Central Perk

marți, 7 iunie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Top Gear – High Speed Albanian Police Chase
Performing Street Monkeys of Indonesia
Alex Ghica's Weight Loss Story
Realistic Baby Head Masks
Wouldn't Life Be Perfect If...
How to Photograph Wolves
20 Awesome X-Men Tattoos
Funny Demotivational Posters - Part 21
Blonde Nurse Parade

Top Gear – High Speed Albanian Police Chase

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 12:47 PM PDT

Testing the speed of the super luxurious Rolls-Royce Ghost, Bentley Mulsanne and Mercedes S65 AMG, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May decide to rob a bank. But with the Albanian police hot on their heels can the team escape to the ferry in time?

Performing Street Monkeys of Indonesia

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 12:21 PM PDT

Dozens of Macaque monkeys are chained to a cage in "monkey village", where their owners train them to perform on the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia.

The Performing Street Monkeys, which you can see in the gallery below, earn nothing more than small change as they mimic humans in silly outfits and masks.

These kinds of monkeys can be seen in many countries of south Asia. Kids take them as fun, owner take them serious business. People passing by give coins to monkeys owners.

Alex Ghica's Weight Loss Story

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 11:26 AM PDT

Meet 22-year-old Alex Ghica from Bucharest, Romania. He was overweight because of his addiction to junk food and candy. But in the early 2010 he took a life-changing decision. The first photos of him were taken in January of 2010 when he weighed almost 256 pounds (116 kg) with 31% body fat. The later photos were taken in the end of July after his transformation where he weighs 187 pounds (85 kg) with only 14% body fat. He doesn't want to look like a body builder, but he now exercises and only eats healthy and nutritious foods.

Realistic Baby Head Masks

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 11:04 AM PDT

Landon Meier creates realistic and a bit disturbing baby head masks. Hyperflesh baby masks are carefully handcrafted by the artist out of extra thick latex so its size fits all. You can get one for only $250 + shipping.

Wouldn't Life Be Perfect If...

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 10:47 AM PDT

Wouldn't life be perfect if nothing bad happened? Though the artist is unknown, he or she has done an excellent job in creating this series of posters to complete the sentence: "Wouldn't life be perfect if..." Take a look at these witty situations we have all had the unfortunate opportunity to be in. Which ones do you wish were true?

Source: dailyinspiration

How to Photograph Wolves

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 11:09 PM PDT

Monty Sloan attempts to photograph the Main Pack at Wolf Park for his Photo of the Day website:

20 Awesome X-Men Tattoos

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 10:40 PM PDT

Mutants make the best tattoos, don't you think? I guess you could say these X-Men tats are "First Class!"

While there are many mutations of X-Men tattoos including the hilarious and awesome Wolverine Riding My Little Pony and My Magneto of Guadalupe we think this gallery features the absolute best.

Funny Demotivational Posters - Part 21

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 07:38 PM PDT

Blonde Nurse Parade

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 01:34 PM PDT

On June 1st a blonde parade took place in Minsk. The event coincided with Children's Day celebrated in Russia and International Blonde Day. All I can say is these beautiful nurses can take care of me anytime.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 03:29 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Since 2005, SEOmoz has released a new version of the Search Ranking Factors survey every two years, a piece of content that many in the SEO world have used and referenced. This year, we've continued that tradition and added a whole new element of research, comparing the aggregated opinions of 132 SEOs around the world with correlation data from over 10,000 results in Google.

Because this document is quite large, we've divided it into a number of sub-sections based on the type and focus of the data. This intro video can help provide some more information (and is available on the overview page as well).

Included in the ranking factors, you'll find the traditional list of factors broken down into sections such as domain level keyword usage features (which describe things like exact match domains, using the keyword in the root or subdomain name, etc) or page level link metrics (which refer to items like quantity of links to the page, mozRank, etc). These opinion data points are, however, in a new format that we hope helps make them a bit more digestable. Here's the page-level traffic metrics section:

Rather than showing the old 0-5 importance scale along with the "degree of consensus" calculated on standard deviation, we're trying this new format, which highlights relative importance of metrics in a single section based on the aggregation of the voters' ordering. Those elements that are very high on the "influence value" tended to be consistently rated as more important that features below them. The degree of difference between influence values shows, on the 100-point scale, how much the average of the votes differed. In this manner, we hope to illustrate the average of voters' opinions in a simple, visual chart.

