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luni, 19 septembrie 2011

The America Invents Act: Turning Ideas into Jobs

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, September 19, 2011

The America Invents Act: Turning Ideas into Jobs

Last Friday, President Obama signed the America Invents Act. This historic legislation will help American entrepreneurs and businesses get their inventions to the marketplace sooner so they can turn their ideas into new products and new jobs.

Learn more and watch the President's remarks.

President Barack Obama signs the America Invents Act into law at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., Sept. 16, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

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Think Visibility Voted #1 UK Search Conference by SEOs

Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:51 AM PDT

Last week I ran a Facebook poll to ask what people considered to be their favourite search conference in the UK.

This received a great response (197 votes in total) – and we can now announce that the winners of the competition were Think Visibility, who collected 63 votes!

SAScon Manchester and BrightonSEO made it a great result for the smaller events as they finished second and third respectively, with 56 and 29 votes – ranking ahead of some of the much bigger organised London events. Thanks to everyone who took part!

Seth's Blog : Can't watch your parade if the house is on fire

Can't watch your parade if the house is on fire

People are in pain. Often of their own making, they tell themselves a story that obsesses/distracts and compels them. "I'll never get a movie gig again," "I can't believe they didn't like what I offered," "My job is in jeopardy," "Money's too tight to buy all the things I want..." "Does my butt look fat in these shorts?"

You can jump up and down and sing and dance and launch fireworks, but if the consumer's story of pain is vivid enough, you will be ignored. When the house is on fire, all your audience wants is a hose.

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Home Prices Rise in All 70 Monitored China Cities;Local Governments Rely on Ponzi Land Sales to Pay Mounting Debt;Tightening Concerns Hit China Stocks
Obama Proposes $4 Trillion in Spending Cuts "Over 120 Years"
European Leaders Remain Divided, Geithner Brushed Off; German Banks Need $175 Billion Capital

Home Prices Rise in All 70 Monitored China Cities;Local Governments Rely on Ponzi Land Sales to Pay Mounting Debt;Tightening Concerns Hit China Stocks

Posted: 18 Sep 2011 10:54 PM PDT

The housing bubble in China blasts ahead full steam even if the Chinese stock market is not.

Please consider China Home Prices Rise, Challenge Curbs

China's August new-home prices rose in all 70 cities monitored for the first time this year, undercutting government efforts to cool the market through higher down-payments and mortgage rates.

Prices in Beijing rose 1.9 percent from a year ago, while those in Shanghai, the nation's financial center, increased 2.8 percent, the statistics bureau said on its website yesterday. New home prices rose in 67 out of 70 cities in the first half this year and were up in all but two in July.

China's measures to control its property market are at a critical stage and the nation needs to focus efforts on curbing price increases in less affluent cities after limiting home purchases by each family in metropolitan areas including Beijing and Shanghai, Premier Wen Jiabao said on Sept. 1. Only two cities responded to the government's July call for added restrictions on housing purchases, as local governments rely on land sales to pay mounting debt.

Local Governments Rely on Land Sales to Pay Mounting Debt

Read that last paragraph above carefully. Local governments have ignored central authority calls to restrict housing because fueling the housing bubble is the only way local governments can pay interest on debt.

Thus, the China property boom has gone beyond bubble to an outright Ponzi scheme.

China Stocks Hit 14-Month Low

Bloomberg reports China's Stocks Decline to 14-Month Low on Tightening Concern, Pending IPOs

China's stocks fell to a 14-month low after Premier Wen Jiabao said the government will take measures to control inflation and investors speculated pending initial public offerings will sap demand for existing equities.

"The upcoming big IPOs are a major reason for the market plunge, draining liquidity in the market," said Tu Jun, a strategist at Shanghai Securities Co. "It's not a good time for fund-raising but the government's tight monetary policy has left companies with no other choice."

Tight Money Policy?!

Good Grief. Credit in China is soaring. Home prices are booming. Local governments are lending money for housing in spite of requests by central authorities to not do so.

How can anyone get "tight money policy" out of those conditions?

Economic Challenges

China shouldn't ease its monetary policy and could face vicious inflation if it does, the Oriental Morning Post said today, citing Wu Xiaoling, vice director of the finance and economy committee of the National People's Congress. China's economic growth faces large challenges in the fourth quarter and next year as the global economic recovery slows, the newspaper said.

China Overheating

Those looking for inflation can easily find it, in China.

However, nearly everyone is looking at the US where inflation is nowhere to be found (at least from a credit aspect, housing aspect, and interest rate aspect) all of which are far more important than nominal price moves of food and gasoline.

