Photoshop might have made it easy to create faked photographs, but you don't need fancy editing skills to manipulate the truth. Photographers have been faking images almost as long as they've been making them simply by setting up shots that look natural.
Here are some of the world's most famous staged photos.
Every year the US military snap tens of thousands of photographs during daily operations in Afghanistan. In this gallery you can get the same view of the varied landscape of the country as the troops get as they sit in their helicopters and planes.
Good link builders are a special breed of SEOs. There are a lot of solid SEOs in the industry, but effectively building links is much different from keyword research, copywriting, and technical analysis. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes an effective link builder.
Whether you’re an SEO looking to improve your own skillset or a manager looking to hire a new link builder, these are the characteristics of an effective link builder.
SEO is one of the few industries where my history as a competitive video game player, an epic geared raiding Warlock, forum admin and hacker became a marketable skill.
I’m an effective marketer online, not because I have formal marketing training, but because I understand online communities intimately.
Creativity is one of the things that is difficult, maybe impossible, to teach. It can be encouraged through culture and environment, because everyone has some level of creative genius, but creativity is something I’d hire for.
SEO, especially link building, is moving closer to being inbound marketing, which is starting to become difficult to distinguish from pure traditional marketing. Creativity is a driver of holistic marketing strategies.
The creative process can also be inspired.
At Distilled, we have a culture and structures in place which help inspire creativity. It’s important to create boundaries and modes of thinking that help creativity. Having the ability the stop, separate, drink a beer, and invest full mental power allows your brain to free itself up to the creative process.
Creativity isn’t enough for an effective link builder. Technical chops are also a requirement. Distilled carries resident math, computer science, and engineering majors. Prior to leaving college to pursue a career in SEO, I was studying engineering and worked at Vanderbilt where I did pharmacology research.
This also includes skills on using the right tools, such as Open Site Explorer, Excel, and Google Analytics.
Analytical skills allow a link builder to do two things really well:
Scale processes by evaluating data effectively.
Recognize changes and trends, which can be reapplied to your marketing efforts.
Although a non-technical link builder can build links through the process of business development, content creation, outreach, and PR; they don’t have the capability to develop products or agile tools without leaning on a team.
Technical Skills a Link Builder Should Have
Intermediate knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS
Basic understanding of at least one modern programming language (no need to code, but hack at least)
Ability to execute 301 redirects using .htaccess and how to create robots.txt files
Sufficient coding skills to “get” tools like Firebug
I agree with Dan Cristo that every SEO should have a side project, and I like to see this in the form of a website where they’ve done at least a basic level of code / design tweaking.
A link builder is not the same as a technical SEO. The SEO who loves indexation and crawl analysis may absolutely hate talking to people. A link builder must be comfortable talking and engaging with complete strangers.
A sociable geek is the valuable combination of the introverted developer and the extroverted sorority girl.
I believe people like Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds are the epitome of sociable geeks.
I do believe being sociable is a skill you can learn. By nature, I’m exceptionally introverted, so I find people describing me as an “affable, personable search marketer” a bit odd. I’ve improved my skills as a link builder by constantly presenting, facing clients as often as possible, going to networking events, and talking to strangers on the bus (this is actually true). Reading books also helps. I personally enjoyed reading Never Eat Alone and The Exceptional Presenter.
Few job experiences taught me more about link building than the three months I worked in-house as an internet marketing coordinator and was placed into the sales department. I worked on a 9 person cold calling sales team and was exposed to their tactics and culture during my time working with them.
Manual outreach is not too different from cold calling and business development.
Recommended Sales Reading for Link Builders
Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
By ingenuity, I mean something different from just creativity.
Ingenuity is intellectual hustle.
Ingenuity allows link builder to create well thought out, systematic and clever solutions. Ingenuity is seen in careers like scientists, engineers, artists, developers, and musicians. I relate this with INTP, INTJ, and ENTP personality types.
A link builder isn’t just placing links on websites, they’re building businesses. They’re creating the differential between a business and its competition. As a link builder, you should be bringing hustle to your work every day. A link builder with hustle can dominate large brands and companies with large budgets by simply outworking them.
Enormous Talent is Not Enough (Gary's language is a bit flavorful, but great video on hustle)
Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer and Director of the White House Photography Office, releases a new series of behind-the-scenes photographs from the last two weeks of April 2011.
President Barack Obama shakes hands with a young girl after arriving at Miami International Airport in Miami, Fla., April 29, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In Case You Missed It
Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.
National Small Business Week is Here! Karen Mills, Administrator of the Small Business Administration, discusses the release of The Small Business Agenda: Growing America’s Small Businesses to Win the Future report. The report details the many things the Administration has done over the past two years to help small businesses do what they do best: create jobs.
Strengthening Social Security and Medicare This year's Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees reports show that Medicare and Social Security are strong, but there is far more work to be done.
Today's Schedule
All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).
8:45 AM: The President departs the White House en route Andrews Air Force Base
9:00 AM: The President departs Andrews Air Force Base en route Memphis, Tennessee
11:00 AM: The President arrives in Memphis, Tennessee
11:30 AM: The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden attend the inauguration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel
11:30 AM: The President meets with families impacted by the flooding, state and local officials, first responders and volunteers.
1:00 PM: The President delivers the commencement address at Booker T. Washington High School, the winner of the 2011 Race to the Top Commencement Challenge
3:00 PM: Launching the U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace
3:25 PM: The President departs Memphis, Tennessee en route Andrews Air Force Base
5:15 PM: The President arrives at Andrews Air Force Base
5:30 PM: The President arrives at the White House
5:35 PM: The President welcomes the University of Connecticut men's basketball team to the White House for a ceremony honoring their 2011 NCAA national championship
6:55 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event
9:25 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event
Last year I asked the public to help identify outstanding Americans I should consider for the Citizens Medal, the nation's second-highest civilian honor. After receiving more than 6,000 nominations, I invited 13 outstanding Americans to the White House to receive the medal and be recognized for their service.
It's time to do it again.
Like last year, we're looking for Americans who have performed exemplary deeds of service outside of their regular jobs and provided inspiration for others to serve. You can view the full criteria and get started on a nomination here:
Now I know there are thousands of citizens out there who meet these criteria -- I read their letters every night, and I meet many of them in my travels around the country. I also know that many times their contributions go unrecognized. The 2011 Citizens Medal is a chance to recognize the everyday heroes in your community.
Here are a few examples of Citizens Medal recipients from last year.
Betty Kwan Chinn was homeless as a child in China and became mute. When she came to America, Betty found her voice and her calling. Today, she provides meals to the homeless in her community twice a day as expressions of gratitude to a welcoming nation.
Susan Retik Ger is a widow who lost her husband on 9/11 who found cause in educating and training Afghan widows and their children.
George Weiss, Jr. is veteran of World War II who founded the Fort Snelling Memorial Rifle Squad, a group of over 125 volunteers who have performed final military honors at over 55,000 veterans' funerals.
Their stories are powerful reminders of the impact an individual can have on his or her community and on the world. You can watch them tell their stories in a video gallery on WhiteHouse.gov:
Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.
This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.
Only after that did we invent the librarian.
The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.
Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.
And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.
Which was all great, until now.
Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.
This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.
When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.
And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.
Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.
The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I want paper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.
The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.
The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.
Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
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