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vineri, 25 februarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Outreach for Linkbuilding - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 12:45 PM PST

Linkbuilding: can't do it alone, can't not do it! While some people may prefer to avoid interaction with people they don't see every day, others flourish when communicating with strangers. The field of SEO is flush with both of these personality types, though to an outsider it could seem like SEO is an inherently non-social career. It's not! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Tom Critchlow, head of search marketing at Distilled, shows us just how important interpersonal interaction is in SEO land. More importantly, he shows us some tips on how to reach out to webmasters and online marketers and more easily get the links we so badly want. All it takes is efficient contact-gathering, enthusiastic communication, adamant (but not overbearing) follow-up, and, well... maybe a little bit of hustle.

Check out Tom's slick resources:

Followerwonk is an awesome tool for running queries across Twitter profiles to find influential people in a given niche. You can filter by location or by keyword in users' bios, which is a great way to find contacts.
Alltop is a great place to artificially get the breaking news in a given niche. It's no replacement for actually living and breathing a given niche but it's very quick and easy to use.
The Distilled Linkbuilding Conferences are taking place in London on March 18th in New Orleans on March 25th. Check it out!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom Critchlow, and I'm here in Seattle helping out with some SEOmoz SEO bits and pieces. I'm sharing Whiteboard Friday because Rand is out of town.

Today I'm going to be talking about outreach for link building. There's a lot of talk online about how to get links, creating great content for links, but a lot of focus goes on creating the content rather than actually doing the outreach for the content. So, I thought I'd do a video on how you can actually get links from your content.

There's an assumption here that you've already created some great content and that that content is targeted to a particular niche. Obviously, great content works much, much better when it's targeted to a particular community that they can be passionate about, they can comment on, and so on. The really broad content doesn't typically do so well.

So, let's assume that you've created some great content, whatever it might be, whether an infographic or a competition or a video, etc. Then there are a few tips that we've used in doing outreach that I just want to share here.

The first thing that I've noticed when doing outreach is that you want to have efficient contact gathering. There are lots of ways of getting bloggers in a particular niche or getting Twitterers in a particular niche, but the more that you can make that process quick, scalable, and efficient, the better the whole process is going to be.

There is the usual stuff that you can do. You can run some Google searches for things like top ten blogs about your niche. So, let's say it is photography. You can run, "top ten photography blogs." Run a search like that and you're going to end up with lots of blog posts and articles talking about what the top blogs are in that niche. You can go through and you can find those. That is obviously a great source. One thing that I really love to do is go find these top blogs that get talked about individually and then go through their blogs rolls. A lot of blogs will have a little blog roll or recommended blogs or friends section. Those kind of talk about all the people that they read, that they subscribe to. In fact, Rand wrote a post about all the blogs that he subscribed to at one point. That might be a list that you might find if you were searching for SEO blogs or recommended SEO reading, etc. Go find the influencers, find who the influencers link to and who they recommend.

You also want to find Twitter followers or rather influential Twitter accounts. And Follower Wonk, which I have written out here, FollowerWonk.com is a fantastic tool that will do this. They've indexed a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, and you can search through all of the bio text. So you can search for Twitter accounts that have a particular follower count and are interested in a particular niche. So, let's say it's photography, you can go through and you can find a whole bunch of people that are interested in photography. You can also search by location on Follower Wonk. This is a great way of finding niche accounts in a particular area that you can then go out and you can contact.

One of the key points here that I love to do is actually categorize these people as I am finding these contacts and finding these blogs. Go through and categorize them depending on what kind of outreach you're going to do to them. Some people you might find and you might think, well, they've got a pretty mediocre blog. It's all right. They have semi-interesting content. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time personalizing my response to them or sending a really detailed email. I'm just going to send them something pretty standard. Some people you might find, however, might be journalists or they might have a really popular blog or it might be somebody that you found Twitter that doesn't have a blog but they maybe own a forum or an email newsletter, something like that.

So categorize these people into broad buckets. The buckets I like to have are your standard contacts, your extraordinarily contacts, and kind of left field. That kind of separation means that you can quickly and efficiently send your mass email to all the standard contacts. The extraordinarily contacts you can go through and you can say, "These people I'm going to really craft an email to. I am going to send something specific and personalized and fun and creative to these people." The left field contacts are those that you might not want to send an email to. Maybe they're left field because they live near you. Maybe they have an email newsletter and you want to subscribe and send them an email dedicated to that. So, something maybe a little bit different. With that categorization, I find really useful when I am going through my contacts so that I can save time later.

That is the first thing. The second thing, being enthusiastic I find is more important than being unique. So when you're doing outreach, everyone will tell you to find something personalized to that person that you're speaking to and put it in the email. Say, "Hey, I read this blog post you recently read and it's really awesome." That will somehow make the outreach more effective. In my experience, I find that being enthusiastic trumps that every time. Even if you don't put much in the email that shows that you've read their site or that you've really tried to engage with them, rather just write an email that's awesome. Right? Take a leaf out of the SEOmoz newsletters that go out and so on. Put some personalization in there. Put some fun in there. Talk about maybe you're a really small company, maybe you're a startup, maybe you've got some exciting tools or content. Whatever it might be, tell people about that. Come across as genuine.

