Central Perk

luni, 18 octombrie 2010

Damn Cool Pics

Zombie vs Japanese Kids
The Best Parent Fails
26 Worst Male Tramp Stamps
Google Headquarters
New Way to Fight Prostitution in Russia
The Lion Whisperer - Kevin Richardson
14 Weirdest Wedding Cakes
The 10 Most Dangerous Stunts Of Jackass

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 08:01 AM PDT

Japanese kids bravely fight a zombie that invaded their home. Watch the subtitles for some adorable dialog. Give your opinion: child abuse, character building, or just plain fun?

The Best Parent Fails

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:55 AM PDT

Usually parents would do anything to make sure that the up bringing of their children is done in the best possible way. However, some of them don't really deserve to be parents. Take a look at these pictures to see what I mean.

Related Post:
Bad Parents
Animal Parents Vs. Human Parents

26 Worst Male Tramp Stamps

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 04:53 AM PDT

What`s wrong with these guys? Daddy issues? Mad at the world? What?

Google Headquarters

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 04:19 AM PDT

The photos are mostly from the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, but some pictures were taken at the Google New York City offices.

If you worked in the Google headquarters, you could bath in a lap pool, have a massage in a massage room and if too tired, take a nap in a nap capsule and many other stuff.

I've seen plenty of cool offices but any of the Google offices around the world is the best!

New Way to Fight Prostitution in Russia

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 04:15 AM PDT

Prostitution has become a real problem in many Russian cities. Here is the latest trend. After the girls are arrested they have a long conversation with a priest who explains them why prostitution is bad for their souls. But I doubt that it helps.

The Lion Whisperer - Kevin Richardson

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 01:19 AM PDT

Kevin Richardson plays with white lions at a park in South Africa. The lions seem to love him.

Animal behaviourist Kevin Richardson says he relies on instinct to win the hearts and form an intimate bond with the big cats. He can spend the night curled up with them without the slightest fear of being attacked. His magic works not only work for lions but other animals such as cheetahs, leopards and even hyenas do not hold a threat against him. Lions are his favourites and its a wonder how he can play, carress, cuddle with them whose teeth are sharp enough to bite through thick steel. Its a dangerous job but to Kevin, its more of a passion for him.

14 Weirdest Wedding Cakes

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 12:57 AM PDT

Cakes are perfect to celebrate any event or occasion. We all are fond of cakes. The more we eat, the more we want to eat. A wedding cake is the traditional cake served to the guests at a wedding reception.

These weird wedding cakes, apart from the color and structure, are completely different from any other wedding cakes.

The 10 Most Dangerous Stunts Of Jackass

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 12:40 AM PDT

Jackass 3D arrives in theaters this weekend and while many may be ready to dismiss Johnny Knoxville and the gang as just a bunch of idiots, we're not. Sure they're idiots, but they're really brave idiots willing to risk life and limb for your entertainment. It's more than just scat jokes, they're modern day daredevils and sometimes their stunts go so far that it's a miracle at least one of them hasn't ended up dead yet.

This weekend Jackass 3D will show up with a whole new host of stupidly death defying stunts, but before that we're taking a look back at the most deadly Jackass moments of the past. Here they are, the ten most dangerous stunts of Jackass… so far:

More Infographics.

Click to Enlarge.

Source: cinemablend

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Traffic "Bait" and Ad Clicks: Perfect Market's Study Isn't Telling the Whole Story

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 01:42 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

Yesterday, Perfect Market, a company that "helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk¹" released a study that's been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analyzes the relative traffic value per visit of several types of content, coming to the conclusion² that "while the Lindsay Lohan sentencing and other celebrity coverage drove significant online traffic for major news publishers, articles about unemployment benefits, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates and other serious topics were the top-earning news topics based on advertising revenue per page view."

Coverage included the New York Times' Traffic Bait Doesn't Bring Ad Clicks, Columbia Journalism Review's Celebs are Loud, but Hard News Pays, Nieman Journalism Lab's Public Interest News Can Be More Valuable to Publishers than Traffic Bait and Search Engine Land's Hard News Pays More than Chasing Search Trends.

I'm worried for a few reasons:

What's the branding value of those stories? Do they drive up awareness of the publications that authored them? Do they increase return visits?
What other actions do those visitors take? Are they more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed? To share those stories on social networks? To get email notifications?
Do these stories drive links that then help other, lower link-earning content rank well in search engines? The goal of linkbait, after all, is often to drive branding, links and sharing rather than being directly monetizable. Plenty of consultants on viral content creation even recommend removing ads to drive up sharing and linking activities.