Of course inflation is not about rising prices in the first place, but rather about credit and credit-marked-to-market.

"No New Stimulus" Warning

Former Deputy Central Banker pleads "No New Stimulus"

China should refrain from boosting credit and fiscal spending again as stimulus measures to avoid fueling inflation and pushing up government debt, Wu Xiaoling, a former deputy central bank governor said in remarks published on Monday.

"Currently, China's economy faces inflationary pressures as well as pressures on government debt, which means we cannot go down the road of expanding both credit and fiscal spending," the official Finance News quoted Wu as telling a forum.

Chinese policymakers should be "extremely wary" about the risk of government debt, said Wu, who is now a senior lawmaker.

China is trying to clean up the roughly 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.68 trillion) in local debt -- a hangover from a 4 trillion yuan economic stimulus package unveiled by Beijing in late 2008 to counter the global financial crisis.

China faces more economic challenges in the fourth quarter of this year and 2012, Wu said, adding that slower economic growth next year would be highly likely.

Weak global demand, government tightening steps to target the property sector and a slowdown in investment for highways and high-speed railways as could weigh on China's growth, she added.

Warning Far Too Late

Put that stimulus warning in the category labeled "ridiculously late". China's property bubble is in an extreme state, right at a time the entire global economy is slowing dramatically.

China Will Slow Far Faster Than Most Think

China's property bubble is set to implode, and when it does, the Chinese economy will cool far more than anyone thinks, taking commodities along for the ride. Commodity producers like Australia and Canada are at extreme risk as well.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Obama Proposes $4 Trillion in Spending Cuts "Over 120 Years"

Posted: 18 Sep 2011 08:32 PM PDT

The theater of the absurd regarding spending cuts hit a new high today. We are now counting budget cuts not over a year, or even ten years, but rather 120 years.

Please consider Obama to propose $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue

The president on Monday will announce a proposal that includes the new taxes, nearly $250 billion in reductions in Medicare spending, $330 billion in cuts in other mandatory benefit programs, and savings of $1 trillion from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The $1.5 trillion in tax revenue would include about $800 billion realized over 10 years from repealing the Bush-era tax rates for couples making more than $250,000. It also would place limits on deductions for wealthy filers and end certain corporate loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies.

By adding the tax revenue, about $580 billion in proposed mandatory spending cuts, the savings from troop withdrawals and $1 trillion in spending cuts already in place, the combined deficit reduction would total about $4 trillion over 120 years.

Whose harebrained idea was it to carry the savings out to 120 years (the Administration or the AP writer?). I suppose it could be a typo for 12 years or 20 years but how about some savings over 1 year?

By the way, we need to ask: Is that $1 trillion troop reduction a budgeted item or it is taking credit for something that was never was appropriated in the first place.

Service Providers Hit

Administration officials said 90 percent of the $248 billion in 10-year Medicare cuts would be squeezed from service providers. The plan does shift some additional costs to beneficiaries, but those changes would not start until 2017, and administration officials made clear as well that Obama would veto any Medicare cuts that aren't paired with tax increases on upper-income people.

The president's plan also called for cuts of $72 billion over ten years from Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for low-income people and the severely disabled. States, hospitals and advocates for the poor are expected to resist those.

Dead on Arrival

I would like to see a detailed plan as to how $223 billion will be squeezed out of service providers.

However, the question is moot because the entire proposal is likely dead on arrival. Republicans will not agree to new taxes and Democrats will bitch about cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

European Leaders Remain Divided, Geithner Brushed Off; German Banks Need $175 Billion Capital

Posted: 18 Sep 2011 09:15 AM PDT

As talks wind down in Poland, European leaders still divided on debt crisis

European leaders made little headway Saturday on resolving a banking crisis that threatens to weaken their economies and spread damage overseas to countries such as the United States.

Finance ministers from European Union nations gathered in Poland for two days of talks and even invited Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to their meeting to explain how the U.S. handled a similar crisis in 2008-09.

Yet EU ministers did not coalesce around any rescue plan for Greece or troubled European banks. Some also brushed off advice from Geithner, who's urged them to stimulate their economies and act quickly to shore up their banking system.

Wealthier EU countries such as Germany have been balking at a larger bailout of Greece using public money. All EU leaders have agreed on so far is that their banks need to be strengthened by raising more capital.

"From our perspective, we see a clear need for bank recapitalization," Swedish Finance minister Anders Borg said. "The EU banking system needs better backstops and that's basically a matter of capital."

The big question is where the money will come from, especially since private investors appear unwilling to risk more cash. A shortage of dollars prompted the Federal Reserve this week to engage in large currency swaps with European central banks that effectively injected more liquidity into the EU's financial system.

