luni, 5 decembrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011

Posted: 05 Dec 2011 01:59 PM PST

Buzzfeed compiled a collection of images from the year's news stories that will remind you how many really big events happened in 2011, from natural disasters to citizen protests to legislation to war.


Robert Peraza, who lost his son Robert David Peraza in 9/11, pauses at his son's name at the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial.
(Getty Images / Justin Lane)


A whirpool forms off the Japanese coast after the tsunami on March 11.
(Reuters / Kyodo )


his sightseeing boat, Hama Yuri, was pulled 1300 feet from the coast and somehow balanced itself on a two story house during the tsunami in Japan.


Members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House on May 1.
(Reuters / HANDOUT)


Two lights from the former site of the World Trade Centers shine for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
(Reuters / GARY HERSHORN)


Phyllis Siegel, 76, left, and Connie Kopelov, 84, both of New York, embrace after becoming the first same-sex couple to get married at the Manhattan City Clerk's office.
(Getty Images / STAN HONDA)


A protester gets sprayed in the face with pepper spray at an Occupy Portland protest. (Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian)


A before and after shot of Joplin, Missouri after a massive tornado on May 22.


Friends and loved ones gather at the Oslo cathedral to mourn 93 victims killed in twin terror attacks from a bombing in downtown Oslo and a mass shooting on Utoya island on July 24.
(Getty Images / Paula Bronstein)


A monstrous dust storm (Haboob) roared through Phoenix, Arizona in July.


A policeman detains an opposition activist in Baku on March 12. Azerbaijan police detained more than 30 activists of the opposition Musavat Party when its members took to the street of Baku to protest against the ruling elite following a similar rally a day before. (Reuters)


Christians protect Muslims during prayer in Cairo, Egypt.


An aerial shot of the damage immediately following the Japanese tsunami.
(Reuters / KYODO)


A girl in isolation for radiation screening looks at her dog through a window in Nihonmatsu, Japan on March 14.
(Reuters / Yuriko Nakao)


A man sits in front of a destroyed apartment building following the Joplin, Missouri tornado. (Reuters)


A University of California Davis police officer pepper-sprays students during their sit-in at an "Occupy UCD" demonstration in Davis, California. (Jasna Hodzic)


A mother comforts her son in Concord, Alabama, near his house which was completely destroyed by a tornado in April.
(AP / Jeff Roberts)


Chile's Puyehue volcano erupts, causing air traffic cancellations across South America, New Zealand, Australia and forcing over 3,000 people to evacuate. (Reuters)


Firefighters of Ladder Company 4 — which lost seven men on 9/11 — perched together on their aerial ladder, watching a news bulletin in Times Square declaring that Osama bin Laden was dead on May 2.


Slain Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson's dog "Hawkeye" lies next to his casket during funeral services in Rockford, Iowa. Tumilson was one of 30 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan on August 6 when their helicopter was shot down during a mission to help fellow troops who had come under fire.


A boy looks at a figure of Steve Jobs next to flowers laid in his tribute at an Apple store in Hong Kong, China.
(AP / Kin Cheung)


Cars are abandoned on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive during the "Snowpocalypse" in February.


Facebook played an extremely important role in the uprisings throughout the Middle East.


84-year-old Dorli Rainey was pepper sprayed during a peaceful march in Seattle, Washington. She would have been thrown to the ground and trampled, but luckily a fellow protester and Iraq vet was there to save her. (Joshua Trujillo / seattlepi.com)


Australian Scott Jones kisses his Canadian girlfriend Alex Thomas after she was knocked to the ground by a police officer's riot shield in Vancouver, British Columbia. Canadians rioted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins.
(Getty Images / Rich Lam)


Hurricane Irene approaches the east coast.


