Central Perk

luni, 13 septembrie 2010

Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Posted: 13 Sep 2010 08:01 AM PDT

A few weeks ago, I twittered about the demise of my Roku Soundbridge music player, and how I was now having to deal with using an old iPod to play my music. The folks on the Sonos twitter account happened to see my situation and agreed to send me two Sonos ZP120′s to review.

To be honest, I have heard of the Sonos system before. I hadn’t really investigated it because it looked too complex to set up, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The whole process was actually incredibly easy. Here’s a picture of the ZP120 in my kitchen. You can see the defunct Soundbridge and the iPod hooked up to my amplifier in the picture below:

Sonos ZP120 and Amplifier

I chose the kitchen for a few reasons: it’s where I spend a lot of time, I’ve got speakers hard wired in (see photo below), and it has a network hub. What…doesn’t everyone have a network hub in their kitchen? If you want your Sonos system to play network music or play internet radio stations like Pandora, at least one has to have a hard wire connection. If your network doesn’t have any connections where you want to listen, it’s not a problem–you’ll need a Zone Bridge BR 100. As long as one unit is on the network, it’s fine. The rest of the Sonos units will connect wirelessly.

Now I didn’t get a Sonos controller; instead, I used one of the many iPhones and iPod Touches around the house. You can also use a computer or iPad if you prefer. If you don’t have one, you will need a controller. After that, it was just a simple matter of telling the Sonos system where the music was located (in my case, on a file server in a completely different room), giving it a few minutes to index, and I was all set.

Now here’s where it gets cool: you can turn on the Sonos systems one at a time, more than one at a time, or all of them at once. You can have them playing different music or the same music in sync (if you’ve ever tried to set up home streaming server you know what a PIA that is). If you had two units on the second floor of your house you could have them sync playing the same music, and all of the units on the first floor sync’d up playing different music as well. If you were throwing a party, you could have the same music playing all over the house at different volumes. Here are some screen shots from my iPhone showing that.

Playing Pandora Radio

One Sonos Playing

Two Sonos playing different Music

Two Sonos playing the same music in sync

As you can see from the pictures it’s actually really easy to change music sources or combine the music sources into one big zone. The Sonos ZP 120 also has a line in, which I hooked up to the TV in the living room. Imagine watching the Yankee game and wanting to have it play throughout the whole house while you’re taking care of some chores. Doing it’s not a problem with the Sonos system.

Another great thing about a Sonos system is that, if you want to add to/grow your music system, you can: just add another unit, sync them together with two buttons, and you’re good to go. If you want to use a Sonos system as a standalone unit, you’ll need an S5 unit with speakers built in. It sounds great.

The only bad thing about a Sonos unit is the price. You can buy the components separately, but for most people the the bundled units make the most sense. They start at $999. That said, I know people who have had them for years without any problems and speak very highly of them.

If you’re looking to take the music you have on digital files and start playing it all over your house without worrying about complicated wiring, I can definitely recommend the Sonos music system.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

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Daily Snapshot: Discussing the Economy with Families in Virginia

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, September 13, 2010

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama pauses during a moment of silence in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House at 8:46AM, Saturday, Sept. 11, 2010, in remembrance of the time that the first plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

View more photos.

Today's Schedule

In the morning, the President and Vice President will meet with the national security team for the regular monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Situation Room. In the afternoon, the President will meet with a family at their home in Fairfax, Virginia. Following the meeting, the President will hold a discussion on the economy with families from the area.

In the evening, the President will continue a tradition started by President George W. Bush by honoring championship teams and student athletes from across the NCAA with a reception at the White House. The President will welcome student athletes from dozens of schools and various sports to congratulate them on their accomplishments in the classroom as well as on and off the playing field.

All times are Eastern Daylight Time

9:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:30 AM: The President delivers remarks at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Reception in the Grand Foyer

11:00 AM: The President and the Vice President meet with the national security team for the regular monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan

1:45 PM: The President meets with Fairfax family

2:00 PM: The President holds a discussion on the economy

3:30 PM: The President meets with senior advisors

4:30 PM: The President meets with Secretary of Defense Gates

5:45 PM: The President delivers remarks to NCAA Champion Student Athletes

6:30 PM: The Vice President attends an event for Representative Joe Sestak

Indicates Events that will be livestreamed on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

SEOptimise

Clever Tricks You Can Do With Google Alerts

Posted: 13 Sep 2010 04:54 AM PDT

This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.

