vineri, 12 august 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Holy Month of Ramadan 2011 in Pictures

Posted: 12 Aug 2011 02:31 PM PDT

Ramazan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which lasts 29 or 30 days. It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and sexual intimacy with their partners during daylight hours and is intended to teach Muslims about patience, spirituality, humility and submissiveness to God. Muslims fast for the sake of God (Arabic: الله‎, trans: Allah) and to offer more prayer than usual.



































































Beautiful iPhone Photography

Posted: 12 Aug 2011 01:51 PM PDT

With so many fantastic apps on the market, with their one touch photo effects and filters, iPhones and their built in digital cameras have taken the photography world by storm. Producing some truly inspiring results, which we have gathered a collection of for you today. Take a look at the fun and creative life captured on an iPhone followed up by some links to a few apps to take your own pics with.
















































































Source: noupe


How Parents Use Facebook to Spy on their Kids [Infographic]

Posted: 12 Aug 2011 01:45 PM PDT

There is a lot you can tell about a person by reading their Facebook profile. From incriminating photos to friendship insights, Facebook tells all. That's one of the reasons so may parents are joining Facebook, according to a recent study. As it turns out, more than half of parents use the popular social network to spy on their kids' Internet activity--and 11 percent of parents joined Facebook for the sole purpose of snooping on their kids! But with the growing number of underage Facebook users, are parents snooping, or safeguarding? Find out the stats on parents and Facebook in the below infographic.

Click to enlarge.

Source: onlineschools


US Debt Crisis - 2012 is only for America

Posted: 11 Aug 2011 09:15 PM PDT



A must watch video for all specially for those who are considering going to US in future!!


Resort Like Prisons Of Netherlands

Posted: 11 Aug 2011 07:28 PM PDT

Neat lawns, flowerbeds, playgrounds and buildings designed by famous architects, this is how a Dutch prison looks like. It is more like a country club or recreation center, but not a prison. It has everything you need for healthy living. Today, in the Dutch prison Penitentiary Maashegge contains 167 people, but in 2 years it will be closed.

In 2009 the Dutch justice ministry announced that it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system, due to the decrease in crime in the country. In order to somehow save their beautiful prisons, the Dutch government is inviting foreign criminals into them. For example, last year 500 Belgian inmates were invited. The Netherlands would get 30 million euros in the deal, and it will allow the closing of the prisons in Rotterdam and Veenhuizen to be postponed until 2012.



This is a medium-security prison which contains 167 prisoners and 140 employees. Taking pictures of the prisoners is prohibited.



The prison looks like a park inside. The Dutch can be definitely proud not only of their cheese, tulips and wind-mills but also of the penitentiary system that had gone through perfection since the 16th century. In 1595 they built the first prison where criminals were engaged in working and where the principle of humanity prevailed.



One can get the idea of the place only looking at the barbed wire fences.



The territory is divided into parts which are connected with one another with the help of such gates.











Posters for personnel.









Doors are supplied with special electronic locks.



They can meet relatives once a month for 2 hours and can make a paid 10-minute call per week. There is a library here that can be attended once a week as well.

















Prisoners can work 4 hours a day and earn 25 Euros a week.



Each room is supplied with a radio, TV socket, watching TV costs 6 Euros a week.





Those who misbehaved are sent to the isolation ward. It is empty and has no windows.





The prisoners are also given a piece of chalk to draw on the door. This can be the only thing to do.









View from the window.



A catholic board school was located here before and was later turned into a prison.





The ground is used for walking.









If somebody can't afford paying 6 Euros a week for watching TV in the ward, he can watch it in the hall.



The prison has standard rooms. Corridors end with a kitchen where anyone can cook for himself if he doesn't like the menu. Prisoners are given jam, rolls, coffee, tea and juices for breakfast. A dinner consists of three hot dishes, salads and fruits. In some prisons it's allowed to order dishes from restaurants. Jews often order Kosher food. Prisoners have a right not to attend the dining room. In this case they will be delivered food but before it's necessary to check whether the delivered menu corresponds to the dishes on the list.



This is the building where young people who haven't reached the age of 23 spend time before the court. Preliminary conclusion can't last longer than 3 months.





A prison must remind of home. Otherwise a person will only become more angry.









A hotel.



Good doctors, attentive nurses and best equipment are available. Only two cases of tuberculosis were recently revealed. Since 2008 the practice of giving food additives reducing stress conditions has been introduced. In one of prisons they started dispensing reagent called orange aroma associated with health and freshness and decreasing aggressiveness.







These molds are left by prisoners in hope not to return here any more.



The Holland law doesn't have an article according to which a prisoner can get an additional term for escape.



Prisoners are welcome to attend the school.







A religious room.