Most analysts think European governments will have no choice but to use public money. Jay Bryson, global economist at Wells Fargo, said Germany "can pay now or they can pay later."

Yes this is a case of pay now or pay later, but that is not the critical issue. Who pays, is the issue.

Bondholder should take a hit. Banks that overleveraged into Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese bonds should taker the hit not taxpayers.

Geithner, the Fed, the ECB, and the banks all want to screw taxpayers one more time, bailing out the banks at taxpayer expense. The amounts are not trivial.

German Banks Need $175 Billion Capital

Reuters reports German banks need 127 billion euros of more capital

Germany's 10 biggest banks need 127 billion euros ($175 billion) of additional capital, German newspaper Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported, citing a study by economic research institute DIW.

Bear in mind that is just German banks. French banks are also severely undercapitalized. Also note the target is a mere 5% equity ratio, implying a leverage ratio of 20-1, still hugely over-leveraged from a common-sense standpoint.

It is fitting that European leaders remain divided, because the best solution is division, a breakup of the Eurozone. Please see Eurozone Breakup Logistics (Never Believe Anything Until It's Officially Denied) for a discussion.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

duminică, 18 septembrie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Linkscape's September Update + Feedback

Posted: 17 Sep 2011 03:12 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Last week, we launched a new Linkscape update with data crawled and indexed in August. Several folks noticed some significant changes in this index, particularly in link counts and some PA/DA metrics. I wanted to take some time in this post to talk about Linkscape's data, our process, some of the challenges we're facing and what you can expect to see with the index over the next several months.

Before we do that, here's the stats on the latest update:

45,200,112,724 (45.2 billion) URLs
425,981,698 (425 million) Subdomains
98,785,848 (98.7 million) Root Domains
373,046,145,690 (373 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.22% of all links found were nofollowed
- 58.7% of nofollowed links are internal, 41.3% are external
Rel Canonical - 10.12% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 80.08 links on it
- 66.71 internal links on average
- 13.37 external links on average

If you've been paying close attention to the stats on the Linkscape index updates, you might have observed that for the past year, domain diversity (the quantity of root domains in the index) and overall size (the number of unique URLs) appear to have an inverse relationship. When we have larger indices, we crawl fewer domains and when we crawl more domains, we tend to have fewer pages from them.

Here's a graphical comparison starting in August of last year:

Linkscape URLs + Root Domains August 2010 - September 2011

As you can see, when we've crawled a larger number of unique domains, we've crawled fewer individual URLs. This has long been a frustration and an artifact of some of the systems that we've used to build the service. In April of this year, we began testing a new system for crawling that we hope will enable us to reach both depth and breadth, but there's a lot of complex, hard-to-build steps we need to take first to scale processing, fix bugs and streamline Linkscape's architecture.

Our VP Engineering, Kate, recently addressed this in a Q+A on the topic:

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to add a quick response to shed a bit more light on the situation. Last year we started a on a project to drastically improve our index. The first part of that was to make our crawler discover more of the web - this included crawling deeper on domains, discovering more links faster (freshness), and contain more links overall.

Background

To understand the changes, it might help if I explain how our crawler used to work and how we changed.

Our crawler used to crawl the web (for 3-4 weeks), then we would compute the link graph and create all the lists of links, and metrics you see in Open Site Explorer - this is what we called processing (and it would take 2-3 weeks). As part of processing we would select the top 10 billion urls to crawl, and then start crawling those.

The problem with this system was that the data was could be 7-8 weeks old (crawling time + processing + deployment to the API and OSE). It also wasn't recursive - meaning that we would only discover new links when we did the processing of that crawl, so it could take us several months before we would see new links that were deeper in domains.

The Changes

We modified our crawler so we were crawling all the time - we crawl sites every day, or week, or month - based on authority. As we crawl those site, any new links that we find are added to one of the buckets, and will be crawled typically within that same index. This is exciting because we can go deeper, discover more links, and produce a higher quality index. The other benefit, is that since we are crawling all the time, we can just take a snapshot of that crawl and run processing - without waiting for the last round of processing to finish - and this means we can update the index more often.

However, in June, we had a problem with the old crawlers, and we had to roll out our new version of the crawl and index with the OSE launch on July 27th. So even though our testing looked good when we released the new index, and correlations were higher than the old crawl, we got complaints about things that were wrong.

The Issues

Binary files were in the index - There are normally only supposed to be links in the index, but because the new crawler went very deep on some domains we started discovering all sorts of binary files, which when parsed, produced lots of weird links. So domains had all these links from sites that didn't link to them. We fixed this issue, and this is the first index with the fix.