Google Alerts is one of the most powerful tools made available from our friends at Mountain View, but despite it's huge potential it's largely under-rated and doesn't get the appreciation or the acknowledgement it deserves.

It's been around for donkey's years but is still in Beta, and the chances are you're using it already in a simple way, perhaps to keep track of your own name to see whether there's a Footballer in Spain with your name or a namesake who's running for the local council.

You might even have it running for your companies brand name to keep tabs on any good or bad press you're getting.

And if you aren't doing either of those two things stop reading this article now (we'll wait for you) and go and get that set up before you do anything else.

Seriously sort it out now…

But I wanted to share with you just a few of the cleverer ways it can be used that will surprise you and almost certainly make you life a bunch easier.

Using Google Alerts to Find Out If You've Been Hacked

With everyone switching to WordPress as a CMS there's a very real danger of more sites getting hacked. It seems currently the main reason people are hacking WordPress sites is to fill them with links to websites in the less savoury corners of the web.

They're even clever enough to cloak your website so only search engines can see the links and they are invisible to you.

So how do you find out if your website has been attacked bar waiting for your rankings to tank for linking to spam sites?

You can use a Google Alert, rather than entering a simple keyword set up your Google alert using site:yourdomain.com then add multiple keywords like viagria, cialis web cams, etc. If you add OR in caps lock between the words then it will look for any mentions of they keywords on your site.

Essentially you're setting up a system which says email me whenever you find any of these dodgy words on my site, you might mention them innocently and get an alert but if something untoward is going on this should give you a early warning.

The only real downside is Google have already spotted the problem so it may already be too late.

This is a great little tip with a hat tip to Patrick.

Using Google Alerts to Find Out Who's Linking to You

You no doubt know that search google with link:yourdomain.com will give you a rough approximation of some of the links pointing at your site. It's no big secret that the data you get from this search is a little flawed, but setting up a Google Alert with this syntax is not a bad way to find out about some new links you've attracted.

Keep Track of Your Competitors Links

You can use exactly the method discussed above to keep track of new inbound links to your competitor sites, this method is arguably it's even more valuable. If you discover they've had a series of infographics which have gone viral perhaps you should be exploring a similar approach, or maybe competitions are leading to high quality editorial links? Well then you should get your thinking cap on.

Find out Every-time Google Index a new Page of Your Site.

A real trend I've seen over recent months is websites suffering from decreasing number of indexed pages in Google, in most cases this hasn't adversely influenced their search traffic or search entry pages but is still an issue of concern. Do you have a system in place to monitor whether your pages are getting indexed as you hope? or are you just submitting an XML site map and crossing your fingers? If you set up a Google alert for site:yourdomain.com you'll get a notification every time a page is indexed, which will help spot any indexing issues you may be suffering from.

Use Google Alerts to Keep Track of Changing Content with RSS feeds

There's certain areas to certain websites that you'd really like to keep track of but for what ever reason don't have RSS feeds, I've found this a lot in press centre sections of company websites, for example.

It can be really helpful to get updated whenever a new page is added to this section of the site. Again a bit of clever Google Alerts syntax can help you. Setting one up for a query like site:theirdomain.com/press-centre/ would do the trick nicely.

See not bad for a free tool that's been in beta for donkey's years.

The myth of preparation

There are three stages of preparation. (For a speech, a product, an interview, a sporting event...)

The first I'll call the beginner stage. This is where you make huge progress as a result of incremental effort.

The second is the novice stage. This is the stage in which incremental effort leads to not so much visible increase in quality.

And the third is the expert stage. Here's where races are won, conversations are started and sales are made. A huge amount of effort, off limits to most people, earns you just a tiny bit of quality. But it's enough to get through the Dip and be seen as the obvious winner.

Here's the myth: The novice stage is useful.

If all you're going to do is go through the novice stage before you ship, don't bother. If you're not prepared to put in the grinding work of the expert stage, just do the beginner stuff and stop screwing around. Make it good enough and ship it and move on.

We diddle around in the novice stage because we're afraid. We polish (but not too much) and go to meetings (plenty of them) and look for deniability, spending hours and hours instead of shipping. And the product, in the end, is not so much better.

I'm all for expertise. Experts, people who push through and make something stunning--we need more of them. But let's be honest, if you're not in the habit of being an expert, it's unlikely your current mode of operation is going to change that any time soon.

Go, give a speech. Go, start a blog. Go, ship that thing that you've been hiding. Begin, begin, begin and then improve. Being a novice is way overrated.