Holland prisons are filled by 86%. This is the lowest index in Europe.



A computer class.



Once a month prisoners can go home for a week. The complex will be closed in two years due to the low level of crime.


Source: zyalt.livejournal


SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


What is Google's PageRank Good For? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 11 Aug 2011 02:49 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Sure, PageRank is older than Emperor Palpatine, but a lot of SEOs still use it as their primary metric for link research and rankability. Unfortunately, using PageRank exclusively to measure progress and page value can yield results as ugly as the Emperor's face. Since Google updates PageRank so sporadically, you may not get an accurate picture of a page's actual value. That being said, Google updated PageRank late June and a lot of SEOs are talking about it! After all, it's not a completely useless metric. Rand covers some of the uses for PageRank in this week's Whiteboard Friday, but if you have ways you use it that we didn't cover, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Video Transcription

Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking a little bit about Google PageRank. I know this feels a little retro for some of you. You're thinking, "PageRank. Oh my God, That's so 2001-2002." But it comes up a lot. It comes up again and again, particularly with folks who are new to the industry, new to SEO, or have heard a lot because Google does a lot of publicity around PageRank being their original algorithm. A lot of media publications talk about it. Even a lot of marketers still think of it as an important metric. So, I am here to set some of those myths straight and also talk about some ways to actually use and understand PageRank in the way that Google gives it to us, which is in the toolbar.

So, let's start by talking about the difference between toolbar PageRank, which is what you can see via Google's toolbar or via every tool on the Web. There is no tool on the Web that calculates a different version of PageRank or that uses some other version of PageRank that they secretly get from Google that Google experts write. The PageRank number is always coming via the toolbar, and tools that report it use something called the checksum to get it from the toolbar the way that Google's toolbar pulls it directly from Google Source.

PageRank, toolbar PageRank, is updated randomly. By randomly, I mean, it's been as long as 11 months in some cases between a toolbar PageRank update, meaning that a site's actual PageRank might have jumped up a bunch or gone down a bunch, but Google won't change the metric that they show for 11 months, and then recently we had a PageRank update that only took about one month. It used to be that it would happen every month. Now it is very inconsistent. I think the last ordering was there was a month between the last update. Then it was six months before that. It was about five months before that. It was like three months before that. So it is inconsistent. It is a little random. It is when someone at Google decides to turn on that meter. So you don't really know when the next update is coming, nor do you necessarily know how recent your PageRank is, the PageRank that is being reported in the toolbar, unless you check when the last update occurred. So that's an important thing to notice.

Also to note, PageRank happens on a log scale. Let's talk a little bit about a log scale, what that means. So, for example, a log scale, this is a log base 2. What I have done is just drawn little lines to try and illustrate. So, zero, there is nothing there. One, I drew one little line. Two has two little lines. Three has four lines. It is doubling, the base is 2. So we're going up. You can imagine, this curve sort of looks like this until we get to PageRank of 10, which would be way, way off the screen, just super high up, and obviously my line illustrations are by no means perfect. So this should actually be double that. It is probably not.

PageRank does not use log base 2. We suspect here at SEOmoz because we calculate our own similar metric by crawling the Web, we calculate a metric called MozRank. MozRank is designed to mimic PageRank. In fact, it is very similar to the original algorithm that was published by Larry and Sergey back at Stanford. But what we've found is that when we need to scale it, the log base is not 2, but it is between 8 and 9. That means that a PR 7 for example would be 8 times, let's say 8.5 times, more important, more linked to, more well linked to than a PageRank 6 page. So there is a lot of variation in here, and that gradation is not observable through the PageRank that you get in the toolbar, which is a little frustrating. It is one of the reasons why when you see MozRank reported, MozRank will say something like 6.42. So you get a sense of, oh, okay, that's where I am in the scale. I am closer to a 6 than a 7. I am right about the midpoint. This helps you to just see those changes month over month since MozRank is reported consistently every month.

PageRank in the toolbar has a relatively low correlation to how well things actually rank. Meaning that if you were to take the toolbar PageRank of thousands of top 10, top 20, top 30 results and compare them and ask the question, "Do things with higher PageRank tend to rank better then things with lower PageRank," the answer would be yes, but only barely. In fact, the correlation is around 0.11, 0.12. It is pretty darn low, and it gets lower and lower the further away we move from the last PageRank update, which makes sense, right? As the scores degrade in freshness, so too does that correlation. You get this sense of like, wow, yeah, PageRank is probably a very small part of the algorithm.

What it is useful for, and what Google talks about it being used for, and not toolbar PageRank but real PageRank, which we'll talk about in a sec, is to help them determine which URLs on the Web to crawl and prioritize and recrawl. Meaning that, things that are more important, they tend to recrawl them more frequently, and PageRank is one of the items that goes into that calculation. I think almost certainly another one is how frequently they are adding new unique content that Google has never seen before, because they want to make sure that they are indexing that stuff.

