Lately there’s been a lot of buzz about internet video being "the next big thing."

Why all the hype?

Simple… Technology has made the making, producing, and hosting of videos affordable for anyone.

You can now make videos at home, host them for free somewhere like Google Video, and not have to worry about all of the typical fees typically associated with video production and hosting.

There are several courses coming out that teach you how to use internet video for infomercials, promoting affiliate products, etc…

But that’s mainly for info products. The question is: can e-commerce stores use internet video to build their business?

We’re about to find out

Within the next couple weeks, we will be launching MyWeddingFavors.tv

It’ll be one of the first e-commerce stores to utilize QVC-type video to promote their products.

Will customers be more likely to buy a product they can see on video instead of just a picture? Is hearing and watching someone discuss the products that much more persuasive than just reading about them?

Will it increase conversion? Average orders? Traffic? PR? Brand?

Who knows – but we’ll find out soon… Stay tuned

Big news travels fast.

People heard about it on CNN before they read it online — BMW.de removed from Google’s index. Within a week, they’re back.

Quite a conversation on mattcutts.com about the speed with which a big company gets back in the index after getting banned for black hat seo.

Google’s PR (PigeonRank) explained. If you haven’t seen this before, you should. Very funny.

BMW Germany has been banned by Google for “black hat” SEO techniques.

BMW.com is a nice PR 7 web site and loved by Google, with over 3,000 incoming backlinks displaying. But now BMW.de (their German site) has been banned by Google.

As you can see by the image below, is a “manual ban,” i.e., a Googler (employee of Google, Inc.) has gone into the system and removed the bmw.de web site from their index. You can tell because of the two bullet points, and the fact that no pages display for a site:bmw.de search.

The site has been removed for black hat techniques like dynamically generated doorway pages. Right now, the only sites I can find that are talking about it are Chinese and MattCutts.com, but stay tuned. Things like this are always great forum fodder. (Also from Matt Cutts: www.ricoh.de has been removed as well.)