There are a lot of tools out there that helps you to download and save videos and sound tracks from youyube. Here’s a compilation of the best of them.

1. Save by submitting url
   This service let’s you download the video to your pc, if you give the youtube url into it.
   Simple one, but it may get you incomplete videos some time.
2. Online download
   This service requires you to install a plugin to your firefox browser, so that you can download the video right from the window where you are playing it.Clean and simple tool. But can get a bit slow and sluggish at times.
3. Online download - submit url
   This service too lets you download the video if you submit the youtube url directly to it. Requires you to collect the youtube url correctly.
4. Convert yuotube video to any other format
   This service will help you convert the youtube video to any other format like 3gp, avi,mov or Mp4. Requires no softare download, just give the youtube url, and select the final file format you need. It will convert the file online as well as enable you to download the file.
5. Download and share the youtube videos
   This service allows you to download a youtube video, by submitting the youtube url and also help you to share the file(downloadable file) with your friend.

In order to play the downloaded youtube files, you need a FLV player.
Here is the list of best players around.

• FLV Player
• Free FLV player
• FLV file streamer

Related post - Download youtube videos using Firefox browser

Here is yet another online free tol that will allow you to create those “number art”(ASCII art) from any image you have. You can simply copy paste the code into forums/orkut/blog or email.

It’s as simple as browsing up your local image(from your hard disk) or either entering the url online and clicking “Send”. The ASCII art will open up in the new window.

You can also set the number of times a character will repeat in the image, which can be compared to the resolution. You can therefore set how much resolution the image is at.You can create light or dark images by increasing the number of characters. Pretty cool!
It’s very quick and even if you want to play around with many images, you can try them again and again, no glitches what so ever.
Try the online ASCII art creating tool here
Also see my earlier post on Free ASCII art creation software for orkut here

I’m trying to get as many opinions as possible from top SEO’s regarding a particular case.

Because every SEO has their own mode of working, and different set of valuables/factors, I’m wondering if there is/are anything that will be strikingly common among us.

Here’s a case for you - in which, for a particular keyword, the Top 5 analysis is as below.
(The on site optimization features are not available at the moment except the number of times the keyword is repeated on the page.)

The client sites statistics are also given.

Site A
Pages Indexed - 1150
Number of page backlinks - 39,000
Number of domain backlinks - 70,000
All in anchor Rank - 1
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 2
Page rank - 5

Site B
Pages Indexed - 171
Number of page backlinks - 1760
Number of domain backlinks - 2170
All in anchor Rank - 2
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 5

Site C
Pages Indexed - 699
Number of page backlinks - 784
Number of domain backlinks - 965
All in anchor Rank - 4
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 5

Site D
Pages Indexed - 82
Number of page backlinks - 1340
Number of domain backlinks - 1520
All in anchor Rank - 4
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 4

Site E
Pages Indexed - 1230
Number of page backlinks - 931
Number of domain backlinks - 1060
All in anchor Rank - 10
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 7
Page rank - 5

Client Site
Pages Indexed - 26
Number of page backlinks - 1200
Number of domain backlinks - 1560
All in anchor Rank - 14
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 1
Page rank - 4

How would you prioritize your SEO work, so that the client site gets to the top?

I’d appreciate if you can list down the SEO variables in decreasing priority.

Remember, the whole idea is to find out if there is/are any common SEO factors that we all agree on? If yes, what all, in what priority?

AOL has launched it’s Indian portal. Very good!

But you know what - They failed to impress me. Because, it’s just a rip off of Yahoo! (You saw it.)

No labelling required. All self-explanatory.

You have all right to. Yes, you have.

When you see yet another “professional” SEO blog, which has nothing more than a few often repeated “How tos”, and the blog itself targeting no keyword at all, and is nothing but a “preachers blog” - You have all right to - hate the SEO’s and the SEO blogs.

No - I haven’t assumed anything. This is a thought i figured out from the numerous blogger responses.

These days,SEO’s are one fraternity that’s easy to be. Almost every other blogger you see is an SEO.Good! But some are ridiculous even. Like the saying - “A half studied doctor kills the patient.” It’s a similar situation here.

Many of them, goto the digitalpoint forums, or the various SEO blogs already available like Aaron Walls SEO Book or Brad Callens and do some quick crash course on - backlinks,meta tags,keyword, adsense and presto! You are an SEO too!

Truth is that they haven’t done any project whatsoever, neither would’ve worked with anyone, but their blog calls them - “Professional SEO”. Ridiculous is the word !

Also, it’s a naked truth that SEO is a self studied discipline as of now, you can get the informations almost from anywhere - the how to’s that is. BUT, what matter more is experience. I would recommend anyone an SEO only if he’s been working on projects earlier, or has been consulting on SEO projects. Any SEO with just book knowledge is a perfect NO - NO!

So you have every right to hate an SEO site/blog if it only spits “gyan” or “info”.

So next time you meet an SEO, ask him, what keywords have he been working on, which are the sites that he ranked for those keywords. That’s a knock out question.