Billy Stinson comforts his daughter Erin Stinson as they sit on the steps where their cottage once stood on August 28 in Nags Head, N.C. The cottage, built in 1903 and destroyed by Hurricane Irene, was one of the first vacation cottages built on Albemarle Sound in Nags Head.
(Getty Images / Scott Olson)


Flowers and tributes are seen outside the home of Amy Winehouse in London on July 24.
(Reuters / STEFAN WERMUTH)


Office workers gather on the sidewalk in downtown Washington, D.C., moments after a 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook the nation's capital. The earthquake was centered northwest of Richmond, Va., but could be felt from North Carolina to Massachusetts.
(AP / J. Scott Applewhite)


Mihag Gedi Farah, a seven-month-old child, is held by his mother in a field hospital of the International Rescue Committee in the town of Dadaab, Kenya. The baby has since made a full recovery.
(AP / Schalk Van Zuydam)


A woman jumps from a burning building during the London riots in August. (Amy Weston / WENN.com)


Office workers look for a way out of a high rise building in central Christchurch, New Zeland on February 22. A strong earthquake killed at least 180 people.
(Reuters / Simon Baker)


A woman cries while sitting on a road amid the destroyed city of Natori, Miyagi Prefecture in northern Japan after the massive earthquake and tsunami.
(Reuters / ASAHI SHIMBUN)


A demonstrator shows his bottom to riot police during a protest by European workers and trade union representatives to demand better job protection in the European Union countries in Brussels on March 24.
(Reuters / Thierry Roge)


A woman rebel fighter supporter fires an AK-47 rifle as she reacts to the news of the withdrawal of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces from Benghazi on March 19.
(Reuters / GORAN TOMASEVIC)


Police spray Ugandan opposition party leaders with colored water during demonstrations in the capital Kampala on May 10.
(Reuters / James Akena)


A student is punched in the face by a police officer in Chile. Students in Chile are demanding a new framework for education.
(Reuters / VICTOR RUIZ CABALLERO)


An aid worker using an iPad captures an image of a dead cow's decomposing carcass in Wajir near the Kenya-Somalia border on July 23.
(Reuters / STRINGER)


A Libyan rebel is pictured with Gadhafi's golden gun.
(Getty Images / Philippe Desmazes)


Harold Camping speaks about the end of the world. The world was supposed to end on May 22 of this year.
(AP / Marcio Jose Sanchez)


A phone hangs off the hook on Wall Street.
(Reuters / LUCAS JACKSON)


US gay service members march in a gay pride parade for the first time ever.
(Getty Images / Sandy Huffaker)


A woman hangs onto a street sign in chest deep water along the flooded streets in Rangsit on the outskirts of Bangkok on October 24.
(Getty Images / Paula Bronstein)


A distressed bride attempts suicide in China after her fiance abruptly called off their marriage. Still in her wedding gown, she tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window of a seventh floor building. Right as she jumped, a man managed to catch and save her.
(Reuters / CHINA DAILY)


A U.S. Army soldier takes five with an Afghan boy during a patrol in Pul-e Alam, a town in Logar province, eastern Afghanistan.
(Reuters / Umit Bektas)

Understanding Viral Content Marketing [Infographic]

Posted: 05 Dec 2011 12:36 PM PST



So if "going viral" is your goal, how can you optimize a campaign to transform into a Web meme goldmine? Smart money would select an environment where lots of group sharing is going on. Places such as Facebook and Twitter are no-brainers, but the value of Reddit as a veritable meme factory is on the rise. Combining the right design and tone with the proper platform is one of the trickiest parts of creating a successful viral campaign, but when it's all aligned, success is more likely.

What's your favorite viral campaign? Let us know in the comments.


Source: ProBlogger
Publicat de 1 la 19:33 0 comentarii

The clock is ticking


The White House, Washington


Good afternoon,

It's simple. If lawmakers don't vote to extend the payroll tax cut, taxes for 160 million Americans will go up on January 1st. 

President Obama just left the press briefing room at the White House where he called on Congress to extend the tax cut, pay for it responsibly, and expand it so middle class families get a $1,500 break next year.

He told Congress to put country before party and stop wasting time.

Every day, folks are fighting to make ends meet and businesses are working to keep their doors open. The longer Congress waits to extend the payroll tax cut, the more uncertainty it creates for ordinary Americans. So we've put a clock on every page of the White House website, counting down the days, hours, and minutes until taxes for the middle class increase. In the briefing room, where the President just spoke, that same clock is ticking down as well.

