marți, 14 august 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Driving in Europe Compilation [Video]

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 06:48 PM PDT



10 mins. of driving-related funny moments from Europe, courtesy of master compiler TwisterNederland.


Funny and Sexy T-Shirt Messages

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 12:36 PM PDT

Of all the prints ever done on T-shirts, these must be the most pleasant to look at. And it's not because of the messages themselves, if you know what I mean…























































































Camouflaged Cell Phone Towers

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 11:38 AM PDT

Radio masts and towers at cell sites may often be camouflaged to look as a giant tree in order to make the place look inconspicuous.













































Famous Disney Kids Then and Now

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 09:29 AM PDT

Disney TV shows and sitcoms were the perfect start in life for many of the present-day celebs. See how the young Disney Channel stars have changed over the years.

Miley Cyrus


Britney Spears


The Jonas Brothers


Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson


Justin Timberlake


Christina Aguilera


Selena Gomez


JC Chasez


Demi Lovato


Ryan Gosling


Lindsay Lohan


Hilary Duff


Ashley Tisdale


Zac Efron


Raven-Symone


Vanessa Hudgens


Emily Osment

Via billboard


Olympic Medalists Set to Cash in on London 2012 [Infographic]

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 08:55 AM PDT

Since 1992, athletes have been allowed to accept cash awards from their governments, national olympic committees or private foundations that are their partners.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via Visual.ly


Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!


Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 07:53 PM PDT

Posted by Kenny Martin

At SEOmoz, we know that learning complex software applications can be time consuming and challenging, kind of like playing chess with a Wookie. Having well-written and comprehensive onboarding materials can help to decrease the learning curve, thus preventing droid dismemberment. Excellent documentation, videos, and "getting started" guides are a key differentiator between software that is successful and software that slowly fizzles away.

We've gone to great lengths to bring knowledge to the SEO and inbound communities with our daily blog articles and handy Beginner's Guide to SEO. However, getting up to speed with our PRO application has been a challenge for all of us.

We're happy to announce that the previous PRO challenge ends today. Introducing: the new SEOmoz Help Hub!

This project has been at the forefront of our Help Team for the past six months. You may have seen me around the blog before; I'm Kenny, and I designed the look and feel of our new Help home base. The walkthroughs, videos, and screenshots are by my fellow helpster, Nick Sayers, our Communications Chief. Together with the rest of the Help Team, we'll be working to bring you the most high-quality self-help customer service experience on the web.

What are you waiting for? Check it out now!

SEOmoz Help Hub Homepage

Over the past few months, we have been fine-tuning our Getting Started Guides, honing our video editing skills, and taking feedback from our new users. Previously we used our customer support software's forums for all of our documentation needs. Sure, these forums were better than having nothing at all, but they didn't allow for many of the features needed to make our help resources useful for new customers.

Largely, our old forums lacked the functionality we needed as they existed off of the www.seomoz.org domain. This opened the door for odd issues with cross authentication between the forums on SEOmoz and other stunted processes. We wanted a system that was unique to SEOmoz so customers could easy navigate to a central location to learn about our tools. With the launch of our new Help Hub, customers can become zen-level power users in a single afternoon. SEOmoz PRO levitation initiated!

SEOmoz Help Hub Navigation

Learning new software through wordy guides and a plethora of screenshots is a good start, but we wanted to shoot for the stars. The new Help Hub hosts a series of finely-tuned video screencasts, which can put the learning process into hyperdrive. Videos are the best way for the community to see where and how to do something on PRO with ease, which is our ultimate goal. In summation, the process should be as quick and painless as a Michael Bay film. Now that we've launched, we'll continue to gather awesome video analytics to see how people are engaged in our content and make improvements to make them even more engaging!

SEOmoz Help Hub Video Screenshot

At SEOmoz, we use Wistia to host our diverse catalogue of videos. Why? Because Wistia is amazing. Their software allows us to see just what sections of our videos are skipped, replayed, and scrobbled back and forth. This information allows us to cut out any fluff and isolate potentially confusing aspects of our videos and even deeper issues with our software itself. Wistia documents user information to help us create video content that you, our awesome community members, really want.

SEOmoz Help Hub Wistia Engagement Metrics

To better measure engagement and success, we are also going to ask for customer feedback. At the end of each article in our Help Hub, you will find a "Was this document helpful?" section. All responses are logged and reviewed so that we can better improve our help documentation over time. Feedback is crucial to this process as we want to know what customers are missing in our learning materials, and also what aspects of our product are the hardest to learn. The most common questions that are submitted to our help team will be identified and added to the documentation, or used to refine current copy to make an article clearer.