The trick here is that people control links. Websites don't link to people, people do. You want to reach out to people and make them like you. You really want to get on their good side. In my opinion, always write an enthusiastic email over a unique email. And what's your USP? Maybe you're more fun than people. Maybe you're more creative than another company. Many you're smaller. Maybe you have content that is more interesting. Whatever it might be, leverage those things when you are crafting the contact.

I'm going to switch over here, now, to the purple section. The other thing here is that when you are doing outreach, not everyone is going to respond to you. In fact, anyone who has actually tried outreach will know that not that many people respond to you, which is kind of unfortunate, but you want to make sure that anyone who does respond to you, even if they come back and say, "Ah, I'm not interested right now. You're content was okay, but it doesn't really fit with my audience." Really make sure that you follow up with those people. In the same way that you would have a sales channel and a sales funnel, make sure that you really cultivate these people. Go back to them and say, "Hey, why didn't you like it?" Or, "What can we do better next time?" Or, "Maybe next time we're doing this, we'll include you in the content that we're writing." So, really, anyone that responds to you, you really want to cultivate a relationship there. At the end of the day, outreach is all about getting relationships with people whether they have a blog, a forum, or they're just an influential Twitter account. You really want to create a relationship, because those relationships are worth so much more than the individual outreach that you're doing. They can be useful for future pieces of content that you're releasing. You can get them involved in things like surveys that you do and things like that.

If they do come back and they're really positive, then you still want to cultivate that relationship. If somebody comes back and says, "Great. Sure. I put it on my blog," don't end there. Find out if where else they blog, for example, is a great one. A lot of people that blog online will have multiple blogs. I think I have about 17 last time I counted, not all of which are recently updated. Do they have any friends? Find out who else they know in the blogging space that might also want to post your content. Anyone that responds to you, really, really go after them really strongly.

Then the final thing is hustle, which is a really hard thing to define. When we've been doing outreach, the most effective thing that we've done is just think laterally. It's all very well building the contact list, sending email to all these people, but actually, at the end of the day, the thing that gets you the results is usually either a random contact or it's leveraging some kind of hot news. Something like that. It's really hard to come up with a process that will get you those things. In my experience, there are a few things that you can do to give you a greater chance at success.

The first thing is, make sure you follow all of the Twitter and RSS feeds in that niche. A lot of people will think, this is a niche I'm engaging in. I'm doing research. I'm trying to find good bloggers. But they don't actually bother living and breathing the niche. You have to go in. You've got to actually engage these people. Read their blog posts. See what gets them riled. See what gets them hot. Really engage with them. That's where you can really win above and beyond just doing the kind of outreach. If you actually understand what this community is about, you'll have a much better chance at success. So, go through and actually follow a lot of these people, and actually see what makes them tick.

Watch forums as well. I think forums are massively underrated when you're doing outreach because that's where a lot of the people that are really passionate about the niche hang out. You can actually capture them in their natural environment so to speak. When you go to forums, you can actually see, you know, what do they chat about that's not in their niche? People are in that niche just chatting. Just shooting the breeze, right. See what they're interested in. See what they're passionate about. You might spot opportunities there that you might otherwise miss.

I find Alltop is a great way of very, very quickly and easily finding a particular niche and then looking at all of the top news in that niche. So, you kind find out what's hot. Alltop has kind of categories all over the place so that it kind of aggregates Twitter users and blogs in a particular niche. You can very quickly see if there is breaking news or if there is a hot topic. Alltop will show that up quite nicely. That's a great way of kind of artificially getting yourself embedded in a particular niche. At the end of the day, don't forget that this is where a lot of the success comes from is that kind of extraordinarily luck basically. You stumble across somebody talking about something or you happen to be doing outreach at the same time as some hot news. You need to give yourself the best chance of success with that kind of activity. These are some good tips to get that.

Those are my main tips. There is one thing here, which I have kind of put in very light blue that you probably can't read up here, which is that you need to manage expectations. Whenever you're doing outreach, there is a tendency to think that every single time you do outreach for content, you're going to get amazing results. That is simply not true. What you can do with outreach is even the failed outreach, even the outreach that you've done that resulted in zero links, that will still build your relationships. When you're doing this whole process again, when we come back to efficient contact gathering, don't forget the people that you've reached out to previously. Don't forget the people that you reached out to that were semi- lukewarm leads last time, but this time maybe it is a different piece of content. Or maybe you took in to account some of their feedback. Make sure that when you're doing outreach, even if you are not getting links, you're building relationships.

That's a great way of kind of managing expectations. Whether it is your boss, maybe you're an agency and you've got a client, when you're positioning the outreach work you're doing, don't just report on the links, also build a rapport on the relationships you've built. They can be really, really useful. This particularly applies when you're doing the really high- level outreach to people like journalists and your high-level bloggers. You're not going to get in the first time most of the time with these. You want to build a relationship, get an email conversation going, and then you can get some really great content that they're going to link to.

