Central Perk

vineri, 17 august 2012

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Wind

Friday, August 16, 2012

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Wind

The Department of Energy put together a list of the top ten things most people don't know about wind energy. Check it out:

10. Human civilizations have harnessed wind power for thousands of years. Early forms of windmills used wind to crush grain or pump water. Now, modern wind turbines use the wind to create electricity. Learn how here.

9. A wind turbine has as many as 8,000 different components.

8. Wind turbines are big. A wind turbine blade can be up to 150 feet long, and a turbine tower can be over 250 feet tall, almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

7. Higher wind speeds mean more electricity, and wind turbines are getting taller to reach higher altitudes where it’s even windier. See the Energy Department’s website to find average wind speeds in your state or hometown.

6. Most of the components of wind turbines installed in the United States are manufactured here. Facilities for building wind turbine parts are located in more than 40 states, and the U.S. wind energy industry currently employs 75,000 people.

5. The technical resource potential of the winds above U.S. coastal waters is enough to provide over 4,000 gigawatts of electricity, or approximately four times the generating capacity of the current U.S. electric power system. Although not all of these resources will be developed, this represents a major opportunity to provide power to highly-populated coastal cities. See what the Energy Department is doing to develop offshore wind in the United States.

4. The United States generates more wind energy than any other country except China, and wind accounts for 35 percent of all newly installed U.S. electricity generation capacity over the last four years.

3. The United States’ wind power capacity reached 47,000 megawatts by the end of 2011 and has since grown to 50,000 megawatts. That’s enough electricity to power over 12 million homes annually -- as many homes as in the entire state of California -- and represents an 18-fold increase in capacity since 2000.

2. Wind energy is affordable. Wind prices for power contracts signed in 2011 are 50 percent lower than those signed in 2009, and levelized wind prices (the price the utility pays to buy power from a wind farm) are as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour in some areas of the country.

1. As much as 20 percent of our nation’s electricity could come from wind energy by 2030 but continued support for clean energy tax credits is critical to achieving this target. That’s why President Obama is calling for an extension on the Production Tax Credit -- to support wind producers in the U.S. and continue to help drive the wind industry’s growth.

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8 Link Building Tips - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 08:02 PM PDT

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

For today's Whiteboard Friday, I'll be covering eight tips to help you build more links. This follows on from my talk at MozCon which covered 35 ways to get links in around 35 minutes.

At MozCon, I explained how link building is hard, it takes time and can be very tough for most of us. Unfortunately for most of us, it isn't as simple as just producing content which automatically gets links. Our content needs a push to make it get links, and over time, it does become easier if you build the right relationships.

These techniques can help you build those relationships with the right people in your niche and get the links you deserve. Not only now, but in the future. Let's get to it and I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Video Transcription

Hi SEOmoz fans. I'm Paddy, I work at Distilled. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. We're going to go through eight link building tips in eight minutes. I've just presented at MozCon, and we did 35 ways to get links in 35 minutes. This is a lot shorter, but hopefully you'll get some good tips out of it.

So, number one, this is a little technique you can use to mine through your competitors backlinks and pull out the links which are good for you. So the process, you go to Open Site Explorer, put in your competitor's URL, you can download an Excel file, put that Excel file into a Google custom search engine, then you can search for whatever you want. So you can search for guest posts, you can search for competition, you can search for sponsored links, you can find all of these really cool places your competitors have got links and average those guys as well and just piggyback off the back of their link building.

Number two: Go to Meetup.com and search for the word "blogger" and refine the results by your area, and you'll find local bloggers meeting up in the same place. So you may find music bloggers, design bloggers, fashion bloggers. Instead of emailing all of those people, just go to the event. Go and meet them, say hello, buy them a drink, go and have dinner. It's a much better way of building a relationship than just firing a bunch of emails out, and this is going to build a good long-term relationship with those guys.

Number three: Build good infographics quickly. Infogr.am is a really, really cool tool for uploading your own data. You can put headlines. You can create really pretty graphs. So without the need of a designer, you can just put out your own infographic really, really quickly. I wouldn't recommend doing this over and over again. But if you get some good wins with it, take it to your boss and show how, "I did this. I'm not a designer. Get us a designer for a day and let's see what we can do." It's really good for building that case, then showing your boss.