So, real PageRank is actually a number that is calculated between 0 and 1. It uses a ton of trailing decimal points typically. It's updated multiple times daily. So you can hear Google's representatives talking about PageRank and they say, "Oh yeah, internally we are constantly recalculating and refactoring PageRank. In fact, we now have systems to estimate the calculation of PageRank so that we don't have to run it across the full web graph because it is very computationally expensive to run PageRank so many times." In fact, here at SEOmoz, MozRank calculations are one of the big reasons that it takes a long time for us to process and calculate an index. I think it is almost a day, day and a half, of processing across 50 to 60 billion URLs to try and make the MozRank calculations happen, which are similar to PageRank.

So, all of that theoretical stuff in mind, let's talk about actually using PageRank, where you should and where you shouldn't.

PageRank is useful as a raw indication of link popularity. Meaning that, PageRank doesn't take into account anchor text. It doesn't take into account whether the sites are related to each other. It doesn't take into account whether some of the sites maybe have been flagged for spam. It doesn't take into account whether the page is relevant to the actual search query. All it says is, in terms of the raw link popularity, the how many pages are pointed to this and how important the pages are that link to this, how important is this on the grand scale of the Web? Remember, the most important site on the web will be a 10, and everything else will fall back from that. So, as the most important sites on the Web gain tons of links, Facebook for example, Twitter for example, everything else is going to be scaled down a little bit. You might have seen in this recent PageRank update, the last couple, that a lot of sites took hits. Big important sites. Nasa.gov went down, Yahoo went down, Google.com fell from a 10 to a 9. That's crazy. That's amazing. What happens there is essentially the most important sites, this is my opinion, but the most important sites are essentially pushing out the boundary of what it takes to be a 10 and then those other sites are falling along the curve somewhere.

So, okay, good as a rough indicator of raw link popularity. It can be useful as well to compare it to other metrics. So, if I see something like a MozRank of a 6 and a PageRank of 3, I might get a little suspicious. There are two big things that could be happening in this type of an instance. If I see that MozRank is high, PageRank is low, I might think to myself, well, maybe since Google's last update to PageRank, this page has gained lots of links and the SEOmoz web index, Linkscape, has recognized that and is crediting them with higher MozRank, but Google, while they have recognized it internally, through real PageRank, they have not calculated it with toolbar PageRank because they have not done a push, an update, of that exported data and so we're just not seeing it.

The other explanation and the more dangerous one is when you see a site and you're like, boy, I think they might be selling links, I think they might be buying links, I think they might be manipulating the link graph in some way through some Web spam and you see those low PR numbers and maybe the page doesn't rank so well, but the MozRank is high, remember that MozRank does not have Google spam calculations in it. PageRank, Google will sometimes penalize sites and pages for selling links or buying links, and that's the way they sort of let you know, like, wink wink, "Hey, we know you're selling links, stop doing it."

The other thing is that the history of PageRank can be useful. So if you se that your site a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago used to be a 6 and now it is a 7, you can gain some insight into that. Especially when you are looking at penalizations you might say, "Oh man, this site used to be a PR 6 four months ago. Now it is a PR 2. Something is mighty suspicious." There is a tool on SEOmoz that is free. It is called Historical PageRank. You can search for it and you will find that. It can be very useful. I actually use and like that tool a lot.

Do not use PageRank for understanding why things rank well in the SERPs or don't. You look at a page of search results and you see, oh, the number one result, well, it must have the highest PageRank. No. Like, no, I can't describe to you how frustrating that is for anyone, for search engineers, for professional SEOs, for . . . anyway, that is not how the search results work. I know. Ten years ago, it used to be the case. It was sort of like use good things on your page and get a high PageRank and you'll rank well on Google. That's not the case anymore. I think PageRank is possibly responsible for, I don't know, sub 5% of the ranking algorithm today, and I think most Googlers would tell you that as well.

Do not use it for valuing link prospects. A lot of cases, I'll see someone say, "Oh, you know, I have this great opportunity. It looks like a great page. It is sitting at CNN.com/articles/012345, but it has a PageRank of 0 or 1. I don't really know if I want that link." Oh my God! You want that link! It's on CNN! What? Come on! PageRank of the actual page, please, use better metrics. Think about things like domain authority. Think about things like page authority. Think about things like, does that PageRank well, is it relevant, is it on a good site, is it useful, is it going to pass good anchor text, are good visitors going to come from there? Don't be thinking about PageRank as your primary metric for valuing link prospects. You can use it in the sense of, hey, let's see if Google might have penalized this page or site for selling links. Maybe that would be worth checking out.

