1. send traffic to lower traffic sites: AdSense for Search lets you specify a list of sites to search across.  Using this option you can send some traffic to your lower traffic sites by placing AdSense for search on a site with more traffic. When a user makes a search, they will get results from all the sites you specified. I have added the DigitGeek URL for the search on this blog, so if you do a search for a keyword like ‘nokia’ you will find results for both this blog and DigitGeek.

2. search results: If you are using WordPress search, you will find that the search results are displayed according to post date – the newer posts show first. One the other hand, AdSense for Search displays results that best matches a users search query.

3. opening of search results page: With AdSense for Search, you can choose whether to open search results on Google or within your own site. By opening the search results on your site itself, you wont lose your visitors.

4. easy to use: In many WordPress blogs, I have seen half of the post shown as description for a post on the search results. This makes it hard for users to go through all the search results. In AdSense for Search, the description is shown only a bit and so it makes it easy for users to go thorough the search results.

5. make money online – Ads that are relevant to search terms are shown

6. search engine users -  AdSense for search displays your site search results the way Google search results are shown, so search engine users will be able to find what they are looking for easily.

7. top queries – AdSense for search displays a list of the top queries made on your sites. This could give you many post ideas.

Are you using AdSense for search ?

The Twitter counter may help you get more followers just like the FeedBurner FeedCount helps you get more subscribers for your blog. I currently have my Twitter Counter displayed near my FeedBurner FeedCount.

Here’s a sample of how the Twitter Counter looks like:

If you use Twitter, don’t forget to follow me

I found the site when one of their team members contacted me to advertise on this site.

What is SocialElves about ?

• We take your interesting story and combine it with the power of Digg networking.
• We don’t pay people to Digg.
• Instead, we use our established Digg contacts.
• We promote your story to those who are interested.
• We guarantee over 200 Diggs within 48 hours of your order.
• Most stories get front page with over 400 Diggs and tens of thousands of hits!
• Since we don’t force people to Digg, your story must be genuinely interesting.
• If your story isn’t ‘Digg worthy’ or we can’t deliver 200 Diggs, we provide a full refund.
• Our experience with social networking is unrivaled!

Instead of paying other people to Digg, SocialElves uses a collection of accounts and reputable connections established on Digg. They will ’shout’ your story through various accounts and spread it through their contacts.

When our story is submitted on Digg,  most of us shout the story to our friends on Digg and they vote for our stories. The more friends we have, the more votes we get. But how easy is it to make friends on Digg that will always digg your submissions, for that we have to be an active Digg user.

These guys are active Digg users and will do all the work of promoting your story on Digg for a price. They also say that they will pay your money back if your story gets under 200 diggs within 48 hours of payment.

Note that SocialElves don’t guarantee front page. They only guarantee over 200 Diggs within 48 hours of your order. My question is, do we have 48 hours time to hit Digg frontpage? I have heard that we have only 24 hours time.

One good thing is that SocialElves don’t reveal your digg story URL or any other story they have promoted earlier. So there’s little chance for your story to get buried by the Digg team.

Also since they don’t reveal their Digg usernames and yours, noone gets banned. Also it will be you that submits your story, so no one can find in that way too.

I remember that for some other ‘pay to digg’ site, users were banned and stories buried because the Digg team were able to find the username of the people running the site and their users. But on SocialElves, I don’t think this problem will be there.

Overall this service sounds good to me as they don’t pay people to digg and only use their accounts to promote our story.

Who’s behind Social Elves?

We are a team of internet marketers and web developers that have utilized Digg to promote our own stuff. Naturally, we began to gain more power and experience as time went on. We were soon able to take almost any story to the front page of Digg. Seeing the success of ‘pay to Digg’ programs and the absence of natural Digg marketing, we decided to give birth to SocialElves.

How much do they charge?

$300

Is it worth the money?

I cant guarantee because I have not tried them myself, but I found one story from socialelves.com that was submitted to Digg and it did not reach the frontpage. Here’s the Digg link.

This does not mean that they cant get your story to the frontpage and also I don’t think that you have to worry about the $300 you pay them because you will mostly get more than what you pay (maybe more than double the money).

Here’s why:

Getting on the Digg frontpage can send you a lot of traffic and get your site many links from different sites that will get you good traffic from Google and other search engines and will make you good money too. So you could easily make the $300 that you pay SocialElves to hit the Digg front page.

My tech blog got to the Digg frontpage recently thanks to my friend who is an active Digg user. The blog got a lot of traffic, comments and links after that and is now ranking well for many iPhone related keywords and gets good traffic from Google now. The site earnings have increased too.

I remember when a tutorial related to utorrent from this blog hit Digg frontpage years back, it got many links from different sites, forums, blogs (its still getting) very fast and very soon the post became the first result for the keyword ‘utorrent’ in Google and other search engines.

Google has and is still sending a lot of traffic for that post and made me good money too

So you see once your story gets on Digg frontpage, you will be making money for years form the post. So paying $300 is fine, you will earn it back

If you still do not want to pay for getting on Digg frontpage, you should:

1. be an active Digg user – submit useful stories and make many friends who will digg your submissions. Then submit  your own content (though I don’t think Diggers like people submitting their own content)

2. find a Top active Digg user who is willing to submit your story. Your story, provided its good, will have more change to get on digg frontpage as these active users will have many friends who will digg their submissions.