Number four: Finding your competitors' guest posts. I'm guessing your competitors are doing guest posting as well as you. They're going to be lazy. They usually write a byline, such as this, so written by "John Smith, CEO of Company X." Just take a snippet out of that bio and search for it in Google. You'll find a bunch of other places that they guest post. You can reach out to those guys as well, and you've got a few easy win links.

Number five: We did this one at Distilled for a client in the UK. Have a profile page for spokespeople and directors of your clients. So when they get quoted by newspapers, by magazines, you can just ask them to link to that profile page. They may not want to link to your homepage if it's quite commercial, but they're quite happy to link to a profile page because they're not commercial. They've got good photos, good information about the person. They're more likely to link to that than a homepage. Also set up Google alerts for the name of that person. So if that person ever gets quoted, you can go along and take a look at that website. See if there's a link. If there's not, contact the website and say, "Hey, thanks a lot for quoting our director. Did you know he's got a profile page here?" And that's going to link to the profile page.

Number six: This is a freebie for you guys. It's a guest blog post search engine. You can get it at http://www.paddymoogan.com/guest-posting-search-engine/, and there will be a link in the blog post as well. When you search this engine for your keywords, you will only see results that accept guest posts. So search for the word "travel,"
search for the word "'food," whatever your industry is, and the only results that get returned, you can reach out to and get a guest post. At the moment, there are about 1,500 domains in the search engine. That's going to grow over the next few weeks as I add more to it, but go away, use it, and get guest posts.

Number seven: This could be a little bit stalkerish, but it's cool. Amazon have a facility where you can search for other people's wish lists using their email address. So if there's a really good blogger who you want to impress, put their email address into Amazon Wish Lists and see if they've got one. If they have, maybe send them a gift with a little note saying it's from your company, you really appreciate the work they do and the blog posts they're putting out. It's a great way of building a relationship. They're going to reply to you. They're going to say thank you.

Number eight: If you're doing any kind of content based link building--so infographics, that kind of thing--you probably want people to tweet it. When they do, use a service like Topsy or BackTweets. Go and see who has tweeted your content, click on their Twitter profile, see if they've got a website. If they have, approach them and say, "Hey, thank you so much for tweeting about our infographic. Did you know you can also embed it on your blog, and here's the embed code." You are going to get a much better response, right, from those people than people who you are just emailing who have never seen that content before. So these guys have already interacted, they've already tweeted, they've shown they like it. So just take that extra step and see if they can embed it and give you a proper link rather than just tweeting about it.

So that's it. Eight link building tips in what was hopefully about eight minutes. I'm Paddy. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, and thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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New Data: The Correlations Between Social Sharing and Inbound Links

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 02:57 AM PDT

Posted by danzarrella

Over the past few years, the topics I’ve researched, written, and spoken about have evolved. One of the most common questions I’m still asked about is the relationship between social media sharing and SEO performance. Thanks to Rand and his awesome team at SEOMoz, I got access to their Mozscape API and was able to actually start to answer these questions in a scientific way.

To complete this analysis, I compiled a database of more than 25,000 URLs that had been shared at least once on the three major social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LIinkedIn), were at least a month old, and had at least one incoming link.

First, I looked at the relationship between the number of times a URL was Tweeted and the number of incoming links it had pointing to it. I found a convincing positive relationship. Those URLs that got more Twitter love, also got more link love.

Secondly, I looked at Facebook and found, somewhat unsurprisingly, almost exactly the same effect. Facebook popularity is related to inbound link popularity for URLs.

Finally, I looked at LinkedIn sharing. Of course the numbers are much smaller here due to sharing activity being much more common on Twitter and Facebook, but I still found another positive relationship.

For all of the “big three” social media networks, I found that social sharing had a positive relationship to incoming links pointing to a URL. This result is basically what I expected to see. However, when I took a step back and compared the actual Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient of the sharing on the three networks to inbound links, what I found was surprising.

While all three networks did have a positive correlation, the strength of the relationship was strongest for LinkedIn. So, while LinkedIn may be the least obvious choice for sharing activity, it is still incredibly important for marketers also interested in SEO performance.

Looking for more insights into online marketing? Don't miss the free webinar on August 20th with Rand from SEOmoz and Dharmesh from Hubspot: The State of SEO and Internet Marketing in 2012.

Will You Hangout With Us?