I think those are my main top tips. I've probably said, as I just said right now, about a million times, and again, because I am kind of new at this. But that's fine. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more about link building, we're running some conferences in London and New Orleans in March. There will be a link so you can find out more details. Sign up to that. I'll see you there. Thanks, guys.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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Seth's Blog : 30%, the long tail and a future of serialized content

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

30%, the long tail and a future of serialized content

The 1960s and 70s were the golden age of magazines. Why?

Lots of people wanted to read them
The newsstand could only hold a few of them (barrier to entry permits some to win)
The winners had no trouble selling ads because they had motivated readers, in quantity
The cost of making one more edition of the magazine was relatively low

Enter tablets. To some, it feels like the dawn of a new golden age. People page through apps like Wired and gasp at the pretty pictures and cool features. Surely, we're going to recreate that moment.

Here's the problem, and here's how Apple is making it much worse:

The newsstand is infinite. That means that far more titles will have far fewer subscribers. There are more than 60,000 apps on the newsstand. Hard to be in the short head when the long tail is so long...

plus, the cost of each issue is far higher, because it costs a lot more to pay a videographer, a video editor, a programmer, etc. than it does to pay John Updike to write 4,000 words...

plus, advertisers are harder to come by, because the number of readers is always going to be lower than it was back then, and the ads are easier to skip.

Of course, the good news is that the publisher doesn't have to pay for paper, so the profit on each subscriber ought to be way higher. Except...

Except Apple has announced that they want to tax each subscription made via the iPad at 30%. Yes, it's a tax, because what it does is dramatically decrease the incremental revenue from each subscriber. An intelligent publisher only has two choices: raise the price (punishing the reader and further cutting down readership) or make it free and hope for mass (see my point above about the infinite newsstand). When you make it free, it's all about the ads, and if you don't reach tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, you'll fail.

In a rare glitch, John Gruber got Apple's decision about the 30% subscription task completely wrong. By his logic, Apple would have been just as good for its users if the tax was 60%.

For content to be fabulous, for tablets to be more than game platforms, folks like Apple need to do two things:

Reward creators instead of taxing them.
Create promotional channels so that curated great stuff (not merely things from big companies) has a chance to reach a mass audience.

The web has been a hotbed of siloed content, of deep dives for small audiences. The large scale stuff, though, has tended to be mostly about gossip and other quick reads that's cheap to produce. Tablets offer a new chance to create content worth paying for. Paving the way for that to happen is a smart move for anyone who cares about the audience and the devices.

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West Wing Week: "Don't Bump My Atoms"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, Feb. 25, 2011

West Wing Week: "Don't Bump My Atoms"

West Wing Week is your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This week, President Obama held events in Oregon and Ohio focused on winning the future through investments in innovation and small business, and convened his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House.

Watch the video.

SEOptimise

30 Ways to Optimise Your Site for Speed

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 06:29 AM PST

Site speed has been the foremost discipline of website optimisation since even before SEO appeared. In the early days of the Internet, connections were so slow that people jokingly referred to the WWW as the world wide wait. I remember those days. I used to type in a URL and then take a book to read while it was loading.

I’ve been using a high speed connection (DSL) for a decade now and most people now do too. Nonetheless, some people are still using modems, while mobile Web use has emerged as an important part of Web traffic. Many people still pay by volume, and mobile connections are not usually really fast yet.

That’s not all though. Users with a fast connection tend to be very impatient. Waiting a few seconds for a loading page makes many users bounce (or flee) straight away. Thus in 2010 Google decided to take site speed into account as a direct ranking factor. Some SEO experts argue that it’s not a really important ranking signal, but the proof is rather anecdotal.

So at the end of the day you still need to optimise your website (or re-optimise it) for speed for a bunch of reasons. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to do so. I’ve listed 30 ways to optimise your site for speed below: I’ll start with the obvious ones which many people nonetheless tend to forget these days, as they use fast connections themselves.

Media

1. Use smaller images – while images are not a problem for most Broadband users, they will still slow a site down significantly. You can resize and compress the same .JPG image so that it’s 50kb instead of 200 and still bring the point across. A very simple program like IrfanView can do it for you.

2. Use fewer images or gallery scripts instead – unless your site is about images, you don’t need to load several images at once. For more than a few images you can use gallery scripts.

3. Use fewer Flash animations or elements – you don’t use Flash as a web design element these days. Flash is used for webware, audio and video players, but most animations and Flash enhancements are obsolete by now.

4. Don’t use video – do you really need to load this video on your homepage? Consider video an additional asset that you show on demand on an extra page.

5. Don’t use audio – the worst thing to do on the Web is autoplay an audio file. I have a special tool that blocks unwanted music installed. In all other instances you can stream it on demand once the user clicks on it.

Files

6. Make fewer http requests – some simple websites send a hundred or more http requests; that means for each tiny image or script the site sends a request to the server. Consider whether you need each of the requests.

7. Merge image, style and script files – the most obvious way to limit http requests is to merge files. Having several CSS or Java Script files is, in many cases, not needed anyway. Use so-called CSS sprites to merge images.

