Digital media and advertising company, MIVA, Inc. has recently announced the further and significant expansion of its ALOT brand with release of a new version of customizable ALOT Toolbar and ALOT Home. MIVA also announced the beta release of ALOT Buttons, a website that offers a number of free to install widgets.

The ALOT brand was launched by MIVA Direct, Inc., the toolbar, homepage and content division of MIVA, in 2007. It’s goal is to “Make the Internet Easy” by aggregating proprietary content and “best-of-the-web” third party content across vertically themed toolbars and homepages. There are over twenty versions of the ALOT Toolbar and all of them are available for free download. For example: music, videos, maps, news, TV guide, sports, movies, celebrity, finance, weather, travel etc.

ALOT’s new customizable toolbar and homepage products are designed give you the information you want at your fingertips. Some features of the ALOT Toolbar are:

• Special Interest Search : One-click access to the specific information you’re interested in.
• Search Features : Display both organic search results and sponsored links from their search partner’s search engine.
• Toolbar Search : Search directly from the toolbar’s search box.
• Auto Search : Allows direct searching from the address bar.
• Error Search : Shows links for potentially correct pages and search results for misspelled web addresses.
• Search Bar : Provides quality search results from the browser’s search bar.
• Marketing Buttons : Additional buttons from their marketing partners.

By using the new widgets that they call ALOT Buttons, you can easily customize the ALOT Toolbar and ALOT Home, where you combine all your favorite content from around the web onto one page. Give it a try!

Want more inbound links? Need some advice? What about from Google itself? Google’s Maile Ohye recently posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that natural and good quality inbound links are always beneficial and can affect your PageRank.

Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.

On the other hand Ohye also pointed out that inbound links from spammy sites are of least or no importance from Google’s point of view.

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Ohye also added that if you have quality content or unique service, you will definitely get quality inbound links. That’s that point that most experts tells you. And now, it is mentioned on an Official Google Blog. So, this is the time to get serious! Teach your readers new things, uncover latest and interesting news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise on a topic, provide a useful product or service and make your site worthwhile.

SimplyBox is a new online service that will allow you to clip and keep portions of web pages in an interesting and visible way. So, it is an advanced online bookmark service that you can use to capture, organize and share only the required portions of web pages, pictures and videos. And in simple words, it is a visual bookmark service.

Right now, SimplyBox offers browser plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Get one for your browser and you are ready to clip your favorite portions of the web! Click on the “Box and Save” button on your browser toolbar and some boxes, that are collections of items, will appear at the bottom of your browser window. Just highlight the portions of a web page that you want to clip and drag it into a box of your choice. That’s it! The clip of your interest will be added to your SimplyBox profile page.

On SimplyBox, your clips will appear as images and you can easily drag and drop them into boxes on any subject/category. It will also allow you to add comments to each of your clipped items. On your toolbar you will also see a “box and send” function, that will enable you to send your clipped items in emails ad image files.

So, what would be the most suitable practical use of SmiplyBox? In my view, it will help you when you are gathering information from a number of sites for research purposes. Just clip the required portions while browsing and refer them later for using the information. But, here you will notice one drawback of SimplyBox! It keeps all the clips in images format. So, you will never be able to use the original text or video from your clipped items.

Internet is full of “get rich quick schemes” and claims to teach you “overnight success” secrets. I am sure that you have came across many of them via emails, forums, advertisements, newsletters, blogs or websites. Just give a look at the spam box in your email account and you will realize how big the field is!

Why there are so many fraud schemes or scams on Internet? In my view, the problem here is that many people want to make more money. The reason may be different for different people. But, lots of people wants to make money. This is the truth! And when those people see that money is being made over Internet, they just want to make that money as quickly as they can. This is the point that keeps the online scam world running and more and more people are falling into the traps of frauds.

Make Money Online

Everyone needs money and there are many legitimate ways to make money online. In fact, many people are making money online by using those legitimate ways. But, when you want to make money online, you must not forget that “There Is No Such A Thing As Free Money”. So, whenever someone promises that you will be flooded with tons of free money simply after joining their exclusive club or buying their products, simply stay away from them. Otherwise you will not only loss your hard-earned money, but will also loss many valuable things like time, efforts and peace of mind.