Alongside (well, actually usually vertically above) these opinion data points are the results of our correlation research on 10,271 results. You can read lots of detail about the methodology here (vetted by our in-house data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters), but the basic idea is to show features that predict higher or lower rankings for pages in the search results. I've tried to visually illustrate this with my homemade crappy graphics below:

Correlation is Not Causation

Just as with the social correlation data we released in mid-April (which comes from this same research), please be careful not to confuse correlation and causation. There are plenty of features that are correlated positively or negatively with rankings in Google that are almost certainly not actual parts of Google's ranking algorithm. For example, here's a couple page-level, keyword agnostic features that have reasonably positive correlations with higher rankings in the results:

Page-Level, Keyword Agnostic Features

I doubt any SEO truly believes that the number of internal links on a page (not pointing to the page, just in the page HTML code) is an element of Google's ranking algorithm, or that by adding more internal links to a page, one could rise in the rankings. However, the positive correlation does exist. Perhaps large, powerful, important sites simply tend to have lots of internal-pointing links on their pages, and since these rank well, the correlation is an artifact of that overlap? Or maybe it's something else entirely that we haven't thought of yet. This is a good way to think of correlation - as an interesting feature that higher/lower ranking pages have that the curious should explore to discover why it might exist.

The ranking factors also contain some very cool charts based on answers that our panel of 132 experts provided to specific questions. You can find these in the predictions + opinions section of the report.

Special Casing Prominence

As an example, in the question above, we asked our voters which "special casing" elements of Google's algorithm they saw most frequently influencing the search results. You can see that QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) was thought to be the most prominent of these, while voters felt sentiment analysis of content was rarely in use.

For those interested, I've compiled some of the findings that we at SEOmoz find most interesting, useful, valuable or just plain weird :-) below in a slide deck I presented at SMX Elite in Sydney, Australia. If you're looking for the high level takeaways, this presentation may be useful (and it contains lots of good caveats about the data, too).

Ranking Factors Data 2011: SMX Elite Sydney

View more presentations from Rand Fishkin

The 2011 Ranking Factors offers a wealth of depth and detail, and I'm extremely excited to share it with everyone in the marketing community. As always, we're making the full raw data and methodology available and we invite peer review and critiques. Matt and I will both try to be in the comments regularly over the next few days to help answer questions, and if you've got a strong math background and want to tackle any particular details, you can also drop Matt a direct line (Matt(at)SEOmoz(dot)org).

Enjoy the data and please help me in giving huge thanks to our 132 voters, who put in tireless hours going through the survey process.

p.s. For those interested in comparisons, the old 2009 ranking factors is now here (though, methodology and presentation of data is quite different, so a 1:1 may not be entirely fair).

p.p.s. Linkscape's index also updated today with fresh linky goodness in Open Site Explorer, the Web App and the mozBar. I'll have more on that in a post tomorrow or Wednesday.

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Welcoming Chancellor Merkel of Germany to the White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Welcoming Chancellor Merkel of Germany to the White House

This morning, the President and First Lady welcomed Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Federal Republic of Germany to the White House for an Official Visit. Watch events live on WhiteHouse.gov all day and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #statevisit.

12:30 PM EDT: Vice President Biden, Dr. Biden and Secretary Hillary Clinton host a lunch in honor of Chancellor Merkel

6:00 PM EDT: President Obama and the First Lady welcomes Chancellor Merkel of the Federal Republic of Germany

7:35 PM EDT: The President and the First Lady attend the State Dinner with Chancellor Merkel; the President and Chancellor Merkel will each deliver a toast.

8:55 PM EDT: President Obama and the First Lady attend the State Dinner Reception with Chancellor Merkel of Germany

Also, watch a video with Ambassador Capricia Penavic Marshall, the Chief of Protocol of The United States as she gives you a sneak peek inside Blair House, where the Chancellor will be staying and discusses the significance and excitement of the visit.

Photo of the Day

Workers construct a temporary floor in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 6, 2011, in preparation for the State Dinner for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)