And to make sure you have the information you need to know exactly what this means for your family, we've put together a calculator to show how much of your money hangs in the balance.

This calculator illustrates for you what nearly every independent economist has said: letting this tax cut expire will be a blow to the economy. We can’t let that happen. Now is the time to make a real difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.

Check it out and pass it along:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxcut

Thanks,

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President


 
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The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111


Publicat de 1 la 13:16 0 comentarii

Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking With the New Domain and Page Authorities

Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking With the New Domain and Page Authorities

Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking With the New Domain and Page Authorities

Posted: 04 Dec 2011 12:48 PM PST

Posted by dohertyjf

As we all read last week, SEOmoz has released the second Linkscape index update of November, and with that came updated Domain Authority and Page Authority. Many of you probably noticed a change, either as a result of the broader crawl, or as a result of active linkbuilding you have been doing on your site or client sites.

The purpose of this post is to help us orientate ourselves around what our scores mean and how those might compare to other sites that we are aware of. Remember, Domain Authority and Page Authority are strictly link based, so the metrics can be influenced by either more links from more sites, or a few links from higher quality sites. One should remember, however, that Domain Authority and Page Authority are hard to directly influence, as they are a combination of 30+ data points and work on a logarithmic scale. As Matt Peters noted in his blog post called "Introducing SEOmoz's Updated Page Authority and Domain Authority":

Page and Domain Authority are machine learning ranking models that predict the likelihood of a single page or domain to rank in search results, regardless of page content. Their input is the 41 link metrics available in our Linkscape URL Metrics API call and their output is a score on a scale from 1 to 100. They are keyword agnostic because they do not use any information about the page content.

What I want to do here is provide you a framework through which to benchmark your site against others in your niche. I'm going to take a mashup of tools that are already available so that you can go forth and figure out if you have any new competitors in your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Then you can go forward and dig deeper into those sites in your own way to decide how to beat them. Let's go!

Where Do I Start?

The first step to take is deciding which keywords you want to rank for. For the sake of a more complete view of your market's landscape and SERP competitors, I recommend finding at least 20 keywords that would be very valuable for you. I've taken fewer for the sake of brevity, so here are the keywords I am going to be using for this example:

First Tool - Tom Anthony's Competitive Analysis Tool

Some months ago Tom Anthony, one of our London SEO consultants (who grows a wicked mustache, by the way), dropped a tool that he says can help you do competitive analysis in under 60 seconds with the SEOmoz API. Take your keywords and plug them into the tool. You will receive rows of data on your competitors and will be able to see how your site lines up. For the keywords above, this is the data that we see in the sheet:

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with any of the sites listed above, other than I buy from some of them periodically.

Note - you will need to make a copy of it and get your own SEOmoz API key in order for this to work for you. Full directions on how to set up the sheet are available on the original post as well. What is important to get out of this list is the list of competitors. From the data provided as well, you can see relatively where your site stands for the search results (or by simply including your site at the bottom of the list and enlarging the sheet to include your metrics as well).

Using the above metrics, if I was doing SEO for skichalet.com, I can see that my competitors to beat directly above me are the-house and Cabelas, but really I am gunning for Backcountry.com and REI.com, and I want to know how they are winning. Let's take this a step further and see why our competitors have a higher Page Authority or Domain Authority.

PA Correlation (thanks to Dr Pete)

Now that you have your competitor's DA and PA, and know roughly where you stand compared to them, you can begin to dissect why their PA or DA is so high. Remember, your metrics can be improved by either a) more links from more sites, or b) a few links from more authoritative sites. If you want to know why your competitor is beating you, I recommend using the spreadsheet in this awesome post about Link Profiling with OpenSiteExplorer. This sheet is useful because, according to Matt Peters, Page Authority is the highest correlated metric against a page's ability to rank well (from a link perspective). This sheet will give you a graph of the average Page Authorities of the sites linking to your competitors. After you have taken the data dump from OSE and plugged it into (LINK) the sheet, you will get a graph that looks like this:

If you want to see your competitors distribution compared with yours, use this sheet, which will show you the two side-by-side like so:

Using this, you can see that while your spread may be similar, the competitor on the left has many more linking root domains (the scale is much broader). That's where you need to start.