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, August 17, 2012

Will You Hangout With Us?

AmeriCorps is a national service opportunity that has helped more than 775,000 Americans serve more than 1 billion hours since 1994. To share the impact AmeriCorps has had, we'll be holding a live Google+ Hangout moderated by White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips and Corporation for National and Community Service CEO Wendy Spencer at 12 p.m. EDT. We hope you'll join the conversation.

Find out how to watch live and engage.

West Wing Week: Dream Day

This week, the White House hosted PTA day and the annual Iftar dinner, the President addressed the drought and spoke with the Curiosity team, and the Administration began accepting applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That's August 10th to August 16th or "Dream Day."

Check out this week's West Wing Week

Seth's Blog : Corporations are not people

Corporations are not people

You may have read Matt Fisher's story about the tragic death of his sister and the response of her insurance company. My heart goes out to his family.

She had Progressive insurance and they refused to pay. Instead, the company paid to send a lawyer to coordinate a defense with the other driver--in other words, they paid their lawyers to go to court to prove that Matt's deceased sister, their client, was at fault. They went to court against their client even though there was significant evidence to the contrary and even though the other driver's insurance company (Nationwide) had already paid her family $25,000. The amount at stake: just $75,000.

Progressive's weasely first response is here.

You can read Progressive's more nuanced, but still doublespeak update here. They could have done the right thing from the start, or almost anywhere along the way, but never did, and they used fancy language to disguise that fact. Of course it's not against state law for them to settle a case. And of course losing a jury trial is not the same as settling with the family.

If Progressive is proud of their tactics, they should say so. "We fight against claims to keep our costs low, saving you money." But if they're not proud, they should tell the truth, learn from it and apologize.

Like many people, I'm disgusted by their strategy, but my point here is this: if someone in your neighborhood used this approach, treating others this way, if a human with a face and a house and a reputation did it, they'd have to move away in shame. If a local businessperson did this, no one in town would ever do business there again.

Corporations (even though it's possible that individuals working there might mean well) play a different game all too often. They bet on short memories and the healing power of marketing dollars, commercials and discounts. Employees are pushed to focus on bureaucratic policies and quarterly numbers, not a realization that individuals, not corporations, are responsible for what they do.

I hope all smart marketers realize just how dumb Progressive's marketing has been. But what I really hope is that all smart humans will realize how misguided Progressive's systems and lack of understanding are. And of course, it's not just this one corporation, it's the mindset.

Corporations don't have to act like this. It's people who can make them stop. Corporations aren't people, people are people.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 16 august 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

New Jersey Unemployment Hits 35-Year High of 9.8%; What Does That Suggest About Retail Sales?
Labor Department $100 Million Giveaway to Stop State Layoffs
Pettis on Debt, Currency Wars, Commodity Prices and Capital Flight; China FDI Contracts 8.7% YoY, 8th Drop in 9 Months

New Jersey Unemployment Hits 35-Year High of 9.8%; What Does That Suggest About Retail Sales?

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 10:48 PM PDT

As I continue to ponder reported rising retail sales, I note that Bloomberg reports New Jersey Jobless Rate Increases to 35-Year High of 9.8%

New Jersey's unemployment rate jumped to a 35-year high of 9.8 percent in July, the state Labor Department said.

The rate climbed from 9.6 percent in June and is above the national level of 8.3 percent, which also increased last month. New Jersey lost 12,000 jobs in July, with the largest drops in manufacturing, construction, and professional and business services, the department said in a statement today.

The last time it was 9.8 percent or higher was in April 1977, according to Labor Department data.

Retail Sales Rise?

On Wednesday, I wrote Retail Sales Rise? Not in California Where Sales Tax Collections Plunge Amazing 40% Year-Over-Year.

Now we see a big uptick in unemployment in New Jersey.

A couple of people pointed out that temporary sales tax hikes expired in California. However, that only accounts for 11% of the 40% decline. Moreover, California was down 33.5% vs. expectations.

Was California not aware of sales tax changes in their estimates?

The more data I look at, including unusual seasonal adjustments in retail sales suggests the recent reported rise will be revised much lower, if not wiped out entirely.

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

Labor Department $100 Million Giveaway to Stop State Layoffs

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 11:49 AM PDT

$100 million sounds like a lot of money, but it does not go very far these days. It is less than .01% of the deficit.