SEOmoz Help Hub Feedback Yes or No

SEOmoz Help Hub Feedback Submit

We've dedicated a trove of resources to guarantee that our new Help Hub is improved on a regular basis. As mentioned above, Nick will be managing the Help Hub and making sure the content is fresh, consumable, and accurate. He will also be blogging about our new venture into customer education as it evolves, so be on the lookout for his stellar posts!

In sum, if you are just getting started with SEOmoz PRO and want to get up to speed quickly, or if you're long-time member and haven't explored some of the new features, don't forget to check out our Help Hub and get schooled. Let us know what you like and what you want to see improved in the comments below. This is your Help Hub, after all!


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400% Higher Throughput Mozscape API Now in Beta, And Seeking Testers

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 03:12 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

If you've used or considered using the Mozscape API to retrieve link metrics data, we've got something unique to share - a brand new beta of a much faster, more robust API. This beta version currently has just a few testers (and we're seeking more), but thus far, we're seeing remarkable results.

Carin, who manages the big data team here at Moz, helped share the story with me last week:

  • The current API is not able to support everyone's use case! Some people need to make a lot of calls in a really short period of time - our API currently can't support more than 10 requests/second (even for paid users). Others have a large list of URLs they want to update metrics on every new index release - our current API doesn't support batching very well and will timeout with batch sizes larger than 50 URLs.
  • The beta version has made some serious performance improvements with single URL throughput and can handle 200 requests / second - the beta API is seeing a 400% throughput improvement, although response times will still be the same
  • To address batching users we've developed a new batching model - online batching (available in the beta API) and offline batching (coming soon to the beta API)
    • Online batching: the maximum amount of results we can process in a POST without a timeout from S3. This has been improved from 50 URLs to 500 URLs in one batch request
    • Offline batching (still in development): for batch sizes larger than 500 URLs, offline batching will process through the entire list (probably up to a certain limit not yet decided) and return a downloadable CSV link to S3 where all the data will be available. Since this is still in development, it is not clear the SLA on offline batching, but this feature will be also be available for beta testing as soon as it is feature complete!

Mozscape's API is pretty big today - we served 154,352,249 (154 million) requests in the first 10 days of August and returned 1,186,736,774 (1.2 billion) rows of link metrics data.

You can still sign up free or try our paid API, but if you have serious demand for high-volume or large batches of link data, we'd love to have you in the beta for the new API. Just contact Andrew Dumont - andrew@seomoz.org - and he'll get you set up!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Helping Our Farmers Cope with the Drought

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

 

Helping Our Farmers Cope with the Drought

Farmers in Iowa are among those struggling with the fallout from the historic drought. Crop yields for corn and soy beans are down sharply, driving up the cost of feed and making it more expensive to raise livestock.

Yesterday, President Obama saw the damage first-hand and described a new effort to help livestock producers. Touring McIntosh Family Farms in Missouri Valley, Iowa, the President announced that the Department of Agriculture will begin to buy up to $170 million worth of beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and fish, and he's encouraging the Department of Defense to do their part as well.

Find out how President Obama is working to help our nation's farmers.

President Barack Obama tours the McIntosh family farm, which has been affected by the drought, in Missouri Valley, Iowa, Aug. 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama tours the McIntosh family farm, which has been affected by the drought, in Missouri Valley, Iowa, Aug. 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

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

Celebrating the Soldier Athletes on Team USA
The Olympic and Paralympic teams include a record number of servicemen and women, both active duty and members of our reserves.

President Obama Congratulates the Curiosity Team
President Obama calls the team that landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.

@Whitehouse Celebrates the 2012 Olympic Games in London
Like people all over the world, the White House has been using Twitter to celebrate the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:15 AM: The Vice President delivers remarks at a campaign event

12:25 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

4:30 PM: The Vice President delivers remarks at a campaign event

5:00 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

8:55 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

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Seth's Blog : Who decided to add the noise?

Who decided to add the noise?

Five or ten years ago, did people start saying, "I don't go to Yankees games any more--the stadium isn't noisy enough, and there aren't enough ads on the big screen TV?"

The new arena in Newark is purpose-designed to pump as much distortion-free sound into the seats as possible—and they're not afraid to use it at any opportunity.

Noise/music/distraction is as much a marketing choice as your logo or the coupons you use. When the harried clerk at the Delta counter starts yelling into the PA system, that's marketing as well.

The calculation (if it gets made at all) is a complex one. How will this investment in speakers and amps translate into increased attendance? (or sausage sales?)

When you turn the stadium into a real-life video game, when the audience can't hear the players or the skates on the ice, you will no doubt attract an audience—but they will be the drive-by masses, not the lifetime fans. The choice to delight the masses at the expense of the diehards seems easy in the short run, but it's ultimately crippling to the future of the brand.

There's no doubt that louder concerts make rock concert goers believe that the performance was better. But beyond that, have they done the math? [And yes, this series of questions probably applies to your project too, noise or no noise].



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