luni, 5 august 2013

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Faith in Humanity Restored

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 12:07 PM PDT

Great photos. Some are very sad but still great.


































A father and his son throughout the years:



"Our first hello and our last goodbye."





Alex's last words:



Little girl's inspiration:



Arnulfo Castorena winning his first gold medal in swimming for Mexico in the Paralympics:



This person received a letter from a developmentally disabled man who visits their barn and found out their horse was hurt:










Kermit and his dad:



Capitán, the dog that sat by his owner's grave for over six years:



The terminally ill mother watched her daughter's wedding over Skype:





The parents made their son's wheelchair into the best Halloween costume ever:



A dog's purpose:



The German shepherd has become a seeing eye dog for a blind spaniel:






When Ellie, a blind spaniel, was adopted by shelter manager Jean Spencer, she never expected that her other dog, Leo, would choose to become her very own seeing-eye dog. "I take them for walks in the park and Leo guides Ellie around," says Spencer. "He is so protective and herds the more boisterous dogs away from her."

Toddlers connecting with complete strangers:

Death In Transit [Infographic]

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 09:06 AM PDT

The "unsinkable" Titanic was carrying more than 2,200 souls when she struck an iceberg in 1912, resulting in a loss of about 1,500 people. A hundred years later and transportation has grown so much that ships can carry 6,000 people, bullet trains carry thousands, and the world's biggest passenger plane can now accommodate more than 800. Add in the now massive venues for cultural events, and the tendency of large crowds of people sometimes stampeding and the potential for accidents is huge. From sinkings, to crashes, to derailments, to stampedes, the National Post has charted the last 100 years of major accidents and incidents (excluding wartime battles). In order to make the timeline, a minimum of 100 people had to die — therefore no automobile accidents.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via National Post.

Building a Better Foundation

Here's What's Happening Here at the White House
 
 
 
 
 
 
  Featured 

Building a Better Foundation

Homeownership is a cornerstone of middle-class security. So helping responsible homeowners is one of President Obama's priorities as he seeks a better bargain for the middle class -- and it's what he'll be talking about tomorrow afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona.

Find out more about President Obama's better foundation for homeownership.

Check out a preview of the President's speech on housing.

 
 
  Top Stories

Ask President Obama Your Questions About Housing

President Obama is traveling to Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday to lay out his plan to continue helping responsible homeowners and those who seek to own their own homes as the next cornerstone of a strong middle class in America -- and he wants to answer your questions.

READ MORE

Weekly Address: Securing a Better Bargain for the Middle Class

In his weekly address, President Obama tells the American people that his plan for creating a better bargain for the middle class builds on the progress we’ve made, fighting our way back from the worst economic recession of our lifetimes.

READ MORE

Happy 52nd Birthday, President Obama

President Obama celebrated his 52nd birthday yesterday. In honor of the occasion, we put together out 52 favorite photos of the President taken in the last year.

READ MORE

 
 
  Today's Schedule

9:45 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:45 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

12:45 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney 

6:00 PM: The President meets with former Negro League baseball players

 

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Seth's Blog : Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

 

Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

Earlier in this series, I wrote about the failure of Survival putting me at the end of my publishing rope, publisherless. Then I self-published Purple Cow (the original, now-out-of-print edition came in a milk carton) and the self-referential marketing, combined with great reader buzz, got me back into the good graces of the publishing world. That wasn't my goal, but in retrospect, it had a big impact on my output as an author.

Josh asks, "How do you turn something that is considered to be a commodity into a Purple Cow, when the lowest price is the only thing that seems to matter to customers?"

If you tell me that price is the only thing that matters to customers, I respond that nothing about this product matters to them.

When something matters to you, you talk about it, care about it, research it, tweak it... If all that we've got to care about is the price, then the price is the discussion, not the item itself.

Businesses have worked overtime to turn things into commodities, telling us that they sell what the other guy does, it's the same, but cheaper. No wonder we've been lulled into not caring.