8. Server side compression – you can compress files using Gzip or PHP.

Scripts

9. Use external scripts – don’t use inline scripts in actual HTML pages. Use external script files, or even better just one file.

10. Use short names for variables, functions and the like – a function like removeelementfromgroup() can be called refg() as well.

11. Use object oriented programming – OOP provides reusable script elements which you have to define once and can use all over your site instead of redefining them for each function etc.

12. Don’t use several redundant JavaScript libraries – while Java Script libraries provide great OOP elements you can reuse, I see more and more sites using several JS libraries at once, despite the fact that those libraries provide basically the same features.

13. Don’t use font replacement – font replacemnt tools for headlines look neat, but they are either built in Flash or in Java Script or both, and require considerable resources.

14. Cache your AJAX – apparently it’s quite easy to cache AJAX in order to save time on repetitive requests.

Web hosting

15. Switch to a faster server – SEOptimise switched to a faster server, or rather web hosting provider, a while ago. The old one was slowing down the site significantly.

16. Use a local server – take at a look at your analytics and find out where most of your users come from. Then host your site there instead of sending them to the other end of the world each time.

17. Use cloud hosting – shared hosting, or even dedicated servers, are fine most of the time but under a heavy load they become slow or can even time out. Cloud hosting, at least theoretically, does not, as your content is spread across many servers as is possible or needed in case of a large spike in traffic.

18. Use CDN – so-called Content Delivery Networks combine some of the advantages of local and cloud hosting. In a CDN, content is served from a server physically in the vicinity of the request.

Code

19. Load external scripts at the bottom – back in the day, you had to add Google Analytics to the head of an HTML page. So when GA was down, the whole page didn’t load. Make sure you load external scripts at the bottom of the page whenever possible.

20. Clean up your code – every site I check has some redundant code; sometimes even whole parts are not used, or they are enclosed in a comment. Clean up everything you don’t really need.

21. Don’t use tables – back in the day, people used tables to structure page content. With CSS and web standards this way of using HTML became obsolete, but many people (or rather programs) still do it to this day. Consider replacing tables with lists and layers (divs) to save lots of redundant code.

22. Compress your scripts (by removing white spaces in script files, for example) – even the most effective files still have lots of white space which enlarge them unnecessarily. While HTML and CSS may be a bit more difficult to compress, it’s easily done with scripts.

Databases

23. Don’t do URL rewrites – clean URLs are very important for SEO and usability, but it can increase the load time. Consider using clean URLs from the start instead of merely rewriting them. Also, Google can now index dynamic URLs that aren’t too complex. Something like shop?p=shoes&b=adidas&s=45 gets treated like shop/shoes/adidas/45.

24. Make fewer requests – again, you can save time by sending fewer database requests, especially for popular websites. For instance, you could use the same field for the html title tag, h1 and alt attribute of the header image. That’s one request instead of three.

25. Cache files as static data – instead of building each page for every user, each time you can save pages as static files – aka cache them. WordPress has a plugin for this WP Super Cache.

External services

26. Don’t activate Gravatar – sadly, Gravatar, which is used on WordPress by default, sends lots of requests. Even the default graphics are unique for every user who comments on your blog. You can save a lot by dumping Gravatar.

27. Don’t embed Facebook elements – while including Facebook tools on your page makes your content more shareable, you have to think twice before doing it. Do you have a significant audience on Facebook? Facebook tools loads dozens of elements to your site. Even Twitter buttons can slow down your site.

28. Use fewer web analytics tools or self-hosted ones – I have to admit I’m a web analytics junkie; I use Google Analytics, Piwik, Woopra, Reinvigorate on my sites at once. That’s a risk, of course; whenever one of them takes longer, your page does as well.

29. Use the faster Google Analytics embed code – there are at least two ways to include Google Analytics in your pages: the traditional one and the asynchronous one. The latter loads data in the background without halting your page load.

30. Don’t integrate third party widgets – widgets are all the rage now, especially third party ones. You can add all kinds of widgets to your site. Most of them are not really earning you money, while they increase load time.

You probably noticed that some of the techniques described above ask you to remove some features you might miss, and indeed the removal of some of them might even harm your SEO. So you always have to consider both sides of the equation and decide what’s more important in a given situation: speed or the actual feature.

We face many of these issues ourselves, as I have been testing SEOptimise for site speed recently. Do you optimise for site speed or do you ignore it? What changes did you implement?

* Image by Stig Nygaard

Seth's Blog : Making a straighter ruler

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

Making a straighter ruler

It's not easy. It's hard to get straighter than straight.

Over time, processes that seek to decrease entropy and create order are valued, but improving them gets more difficult as well. If you're seeking to make the organized more organized, it's a tough row to hoe.

Far easier and more productive to create productive chaos, to interrupt, re-create, produce, invent and redefine.

