Professor Zhang Lin has built a dream mountain villa on top of a Beijing apartment block. He has spent six years shifting rocks and rubble to the roof to create this mountaintop penthouse. The people underneath aren't too happy because cracks and leaks appeared throughout the apartment block. The construction will be demolished if deemed unsafe.
Movies and motorcycles go together like PB&J – but not every use of the wonderful two-wheeled drive has been beneficial. In fact, some movies seem hell bent on besmirching the cool factor of the motorcycle and we're just not going to stand for it. The jury has passed their verdict on the very best and worst motorcycle movies the world has to offer. Question is, do you agree with our sentencing?
It might be a little early to start with the annual compilation videos, but Vine's offered up so many goodies, there isn't time to wait. Check it out to start your week off with a laugh, but keep the volume down for some NSFW.
As someone who has been involved in the search industry for over a decade, one of the things that really bothers me is how Google is slowly but inevitably taking all of the “above the fold” organic search result space and giving it to paid results, Google web properties, and to the Google Knowledge graph. […]
National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice briefs President Barack Obama during his Presidential Daily Briefing in Chilmark, Mass., Aug. 12, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
As members of Congress go home to their districts for the August recess, they are hearing directly from Americans of all political stripes who are calling for a vote on commonsense immigration reform.
Severe weather is the number one cause of power outages on the nation’s electric grid, which serves as the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure that delivers electric power to millions of Americans in homes, schools, offices, and factories across the United States.
On Saturday, the President and First Lady spoke at the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) National Convention in Orlando, FL. Founded in September of 1920, the DAV celebrates 92 years of service to disabled veterans and their families with this three-day event.
If you want to see how your competitors are gaining a strategic advantage, one of the best tactics to overtake them is to take a deep dive into their backlinks. They leave breadcrumbs behind that reveal their best tactics. Then pivot (no pun intended), glean ideas from their brilliance, and do it even better!
Required skill: pivot tables
If you don't know how to use pivot tables, you need to check out this video walkthrough. I teach you everything you need to know and then some.
Download example pivot table
I redacted my client's data from the pivot table in the Excel sheet, but you can get an idea of how I pulled together the data in the "Raw Data" tab and then see how I organized my pivot table in that tab. You can, of course, organize yours however you feel is best. But hopefully this will provide a good jumping-off point. I also sorted my pivot table by domain authority in descending order and then filtered out links from [free-subdomain].wordpress.com.
Step 2: Add another column and label it "Site." What I typically do is add the domain (without the http:// or www to minimize noise) and double-click the bottom-right corner of the cell to fill down to the bottom of the data set. Rinse and repeat each time you add a new batch of backlinks. When you finish, you'll have a single table that contains a mashup of backlinks.
Step 3: Extract the domains from the backlink URLs using the LEFT and SEARCH functions. If you haven't done this before, I demonstrate how in this video tutorial. (Or you can download the demo workbook from the post and just copy the formulas.)
Step 4: Create your pivot table using these settings:
Step 5: As a general rule, I don't like how Excel merely indents rows in the default, "Compact" pivot table format. In our data set here, where we have three different values pulled down in rows (Domain, Site, and URL). This can cause your rows to get really congested, and it can be hard to differentiate them. For this reason, if I pull multiple values into the Rows field list, I prefer the Outline layout. You can check it out in the Excel file download.
To set your pivot table to "Outline," click on any cell in the pivot table and go to Pivot Table Tools > Design tab > Layout > Report Layout > Show in Outline Form (Mac: PivotTable tab > Design > Layout > Outline Layout).
Step 6: I pulled individual observations into text boxes to the left of the pivot table. I used text boxes for a couple reasons:
I didn't want to mess up the heights of rows inside my pivot table.
I could attach links to the text boxes that linked to the individual cells in the pivot table.
Step 7: Dive into the data and start reverse-engineering strategies (using the observations I pulled out as a template, if you'd like). I can assure you there are many more to excavate from that data set!
Video tutorial
For you visual learners out there, I pulled together a 10-minute video walkthrough of some of the key steps I took to organize the data for analysis.
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Put two loudspeakers next to each other, and the perceived sound isn't twice as loud--and ten times as many speakers certainly doesn't seem ten times as loud.
But when you hear an idea from two people, it counts for twice as much as if you randomly hear it once. And if you hear an idea from ten people, the impact is completely off the charts compared to just one person whispering in your ear.
Coordinating and amplifying the evangelists of your idea is a big part of the secret of marketing with impact.
U.S. satisfaction suffered a setback this month, after a two-month upswing. Twenty-two percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country, down from 28% in July and 27% in June. Three-quarters of Americans are now dissatisfied with the nation's course, up from 68% in July.
In general, are you satisfied with the way things are going in the Unites States at this time?
Given the decline, America's mood is now on par with the lowest readings seen since early 2012, including March of this year, when 21% were satisfied.
Democrats maintain higher satisfaction than either political independents or Republicans, a pattern seen throughout President Barack Obama's White House tenure. Nevertheless, their satisfaction fell seven percentage points this month (from 44% to 37%), consistent with the six-point drop among Republicans (from 14% to 8%), and slightly greater than the four-point drop among independents (from 25% to 21%).
Gallup expressed the opinion the drop in satisfaction levels was political rather that economic. I suggest otherwise, but it's hard to say given the up and down fluctuation this year.
The Greek economy posted its 20th consecutive quarterly decline in the three months through June, government data showed on Monday, but a slower pace of contraction provided a glimmer of hope for beleaguered Greeks.
Gross domestic product shrank by 4.6 percent in the second quarter compared with the same three months a year earlier, the official Hellenic Statistical Authority said. That was an improvement from the first quarter of 2013, when the economy contracted 5.6 percent compared with a year earlier.
Ben May, an economist in London with Capital Economics, said the latest number was "encouraging, as it looks like the quarterly pace of decline is slowing." An analysis of the second-quarter figure suggested that G.D.P. might have ticked up by about one-tenth of a percent from the first quarter, he said.
"The troika's forecast for a 4.2 percent annual decline in 2013 looks achievable," Mr. May said.
But it remains "plausible," he said, that the Greek economy will continue shrinking into 2015. He forecast a 2 percent decline in G.D.P. for next year, followed by a 0.5 percent contraction in 2015.
Illusion of Hope
Allegedly GDP improving from negative 4.6% to the target of negative 4.2% provides a glimmer of hope.
Youth unemployment is about 65%. Let's assume the Greek economy improves steadily over the next two years and by 2015 Greece does even better than expected and achieves 0% growth.
Three Questions
Can Greece suffer through another two years of rising unemployment and stay committed to the Euro?
What will the unemployment numbers look like in two years?
How fast will the unemployment rate drop when growth does return?
Hope is an illusion provided by economists who think Greece should stay committed to the Euro even as the cancer of unemployment spreads and numerous structural problems remain unsolved.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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