DA Correlation

You may also find it helpful to see the overall strength of the sites from which your competitors are getting links and the spread of those Domain Authorities across their backlink profile. For this purpose, I built a spreadsheet based off the PA Tool from Dr Pete above. The steps are exactly the same, but instead of the Page Authority graph you receive the Domain Authority graph:

Right here you may come up against a shortcoming of OSE, in that with sites that have a lot of linking root domains you may not be able to get the lower DA links. So watch out for this.

You can grab the Domain Authority Sheet right here.

Final Secret Sauce - SERP Analysis Report + Excel

Finally, now that you have gotten a quick overall look at your competitors and know where you stand and what certain domain and page authorities mean for ranking in your niche, you'll want to make this actionable. The above graphs do not go specific enough to be very actionable, so now let's use the SERP Analysis Report (available in the Keyword Difficulty Tool) to put the data for your specific keywords individually (that you used at the beginning to begin finding your SERP competitors)

A while back I presented a spreadsheet that allows you to take the SEOmoz SERP Analysis Report and dump it into an Excel sheet, which then gives you a bunch of graphs showing you where your site is weak. I'd be remiss to not say that I took this idea from Jason over at BusinessHut who gave away the original spreadsheet before the SERP Analysis Tool existed. You can read the full explanation of this sheet over at my site in the post called Making SEOmoz's SERP Analysis Tool More Awesome, but essentially what you can do with this sheet is:

  1. Get your SERP Analysis Report for your keyword;
  2. Export the data to Excel;
  3. Copy and paste the data into the spreadsheet provided;
  4. Sit back and compare your site to the competitors to find where you need to improve.

Maybe you'll find that your overall number of linking root domains is way low compared to the others in your SERP:

Or maybe you'll see that your on-page targeting is off (which is great since DA and PA are only links based. Now you get a better site picture):

Get the spreadsheet here.

I hope this post has been helpful for you in finding where you compare against your competitors. Knowing approximately what the benchmarks are for your niche can really help with speedy link prospecting and qualifying your site against others.

For those of you who are interested, here are some popular sites and their Domain Authorities, just for a quick snapshot of the web at large:

Arts & Entertainment
Website DmR DA PA Links
AllMusic 6.55 92.77 93.86 168826
Art.com 6.24 82.73 85.57 16493
Art Cyclopedia 6.09 87.48 89.36 29686
AMC Theatres 6.22 80.94 84.08 23760
Art.net 5.34 70.06 74.96 3511
Shihad.com 4.23 34.57 45.24 338
The Official Whitlams Website 4.43 42.16 51.79 147
EntertainmentTonight.org 2.92 14.82 29.02 9

 

Business
Website DmR DA PA Links
Business.gov 6.47 92.71 92.07 23179
Business.com 6.17 88.11 90.05 48786
Prudential 6.31 88.32 90.1 71326
Kansas Insurance Commissioner 5.58 77.07 80.87 2155
WorldBiz.com 5.21 52.25 52.36 1108
HRM Business Practices and Notes 3.62 34.97 45.79 546
Chevron Corporate Solutions 3.12 15.59 28.39 14

 

Economy & Politics
Website DmR DA PA Links
The White House 7.86 100 98.47 721707
Barak Obama 6.59 93.45 93.3 150410
The Democratic Party 6.13 88.2 89.79 88356
Republican National Committee 5.78 83.22 86.01 36615
Democrats.com | The Aggressive Progressives 5.39 72.58 77.05 57713
Iowa Democratic Party 4.79 58.1 64.92 6883
Republican Party of America 3.95 45.35 54.4 260
Vote Brian Sayrs 2.88 14.81 29.01 9

 

Education
Website DmR DA PA Links
Great Schools 6.84 93.78 94 4176177
Guide to Online Schools 5.56 77.64 80.02 76050
Khan Academy 6.22 90.35 91.92 938626
OEDB 5.42 68.01 71.26 540526
Online Education.net 4.92 57.06 64.14 154700

