We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Ryan, who reckons it’s about time he stopped playing with Lego blocks and began playing with a real man’s robot platform. Just kidding about the Lego bit. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I am an aspiring roboticist who has been using Lego Mindstorms NXT for a few years and I am looking for the next step up. I have a budget of about $400. I am looking for something that has more motors, more sensors, and a way to have it live feed video back to a computer. I would also like a platform that has a large amount of building that can be done on top of it, such as adding an arm or another array of sensors, or a different drive base. I’m new to the world of robotics outside of the NXT, so any tips would be appreciated as well. Thanks!”

Come on over, robot lovers. Toss those gloves and goggles aside for a moment and throw this guy some advice. What platform keeps you up in the garage at night?

Ask Engadget: best robot platform for under $400? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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John Pozadzides of the Web analytics company Woopra wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb looking at the web’s top sources of referral traffic. He breaks it down in to the following categories: social network, social bookmark, search, and media.

Six versions of Google top the list for search before Bing makes an appearance. Facebook takes the cake in social networks, followed by Twitter and LinkedIn. In the social bookmark category, StumbleUpon leads, and in media, it’s YouTube.

Mashable’s Jolie O’Dell reports that a court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has demanded a Russian ISP block access to YouTube because it hosted what it says is an extremist video. The Internet Archive and three online libraries were also reportedly blocked. As O’Dell points out, a number of other countries have also blocked access to YouTube at different times.

The New York Times reports that the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill that would effectively legalize online poker and other nonsports betting, overturning a 2006 federal ban.

Pocket-lint reports that Amazon claims ebook sales will overtake paperbacks next year. It’s a pretty astonishing notion, but not too hard to believe considering that Amazon recently announced that ebook sales have overtaken hardback sales.

Mobile Crunch has pointed out that RIM has purchased the domain BlackPad.com, speculating that a long-rumored BlackBerry tablet could be called the BlackPad.

News surfaced yesterday that a directory containing personal details of over 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on a file-sharing site. BBC News spoke to the man responsible who says he harvested the info for a security tool.

Back in early May, it was discovered that Google had invested in something called Recorded Future. Now Wired reports that the CIA is involved as well, in the company that monitors the web predicts the future.

Facebook launched the long-awaited Questions feature yesterday (in beta). Search Engine Land has a detailed walkthrough of the feature.

According to Ben Patterson at Yahoo News, citing information from Courant.com, U.S. libraries are loaning more DVDs on a daily basis than Netflix and Redbox are renting them. This make sense given that many libraries offer free DVD loans, and cheap prices on new releases.

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Google was granted an interesting patent today. The title is "System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring". Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

"The patent presents a couple of assumptions about how mouse pointer movements can be interpreted," explains Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, who presents a much more readable explanation of the patent. "For example, a longer hover over a result may indicate a positive opinion about how relevant a listing on the results page might be to a query. And, if someone moves their mouse pointer across a snippet line by line at a normal reading speed, it may indicate a higher level of attention to that result than if pointer was kept in a static position or moved randomly."

"So, the speed and movement of a mouse pointer as well as where it is placed on a search result page might be tracked to see how much attention a search pays to different search results," he adds. "If someone hovers over one sponsored listing, or ad, but not another, that might indicate more attention and interest in the ad hovered over. If a local map is shown, or a definition, or some other OneBox result, and the searcher viewing the page hovers over those OneBox results for a while, that could be an indication that the map or the definition or other OneBox listing was helpful."
 
The patent was filed all the way back in 2005, and like Slawski notes, there’s no telling if Google will actually utilize it. A lot can change in 5 years, especially in this industry. Either way, they’ve been granted the patent. You can read it here.

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You might’ve heard about a new Kindle model or two this evening, and good news if they tickled your fancy — they’re now on Amazon and available for pre-order. Both the WiFi-only and WiFi / 3G models are shipping August 27th, the former in graphite and the latter in graphite and white options. Search your pocketbook, if you know it to be coveted.

P.S. – UK customers, try here.

New Kindles now available for pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BusinessWire, the popular newswire service, is set to launch some new services for businesses and organizations next month. These are the NewsHQ online newsroom and the InvestorHQ investor center.

BusinessWire says these microsites were developed specifically to help corporate communicators and investor relations officers house and maintain information for journalists, bloggers, investors, consumers, analysts, key influencers, etc.

"There are many benefits to employing these content management solutions," explains BusinessWire VP of Web Communications, Ibrey Woodall. "One of the main reasons the online newsroom came into existence was because public relations representatives were having a hard time getting cooperation from their technical, or IT department, when they needed a press release posted quickly. Investor relations officers also needed a means by which they could get the most recent financial news and data to their company’s investors and analysts."

"So, control was an initiating factor for this technological evolution," she adds. "Communicators needed to be able to post and organize content in a timely manner. They needed to be able to get their message on their website, and delivered directly to those who were interested in their organization."

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal of gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. Providing the givers of press (journalists, bloggers, and even everyday consumers via social media) with as many resources for finding information as possible, will only increase the likelihood of coverage. Businesses may find  these new services from Business Wire quite helpful.

It also helps that the services come with some basic SEO features, which should further increase visibility.

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Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance’s transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

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Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.

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As you probably know by now, Google considers page speed as one of its many signals for search engine rankings. With that in mind, you may also be interested in knowing that in Chrome 6, developers can access web timing metrics for measuring web page load time across browsers.

"Measuring web page load time is a notoriously tricky but important endeavor," says Google software engineer Tony Gentilcore. "One of the most common challenges is simply getting a true start time. Historically, the earliest a web page could reliably begin measurement is when the browser begins to parse an HTML document (by marking a start time in a <script> block at the top of the document)."

"Unfortunately, that is too late to include a significant portion of the time web surfers spend waiting for the page: much of the time is spent fetching the page from the web server," says Gentilcore. "To address this shortcoming, some clever web developers work around the problem by storing the navigation start time in a cookie during the previous page’s onbeforeunload handler. However, this doesn’t work for the critical first page load which likely has a cold cache."

Genticore has more details (as well as an explanation of the above image) in this post.

Web Timing metrics can be found under window.webkitPerformance in Chrome 6. Google is kind enough to point out where they can be found in other browsers as well: window.msPerformance in the third platform preview of IE 9 and soon window.mozPerformance in Firefox.

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Astro Clash 2.0 for iPhone/iPad review
The lightweight nature of the iPhone, and the accessible coding environment makes it idea for revisiting arcade classics. Astro Clash , by Jaylord Systems , is one such game, recreating Asteroids on the iPhone and iPad.

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Brand new Blackberry Bold II 9700
Category: Gadgets & Tech User : stillme Date : Wednesday, 28/07/10 – 15:07PM Description : Forsale : Brand new mobile phones with complete accessories and 2 year warranty which also includes a 1 year return poilicy Brand new Nokia N97 16gb Brand new Nokia N96 16gb Brand new Nokia N95 8gb Brand new Nokia E90 Brand new Sony Ericsson XPERIA Brand new Nokia N900 Smartphone 32 GB Brand new Nokia X6 …

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44 Minutes the 1997 north hollywood shootout Come chill with other gamers! maniacgamers.com Guys! Stop using google, Use SwagBucks, It’s like google search engine, Except they have a point system. Exchange points for prizes, Just for doing what you already do with google. swagbucks.com

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