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joi, 24 februarie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Allen Park Michigan Sent Layoff Notices to Entire Fire Department; Allen Park, Hamtramck, Detroit are Bankrupt
Libyan Rebels Close In on Capital; Qaddafi Blames Violence on “Hallucinogenic” Drugs and bin Laden; PIMCO Co-CEO Calls Oil Spike "Stagflationary"
Arab Unrest Propels Iran; Saudi King Rolls Out Reforms; Violence Shakes Kurdistan; Bahrain, Saudi Kings Discuss Unrest; Brent Crude Spikes Near $120

Allen Park Michigan Sent Layoff Notices to Entire Fire Department; Allen Park, Hamtramck, Detroit are Bankrupt

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 06:42 PM PST

Allen Park, Michigan, a town of about 28,000, sent layoff notices to its entire fire department. This is a procedural move because the town is unsure how many it will need to lay off. However, the situation looks grim.

Please consider Allen Park official says layoffs needed to plug $600K deficit

The city's finance director said today that Allen Park must lay off 25 to 30 employees by June to avoid a $600,000 deficit for the current fiscal year.

Tim McCurley said in an interview that the city sent layoff notices to everyone in the fire department to comply with a clause in the firefighters' union contract requiring a 30-day notice. He said some or all of the firefighters could lose their jobs, and that the police department faces layoffs too.

"It's not easy to lay people off," McCurley said. "No one wants to do that. It's never easy, but we are trying to work through it."

The finance director said the layoffs would only keep the city's books balanced for this year and have nothing to do with any funding cuts in Gov. Rick Snyder's proposed budget for fiscal 2012.

According to McCurley, the city faces a fiscal crunch because revenue in several areas has fallen short of projections. Collections from traffic tickets are $819,000 below what was budgeted, and ambulance billing collections are $200,000 under budget, he said.

McCurley said the city also had to refund $80,000 under order of the Michigan Tax Tribunal.

In other areas, spending has exceeded projections, including $130,000 in parks and recreation. McCurley said the city failed to budget for $150,000 for unused sick and vacation time for employees who have retired.

Overtime in the fire department is $150,000 over budget, even after firefighters agreed to limit overtime pay as part of concessions negotiated last year, McCurley said.

City Council members approved laying off the 25-person fire department Tuesday night.

Fire Chief Doug LaFond said he would be laid off as well.

But LaFond questioned the need to eliminate his entire force to make up for shrinking revenue.

"The bottom line is there aren't any other cities in the state of Michigan that are eliminating fire departments because of it," LaFond said.

The fire chief said he did not believe the entire police department was being threatened with layoff, but said the police force is about double the size of his department and could see significant cuts.

This is the second such maneuver we have seen recently where a town sent layoffs to an entire department.

In case you missed it, please consider Providence School Superintendent to Send Dismissal Notices to All 1,926 Teachers; Providence is Bankrupt

Allen Park, Hamtramck,Detroit are Bankrupt

I recommend Allen Park outsource its entire police and fire departments. Moreover, the Mayor should be in touch with the governor about petitioning for bankruptcy.

I have written about Detroit and Hamtramck before. Here are a few links.

City of Hamtramck, Michigan Seeks Bankruptcy

Michigan Forbids City of Hamtramck to Seek Bankruptcy; My Advice to Hamtramck: "Default"

Detroit Mayor Plans to Halt Garbage Pickup, Police Patrols in 20% of City; Expect Bankruptcy, Massive Municipal Bond Turmoil in 2011

It is virtually impossible to solve problems in those cities outside of bankruptcy. Contracts needs to be rewritten, pension obligations shed, and new wage structures mandated (not negotiated).

That cannot be done via collective bargaining, or indeed any kind of bargaining. The mayors and city managers of those towns should all get together and announce intention to default if the governor will not approve a valid bankruptcy process.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Libyan Rebels Close In on Capital; Qaddafi Blames Violence on “Hallucinogenic” Drugs and bin Laden; PIMCO Co-CEO Calls Oil Spike "Stagflationary"

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 11:50 AM PST

Libyan Rebels control most of the oil coast and have moved within 30 miles of Tripoli. Oil prices have risen along with the violence and PIMCO Co-CEO Calls Oil Spike "Stagflationary".

The New York Times reports Qaddafi Strikes Back as Rebels Close In on Libyan Capital

Thousands of mercenary and irregular forces struck back at a tightening circle of rebellions around the capital, Tripoli, on Thursday, trying to fend off an uprising against the 40-year rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who blamed the violence on "hallucinogenic" drugs and Osama bin Laden.

The fighting on Thursday centered on Zawiya, a gateway city to the capital, just 30 miles west of Tripoli, where government opponents had briefly claimed victory. Colonel Qaddafi's forces — a mixture of special brigades and African mercenaries — fought back, blasting a mosque that had been used as a refuge by protesters, a witness told The Associated Press.

An exiled Libyan who had been in contact with members of the opposition in Zawiya said Colonel Qaddafi's forces attacked beginning about 5 a.m., initiating a battle that lasted 4 hours. The rebel forces fought back with hunting rifles and about 100 were killed, he said.

Fighting intensified in other cities near Tripoli — Misurata, 130 miles to the east, and Sabratha, about 50 miles west. There were also reports that Zuara, 75 miles west of the capital, had fallen to anti-government militias.

