Central Perk

luni, 20 decembrie 2010

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Grand Rapids Michigan Outsources Airport Parking Operations To Private Firm
Unintended Consequences
New York Times 10th Annual Year in Ideas; #1 Idea: Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics

Grand Rapids Michigan Outsources Airport Parking Operations To Private Firm

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 03:58 PM PST

The trend towards dumping public unions continues to escalate in cities across the country. Latest on the list is from Michigan where a board votes to outsource parking operations at Grand Rapids airport

Airport leaders unanimously selected a private firm to take over parking operations at Gerald R. Ford International Airport today, despite impassioned pleas by employees who will now have to reapply for their jobs and likely face pay and benefit cuts.

The vote to select Chicago-based Standard Parking to manage parking came after several parking employees that are now employed by Kent County spoke during the public comment period. The group questioned the fairness of the process and asked the board to delay the vote and give them more time to negotiate to keep their current jobs.

Finance Director Brian Picardat and airport leaders said the decision was difficult and based on a projected savings of $1.5 million over five years, even after a wage concession offered by current parking employees was factored in.

In an article just prior to the decision, the Grand Rapids Press noted ...

Parking agents who do maintenance and assist customers can make between $14 to $19 an hour, not including tips. Those jobs also come with nearly a 33 percent medical and fringe benefit package.

Airport Director Jim Koslosky said the decision was tough because union leaders offered wage concessions that would have reduced the hourly pay rate to around $13 an hour, saving about $135,000 a year. But, even factoring in the wage concessions, airport staff determined that going with the private company would still result in a net savings of $1.5 million over five years. Without the wage concessions, the switch would save $1.9 million over five years.

"Standard Parking already operates the airport's express shuttle lot and valet parking services, Koslosky said. The firm beat out five other companies that bid on the contract, including Grand Rapids-based Ellis Parking.

The union members are complaining about fairness.

What can possibly be more fair to everyone than putting the contract out to bid to 5 competing firms and taking the best offer?

What's 100% fair is to watch out for taxpayers, not unions.

Expect outsourcing to intensify. It will be a major theme in 2011, and a very welcome them at that. Taxpayers have simply had enough.

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

Unintended Consequences

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:01 AM PST

Here is an interesting video about the unintended consequences of various government actions. Ignore the lead-in message about hyperinflation and the scratchy-sounding start of a Fox News segment on BP and oil in the Gulf. Once the video gets going, the message about unintended consequences is very well presented.

Link to Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij4H9M55c64

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

New York Times 10th Annual Year in Ideas; #1 Idea: Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:37 AM PST

For the past 10 years, at the end of the year, the New York Times discusses 10 ideas for the past year. The ideas vary widely and may pertain to social trends, sports, or war. The lead-in idea for 2010 was "Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics".

It certainly is an honor to be mentioned along with the Big Picture and Calculated Risk. Here is a snip from the 10th Annual Year in Ideas.

For the 10th consecutive December, the magazine has chosen to look back on the past year through a distinctive prism: ideas.

Our digest of short entries refracts the light beam of human inspiration, breaking it up into its constituent colors — innovations and insights from a spectrum of fields, including economics, biology, engineering, medicine, literature, sports, music and, of course, raw-meat clothing. Happy thinking!

D.I.Y. Macroeconomics

Until recently, the economics profession largely controlled the production, dissemination and interpretation of economic data. Now there's a new trend afoot: do-it-yourself macroeconomics, in which ordinary citizens pull apart the data and come to their own conclusions.

The democratization of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe, which few economists predicted, tarnished the profession's reputation, prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned to — where else? — the Internet, where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.

At the same time, a growing army of knowledgeable "econo-bloggers" began analyzing the data available online. Strikingly, many of the authors of these blogs — the brains behind the Big Picture, Calculated Risk, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis and others — aren't academic economists but people with real-world experience in financial markets. Their Web sites offer sophisticated interpretations of economic data and hold passionate debates with their readers over the merits of the data. As a result, economic data that were formerly greeted with grudging acceptance by the public — the latest unemployment figures, for example — are now the catalyst for endless popular exegeses.

Please see the article for a wide variety of other ideas.

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

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Excel For SEOs: Manipulating URL Strings with Functions

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 01:17 PM PST

Posted by MikeCP

Over the past few months, I've been preparing a guide with the tentative title, Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas. I've embarked on this great journey because sometime during the #Mozinar back in September I decided that my Excel abilities were far too limited, especially compared to all the smarty pants that were giving great presentations and advice about SEO data analysis.

