more.

Here are some other search engine headlines we have found interesting this week:

Google Adds A Filter For Finding Blogs SE Land
New Awesome Ways to Search within Current Site (Using Google’s site operator) SE Journal
Has Google Purged Places Of Yelp? All Signs Point To Yes TechCrunch
Google Realtime Search Gets Home Page, Conversation View, Alerts & Geosearch SE Land
Google News Changes Again, Adds Collapsible Right Side SE Roundtable
Bing’s Market Share Up 51% In Past 12 Months SE Land
Google’s Latest Buy – Like.com Confirmed! PageTraffic
Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform Yahoo! switches over to Bing search results in the US and Canada.
Twitter hashtags: quick guide Phil Bradley
4 Cool New Gmail Features You Should Know Search mail and docs, sign into multiple accounts, and more; Google Tutor

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.

Google Replay was Google’s attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period.

The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page.

You can also find this microblog search tool by doing a regular Google search and then click on “More” and “Updates” in the left hand column of the search result page.

Resourceshelf reports that the “Updates” database contains content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz. Only Twitter is covered by the Replay tool, and then only back to February this year. The idea is to expand the historical Twitter database back to 2006.

You can narrow searches by clicking on the time-line (to select a month or a date) or by selecting “location” in the left hand column. A link to “Updates with Images” give you the same results with image thumbnails fetched from the blog or the page the microblog entries are linking to.

In the right hand column you will find links to the most popular web site links at the time of your search query.

Finally, Google may also add a link to the full conversation leading up to a tweet or update if possible.

Is this and important upgrade for Google?

We think so, as Twitter and other social web sites contain a lot of interesting references to online resources that will be of use to journalists, librarians, researchers and other investigators. Remember that Twitter & Co is much more than senseless chatter about making dinner and going to bed. People use this services to look for information, and by using Google Realtime you can tap into those searches.

Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal.

See also Google Tutor: Google Increases Focus On Realtime With Realtime Search Page

A World of Friends!

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!

Subscribe to an RSS Feed

There are generally two different kinds of tools that allow visitors to subscribe to RSS feeds. These tools are known as aggregators, or RSS news readers. As the content of an RSS feed changes, the RSS reader/aggregator will update itself automatically and display the new RSS feed items.

There are two types of aggregators — desktop aggregators, and web-based aggregators…

Desktop Aggregators

These are downloadable desktop applications that contain all of the RSS subscriptions. In most cases, you can group and categorize the RSS feeds that you subscribe to. When open, the RSS desktop reader will update all the RSS feeds that you have subscribed to, and new posts will appear in the RSS reader.

Web-Based Aggregators

Web-based RSS aggregators are applications that reside online, through which you can subscribe to RSS feeds. The feeds are displayed on a webpage using a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. For example, one of the more popular web-based aggregators is Google Reader.

How To Subscribe To An RSS Feed

In order to subscribe to an RSS feed, look for the RSS icon on the websites you visit. Find the URL for the RSS feed, and paste it into your RSS reader and subscribe to it.

Many web browsers, such as Firefox, include auto-discovery features which will automatically detect RSS feeds. With those browsers, you will see an RSS icon in the left-hand side of the URL box — just click the icon to obtain the link to the RSS feed.

Once subscribed, the aggregator or reader will periodically check to see if the RSS feed has been updated.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll audio recording and editing software.

Observers have stated that it is almost impossible to find any bad news about Cowell on Google’s searches and that he probably has something to do with it. An actual test of this allegation seems to confirm it, as any search for “Simon Cowell” does not turn up anything negative about the Briton.

The theory is that Cowell is using an SEO or Search Engine Optimization firm to ensure that nothing but the good stuff turns up on Google. This could be true as any critical news of him only appears after the 20th page on Google’s search results. Casual users wouldn’t go beyond even the 3rd page on any search result. The theory seems to carry even more weight in light of a censorship story.

Apparently a blog slashing Cowell and his behavior was taken down by the host, Wordpress. They had explained the action by calling it a violation of the terms and conditions of the website. Although the blog was restored after several hours Hans Ebert, the author of the blog, did some digging to find out the truth. According to Ebert, the complaint had come from an SEO firm that was operating out of Bangalore, India. Further digging revealed that the SEO firm was under contract from a firm in London, England which gets them to monitor news about specific personalities. A spokeswoman for Cowell rubbished the story and denied any knowledge of a person named Ebert.