The Lost Remote TV blog discussed two new online advertising technologies that I want to point out to you.

First, YouTube is finally going to start putting ads in the video using video overlay ads. The new semi-transparent ads will cover the lower fifth of the screen and disappear after 10 seconds. Hopefully, other video sites will follow their lead and help kill pre-roll video commercials.

Second, Facebook is trying to monetize their traffic and huge database of info about it’s members by working on a new advertising approach that puts ads in their user’s news feeds based on user criteria such as age, gender, location, favorite activities and preferred music, to name a few. Advertisers love specifically targeting their ads with lots of demographic data because they get more bang for the bucks and sites love selling targeted ads because they can charge a whole lot more for them.

If you aren’t a web star or can’t code like a web star, you can at least buy code from a web star. Eric Meyer now has his very own CSS Sculptor. This new Dreamweaver compatible tool creates standards-compliant two and three column layouts from a menus driven product and you end up with CSS code like Eric Meyer would have done it. Even though I can code CSS, I think I’m going to try this out because it will really help me get to a starting point on a web site much quicker.

Google is finally offering easy tools to embed a Google map in your website. There have been third party tools to do this for a while or you get a Google developer API key, but this is so much simpler.

Vitamin has four good tips to remember when redesigning your home page.

1. 60 percent of users enter the average site from somewhere besides the home page, so focus on consistent site wide navigation.
2. Start out by designing a standard text page to establish the style and usability of the design before it gets hit by the home page land grab.
3. Show your love to the white space and keep it simple.
4. Forgot about the idea of “above the fold” because in reality every user has a different folder and over 75 percent of users scroll to some degree.

Thanks for the link Chris.

“Newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Minneapolis Star Tribune are hurting not because they’re local, but because they’re not local enough. And as they try to figure out how to be local, they’re discovering they lack the proper tools. They have the wrong staff, the wrong processes, even the wrong presses.”

-Steve Yelvington

A List Apart has some great articles in it’s most recent issues covering dealing with clients and staying fresh. Kevin Cornell gives us a list of tips to stay motivated to create and Jack Zeal helps us figure out the right design metaphors to use when talking with clients so your clients aren’t always expecting Ebay when you gave them Facebook.

Facebook is the current ideal prototype of social media. Since it opened up its network outside of college its growth has been astounding with many media stories with outrageous stats. Shel Israel decided to see if the stats were true and called up Facebook’s corporate communications folks. Here’s a smattering of what they told him.

• Over a million new registrants a week since January 2007 with a total of 35 million.
• Over half of users are outside of college.
• Average visitor stay is 20 minutes (and I know some students that sta for hours).
• Top photo sharing site on the web.

Wow!

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog asking is good enough enough?. Instead of good enough he says we should redefine the objective to be “makes some people uncomfortable, changes the entire competitive landscape and is truly remarkable in that many of the key people we reach feel compelled to talk about it.”

Godin goes on to say that going to that extreme to succeed is synonymous with risking failure, getting fired and exhausting because you raise the bar every time, but at the same time, when you succeed, it’s worth it all of it.

Photo portfolio sites are moving beyond the simple Photoshop/Fireworks exported images thrown onto a page to where the site should showcase the photographers vision and personality while being cutting edge in order to attract new clients. Layers Magazine looks at three distinct approaches to photographers web portfolios.

My favorite photo portfolio sites are CSS driven sites that are easy to navigate and showcase the images with plenty of white (or black) space. I really don’t care for the flash driven sites with images thrown all over the place where you to make your mouse do back flips to get around.

Google announced this week that you can buy more space for your gmail if you are running out. It’s only $20 a year for 6 GB of additional online space. You can also apply the additional space to your Picasa web albums, too. Of course it’s hard for me to believe that you could run out of space on Gmail. Personally, I’m only using 15% of my 2.8GB storage limit and I don’t think I’ve ever deleted anything from my Gmail account except the Spam that automatically deletes about 30 days.