Granted, from a personal perspective, I love the idea that writing about celebrity gossip and other "soft news" isn't profitable and therefore might be less prevalent in the future. It's purely opinion, but I suspect that many share my sentiment that the United States' major media outlets are far too focused on shallow reporting of topics (like those mentioned in the Perfect Market analysis) that deserve far less attention than, say, understanding what caused the mortgage crisis, who's spending money on elections and why, the success other nations have had in dealing with crime, poverty, drugs, multiculturalism, etc.

However, anytime a skin-deep, single-metric analysis like this makes its way into major publications, it has an effect on content publication that's not necessarily positive. If executives, editors and journalists start using singular metrics rather than deep analyses of data to make decisions, their publications will suffer and their content and marketing budgets will be misallocated.

If Perfect Market (or another source) could show:

The value of the links brought in from those stories
The branding impact of the visits generated
The value of sharing activities from those visits

I'd be far more inclined to agree with the conclusions the press is reporting.

If you can't fully/accurately analyze the true lifetime value to your publication of so-called "bait" (and I don't just mean celebrity-obsessed soft news, but a broader group of creative, traffic-driving pieces), that's OK. Just don't presume a single metric like "ad click value" combined with "page views" will give you the whole story. The web is all about providing data, and you're cheapening your own value when you cut corners to this extent.

BTW - I don't mean to cast all the blame on Perfect Market - they did some reasonable data analysis and shared the findings. I wish it had included a bit more caveats, but their job is promoting their work. I'm more concerned with how the media treated the story - reporting, exaggerating and not bothering to dig deeper. Just look at the opening lines of the NYTimes piece³:

Sure, articles about Lindsay Lohan’s repeat trips to rehabilitation and Brett Favre’s purported sexual peccadilloes generate loads of reader traffic, but do they actually make decent money for the Web sites that publish them? According to a new analysis, no.

That's not what the analysis showed. It showed one metric and it's impact, but it didn't explore the overall value of the page views, visits and CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the stories it examined. Let's hope the publishers do a more thorough job and that we, as content creators & marketers, think carefully about how to value the content we create and the traffic we attract.

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5 Quick Google Analytics Hacks

Posted: 17 Oct 2010 12:52 PM PDT

Posted by Tom_C

1) Regex for Counting " " and "/"

Regex is awesome. I don't claim to be amazing at it but there are a few common regex strings I use all the time in my analysis.

Length of Keyword

To quickly filter your keywords report by the length of keyword, I use some regex to count the number of spaces in the keyword like this:

^([^ ]+ ){5,50}[^ ]+$

The above regex searches for keywords that have between 5 and 50 spaces in them. You can also search across a single number as shown below. This image is a search for all keywords with 6 spaces in them for the distilled site (i.e. 7 words):

Depth of Page

Very similar to the above regex, but when I'm looking at top landing pages I use regex like this to count the number of slashes in a URL:

^/([^/]+/){3}[^/]*$

Note that because I'm not a full regex ninja this actually counts those URLs that have 4 slashes in (i.e. n+1). So the following image is showing all traffic to those pages with 5 slashes in them:

Note how useful this search is? Pretty much all of these pages are low quality like pagination or blog pages that have multiple categories assigned. For large sites if you construct the regex correctly this can be a great way to analyse where traffic is landing on the site and identify low quality pages to remove from the index.

If you're new to regex - this is my goto guide for using regex in Google Analytics (PDF).

2) Check Your Analytics Code Is Correctly Installed

This is a super easy one, but definitely one worth running on any new site you take a look at. SiteScan will crawl your site and check for the analytics code which is pretty nifty. It even intelligently checks for the old and new versions of the GA code. Nice. Unfortunately the free version only checks 100 pages but it's definitely a solid resource for smaller sites:

Another quick check for correctly installed Google Analytics is to look for referrals from your own domain. Any referral from your own domain indicates that there are pages not correctly tagged (and will even show you which ones!). Nice.