Instead of wasting your money and time on those online scams, start to research the legitimate ways to make money online. There are many ways such as affiliate marketing, blogging, writing, freelancing, consultation and so on. Ask yourself what you can do and what you can’t. Decide on the field that suits you most and start to learn the tips and tricks of the trade. For example: if you are good at writing, look for ways to get writing assignments. And if you enjoy blogging, you can try the services that pays you to blog!

Continue your quest to make money online and always keep an option for learning new things. If you are honest with your work and regularly update your knowledge and skills, soon you will able to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Once you are there, there is no need to look back. Because, by then you will master your own art and science of making money online!

Need a new avatar for yourself? What about a dynamic avatar with your personal touch? Cool? Then, you must give DoppelMe a try. DoppelMe is a free online avatar generator and offers some exciting features to make your avatar interesting.

On DoppelMe, creation of an avatar is very easy. First it offers you to choose gender, skin colour and eye colour of your avatar. And then it offers a number of options to choose expressions, hair, eyewear, hats, tops, bottoms, shoes, accessories, background and extras. Just follow the instructions and design your own personalized avatar.

Once your avatar is ready, you will be given information on how to incorporate it in various places like blogs, forums etc. You can also download your avatar to your computer. By default the avatars are provided in GIF format. But, you can also request PNG format just by changing the “.gif” portion of the image URL with “.png”.

Well, registration is not necessary for trying the avatar generator. But having a free account will enable you to save your DoppelMe online and to log in and make changes at any time. As a member, you will also get many more items and expressions to use on your avatar. The interesting point is that you can create groups using your own DoppelMes and or those of your friends, family, team, gang, clan etc etc.

DoppelMe is a dynamic avatar generator. You can put you avatars in blogs, forums, instant messenger and anywhere in the internet. And depending on your mood you can change your avatars right from your DoppelMe account. Try it today.

When I think about searching what’s happening around the blogosphere, I always use Google Blog Search. This tool is just awesome and incomparable in terms of blog search. And adding more charm to it, Google has recently launched a new home page for Google Blog Search, which features the latest and hottest stories in the blogosphere.

Functioning like the Google News, Blog Search now pulls blog posts from various blogs and organize them within a number of categories like Politics, US, World, Business, Technology, Video Games, Science, Entertainment, Movies, Television and Sports. Within a category, the blog posts about the same topic are grouped into clusters. The clusters will let you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives.

The interesting point is that, when you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on a particular topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

I’m already loving the new look of Google Blog Search. It is now more organised and helps in quick scan of the hottest or most happening story or event. What about you? What you feel about the new look of Google Blog Search?

Want to add an interesting widget on your blog? Need a third party help? Take a look at the Wowzio, a service that provides beautiful and engaging widgets for blogs. Their service is free and you don’t have to register for an account to use their beautiful and customizable widgets on your blogs.

Wowzio offers a number of interesting blog widgets. For example: gallery widget, tagcloud widget, slideshow widget, feed content widget, visitor activity widget etc.

• Gallery Widget: It automatically finds all the pictures on your blog and creates a beautiful photo gallery from them for you. And the interesting point is that each photo links to its corresponding post. It can help you to prompt your readers to spend more time on your blog.

• Live Activity Widget: This widget provides you and your users with a “live” feed of the visits to your blog or site. It shows where your visitors came from and what they are doing on you blog.

• Panoramic SlideShow Widget: This widget automatically finds all the images on your blog and creates a beautiful slideshow from them for you where each image links to its corresponding post. So, it provides an elegant and simple way for users to discover the best content on your blog.

• Tagcloud Widget: This widget displays the top tags found on your blog. It automatically extract your post tags, technorati tags, as well as auto-extracts tags, then scores them based on recency, frequency and placement. When a user clicks on a tag, it displays the matching blog posts inside the tagcloud widget frame.

• Feed Content Widget: This widget displays the most recent 50 posts from your blog alongwith images. You can also use it to aggregate feeds from upto 15 different feed sources.

The widgets from Wowzio are not only beautiful, but also very engaging for blog visitors. They don’t put any extra load on your server, as they are controlled by Wowzio servers. Even your visitors can share your interesting content by using the “Grab This Widget” links on Wowzio widgets. So, visit Wowzio today and spice up your blog with a cool widget.