To the east, at least half of the nation's 1,000-mile Mediterranean coast, up to the port of Ra's Lanuf, appeared to have fallen to opposition forces, a Guardian correspondent in the area reported.

Rebels Control Much of Oil-Rich East

Bloomberg reports Qaddafi Urges End to Violence as Foes Increase Control in East

Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who has lost control of much of the country's oil-rich east, appealed to citizens to end violence as his forces stepped up a crackdown on opponents and more than 100 people were reportedly shot dead.

Qaddafi blamed the uprising against his 41-year rule on "drugged kids" and al-Qaeda, speaking by telephone on state television today for the first time since a Feb. 22 speech in which he vowed to fight "until his last drop of blood." He said he regretted the deaths during the unrest.

In the east, Qaddafi's opponents organized committees of civilians to run and defend their cities with the help of troops who deserted his forces. In Benghazi, the country's second- largest city, anti-Qaddafi militias in front of the courthouse were collecting weapons from people who had seized them from army supplies, a local resident said by phone, declining to be identified due to concern over reprisals.

Anti-government protesters appeared to be in control of the entire eastern coastline, Al Jazeera reported today, as clashes between pro- and anti-government forces broke out in other cities, including Sabha in the southwest, and Sabhatha and Az- Zawiyah, both west of Tripoli.

Major General Suleiman Mahmoud, commander of the Libyan army in Tobruk, told Al Jazeera that his forces have deserted Qaddafi and are siding with local residents. "We are supporting the Libyan people," he said in a phone interview with the channel. He said Tobruk was peaceful and that residents were organizing themselves.
Civil War

"The possibility of civil war only exists if Qaddafi stays," Mohammed Ali Abdallah, deputy head of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, the main exiled opposition group, said today.

Possibility of Civil War is 100%

I wonder what definition of "civil war" the deputy head of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya is using. That name alone implies a civil war movement, but more importantly what else can it be called with the military splits between pro and anti-government forces with rebels attacking the capital?

Clinton, El-Erian, Khelil Own Words on Libya, Oil Prices

Bloomberg has an interesting video on Libya and oil prices with Secretary of State Clinton, and PIMCO co-CEO Mohamed El-Erian.

Select El-Erian Points From Video

Western world will not grow as rapidly as before
Unemployment will be a persistent issue
Social safety nets will be stretched
On top of that we have headwinds of higher oil prices and higher geopolitical risk
Commodity prices may overshoot on stockpiling, just as happened in 2008. That is the concern of a stagflationary headwind.

If one views inflation as a function of prices there may be merit to a stagflation argument. If one properly views inflation in terms of money supply and credit, the term is confusing, because it is about prices, regardless of cause.

Please remember the origin of the term came about in the 70's when the Keynesian theory at the time was that inflation and recession could not happen at the same time. Obviously it did, proving Keynesian theory belongs in the ashcan.

This is not 1970, and the ability and willingness of consumers to expand credit at this point in time is not the same, no matter how hard Bernanke tries.

However, we are in the midst of another oil price shock, compounded by peak oil and a rapidly overheating Chinese economy. Thus the idea of "headwinds" is very real, regardless of what "flation" label one chooses to use.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Arab Unrest Propels Iran; Saudi King Rolls Out Reforms; Violence Shakes Kurdistan; Bahrain, Saudi Kings Discuss Unrest; Brent Crude Spikes Near $120

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 03:30 AM PST

The civil war in Libya continues but much of Iraq is now in the hands of the rebellion. As the revolt spreads, Qaddafi Masses Forces in Tripoli for a final showdown or a counterstrike against the rebels.

As rebellion crept closer to the capital and defections of military officers multiplied, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called on thousands of mercenaries and irregular security forces on Wednesday to defend his bastion in Tripoli, in what residents said was a desperate and dangerous turn in the week-old uprising.

Distrustful of even his own generals, Colonel Qaddafi has for years quietly built up this ruthless and loyal force. It is made up of special brigades headed by his sons, segments of the military loyal to his native tribe and its allies, and legions of African mercenaries he has helped train and equip.

Witnesses said thousands of members of this irregular army were massing on roads to the capital, Tripoli, where one resident described scenes evocative of anarchic Somalia: clusters of heavily armed men in mismatched uniforms clutching machine guns and willing to carry out orders to kill Libyans that other police and military units, and even fighter pilots, have refused.

But amid spreading rebellion and growing defections by top officials, diplomats and segments of the regular army, Colonel Qaddafi's preparations for a defense of Tripoli also reframed the question of who might still be enforcing his rule.

Colonel Qaddafi, who took power in a military coup, has always kept the Libyan military too weak and divided to do the same thing to him. About half its relatively small 50,000-member army is made up of poorly trained and unreliable conscripts, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Colonel Qaddafi's own clan dominates the air force and the upper level of army officers, and they are believed to have remained loyal to him, in part because his clan has the most to lose from his ouster.

But perhaps the most significant force that Colonel Qaddafi has deployed against the current insurrection is one believed to consist of about 2,500 mercenaries from countries like Chad, Sudan and Niger that he calls his Islamic Pan African Brigade.