3) 5 Ways to Segment your Funnel

Segmenting your funnel is not something you can do natively in Google Analytics which annoys the hell out of me. I'm hopeful that Google will be adding this feature sometime in the near future. In the meantime, there's a few ways to segment your funnel:

ROI Revolution have a method for segmenting on the fly - Doesn't do custom date ranges
LunaMetrics have a way of segmenting the funnel using goals. - Won't let you run across historical data
Analytics Ninja has a way of segmenting using advanced segments. - Maximum 3 steps at a time
I give a method using regex and excel here. - takes a bit longer and uses regex and excel
Paditrack is a tool for doing this - requires some setup and is fairly basic but gives pretty reports

Why do you care about segmenting your funnel? Well I give a detailed run-down of why this is important over here but hopefully this image should explain itself (the output of segmenting the funnel using my method):

4) Track SEO Variables In Google Analytics

This is a nifty use of custom variables which I recently started using on a few sites. Imagine you're running a hotels reviews website. Some of your reviews have 100s of reviews and are lovely content-rich pages. But some of your hotels are awaiting their first review. In that case, your hotel page might be very light on content and might only have the name and address of the hotel on the page (which is duplicated on 100s of other sites). Wouldn't it be nice to be able to segment your Google traffic by how many reviews your hotel page had? Well using page level custom variables this is as easy as the following code:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
          1,                   // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required.
          'Num_Reviews',       // The name of the custom variable. Required.
          0,                   // Sets the value of "Num_Reviews" to 0. Required.
          3                    // Sets the scope to page-level.  Optional.
         ]);

You don't have to limit yourself to just using this for number of reviews, you could look at other factors that you think might be affecting your pages ability to rank and pass those into GA. For example, you could pass the length of the description of a page. Or the number of tweets it has or anything you can think of really!

Learn more about page level custom variables over here.

5) Track Form Abandonment

This one comes from a blog post Duncan wrote a little while back, but I love how simple this is to use and how useful the insight is. Basically, using jquery it becomes very easy to track how far through a form people get. The idea was prompted by Sam's post from some time ago, but uses events instead of virtual page views.

You should read the full write-up on Duncan's post but the code looks something like this:

1.  $(document).ready(function() {   
2.      var currentPage = jQuery.url.attr("path");  
3.      $(':input').blur(function () {  
4.          if($(this).val().length > 0){  
5.              pageTracker._trackEvent("Form: " + currentPage, "input_exit", $(this).attr('name'));  
6.          }   
7.      });  
8.  });

Bonus!

While writing this post, one of Dave Naylor's gang posted about a new interface for in-page analytics which replaces the old site overlay. I'm quite excited about this, I think it paves the way for all kinds of cool things (not least of which is heatmaps as David points out...)

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Daily Snapshot: The White House Science Fair

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, October 18, 2010

Photostream: September in Full

Check out behind the scenes photos from September 2010.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama walk along the Colonnade of the White House, Sept. 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Today's Schedule

Today, the President will host the White House Science Fair celebrating the winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions. The President will view exhibits of these students’ work, ranging from breakthrough basic research to new inventions, followed by remarks to an audience of students, science educators and business leaders on the importance of STEM education to our country’s economic future.

All times are Eastern Daylight Time

10:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:00 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

11:35 AM: The President views science fair projects

12:00 PM: The President delivers remarks at the White House Science Fair

1:00 PM: Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

5:15 PM: The Vice President attends an event with Congressional candidate Mayor John Callahan

7:05 PM: The President departs the White House en route Rockville, Maryland

8:10 PM: The President delivers remarks at a dinner for the DSCC

9:00 PM: The President arrives at the White House

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

Seth's Blog : You're famous

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

You're famous

What makes a celebrity special? She was just an ordinary person a month or a year ago, but now, suddenly, your heart goes flitter-flutter when you meet her, or you want an autograph.

One way to consider fame is that it increases the options for the person at the same time the number of demands go up. In other words, celebrity makes the celebrity's attention more valuable.

It's exciting to shake hands or get an autograph from a famous person, then, because the celebrity has something others want, you're getting a slice of attention from someone who has other options. But she didn't exercise those options--she chose you.

By this definition, you're famous. Compared to just a few years ago, more people know you, you have more options and your attention is far more precious than it ever was.

Not just you, of course. Your customers too. They're famous now.

Time to start treating them that way.

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luni, 18 octombrie 2010

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

1) Regex for Counting " " and "/"

2) Check Your Analytics Code Is Correctly Installed

3) 5 Ways to Segment your Funnel

4) Track SEO Variables In Google Analytics

5) Track Form Abandonment

Bonus!

Daily Snapshot: The White House Science Fair

Seth's Blog : You're famous

You're famous

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luni, 18 octombrie 2010

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

1) Regex for Counting " " and "/"

2) Check Your Analytics Code Is Correctly Installed

3) 5 Ways to Segment your Funnel

4) Track SEO Variables In Google Analytics

5) Track Form Abandonment

Bonus!

Daily Snapshot: The White House Science Fair

Seth's Blog : You're famous

You're famous

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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