 

Health
Website DmR DA PA Links
WebMD 7.2 97.79 96.63 283163
HealthWorld Online 5.84 82 84.96 16882
Health.com 6.29 88.08 88.42 54716
Men's Health Network 5.58 74.3 78.58 4443
Healthy Child 5.06 56.88 64.04 2222
Healthy Living Natural Foods 4.56 50.91 57.89 1324
All American Healthcare 2.87 13.35 27.79 8

 

Home & Housing
Website DmR DA PA Links
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 7.37 99.6 97.2 353813
HGTV 6.66 91.64 92.4 207110
RealEstate.com 6.01 85.16 87.45 511320
HousingMaps 6.43 71.22 76.02 9403
Get Decorating 4.57 51.78 59.75 3858
Eastern Corner 4.17 46.85 55.59 680
RentSpeed.com 4.27 44.2 53.46 2779
WeBuyHouses.info 2.87 13.35 27.79 8

 

News & Media
Website DmR DA PA Links
CNN 7.34 98.92 97.31 733484
Anchorage Daily News 6.34 89.28 90.78 46456
News-Record 5.97 79.89 83.18 15544
Happy News 5.36 67.83 73.18 5590
News Directory 5.06 67.05 72.47 2829
Napier Mail 4.34 33.21 44.27 97
Kingsburg Recorder 4.03 39.24 49.34 269

 

People & Society
Website DmR DA PA Links
U.S. Department of Education 7.43 100 97.23 222465
ConsumerReports 6.8 96.4 94.73 92732
Consumer Web Watch 5.77 71.68 75.91 1756
Consumerist 5.48 90.83 80.67 40998
South Carolina Department of Education 5.05 59.15 65.94 597
No Nonsense Self Defense 4.64 49.68 57.99 1053
Inner Strength 3.3 18.65 31.98 13
Acqua Beauty Bar 3.93 32.38 41.81 34

 

Science
Website DmR DA PA Links
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 7.28 100 96.95 377258
U.S. Science Portal 6.1 91.3 92.7 37411
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society 5.86 78.05 81.66 14296
Association of Clinical Research Professionals 5.44 69.87 74.85 9982
SciNet Science & Technology Search Engine 4.29 48.62 57.17 2296
Cafe Science Dundee 4 28.84 40.58 379
Society of Natural Science 2.87 13.35 27.79 8

 

Sports & Recreation
Website DmR DA PA Links
Fox Sports 7.01 96 94.94 233064
Official Site of Major League Baseball 6.18 94.87 80.73 25961
FIBA - Home of International Basketball 6.08 84.9 87.4 88890
NCAA Football 5.1 64.98 70.8 15148
Sports Illustrated for Kids 4.8 81.06 61.55 338
North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance 6.87 95.22 43.85 499
Swimwatch 3.68 22.31 33.96 360

 

Technology
Website DmR DA PA Links
Apple 8.55 100 98.68 819356
Google Mail 7.2 96.03 95.98 316922
Blackberry 7.14 94.25 94.24 256136
Government of India, Department of Information Technology 5.77 76.82 80.41 10390
Internet History 5.46 73.74 78.03 2794
The Society for the History of Technology 5.05 55.66 62.72 786
The Loop 5.77 74.4 77.69 15103

Websites taken from Rob Ousbey's post and the Getstat Codex.


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Publicat de 1 la 09:05 0 comentarii

Seth's Blog : Tools vs insight

Tools vs insight

How is your vocabulary? It's a vital tool, certainly. Do you know these words?

a, after, and, as, die, eternal, first, gets, gun, have, in, is, job, life, me, mouth, my, pushing, saying, step, that, the, to, Tyler, waiter, you.

How about these?

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

The first list contains every word in the opening lines from Fight Club, the second is the entire word list from Green Eggs and Ham. Of course, neither you nor I wrote either of these, regardless of how well trained we are in what the words (the tools) mean.

Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world is another. Perhaps we need to spend less time learning new tools and more time using them.

 

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