Elsewhere, there were signs that Colonel Qaddafi's forces were refortifying. For the first time, witnesses said, at least four army tanks had rolled into the streets of the capital.

Saudi Arabia King Rolls Out Reforms

Fearful of uprisings in the region Saudi Arabia King Rolls Out Reforms

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah returned to the kingdom Wednesday after a three-month absence for medical treatment and introduced a number of nonpolitical reforms amid regional uprisings that have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and infected neighboring Bahrain.

The social and economic overhaul, estimated to cost around 135 billion Saudi riyals ($36 billion), include housing support, funding to offset inflation and guarantee of payment for students overseas, according to a series of royal decrees published on the official Saudi Press Agency, or SPA. They come as political upheaval continues to sweep the Arab world.

"The measures are paying particular attention to housing, unemployment, education and helping the brunt of Saudis who work for the public sector be better protected from cost of living pressures. The unemployment benefits are the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia," said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi. "The message from King Abdullah is that he's aware of the challenges facing the economy and steps are taken to address immediate and more medium-term issues."

"Saudis want more from the king and his regime. They want more political and social freedom, more rights for women, better education and more job opportunities," said a Saudi businessman who declined to be named. "The region is changing rapidly and the Saudis want to feel this change in their country too."

A few hundred Facebook users called for a "day of rage in Saudi Arabia" earlier this week, demanding more political freedom and an elected leader. A few Facebook pages called for protests on March 11 in the Arab world's largest economy, but it was too early to judge if these demonstrations will take place.

Bahrain King in Saudi Arabia to Discuss Unrest

Please consider Bahrain King in Saudi Arabia to Discuss Unrest

A day after one of the largest pro-democracy demonstrations this tiny Persian Gulf nation had ever seen, its king was in Saudi Arabia, a close ally and neighbor, to discuss the unrest engulfing the region.

The visit of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa on Wednesday came just as the aging Saudi ruler, King Abdullah, returned to the country after three months of medical treatment in the United States and Morocco.

King Hamad had already tried his own payout — offering $2,650 to every Bahraini family in the days before large protests broke out more than a week ago — but the economic concession was not enough to stem the tide of opposition from the country's Shiite majority. Sunnis, the majority in Saudi Arabia, also form the ruling class in Bahrain, where Sunnis are a minority.

In a nation of only 500,000 citizens, the sheer size of the gathering on Tuesday in Manama, Bahrain's capital, was astonishing. Tens of thousands of men, women and children, mostly members of the Shiite majority, formed a ribbon of protest for several miles along the Sheik Khalifa bin Salman Highway as they headed for the square, calling for the downfall of the government in a march that was intended to show national unity.

"This is the first time in the history of Bahrain that the majority of people, of Bahraini people, got together with one message: this regime must fall," said Muhammad Abdullah, 43, who was almost shaking with emotion as he watched the swelling crowd.

"It is a revolution," said Hussein Mohammed, 37, a bookstore owner and volunteer for Al Wefaq. "It is a big revolution. It is unbelievable."

Three Questions

Given that payouts failed in Bahrain, will payouts work in Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia is much wealthier of course, but are Saudi concerns about money or political freedom?
How long can can King Abdullah last at age 86, given he is not in especially good health?

Please note that the crown prince and next in line is Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, and if anything, Sultan is even in worse medical condition.

In 2004, [Sultan] was diagnosed with colon cancer and reportedly underwent several corrective surgeries. He underwent an operation to remove an intestinal polyp. In April 2009, it was reported that he was, again, seriously ill, and had spent several months in New York City at New York Presbyterian Hospital undergoing surgery and shuttling thereafter between the United States and Agadir, Morocco. He has spent much of the last year abroad for medical treatment and rest.

A leaked March 2009 diplomatic cable from WikiLeaks showed that U.S. diplomats view Crown Prince Sultan as "for all intents and purposes incapacitated". Sultan, who will be eighty-seven this year, is believed to be suffering from a form of dementia, possibly Alzheimer's disease.

Bonus 4th Question: Will the people readily accept the new king?

Violence Shakes Kurdistan

The New York Times reports Iraqi Kurdistan, Known as Haven, Faces Unrest

This is a place that calls itself "the other Iraq," a haven of social and economic stability that largely escaped the bloodshed and chaos that have ravaged the rest of the nation.

But over the past week a wave of sometimes violent unrest has shaken Kurdistan, posing a rare challenge to the political powers that have led Iraq's mountainous north for decades, during and after Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of people — many of them university students — have been filling the central square here to wave Kurdish flags and voice the calls for change that echo those ringing across northern Africa and the Middle East. The protests here, reflecting a long-festering anger with government corruption and partisan politics, have grown larger in recent days, and have support from this eclectic city's legions of poets, writers, artists and unions.

"Everyone is angry," said Asos Hardi, manager of Awena, one of the few newspapers not tied to one of the region's political or religious parties. "Everyone from the taxi driver to the shopkeeper to intellectuals and students."