We went too deep on big domains - There are a lot of knobs to turn on the new crawlers - from the number of sites we crawl daily/weekly/month to how many links we keep for different domains. One of the first things we noticed with this new crawl, was that we had less domains in our index. So we dialed down how many urls could come from a domain - and this new index also contains that change.

What We Are Doing

We recognize that all of you depend on this data. And we take the index quality very seriously.

We have already made a lot of other changes, increasing the overall size and adjusting how we crawl. However, since it still takes 2-4 weeks to process an index, so some of those changes won't be seen for another 2-4 weeks yet.

We are also working on an updated, higher correlating Page Authority/Domain Authority that should be out in a month or two - but also may jump around a bit.

What You Can Do

Definitely keep sending us feedback. It really helps us understand where we may have missed in our testing, and what we can do to fix it. And thanks again for your patience - we really want to deliver the best possible Linkscape for you, and I assure the team is working nights and weekends to address these concerns. And if anyone has questions you can always email me or our help team (which tend to respond to emails much faster), as all of us care a lot and really want to hear your feedback.

Thanks again,
Kate

On Friday night, I stayed late at the office with a number of folks from the Linkscape team (pictured below during their morning standup):

The Linkscape Team at SEOmoz
(clockwise from Martin in the center; Alec, Phil, Brandon, Carin, Matt and Walt)

There are big, tough problems around building a web index, particularly on a budget like ours vs. those of Google or Bing. We brainstormed a lot of ideas, but the big challenge comes down to this: Any change we make today won't be observable for at least 5-6 weeks, making for a very slow iteration process. In software engineering, the faster your iterations and the faster you know the impact of your changes, the faster you can improve. Linkscape is not providing a fast feedback loop today, and we know we need to address that before we invest tons of efforts in improvements that "might" have a positive impact.

I can promise, however, that the team of engineers working on this are among the smartest, most capable, diligent and passionate people I've ever worked with or met. We know there's going to be 3-4 more months of hard slogging and indices of only moderately improved quality before we reach the levels we really want (our internal goal is 100 billion URLs in an index while maintaining domain diversity above 110 million root domains).

You can definitely help us by providing feedback when you think we've missed an important site or page, when metrics look out of whack or when something goes awry in OSE, the mozBar or your web app campaigns. We really appreciate your patience while we improve and your support for the Linkscape dataset. The team can tell you that I take our struggles personally and hard, but I'm incredibly bullish on what we'll be producing by the end of the year.

What to Expect in the Next 3 Months

We'll have a new index out in just 7-10 days that further addresses some bugs (and has some more freshly crawled pages, too)
Index sizes - look for between 44-55 billion URLs, probably not achieving much over that until December, possibly later
Domain diversity - look for 100mil+ starting in the next index, and likely maintaining near that or above for future indices
Index updates may slip past 4-5 weeks as we try to make more fixes ahead of a new crawl or processing cycle (we'll keep the Linkscape calendar updated to make this a transparent process)
We're releasing a new version of PA + DA that are likely to be much better correlated with Google rankings (giving a superior metric to judge the ranking potential of sites/pages). This might, however, result in some sites + pages rising or falling dramatically. My best advice here is to use your competitors and industry cohorts as a bar for comparison rather than just looking at the raw numbers over time (since the metric itself is changing, a "40" in October might not mean what a "40" means today).

Looking forward to hearing from you - the engineering team, along with myself and Kate, will be paying close attention to the comments on the thread and to any private feedback or emails to help@seomoz.org on this topic as well. Thanks again - it's an honor to have such a great community of folks paying careful attention and deriving value from our products. We promise to live up to the high expectations you've got for us.

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Seth's Blog : "Yet"

"Yet"

Here's a way to figure out if it pays to adopt a new technology.

When you talk about your market or your peers, do you say, "no one is using it..." or "no one is using it yet"?

Yet implies inevitability. If they're going to use it, it might make sense to get there before they do.

[Worth considering: The difference between a technology where getting in early pays dividends, and those that don't. For example, having a website or a blog or a Twitter account early can help, because each day you add new users and fans.

QR codes, on the other hand, don't reward those that get in the ground floor. You can always start tomorrow.]

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luni, 19 septembrie 2011

The America Invents Act: Turning Ideas into Jobs

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Can't watch your parade if the house is on fire

Can't watch your parade if the house is on fire

More Recent Articles

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

duminică, 18 septembrie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Seth's Blog : "Yet"

"Yet"

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

luni, 19 septembrie 2011

More Recent Articles

duminică, 18 septembrie 2011

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