See Google’s recommendations on what to look for when selecting an SEO

Vanessa Fox, (Product manager, Google Webmaster Central) makes a commendable effort by sorting out an issue, that was silly but interesting, since it’s been ongoing for some time.

Yesterday, I had reported the broken links on the “Sitemaps.org launch” article posted by her, at the Google Webmaster’s central blog, and suprisingly, she reacted very quickly - and the links are all in place now.

She’s also arranged(arranging) for suitable measures(.htaccess file)so that,these kind of errors are not reported again.

Here’s Vanessa’s reply -

Hi,

Funny thing! The engineer who made the change to the site sits right next to me, I just forgot about those links in the blog post. I’ve fixed them now while we work on getting an .htaccess file uploaded that’ll redirect the old URLs to the new ones. Thanks for the catch!

Vanessa Fox

A very commendable effort from Google. Much appreciated!

You can also see her reply in the comments section of this post.

Like many other bloggers in the country, I respect Amit Agarwal of Labnol as the most influential blogger around.
It’s great to see him posting quality articles everyday, and i almost read the articles instantly on recieving the Feedblitz Newsletter in my inbox. It’s amazing to see how he picks up interesting articles - that too 5-8 per day.

Yesterday(Apr 24, 2007 2:04 AM), I received a newsletter saying 6 new articles on Digital Inspiration, and something caught my attention. One of the posts was from the other days post! Well…….., may be i misread it.

Curious enough- i checked the previous Newsletter(Apr 22, 2007 2:04 AM).
It read - 5 New articles on Digital Inspiration.And it had the same post(The best Video tutorial websites) as in today’s newsletter. (See both screenshots)

I wonder why Amit is doing this? Is it a mistake or a deliberate attempt to “show” that he’s posting 5-6 articles per day?

Readers like me wouldn’t really mind if he posted no articles at all in a day, because we know he will post some good ones by the weekend to cover up. But why the lie here?

Sincerely wish this is a mistake, and something that need be corrected from the Feedblitz newletter mailer configuration.

Once again - Amit, are you listening?

How disappointing !! I don’t know if this is just with me - but these days, the number of broken links on the official google blogs/services is just increasing.And there’s no stopping it.

Soon after i had reported the broken links here(on Google history) and here on Google, here’s the latest one.

Vanessa Fox’s post about the Sitemaps.org has all the links to the new site broken!!

I really wonder if somebody is actually reading it from their side once it’s posted, how careless can they be?

Here’s is the snapshot of the broken links. While all the links point to the HTML file, there is no HTML file on the sitemaps.org site, instead PHP files!Hence the broken link.

I would recommend Google to be more careful next time, and pluuueeaasee… co ordinate between your departments before making changes. Seems like, the guy on the other end of the office is not aware, every time somebody makes a change to the site structure.

Google shut down Froogle on April 21(Official News here) and released a new product(well old wine in new bottle) Google History, which is a new version of Google Search history(See Philip’s thought on this).

If you enable this service, and if you have installed the Google Toolbar , you can now browse through the list of sites you visited in the past, and see them in a chronological order.
Talk about Nostalgia!

Sorry a bit of repetition here!

According to Google, back links are votes given by other sites to you.

According to me, in the SEO process, getting these votes is the best SEO practice known so far.

One question that nags everyone is - How to get back links?

The answer is simple - Think about how to improve the contents on your site rather than torture your head thinking of links.
Because, once you have great content on your site, then it’s basic human psychology that people want to get associated with it - so they link.

- The above piece of information can be found on almost all SEO related websites and I’m sure is nothing new to you.

Now what decides what’s a great content? Or what content will attract more links? Here are a few tips from my experience.

• Be Innovative

  Let it be such that the readers will think - “Damn! Why didn’t i think of it earlier?”

  Which means that the content should be simple and related to the topics everyone knows, but in a way that they would’ve never thought of. It’s not easy to think of something like that every other day.But if you can manage to squeeze in at least a few every week, that should do the trick.
  Some famous examples would be - When john Chow released the Link bait posts.

• Be the first to report.

  This one’s easier if you are a techie and watch blogs/news sites closely. All you have to do is report a sensational news the very first time.It is very tricky - because sometimes the news is so common and popular that, when you post it, millions would have posted it on the other end. So you have to find some tweak to get the best news the first time. A very effective method is to religiously read all the news blogs by grabbing their RSS feeds on your favorite RSS News reader.

• Review with a twist.

  Suppose there is a lovely piece of software you love using. And you thought, why not do a review on it. But you have seen 143 reviews on various blogs on the same software.

  So what do you do? Collect data from all those blogs and see what are the common points in them, then since you are very familiar with the software, it’s more likely that you’ll find something all of them have missed. Trust me, I’ve had similar experiences.

• Write the content with user participation

  It wouldn’t make any sense if you just write excellent articles explaining about the technical wizardry you have or the super piece of code you developed, if a reader does not enjoy it. It’s more like watching TV - you prefer a reality show to a News channel(at least many of us). So write articles that will participate users, or at least strike their thinking pattern and provoke them to write about it on their blog. It works if you hit the right note!

More ideas will continue the next week..