Balance of Power Shifts Towards Iran

The New York Times reports Arab Unrest Propels Iran as Saudi Influence Declines

The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran's position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

While it is far too soon to write the final chapter on the uprisings' impact, Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said. This week Iran sent two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since its revolution in 1979, and Egypt's new military leaders allowed them to pass.

The Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain accuse their Shiite populations of loyalty to Iran, a charge rejected by Shiites who say it is intended to stoke sectarian tensions and justify opposition to democracy.

The uprisings are driven by domestic concerns. But they have already shredded a regional paradigm in which a trio of states aligned with the West supported engaging Israel and containing Israel's enemies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, experts said. The pro-engagement camp of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia is now in tatters. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has been forced to resign, King Abdullah of Jordan is struggling to control discontent in his kingdom and Saudi Arabia has been left alone to face a rising challenge to its regional role.

"I think the Saudis are worried that they're encircled — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon; Yemen is unstable; Bahrain is very uncertain," said Alireza Nader, an expert in international affairs with the RAND Corporation. "They worry that the region is ripe for Iranian exploitation. Iran has shown that it is very capable of taking advantage of regional instability."

"Iran is the big winner here," said a regional adviser to the United States government who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

For now, Iran and Syria are emboldened. Qatar and Oman are tilting toward Iran, and Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen are in play.

"If these 'pro-American' Arab political orders currently being challenged by significant protest movements become at all more representative of their populations, they will for sure become less enthusiastic about strategic cooperation with the United States," Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, former National Security Council staff members, wrote in an e-mail.

The balance of power may have shifted to Iran, but Iran is certainly not immune from similar uprisings.

Bidding War For Light Crude?

With all that turmoil, the price of oil has once again spiked overnight. I have some charts below, but first consider Why the Disruption of Libyan Oil Has Led to a Price Spike

Crude oil prices reached $100 a barrel in the United States on Wednesday, the highest price in more than two years, as Middle East oil flows were interrupted this week for the first time since the region's turmoil began.

Analysts estimate that as many as a million barrels of Libyan oil a day have been removed from world markets in recent days, and investors fear that more oil production could be disrupted if the unrest spreads to other crucial producing nations, like Algeria.

More broadly, economists are concerned that if oil prices stay high this year, they could slow the already fragile global economic recovery. As a general rule of thumb, every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil reduces the growth of the gross domestic product by half a percentage point within two years.

Libya produces less than 2 percent of the world's oil, and exports little to the United States. But the high quality of its reserves magnifies its importance in world markets.

Libya's "sweet" crude oil cannot be easily replaced in the production of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, particularly by the many European and Asian refineries that are not equipped to refine "sour" crude, which is higher in sulfur content. Saudi Arabia has more than four million barrels of spare capacity and has promised to tap it if necessary, but that capacity is mostly for sour grades of oil.

Should the turmoil in Libya last for more than a few weeks, oil experts predict that European refiners will be forced to buy sweet crude from Algeria and Nigeria, two principal sources of sweet crude for the United States. That would probably push up American gasoline prices, which have already risen 6 cents a gallon over the last week to an average of $3.19 for regular grade.

"It will force all sweet crude refiners into a bidding war," said Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, an organization partly financed by the oil industry. "Quality matters more than quantity."

The price of the benchmark American oil, West Texas Intermediate, briefly touched $100 on Wednesday before settling at $98.10 in New York trading, up $2.68 from Tuesday. In London, the benchmark Brent crude rose $5.47, to $111.25.

A gauge of jet fuel prices, known as Gulf Coast jet fuel, soared 10.7 cents, to $2.99 a gallon in the spot market on Wednesday, putting pressure on airlines to raise fares. Meanwhile, diesel prices have risen 4 cents in the last week, to $3.57 a gallon, the highest level since October 2008.

Brent Crude Spikes Near $120

Both Brent and WTI spiked higher early Thursday morning. As happened yesterday, much of the spike retraced, only to shoot up again. Will we see yet another spike tomorrow? While pondering that, here are a couple charts.

Brent Daily Chart

click on chart for sharper image

WTI Daily Chart

click on chart for sharper image

Supply Shock on Top of Speculation

WTI has gone from $75 to over $100 since September. If that rise was a result of a strengthening economy and millions of new jobs it would be one thing. However, it's not. Much of the rise is speculative and/or a result of a hugely overheating situation in China.

Top that off with a supply shock spike, and there is nothing inflationary about the situation at all. These oil spikes will certainly not help the European or US economies.

Amusingly I read stories that higher oil prices will force the ECB to hike. No they won't. For starters, supply shocks have nothing to do with inflation. Second, ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet, for all his anti-inflation talk over the years, has turned out to be nothing but a pussycat. Besides Trichet will be gone in October (unless via some emergency he is asked to stay on).

Were Axel Weber to take Trichet's spot, a genuine hawk would be in line to head up the ECB. However, Weber has bowed out of the race.

The ECB presidency is now up for grabs, and with most of the board on the doveish side, I do not see the ECB hiking anytime soon given sovereign contagion worries are still intact and now there is an oil supply shock on top of it. Nonetheless, the idea of interest rates hikes in Europe is holding the Euro firm for a moment. How long that lasts is anyone's guess.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

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