Central Perk

marți, 31 mai 2011

Damn Cool Pics

15 Creative Potholes
Top 25 Cross Tattoos
Meet Ernestine Shepherd, 74-Year-Old Woman with a Six-Pack
Giant Scale Street Art

Posted: 31 May 2011 07:06 PM PDT

Potholes are annoying and destructive. They can wreck your car's suspension, distract cyclists and worst of all, running into one can make you spill your latte all over your freshly cleaned suit.

However, like with everything else, some happy do-gooders are making lemons out of lemonade. After Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca, artists from Montreal, had to pay $600 in car repairs from hitting a pothole; they decided to make potholes the theme for their next photography project.

What happened next was creative, inspiring and will make you look at potholes a little differently from now on. They staged photography around the potholes by creating interesting scenes. Their work has become so popular that they have now photographed potholes in not only Montreal, but New York City and Los Angeles. This is a small sampling of their work.

Artist Website: mypotholes

Top 25 Cross Tattoos

Posted: 31 May 2011 01:14 PM PDT

Cross Tattoos have been popular all throughout history and it doesn't look like the design will lose popularity anytime soon. Most Cross Tattoos often had and still do have special meaning whether for religious reasons or otherwise. The early Christian religious clergy used small, hand-held crosses to bestow blessings and Crosses were carried in holy processions. Later, crosses found a place on altars in churches and were erected outdoors in markets and along roads. The cross is probably one of the most recognized religious symbols in the world because people associate it with Christianity.

Meet Ernestine Shepherd, 74-Year-Old Woman with a Six-Pack

Posted: 31 May 2011 12:32 PM PDT

Ernestine Shepherd, 74, of Baltimore, United States has been crowned by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest competitive female bodybuilder ever.

She told the Washington Post: 'Age is nothing but a number'.
Ms Shepherd has impeccably toned 'six-pack' abs that are the marvel of her Baltimore fitness centre.

Her husband of 54 years, Collin Shepherd, says he 'has trouble keeping guys away from her'. The Shepherds live in Baltimore with their son, 53, and grandson, 14.

Over the past 18 years, Shepherd has run nine marathons and won two bodybuilding contests.

Shepherd said she wasn't always so fit. She was a 'couch potato' until she was 56 years old, when she and her older sister, Mildred, discovered their bodies had started going soft. She says Sylvester Stallone is her idol. Not exactly your typical grandmother.

Source: dailymail

Giant Scale Street Art

Posted: 31 May 2011 12:04 PM PDT

Swiss artists Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann take streets, overpasses, soccer fields and other open public spaces and transform them into abstract paintings and a giant scale. It's literally street art. Adding colors to street for them is fun. They have already been doing such work in many places. Have an eye on pictures below and let us know what do you think.

Source: langbaumann

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Head Smacking Tip #20: Don't Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect.

Posted: 30 May 2011 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Many of us trained in the ways of classical SEO are familiar with the link building process:

Step 1: Find relevant sites from which to get a link.

Step 2: Search for contact information (email or phone number).

Step 3: Get in touch and find a way to make the link happen (sell them on great content, do a trade in-kind, plant a seed and hope, etc.)

If you've ever done this (for the first 2 years of my SEO career, it's practically all I did), you know how much it sucks. Conversion rates are low. Time/link is high. The ROI is there, but it's a painful, boring, awkward slog.

I've got some good news. There's a better way.

Try this instead:

Step 1: Find relevant human beings (bloggers, journalists, forum participants, members of online communities, active social networkers, people in media, PR, or simply the well-connected).

Step 2: Follow their contributions to the web world and engage (in blog comments, over Twitter, via LinkedIn, through Q+A sites and forums, or directly over email). Ask for nothing.

Step 3: Build something highly relevant and useful to them. If you've truly built that connection and gotten to "know them," even if it's just virtually, you will know what they need/want/will appreciate.

Step 4: Let them know about it. This can be over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, in a blog comment, or whatever medium makes sense.

There's huge advantages to this method, including:

More Scalable Link Building: Content plays can approach dozens of folks who may influence, write for or control multiple properties leading to a much higher ROI for each successful contact.
People Like People: People who answer webmaster@somesite.com don't particularly like link requests.
Authenticity: Rather than simply begging for a link to help your SEO, you're actually forming connections that can help with every form of marketing - greater brand awareness, attention from influencers, social sharing, etc.
Future Proof: No matter what signals engines evolve to measure or what forms of discovery become popular, your work carries value. If Facebook sharing takes over the web, it's not a problem because that's how people will share your links. If some new platform wins, you can rest assured that your content will make its way there.
Better Web Content: Since you're producing material that fill a need, you're helping to make the web a better place - there's nothing more deserving of a link or rankings than that.

Admittedly, the hardest part is Step 1: "Finding the Right People." Allow Google to assist:

Pictured above is a Google "profile" search. You can search Google's public user profiles with search query strings like this http://www.google.com/search?q=travel+blogger&tbs=prfl:e or by appending &tbs=prfl:e onto any search URL.

It's also easy to use tools like FollowerWonk and LinkedIn Search to supplement these results. Armed with these tools and this process, I'm bullish that any SEO with the passion to invest time and the freedom to build quality resources can earn great links, mentions and social metrics from real people across the web.

Good luck out there link builders. I'll have my fingers crossed that this process can reduce friction and pain for people on both sides of the link equation. If you've got any additional recommendations, tools or methods to share, feel free to do so in the comments!

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