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marți, 1 aprilie 2014

7.1 million Americans

Hello everyone,

Last night, the first open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act came to an end.

And this afternoon, we announced that 7.1 million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through the new Health Insurance Marketplaces.

7.1 million.

That doesn't count the more than 3 million young adults who have gained insurance under this law by staying on their families' plans. It doesn't count the millions more who have gotten covered through the expansion of Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. It doesn't include the more than 100 million folks who now have better care -- who are receiving additional benefits, like mammograms and contraceptive care, at no extra cost.

Now, millions of our fellow Americans have the comfort and peace of mind that comes with knowing they're no longer leaving their health and well-being to chance. For many of them, quality health insurance wasn't an option until this year -- maybe because they couldn't afford it, or because a pre-existing condition kept them locked out of a discriminatory system.

Today, that's changed. And while our long-broken health care system may not be completely fixed, it's without question a lot better. That's something to be proud of -- and there's no good reason to go back.

Regardless of your politics, or your feelings about the Affordable Care Act, millions more Americans with health coverage is something that's good for our economy and our country.

At the end of the day, that is what this law -- and the other reforms we're fighting for, from a 21st-century immigration system to a fairer wage for every American who's willing to work for it -- are all about:

Making sure our country lives up to our highest ideals.

I am thankful to be your President today, and every day. And I am proud that this law will continue to make life better for millions of Americans in the years to come.

Thank you.

President Barack Obama

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7,041,000

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7,041,000

The numbers are in: more than seven million Americans -- 7,041,000 to be exact -- have signed up for private health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act. And that number will only grow as state-run health care exchanges report their numbers for the final day of open enrollment.

Share the big news: the Affordable Care Act is working and millions of Americans are getting covered.

Watch President Obama's remarks on the Affordable Care Act at 4:15 PM ET at WH.gov/live.

You'll Cry Tears of Joy When You Learn how Easy Viral Videos Can Be

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 04:09 PM PDT

Posted by jennita

Today, I'm super-excited to introduce our latest product from Moz, MozWorthy! It's a tool that takes your regular (perhaps even boring) videos, adds some "oomph" and pizzazz, and makes it go viral.

With so much talk about content marketing on the riseâ€"and guest posting on the declineâ€"we wanted to build something that helps in both instances. You make the videoâ€"heck, it doesn't even have to be that greatâ€"and we do the rest.

Check out the video we used as the test. What started out as just a regular old video, turned into a HUGE HIT around the world. In fact, it was the original version of the "internet famous" FIRST KISS video.

You can jump in and give MozWorthy! a try now, or read a bit more about why we made it, see some examples, and learn how it works.

Start using MozWorthy!

How it began

At the end of February, many of us at Moz participated in Ship It Week. This was a time when we focused on using all our internal talent, enthusiasm, and fun to collectively come together and innovate. This meant more than just coding and building things, but working to build new ideas, frameworks, and anything else we could imagine to innovate at Moz. MozWorthy! was one of the tools we created.

Our top-rated Ship It Week project is a tool that helps you learn the names of all the Mozzers, called "Name That Mozzer." It was built as an internal tool only, to help staff get to know others on the team. A big thanks to Brandon for all the work he put into making Moz a better place!

Although that one was a favorite among staff, we knew that several other projects would be used and loved by the community. For example, Peter Bray built Zoom Profiler, a tool that allows users to very quickly analyze a competitor, influencer, or customer to find their most important relationships, their top tweets, and their top content sources.

At the same time, Evan came up with the idea of making it easier for people to get their videos to go viral. As a team, we thought our customers would really love it as well, so we jumped in full force: The product, design, dev, and marketing teams got together to create something truly helpful!

Start using MozWorthy!

How it works

Ok, ok, let's get down to the real dirt. How does this baby work?! It's quite simple, and it only takes a few steps to find yourself in viral video world.

Upload your video to YouTube. (Right now, the tool only works with YouTube videos, since it's still in its infancy. However, we plan on adding Vimeo, Wistia, and other platforms soon.) If you already have a video on YouTube that you'd like to use, that's great too.
Give it a basic title; you don't need anything fancy here. We'll do the work for you!
Once your video is uploaded, head on over to mozworthy.moz.com to add the link to your video and fill out a couple of key attributes.
Hit submit! Then we do the rest for you.

Viral title generator

Once you submit your video, we take it and process both the video and title. Using super-special Moz data based on what words are the most clickable and linkable, we create a viral title for you. A combination of your title, attributes you added, and the addition of "highly viral keywords" will be used to make your title as ahhMOZing as possible.