The problem with such thinking is government programs start out "small" then end up costing tens of billions of dollars as each party tries to outdo the other in an attempt to buy voters.

Please consider Labor Dept. Attempts to Stop Layoffs by Giving $100 Million to States to Subsidize Payrolls

The Labor Department announced on Monday that it will be awarding almost $100 million in grant funding to states to prevent layoffs by allowing businesses to pay employees as part-time workers and the federal government will pick up the tab for the cost of a full-time paycheck.

The "work-sharing" program was passed as part of a Republican-led bill in the House, H.R. 3630, and Senate Amendment 1465 to extend the payroll tax deduction and unemployment benefits. In February 2012, President Barack Obama signed the bill into law, which included the $100 million in funding.

The work-sharing programs "allows employees to keep their jobs and helps employers to avoid laying off their trained workforces during economic downturns by reducing the hours of work for an entire group of affected workers," according to the Labor Department.

The grants will be given to states that apply and meet certain requirements, including having short-term compensation programs in place that meet federal guidelines. Workers will have "wages compensated with a portion of their weekly unemployment compensation payments," according to the Labor Department.

The largest pot is available to California, with $11,593,587 in grant funding listed. New York and Florida can get around $6 million, with Illinois and Pennsylvania eligible for more than $4 million each.

Reader Andrew who sent me the link, writes ...

A $100 million program for all 50 states is clearly just a political token to say that they have done something about the problem.
The money will probably go to those companies that have close connections to the politicians in power (i.e., those who make sizable campaign contributions).

Andrew is correct on both counts. The problem with #1 is politicians are likely to want to do "more" as soon as this program kicks off.

The idea that government should be supplementing anyone this way is of course ludicrous.

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

Pettis on Debt, Currency Wars, Commodity Prices and Capital Flight; China FDI Contracts 8.7% YoY, 8th Drop in 9 Months

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 08:01 AM PDT

The much-denied hard landing in China is now underway with weakening data everywhere one looks. Today there is More Bad News For China as FDI Falls.

Foreign direct investment in China fell to the lowest level in two years in July, fueling concern that waning confidence in the nation's growth prospects may restrain any economic rebound.

Investment declined 8.7 percent from a year earlier to $7.58 billion, the eighth drop in nine months and the smallest inflow since July 2010. The Ministry of Commerce released the data at a briefing in Beijing today.

Chinese financial institutions sold a net 3.8 billion yuan ($600 million) of foreign currency last month, indicating capital is flowing out as property curbs and weakness in exports slow growth and the yuan weakens.

China's slowdown may extend into a seventh quarter after export growth collapsed in July and industrial production and lending missed economists' forecasts. The nation reported a $71.4 billion capital account deficit in April-through-June, the biggest quarterly shortfall in data going back to 1998.

Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), the world's largest maker of construction and mining machinery, shut its main excavator factory in China for much of July and had employees on shortened work weeks, Mike DeWalt, director of investor relations at the Peoria, Illinois, company, said in an Aug. 8 conference presentation, according to a transcript.

"The current sales level in China is quite depressed," DeWalt said. "We've cut production there."

Pettis on Debt, Currency Wars, Commodity Prices and Capital Flight in China

Via email, Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets has a few comments on debt, commodity prices, and capital flight in China.

Any sustained increase in the growth rate of Chinese consumption – if indeed this occurs, which in my opinion is very doubtful – will not only have to compensate for a reduction in the growth rate of Chinese investment, but might also have to compensate for a reduction in China's current account surplus.　 What is more, the crisis in Europe will only make the global trade environment tenser and nastier.　

Notice already what is happening in commodity-exporting countries like Indonesia.　 According to an article in Thursday's Wall Street Journal: Indonesia's Trade Gap Signals Tougher Times

Indonesia's trade deficit hit an all-time high in June as exports from Southeast Asia's largest economy fell sharply, a sign that weaker demand from China and the West is affecting some of the few countries still growing at a considerable clip.

A third straight month of trade deficits in one of the world's biggest commodity producers bodes ill for Indonesia, which had become a darling of foreign investors looking for fresh opportunities, but has struggled to contain the damage from a sharp fall in its currency in recent months that has rattled investors.