After talking with some of my colleagues I found that I wasn't alone in my feelings of Excel inadequacy. So Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas was born as a means to help others by documenting my quest for Excel Ninj-ocity. The full document will be released sometime in January, but here is a selection that I hope provides some value alone.

While having a working knowledge of the functions described below can help with a multitude of SEO tasks, the specific tasks that we'll be completing in the following include:

Isolating the root domains from a group of full URLs
Stripping the descriptive portion of a URL out of the full URL

-----SNIP-----

Lesson 2: More Functions - Text Manipulation

The functions on which we'll be focusing in this lesson are useful for dealing with text manipulation. As we'll see from the examples, there are quite a few scenarios wherein the SEO has to manipulate a text string. Some of the formulas we'll talk about are pretty simple to grasp individually, but can get a bit confusing when used together. We'll touch on:

LEN
SEARCH/FIND
LEFT, RIGHT, MID

LEN

Microsoft Excel Definition: Returns the number of characters in a text string.

Syntax: LEN(text)

Example of LEN function
I doubt this requires much explanation. LEN alone is fairly useless. Sorry LEN.

SEARCH/FIND

Microsoft Excel Definition:
SEARCH - Returns the number of the character at which a specific character or text string is first found, reading left to right (not case-sensitive).
FIND - Returns the starting position of one text string within another text string. FIND is case-sensitive.

Syntax: SEARCH(find_text,within_text,start_num) and FIND(find_text,within_text,start_num)

There are two differences between SEARCH and FIND. SEARCH is not case-sensitive, FIND is. SEARCH allows the use of wildcards, FIND does not. Under most circumstances, SEARCH is all you need, but it helps to know that FIND is always there if you've got to deal with pesky capital letters in URLs or something similar. Another reason to choose FIND is if you're dealing with URLs that contain parameters. Without properly escaping question marks, they will act as wild cards, which may cause some frustration.

In our example below, we've pulled out the character number at which the "/blog/" string begins. Much like LEN, this function is a bit silly on its own, but can be combined with some of our other functions to do some cool things.

Excel SEARCH function at work
This is good but its not very pretty, let's use IFERROR to get rid of those #VALUE!s

The IFERROR syntax: IFERROR(value,value_if_error)

Excel SEARCH and IFERROR functions at work
So much better!

LEFT, RIGHT, MID

Microsoft Excel Definition:
LEFT: Returns the specific number of characters from the start of a text string.
RIGHT: Returns the specific number of characters from the end of a text string.
MID: Returns the characters from the middle of a text string, given a starting position and length.

Syntax:
LEFT(text,num_chars)
RIGHT(text,num_chars)
MID(text,start_num,num_chars)

Both LEFT and RIGHT return the characters from a given position in a text string starting from either side of a string. MID is great for extracting a portion of a text string. I've lumped the three together because they are often used in conjunction with each other (along with a few of the earlier functions). Let's dive into an example:

Bringing it all together - Example 1

Let's say we've been given a list of URLs, and we want to extract just the domain.

Using LEFT and SEARCH together

This formula will do the job. Let's break down this nested formula, and see how it pulls just the domain out of our URL. Starting from the middle we see SEARCH, which uses the syntax:

SEARCH(find_text,within_text,start_num)

In plain terms, this formula finds the first instance of "/" in the cell to the left, starting at the 8th character from the beginning, which is done to start passed the double slash in http://. As we see below, the result for the first row of data is 22.

The same formula with the inner function calculated

Now we are left with a simple LEFT formula. Remember, the syntax for LEFT is LEFT(text,num_chars).

In plain terms: Give us the first 22 characters starting from the beginning. The number of characters differs depending on URL, but adjusts accordingly when applied to the rest of the table. We now have a nice listing of just root domains.

root domains calculated with Excel functions
Our list of root domains. The formula reflects the change to a table format from the simple range used previously.

Example 2

Let’s use SEARCH (with wildcards) and MID together to extract a portion of a URL:

A list of raw URLs
Let's assume we want to pull the descriptive piece out of each of these URLs for reporting purposes

We’ll definitely be making use of MID, as the text we want is in the MIDdle of our string. We’ll need to determine how many characters make up the "-tXXX.html" bit at the end of each URL. Since the length of this portion of the URL varies, but the format doesn’t (that is, "-t" + "numbers" + ".html"), we can use wildcards to find this character count.

Again, the syntaxes for these 2 functions:
MID(text,start_num,num_chars)
SEARCH(find_text,within_text,start_num)

Let's break down the formula for the first URL in our list.

