TechnoCloud

Handy link for playing with Google mobile search via a computer browser when you’re not actually on the move…

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If there’s a more visually appealing way to discover music, I’d like to see it. Step forward, Musicovery, an evolution of the liveplasma discovery engine idea.

Navigation is through an innovative, yet intuitive, panel offering choices of genre and era, subdivided into a mood grid covering dark, energetic, positive, calm. Beyond this is a central navigation panel to select cross-genre mood and dance tempo.

The music catalogue available is of reasonable breadth, if short of exhaustive. On selecting your start point, Musicovery creates a playlist for you, illustrated through a colourful interlinked journey which you can drag to explore.

In the latest version, the e-commerce offering has been improved. You can now click through to buy the track on Amazon or iTunes and can listen to higher quality audio by paying €9.99 a year or €2 a month.

It will be interesting to see how financially viable the e-commerce options prove, but as a music discovery engine it has already expanded my horizons for one. 

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The likes of Commission Junction and TradeDoubler should be stirring their tea nervously, with news that Google is moving into the world of affiliate marketing. The AdSense blog reveals that they are now ‘accepting applications for new referrals beta’, leading to a flood of chatter in the blogosphere .

Cost-per-click advertising has been one of the great success stories of online advertising and has fueled the Google Advertising juggernaut. It’s strikes a satisfactory balance between the advertiser’s desire to pay for actions only and the publisher’s desire to get paid for branding. It has its critics with regards to ongoing problems with click fraud, but it continues to thrive because it works.

While the move into cost-per-action won’t threaten the cost-per-click cash cow anytime soon, it’s an interesting play to control yet more of the world’s online ad inventory.

It does make it harder to conduct click fraud (although the fraudsters will try), but will the returns be big enough for publishers to gain sufficient take-up? The beta is US only at present, so I will have to read about other’s findings to see if the numbers look likely to add up. I’m not so sure they will.

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Every now and then you stumble upon (literally) a piece of content on YouTube whereby the term ‘user-generated content’ just doesn’t cut it.

Step forward OneManSho, who manages to cram an incredible 200 impressions into just over a quarter of an hour. What’s even more impressive, is that most of them are actualy pretty good.

It reminded me of the crammer’s favourite the Reduced Shakespeare Company which squeezes all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays into just over an hour and a half.

All-in-all, an enjoyable global audition which will surely lead to him moving to other platforms - the other video sharing sites will no doubt be on the poach and he would be a surefire hit a the Edinburgh Fringe (although he may have to pad it out a half hour!).

We keep reading about the ‘MySpace-made-us’ musicians (cue Lily Allen, Artic Monkeys), how long until we see the YouTube etc. comedians as a fixture on our big screens?

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Up to a couple of weeks ago very few visitors were coming through to this site from the search engines. In fact it took a couple of months for Google (MSN Search and Yahoo were more accommodating) to even offer up the site as a result for a direct search on ‘TechnoCloud’.

I’ve semi-dilligently built up inbound links and populated the site with content, but Google refused to send even a dribble of its endless traffic TechnoCloud’s way. This started to change thanks to inclusion in Dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project, which Google uses as one element of its ranking system. After that you could search for ‘TechnoCloud’ and find the site.

I’ve read before about Google ‘Sandboxing‘, but not experienced it first hand. The theory goes that Google will place new sites for around six months into an equivalent of internet purgatory.

Around six months after making my first post on TechnoCloud, it appears that Google has given the thumbs up to the site. As if a switch had been flicked all of a sudden, I started getting through a regular stream of visitors from the search engines on the likes of ‘Facebook mobile’ and interestingly the ever popular ‘Make your own Supermodel’.

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