Countries whose growth depends either on growth in Chinese investment or growth in European demand are going to see significant deterioration in their trade accounts.　 This will almost certainly lead to even more trade intervention, currency wars, and all the other beggar-thy-neighbor polices typical of a global demand contraction. I think we should expect to see a lot more articles like this.

In addition China itself is seeing noticeable capital outflows as business owners and other wealthy people begin disinvesting and withdrawing deposits.　 Capital flight from China began surging in early 2010, and it seems to be getting worse, with some monthly withdrawal estimates as high as $40-50 billion, and this can't help but put increasing pressure on China's ability to finance the infrastructure, manufacturing and real estate bubbles that have driven the economy.　

Over the long term, and in the name of rebalancing, this is probably a good thing for China.　 The sooner liquidity-driven overinvestment stops, the less debt will pile up and the less painful the deleveraging process will be.　 But in the short term it will aggravate the slowing down of the economy.

Rebalancing Effect on Commodities

If we assume that China will have no problem sailing through its economic rebalancing, the European crisis, and everything else, then clearly we don't need to worry about anything.　 But if China's rebalancing is accompanied by a sharp slowdown in economic growth, or if it occurs during a worsening of the European crisis – both very likely scenarios – then we need to think about what the debt burden will be under those conditions.

So, for example, will commodity prices drop?　 I think they will, perhaps by as much as 50% over the next three years, and to the extent that there is still a lot of outstanding debt in China collateralized by copper and other metals (and there is), our debt count should include estimates for uncollateralized debt in the event of a sharp fall in metal prices .　 Will slower growth increase bankruptcies, or put further pressure on the loan guarantee companies?　 They almost certainly will, so we will need again to increase our estimates for non-performing loans.　

Liquidity Pressures

Will capital outflows increase if growth slows sharply?　 Probably, and of course this puts additional pressure on liquidity and the banking system, and with refinancing becoming harder, otherwise-solvent borrowers will become insolvent.　 Will rebalancing require higher real interest rates, a currency revaluation, or higher wages?　 Since rebalancing cannot occur without an increase in the household income share of GDP, and since these are the biggest implicit "taxes" on household income, there must be a net increase in the combination of these three variables, in which case the impact on net indebtedness can be quite significant depending on which of these variables move most.　 Since I think rising real interest rates are a key component of rebalancing, clearly I would want to estimate the debt impact of a rise in real rates.

Just remember the finger wagging and the self-satisfied lectures on banking and debt given by senior Spanish government officials and bankers to US and European bankers as late as 2009.　 No one thought Spain had a problem until debt suddenly emerged from every nook and cranny as a response to the adverse shock Spain was undergoing.　 Some analysts will complain that it is very difficult to figure out all the contingencies in any country, so acknowledging the possibility adds nothing to the quality of our analysis.　 But they are dead wrong.　 An experienced balance sheet analysts can easily tell when overall a country's balance sheet is more inverted or less inverted, and in the former case he must always assume that the potential for a debt crisis is much greater than the raw debt numbers suggest.

When the cost of capital is artificially repressed, economic entities tend to overuse capital as an input.　 Perhaps that has not happened in China in the past decade, but if it hasn't, China would represent a truly unique case in history.

Recognition of Losses

We need to be worried about debt, in Europe and the US of course, but we need also to be worried about debt in China.　 The deleveraging process in any country always results in much slower growth than during the period in which debt was rising quickly, and what matters is overall deleveraging, not just government debt.　 At some point we will see deleveraging in China, and this must affect growth.　 Misallocated investment funded by debt means that losses have occurred and one way or another they will eventually be recognized.　 The recognition of the losses can be postponed for a time, by the simple expedient of not recognizing non-performing loans, but at some point, and usually at the worst possible time, they will be recognized.

What to Expect in Deflation

Pettis did not use the word "deflation' in his email, but deleveraging, rebalancing, trade intervention, currency wars, falling commodity prices, and beggar-thy-neighbor polices "typical of a global demand contraction" are certainly synonymous with the word.

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

vineri, 17 august 2012

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Wind

8 Link Building Tips - Whiteboard Friday

8 Link Building Tips - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

Will You Hangout With Us?

Seth's Blog : Corporations are not people

Corporations are not people

More Recent Articles

joi, 16 august 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

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Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

vineri, 17 august 2012

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More Recent Articles

joi, 16 august 2012

Pagini

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Arhivă blog

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