Every time you say, "all they care about is price," you've just said, "they don't really care, they just want to get the buying over with, cheap."

The thing is, it doesn't have to be a commodity if you don't want it to be. It's easy to forget, but before the smartphone, cell phones were treated as a commodity as well. Nucor figured out how to turn steel from a cheap commodity into something worth caring about. Not cared about by everyone, but cared about by enough buyers. And that's the opportunity in every industry, in every segment, for any product or service that has become a commodity.

No, you can't magically make it interesting to all. But yes, with enough effort and care, you can find those that are interested enough if what you create that they'll choose to talk about it.

And if you can't, go make something else. Something that people will choose to care about and talk about.

We sell commodities by choice.

       

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Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate


Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013 07:28 PM PDT

Posted by tallen1985

SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following few things:

  1. Links
  2. Rankings
  3. Fun cuddly animals that Google keeps releasing from its algorithmic zoo

Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn't really our problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users, which in turn will result in higher conversions.

There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course, conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one specific part of user experience â€" CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) â€" and why I think they suck.

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,"Are you a robot?" It's like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, "Are you a thief?" before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to flood our users with these "questions:"

And from there we have now moved to this:

Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on a nearby wall:

CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA's effect on conversion rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company's conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It's worth noting that the CAPTCHA type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2% is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.

Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before continuing.

Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans. They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).

Yet all of these "solutions" create the same problem. I, the user, am trying to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you, the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself and my goal, just so you don't have to sort through a few items of spam.

Another major concern is that these products aren't particularly user-friendly for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we remember.

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress to the next page.

Users don't want to see adverts even when they are "subtly" placed around a beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon them (ahem...YouTube).

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it's a quick fix that means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.

Figures from Drupal's usage statistics show that they alone have nearly 200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a more fulfilled user experience that doesn't seem to be going away.

https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha

"CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines"

...according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800 completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week's worth of data from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.

The study showed that, on average:

  • Visual CAPTCHAs take 9.8 seconds to complete
  • Audio CAPTCHAs take much longer (28.4 seconds) to hear and solve
  • Audio CAPTCHA has a 50% give-up rate
  • Only 71% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of a CAPTCHA
  • Only 31.2% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of an audio CAPTCHA

With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is potentially a huge market to lose.

So what is the solution?

There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.

There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to reduce the amount of spam you receive but won't interfere with your user experience.

Akismet

Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site. Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat comment spam.

The honeypot technique

Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, "If you are human, don't fill in this field".

We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user doesn't fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.

However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn't getting punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their actions.

Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?

I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by asking ourselves the following questions:

  • Is the amount of spam you are receiving really worth potentially losing conversions?
  • If the answer is yes, is your CAPTCHA friendly to all users, including those who are visually impaired?
  • CAPTCHAs are for robots, not for humans. Unfortunately, anything one person can code to try and prevent robots from entering a site is something another can find a way through. The real consideration is, are we just shoving our problem with spam onto our customers?

When it comes down to it, CAPTCHAs lead to a negative experience on our sites. They frustrate users, damage conversion rates, and they are not particularly friendly to visually impaired users. Most of all, it is shifting our problem onto our users. That's definitely not right. Getting rid of CAPTCHAs will not only improve our users' experiences, but it will also improve the web as a whole. This should be the beginning of the end of the CAPTCHA. If you have a CAPTCHA, I urge you to remove it now!

What do you think?

Image credits

http://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas

http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf

http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg


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Seth's Blog : Colors or numbers?

 

Colors or numbers?

As soon as we measure something, we seek to improve the numbers.

Which is a worthwhile endeavor, if better numbers are the point of the exercise.

The other path is to focus on colors, not numbers. Instead of measuring, for example, how many people click on a link, we can measure how something you wrote or created delighted or challenged people... You can see the changes in emotion, or dignity improved or light shed.

The questions we ask change the thing we make. Organizations that do nothing but measure the numbers rarely create breakthroughs. Merely better numbers.

       

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