Video enhancements

But we don't want to stop at just the title. We also take your video and make enhancements to it that will make people love it even more. Honestly, your video doesn't even have to be all that good, and we'll make it great. I mean, everyone wants to do mediocre work and press an easy button to make it awesome, right?

Increased social shares

Creating a great title and updating the video are all good and great. But what you really want is for people to see it, right? Cool. We help with that too. You'll see social shares across all the major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube) go up practically instantaneously.

A couple examples

Ok, I know you all well, and you're not going to settle until you see exactly how it works. Which is cool, so I have a few examples to show you the kind of virality I'm talking about here!

This One Weird Trick Will Keep You Energized All Day

This one is fairly straightforward, but wow, look at that title!

You'll Never Believe What This Former Philologist Caught on Video

This is just a short, simple video as you see. But with MozWorthy! we were able to add oomph to the video, and make the title something that even your grandmother will want to share.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check out MozWorthy! right now, and see what we can do for your social shares!

Start using MozWorthy!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

MeasureCamp IV – Excel Tip Exchange

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 01:00 AM PDT

Saturday was the fourth MeasureCamp – a free 'unconference' dedicated to web analytics. As it was my third time going I made a last-minute decision to lead a session of my own, to let people swap the Excel tips and tricks they'd accumulated over their careers. The lack of preparation was probably a mistake but hopefully it was useful anyway…

I don’t have the spreadsheet we were working on in the session: my main takeaway of the day was that you should bring a VGA to HDMI converter if you might want to use a projector with your new HDMI-and-USB-port-only laptop, rather than having to borrow someone else’s Mac.

So, instead, I’ve done my best to recreate the spreadsheet and the tips shared! Download it here.

Using awkward characters in strings in formulae

If you want to use a double quote in a string, use "".

Some functions, such as SUMIF, COUNTIF and VLOOKUP, treat the characters * and ? as wildcards – if you want to use * and ? to actually mean the characters rather than the wildcard, then use ~* and ~?. But this is only necessary in formulae that can use wildcards (and when using Find and Replace).

In the process of making the spreadsheet I've found that the tilde is more complicated: you use ~ for COUNTIF and SUMIF, but ~~ for VLOOKUP and SEARCH (and Find and Replace).

Use TEXT to get the day or month by name

The TEXT function will take in a number and give you back a piece of text in the specified format. The format “ddd” will give a shortened day of the week, “dddd” will give the full day name. Similarly “mmm” and “mmmm” will give the shortened and full name of the month.

If you have a number saved as text, then use VALUE to turn it into an actual number.

Use custom formatting to change the colour of numbers

Right click, go to Format Cells, and choose Custom. Then type in
[Color10] 0.0;[Red] -0.0;[Color15] 0
The first bit specifies how positive numbers are formatted (in this case, dark green and with one decimal point). The second is for negative numbers (in this case they appear red, with a minus sign and with one decimal point). The third is for values which are 0 (in this case they will appear grey and with no decimal points).

You can also make 0 values into something else.
[Color10] 0.0;[Red] -0.0;" - "
This will make 0 values appear ” – “. If you use them in formulae later Excel will still treat the value as zero, as you’ve changed the formatting rather than the value itself.

Shortcuts

If you’re using Windows, there are a few useful shortcuts with the formula keys:

F4 will repeat the last action.

F2 will let you edit formulae.

If you select part of a formula and press F9, the selected part will be replaced by the value of that bit. For example, if you have a formula:
=1+1=4
If you selected 1+1 and pressed F9, it would change it into 2.

Having Fewer Columns

If you only want seven columns to appear, then select the eighth column and press Ctrl, Shift and Right Arrow (or Command, Shift and Right Arrow on a Mac) to select all columns to the right. Then right click and select Hide.

Pivot Tables

To make a pivot table:

Select your data. (Make sure all columns have headers!)

Go to the ‘Insert’ tab in Windows, or the Data tab on a Mac. Click PivotTable.

If you're on Windows there’ll be a menu: just click 'OK'. You'll then have a Pivot Table in a new worksheet. You can then choose the fields you want to show. You can also drag and drop the field names to rearrange them.

If something has come out as 'Count of blah' rather than 'Sum of blah', then right click on it and go to 'Value Field Settings'. Then you can change it into a Sum.

You can add calculate fields if you want something like ROI that can't just be summed. Click on 'Fields, Items & Sets' in the Analyze tab and then on 'Calculated Field…'

You can then enter in a name for the new field, and the formula for the field.