Cell A2: http://www.example.com/lamp-maintenance-t83.html

 =MID(A2,SEARCH("/",A2,8),SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-SEARCH("/",A2,8)) =MID(A2,23, SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-23)

We've calculated the first instance of a "/" after the 8th character. This gives us our start_num values. We're also using the * wildcard to help us get the character count of the right-most chunk of text.

 =MID(A2,23,SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-23) =MID(A2,23,40-23)

We can easily calculate the number of characters for our MID once we know where our non-descriptive characters begin.

 =MID(A2,23,17) /lamp-maintenance

Hooray!

Example 2.5

Let's make a small adjustment to our original URL to demonstrate how we can use LEN in this formula.

Cell A2: http://www.example.com/t1521-lamp-maintenance.html

 =MID(A2,SEARCH("-",A2)+1,LEN(A4)-SEARCH("-",A2)-5) =MID(A2,29+1,50-29-5) lamp-maintenance

The additional +1 and -5 are necessary to make minor adjustments to the final outcome. Without them, our final result would have been "-lamp-maintenance.html".

-----SNIP-----

Thus concludes the sample lesson on manipulating text strings in Excel. I hope you've found it useful, and not too confusing!

If you have any questions, ask away in the comments and follow me (@MikeCP) and @Distilled on Twitter for more info on the full release of Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas. There's much more where this came from, including bits on pivot tables, VLOOKUP, Index/Match, OFFSET, and more!

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Story Time with President Obama

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, Dec. 20, 2010

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama high-fives a girl named Malia after reading "'Twas the Night Before Christmas” to the second graders in the library of Long Branch Elementary School in Arlington, Va., Dec. 17, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Christmas Crackers: Top Comments from 2010

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 03:42 AM PST

As we all wind down for the Christmas week, I thought I'd revisit some of the best comments left on my guest blog posts over the year…

Christmas Penguin
Image credit: Flickr

Regular readers of my Twitter feed will know that I am a regular guest blogger, often appearing on websites such as Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy and Search Engine Land, as well as writing here on the SEOptimise blog.

Some of the responses to posts I write are extremely knowledgeable and often provoke informed debate.

A blogger like me values these insights from readers, because a blog is not just a one-way street and the comments can often really enhance the usefulness of a post.

So, as the year draws to a close, I wanted to shine a light on some of the best comments left on my blog posts. Here are my top comments from 2010:

Digital marketing careers advice

Where? My Econsultancy post 'So you want to work in SEO?'
Who? Vivien Underwood, training and operations manager at Econsultancy
Why it's top: Vivien responded to other comments suggesting that there is insufficient digital marketing training in schools.

She offered an opinion – that most teachers and careers advisers will not be sufficiently "clued up", gave some examples of university courses that cater to the industry and even briefly reviewed them.

Then Vivien offered some excellent advice to school leavers on standing out from the crowd.

"I’d advise school leavers to consider digital specific work experience during their undergrad studies and then look to do a postgrad or professional digital marketing qualification which includes lots of sessions with practitioners and project based work to hone their skills."

Social is not commercial

Where? My Econsultancy post 'How not to use Twitter, by Rentokil'
Who? Deborah Lewis, PR adviser at agency The Hero Machine
Why it's top: In one short example, Deborah highlights the major issue with how so many companies operate on Twitter and other social platforms.

In fact, I have since used this example when illustrating the limitations of social marketing, and the importance of using it correctly to gain long-term benefits rather than short-term wins.

She said: "Just because really good friends will help you paint a spare room or clear out a basement doesn’t mean you should go out there, pretend to make friends in order to get a house cleared or decorated. And that’s why I think corporates get it wrong on social media – they’re not being social, they’re being commercial."

There is no 'magic formula' for SEO

Where? My Search Engine Watch article 'Why Google is Never the \’Only Customer\’'
Who? Heather Lloyd-Martin, head of copywriting agency SuccessWorks
Why it's top: Because Heather and I share a passionate dislike for those who believe that there's a magic formula to writing SEO-friendly copy. There's no 'trick' to online copywriting, it's down to creating useful, informative and shareable articles that will be popular online.

Heather admitted she felt my pain.

"Like you, I’ve chatted with clients who believe they have the magical formula for SEO content – normally something stupid like an 1,000 word article with a specific keyword density. When I talk about writing for customers, persuasive copywriting – heck, even writing something that folks would want to read – a typical response is, 'Well, we just care about Google.'

"Hunh? I mean, we all love those happy Google rankings. But if a page doesn’t convert – and worse, the writing is so bad that it hurts the brand – the company doesn’t 'win'. In fact, they’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money for nothing."