Finally, don't use it as a key metric for reporting. PageRank is not a KPI for anyone and never should be. If someone is coming to you to do SEO and they say, "Hey, you know, we'd really like to improve our PageRank," say no, because PageRank will not send you more visits. It will not send you more business. It will not make your website better in any way. It will not improve your conversion rate. It won't bring you more Twitter followers. It is not going to make your life any better in any way. So please don't report it as a key metric and don't request that it be reported as a key metric. It is generally useless as a KPI. You might consider looking at it just to make sure that you haven't been penalized or that things aren't going terribly wrong. But if you see your PageRank go up by 1 or down by 1, look at your visits. Look at your traffic. Look at how many keywords are sending you referrals. Those are key performance indicators for SEO, not PageRank.

The last thing, possibly the thing that upsets me the most, because I think a lot of experienced SEOs should know this, and many don't. I am not quite sure where this miscommunication happens or why, but PageRank is for pages only. You'd think that would be obvious since it's in the name. Right? It's not called domain rank. It's called PageRank. I know, technically it refers to Larry's last name, Larry Page, not page rank. We're lucky Brin didn't use it or, I don't know, God forbid, I'd created Google. It would be called FishkinRank. That would be horrible.

But PageRank measures pages. Right? So, when you see someone say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a PageRank 6 domain," you have my permission to call baloney on them. You can even use something stronger if you would like, because there is no such thing as a PageRank 6 domain. There is a domain whose home page may indeed have a PageRank score of 6, but that is measuring that home page's link importance and that home page's PageRank, not the importance of the domain as a whole. So, you will find dozens, hundreds, thousands of sites who have a PageRank on their home page that is smaller than what their internal pages might have. For years, SEOmoz had a PageRank of 5 on our home page, but we had a PageRank of 7 on one of our articles and PageRank of 6 on another one. It is not describing how important your domain is. It never is. There is no such thing as domain PageRank.

If you would like, you can use a metric called Domain MozRank, which essentially calculates PageRank over the domain level link graph, meaning it consolidates all pages and looks at domains that point to each other. We think this is something the engines do as well. There are patents and scientific papers and research papers that are written for conferences that suggest that something like that exists, but it is not domain PageRank. Or rather, Google does not report anything that is domain PageRank, and anyone who says otherwise should watch this video.

All right everyone. Thanks so much. Hope you enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


Looking for information on some of the other metrics you can use for analyzing links? Check out our earlier series on the topic here: Which Link Metrics Should I Use? Part 1.


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Seth's Blog : Herbie Hancock is not a Pip

Herbie Hancock is not a Pip

I need to clarify this morning's post. In my glib attempt to make a point, I wasn't as clear as I wanted to be.

When Miles Davis made records with John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock, they weren't easily replaceable, invisible sidemen. No one who went to hear them would have been satisfied if they had been subbed out. By my definition, then, they did in fact have a relationship with the customer... they did work that was unique, that was hard to replace.

Yes, we need teams, no doubt about. The MGs without Steve Cropper could never have been such an amazing house band, and we're all lucky that some people will take their craft that far. Marshall Grant didn't merely perform Johnny Cash's bass sound... he invented it.

Does the world need anonymous, replaceable cogs, people who work for the front man and put in a day's work but that's all? Sure, but it doesn't have to be you. The goal, I think, is to find out how to do your work in a way that makes the team and the product in a way that matters.

PS a fun video from Todd makes my point...

 

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West Wing Week: Made in America

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, August 12, 2011
 

West Wing Week: "Made in America" 

West Wing Week is your video guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President announced new initiatives to put unemployed veterans back to work as well as new fuel economy standards for heavy duty vehicles. He also traveled to Holland, Michigan to visit an advanced battery facility highlighting technologies helping to achieve the new standards and addressed the nation on the budget deficit and creating jobs.

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In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

President Obama: There’s Something Wrong with our Politics that We Need to Fix
The President outlined a series of steps that will put more money in the pockets of American workers, and said that the best way to make sure they happen is to let Congress know “you’ve had enough of theatrics.”

President Obama Hosts an Iftar Dinner to Celebrate Ramadan
Continuing a tradition at the White House, President Obama hosts an Iftar - the meal that breaks the day of fasting - to celebrate Ramadan.

How New Fuel Economy Standards Are Creating New Jobs
The President travels to Holland, MI where one company has already hired 150 people to create batteries for the cars of the future

Today's Schedule 

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

1:20 PM: The President meets with business leaders to discuss the economy 

2:35 PM: The President welcomes the Super Bowl XLV Champion Green Bay Packers to honor the team and their Super Bowl victory WhiteHouse.gov/live 
 
WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.Gov/Live

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