You can also group values, for example if you have data by the day and want to see it summarised by week or month. Right click the column you want to group, then click 'Group'. In this example I've grouped areas with 1 or 2 staff, and those with over 2.

But beware that this may mess up calculated fields that use the grouped field!

Counting Unique Values

There was a question on how to count the number of unique values in a field. For example, if you have a list of user IDs and purchases, and want to know how many users there are – you can’t just count the number of cells with values in, as the user IDs will be duplicated if someone made a repeat purchase. You can’t use COUNTIF as that will count the number of times an ID appears, rather than how many unique IDs there are.

However, there is a formula specifically designed to do this if you download the add-in PowerPivot.

After some post-conference Googling I've found a complicated solution using an array formula. Also, StackOverflow suggests =SUMPRODUCT((A2:A100<>"")/COUNTIF(A2:A100,A2:A100&"")) but this will only work with numeric values.

Alternatively, you could copy the user ID list, remove duplicates from that copied list, and see how many IDs you're left with.

The JOIN Function in Google Docs

A non-Excel tip! If you want to concatenate a bunch of text with a character in-between – for example, if you’ve got a list of words and want to make a regular expression like word1|word2|word3 by sticking them all together with |s in-between – then copy the list of words into a Google Doc spreadsheet and use the JOIN function.

I've made an example spreadsheet here.

Want more?

If you’d like more Excel tips I’d recommend:

Russel McAthy’s 'Why Do You Hate Excel?' MeasureFest slideshare
PPCHero, which has more Excel articles than I can usefully list
Everyone loves Chandoo.org!
And, if you don't mind the self-promotion, I've written posts on basic Excel hints, array formulae, and learning macros.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who came along and took part!

Please get in touch, either by Twitter or in the comment section, if I’ve missed out any of the tips, or if you just want to add something entirely new.

The post MeasureCamp IV – Excel Tip Exchange appeared first on White Noise.

Seth's Blog : Maximizing the value of worry: Snowden's new project

Maximizing the value of worry: Snowden's new project

At a recent conference, I was talking with Ed Snowden about the range of data that's now available, not just to the government, but by extension, to servers in the cloud. We got to thinking about just how much worry is wasted.

Combine this with Google's work on the self-driving car,

and with the increasing use of wearable computers,

and home monitors and videocams...

It turns out that we've been spending countless hours worrying about the wrong things.

It's pretty clear what the next opportunity is. Today, Ed has given me the okay to announce that he has received $15 million in funding to launch a new startup: Worry.com (not ready for sign ups yet, but he wanted to announce this at the beginning of April because the space is about to get crowded). He and his partners already have a spokesperson.

Worry is the very first technological solution that maximizes the benefit of mankind's oldest task: anxiety.

The Worry app is a front end to a sophisticated, cloud-based trouble-recognition system. Using Bayesian probability as well as advanced Fourier transforms and Markoff chains, the backend of Worry will monitor and calculate what really matters—the things you can't control that somehow are a better use of all the time you're spending trying to change things merely by thinking and worrying about them. (I didn't understand all of this at first either, but Snowden is pretty smart, and explained it to me).

Imagine taking everything the web knows about you, including the content of your web history, your emails, your reading habits and more... then integrating that with real-time video cameras and GPS tracking... then adding to that what your friends, rivals and colleagues are saying about you (not just in public, but behind your back).

Using this flow of data, the Worry app computes the things you ought to be worried about. For example, instead of needlessly wasting time worrying about a random event like being bitten by a brown recluse spider, the Worry GPS system can point out that based on where you are, you'd be better off worrying about a different, unpreventable event like being killed by a fire hydrant flying through the air or perhaps by an angry rooster wielding a knife. The Worry app will alert you to that, which dramatically increases the effectiveness of your worrying.

Even better, the new Worry watch (sorry, I should call it wearable tech) will alert you in case you stop worrying. During worrying downtime, the watch will vibrate, indicating the most likely uncontrollable scenario on your horizon, so you can begin cycling through your anxiousness.

Instead of spending time fruitlessly fretting about things that are extremely unlikely to happen, or worrying about whether your friend Sue was offended by what you said last night (he looked it up: she wasn't), now you can experience failure in advance on issues that are actually more likely to happen. Worry about the right stuff.

Your sleepless nights will now be more productive, because you can be sleepless about the right things.

In addition to Mr. Snowden, board members include pioneers Cory Doctorow, Stewart Brand and Pema Chodron. Matt Cutts has agreed to leave Google to run their SEO efforts. Stay tuned!

Look for them to launch in about a year...