How staff can stonewall an SEO campaign

Where? My Econsultancy article 'Five things to consider before starting an SEO campaign'
Who? Russell Hogg, of web design and print agency Superheroes of Search
Why it's top: Russ elaborates on a problem so many SEO agencies encounter – a lack of staff buy-in among their clients. A lack of co-operation from a company's full-time staff can actively harm an online marketing campaign and this comment highlights the real issue. A successful relationship between agency and client requires work both ways, as Russ explains.

"At the end of the day, the client needs to understand the needs of any agency they employ, and vice versa…it’s a 2 way street, but all clients should expect, as a minimum, detailed benchmark reports on a regular basis so the client can at least keep tabs of progress…or not!"

Linking online and offline marketing

Where? My #JUMPchallenge post on SEOptimise ' How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing'
Who? Matt Owen, social media producer at Econsultancy
Why it's top: My post explored the benefits of linking online and offline marketing efforts, and how that could be achieved. It was written from the position that many companies already have splintered efforts – techies on one side and PR experts on the other.

What Matt highlighted was where this splintering often begins.

"Especially good to see emphasis on team integration. Too often companies find their departments at odds as the organisation scales up, so it's incredibly important to keep people in the loop and invest them with a set of core values rather than overly segregating them."

This advice will help some readers prevent the problems and join up their marketing from the start.

The importance of communication
Where? My Econsultancy post 'Five reasons your client hate you'
Who? A corporate identity from ambergreen Internet Marketing
Why it's top: My post highlighted five different reasons an online marketing agency might have alienated its clients and this comment makes the list because it highlighted the issue that underlined most of the points I made.

"Of course Clients do not like to be patronised by agencies using jargon or treating each client in the same way with the same formula. No business is the same, and until other agencies realise this they will not give clients the bespoke, tailored service that is needed."

The comment also reiterated the importance of communication across the whole of the company, as SEO is not an isolated effort.

"The larger the client, the more departments and people who will need to be involved and on board with any marketing or PR plan and the more important it is that an account manager exists to understand the layers of the business, after all, search does not work in a vacuum."

Guest blogging in action

Where? My Econsultancy post 'Link building for SEO beginners'
Who? Ashley Friedlein, CEO at Econsultancy
Why it's top: My post advised creating interesting articles to encourage blogs to accept your guest posts without sponsorship. It also recommended making as many industry friends and acquaintances as possible so that more people are willing to publish your articles.

What I liked about Ashley's comment was that it highlighted to readers the value of guest blogging – by drawing attention to the benefits of my own guest blog post.

"Very sensible advice. And, of course, this very post, on this very site, is actually an example of what you say in action! Valuable/interesting content + you’ve made friends with us (we like you back ;)) + link to your blogger profile which in turn links to your member profile which has SEOptimise – Search Engine Marketing which is nice link with nice anchor text. And now look… I’ve gone and linked to you again ;)"

Seth's Blog : Do elite trappings create success? (Causation vs. correlation)

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Do elite trappings create success? (Causation vs. correlation)

Does a ski trip to Aspen make you a successful bond trader, or do successful bond traders go skiing in Aspen?

It's college acceptance season, and worth considering an often overlooked question:

Do people who are on track to become successful go to elite colleges, buy elite cars, engage in other elite behaviors... (Defining elite as something both scarce and thus expensive).

Do attending these colleges or engaging in these behaviors make you successful?

It matters, because if you're buying the elite label as a shortcut to success, you might be surprised at what you get.

There are certainly exceptions (for professions that are very focused on a credential, and for the economically disadvantaged), but generally, most elite products like college are overrated as life changers.

It turns out that merely getting into Harvard is as good as indicator of future success as actually going. It turns out that being the sort of person that can invest the effort, conquer fear and/or raise the money to capture some of the elite trappings of visible success is what drives success, not the other way around.

The learning matters a great deal, and especially the focused effort behind it. The brand name of the institution, not so much.

Don't worry so much if some overworked admissions officer or grizzled journalist fails to pick you. It might mean more that you could go, not that you do.

Does advertising on the Super Bowl make your brand successful? I think it's more likely that successful brands advertise on the Super Bowl.

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luni, 20 decembrie 2010

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Lesson 2: More Functions - Text Manipulation

LEN

SEARCH/FIND

LEFT, RIGHT, MID

Bringing it all together - Example 1

Example 2

Example 2.5

Story Time with President Obama

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Do elite trappings create success? (Causation vs. correlation)

Do elite trappings create success? (Causation vs. correlation)

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luni, 20 decembrie 2010

Lesson 2: More Functions - Text Manipulation

LEN

SEARCH/FIND

LEFT, RIGHT, MID

Bringing it all together - Example 1

Example 2

Example 2.5

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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