What’s your opinion about SocialElves?

Watch latest English Hollywood movies online for free

• Watch-movies-online.tv (my favorite)
• QuickSilverScreen

Watch Indian movies online (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, etc)

• BollyClips
• ApnaView

Note: There are many sites that let you watch movies online, but many contain dead links or may not be of good quality, so I have just mentioned the best ones here.

If you know any more good sites to watch movies online for free, feel free to suggest them via the comment section below and I will add them here.

Cartoon via ReadWriteWeb

Trick to to watch YouTube videos in high quality

Add &fmt=18 at the end of a URL of a YouTube video and press enter to view the video in higher quality.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27mb_AyzGyQ&fmt=18

You can also choose the higher quality as a default option by going to your YouTube account settings and changing the video playback quality to “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available.”

Watch YouTube videos in high quality

YOUTUBE HACK: How to watch ANY VIDEO in High Definition (HD) on YouTube

I tried out a few rotation WordPress plugins but they did not work well. So I contacted Shrihari, the guy who made the useful GotBanners plugin, and asked if he could make a plugin for this.

He contacted me some days later letting me know about his new site called Rotatee, which is a remotely hosted banner rotation service. You can use it to rotate ad banners on your website.

Rotatee can be considered as an easier and better alternative for GotBanners. I heard from a lot of users that they struggled to install GotBanners. But, with Rotatee, users can get going in three simple steps:

1) Create a campaign…
2) Add the ad codes and assign them a weight (probability of displaying)…
3) Get a one-line code to place on their website…

I’ve addressed a lot of GotBanners’ problems here on Rotatee. Rotatee can be used to do what GotBanners does. Also, it can be used to show one random banner at a time (like other systems) and anything in between “show 1″ and “show all”.

Also, there is a “weight” option to control the probability of showing a banner. Also, it was not possible to install multiple instances of GotBanners on the same blog. With, Rotatee this has been over come. Also, there are ways to style your ad spots easily.

Though Rotatee is a cool service that’s easy to use, it isn’t completely free. The basic account is limited to 5 Campaigns. So if you would like to create more than 5 Campaigns, you will have to upgrade to a PRO account. Luckily there is no limit on the number of banners that you can rotate.

So how much does a PRO account cost ?

The PRO account costs just $3.99 per month. You can save 20% by paying half-yearly ($19.99) and save 40% by paying annually ($28.99)

Apart from letting you rotate banners for your site, Rotatee also provides you with the total banner impressions along with a pie chart based on it.

Rotatee is currently in a closed beta and so to use it you will need an invite code. Luckily Shrihari was kind enough to give the readers of JohnTP.com a chance to try out his banner rotation service.

To try out Rotatee, just use the invite code “johntp“. Please note that this invite code will only work for the first 200 signups, so hurry!

If you would like to see Rotatee in action, check out my hardware review blog (I couldn’t use it here as the basic account has a limit of 5 Campaigns).

I hope Shrihari gives me a free PRO account now that I wrote about his site

Update: Shrihari just let me know that the “johntp” invite code will now work for 1000 signups

Hard-core Photoshoppers might claim there is no alternative to the mighty adobe image application, But while Photoshop is not about to be dethroned, be prepared to be blown away by Fauxto. This site hosts an online app that can open JPEG,PNG,GIF,BMP,and TIFF images. From there you can add multiple layers, adjustments, movable marquees, including text layers, there are even a number of common effect filters.

As you can see on this image Fauxto pretty much resembles Photoshop Interface

Fauxto is built in flash, but amazingly it is fairly quick, it takes just a few seconds to load on my computer and the times I have used it, works flawlessly. It might be a good alternative application for those people needing to edit their images but don’t have access to the computer where they have Photoshop installed.

Fauxto lacks instruction and documentations, it seems like it was just put there for people to figure it out, but if you have Photoshop experience this should be easy to figure it out.

You will need to create an account the first time you want to use Fauxto though, but is really simple and straightforward. Hope you like it.

What’s Joost?

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

From Wikipedia

Joost (pronounced ‘juiced’) is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

To know more about Joost, go to this page and watch the video there.

To try out Joost beta, we need an invite. And since I don’t have any invites and is asked for them by others, I put up this post so that those who have an invite can share it with those who don’t.

So who can invite me? Who else needs invites?

But Technorati did not do anything about it, I guess they are not fast enough like the ReviewMe team who quickly prevented people from price gaming after reading my post.

Recently some bloggers started gaming Technorati to get in to the Top 100 Favorited list by doing the same Technorati Favorite exchange that I had done last year.

Some of the bloggers were successful in getting into the list, but with them getting in, many other bloggers including me were kicked out of the list.

I think these bloggers wanted to get into the list because they thought that the list would bring them traffic. This blog was in the list from December until recently, and I have not got a single visitor from the list (as far as I know).

I remember contacting Darren Rowse after I got into the list to let him know how easy it was to get into the list. Darren replied back saying that though he is in a high position on the list (currently 3rd), he has not got much traffic from it at all.

So what is the point in getting into the Top 100 Favorited list anyway? Does it increase profile? Does it give egos a boost?

Darren and Amit have written about the Technorati gaming too and like Amit I too feel that Technorati’s Top 100 Favorited list is not worth any more (until Technorati does something about it).

What do you think?