marți, 1 februarie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Mortal Kombat: Brutal X-Ray Action Highlights

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 03:55 PM PST

IGN sits down to interview the team of the new Mortal Kombat about the brutal new fighting system. Check out these bone breaking damage features.

85 Strange and Stunning Buildings Architecture

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 01:57 PM PST

The term Architecture can refer to a process, a profession or documentation. As a process, architecture is the activity of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures by a person or a computer, primarily to provide shelter. As a profession, architecture is the role of those persons or machines providing architectural services. As documentation, usually based on drawings, architecture defines the structure and/or behavior of a building or any other kind of system that is to be or has been constructed.

01. Device to Root Out Evil (Vancouver, Canada)


02. The Crooked House (Sopot, Poland)


03. Museum of Contemporary Art (Niteroi, Brazil)


04. ING Headquarters (Amsterdam, Netherlands)


05. Experience Music Project (Seattle, Washington, USA)


06. Dancing Building (Prague, Czech Republic)


07. Druzhba Holiday Center (Yalta, Ukraine)

08. Lotus Temple (Delhi, India)


09. Forest Spiral Building (Darmstadt, Germany)


10. The Torre Galatea Figueras (Spain)


11. Upside Down House (Szymbark, Poland)


12. The Basket Building (Ohio, USA)


13. The Ufo House (Sanjhih, Taiwan)

14. Stone House (FAFE, Portugal)


15. Kansas City Public Library (Missouri, USA)


16. Stata Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)


17. The Hole House (Texas, USA)


18. Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang, North Korea)

19. Container City (London, UK)


20. Erwin Wurm: House Attack (Viena, Austria)


21. Solar Furnace (Odeillo, France)


22. Nakagin Capsule Tower (Tokyo, Japan)


23. Beijing National Stadium (Beijing, China)


24. CCTV Tower – China Central Television Headquarters (Beijing, China)


25. The Egg (Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York, USA)


26. Ripley's Building (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada)


27. Ripley's Believe It or Not! (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada)


28. Fuji television building (Tokyo, Japan)


29. Olympic Stadium (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)


30. Blur Building (Yverdon-les-Bainz, Switzerland)


31. The Puerta de Europa towers (Madrid, Spain)


32. Gas Natural headquarters (Barcelona, Spain)


33. Wonderworks (Pigeon Forge, TN, USA)


34. Habitat 67 (Montreal, Canada)


35. Manchester Civil Justice Centre (Manchester, UK)


36. Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles, California, USA)


37. Shoe House (Pennsylvania, USA)


38. The National Library (Minsk, Belarus)


39. Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain)


40. Air Force Academy Chapel (Colorado, USA)


41. Fashion Show Mall (Las Vegas, USA)


42. Edificio Mirador (Madrid, Spain)


43. Luxor Hotel & Casino (Las Vegas, USA)


44. Grand Lisboa (Macau, China)


45. Dome House (Florida, USA)


46. Gherkin Building (London, UK)


47. Tempe Municipal Building (Tempe, Arizona, USA)


48. National Architects Union Headquarters (Romania)


49. Cubic Houses (Rotterdam, Netherlands)


50. Nord LB building (Hannover, Germany)


51. Turning Torso (Malmö, Sweden)


52. Lloyd's building (London, UK)


53. Wozoco Apartments (Amsterdam, Holland)


54. UCSD Geisel Library (San Diego, California, USA)


55. Chapel in the Rock (Arizona, USA)


56. Atomium (Brussels, Belgium)


57. Great arche of defense (Paris, France)


58. Ferdinand Cheval Palace (France)


59. Cathedral of Brasilia (Brazil)


60. Errante Guest House (Chile)


61. The Museum of Play (Rochester , USA)


62. Jumeirah Emirates Towers (Dubai, UAE)


63. Burj al Arab (Dubai, UAE)


64. Raffles Dubai in Wafi city (Dubai, UAE)


65. National centre for the performing arts (Beijing, China)


66. Digital Beijing (Beijing, China)


67. Water Cube (Beijing, China)


68. Atlantis (Dubai, UAE)


69. Nordpark Cable Railway (Innsbruck, Austria)


70. The Valencia Opera House (Valencia, Spain)


71. Water Tower (Zaragoza)


72. Pabellon de Aragon (Zaragoza)


73. Eden project (United Kingdom)


74. Royal Ontario Museum Expansion (Toronto, Canada)


75. John Curtin School of Medical Research (Australia)


76. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Nice, France)


77. Kunsthaus (Graz, Austria)


78. State Department for Traffic (Tbilis, Georgia)


79. Tenerife Concert Hall (Canary Islands, Spain)


80. Berlin Zeiss Planetarium (Berlin, Germany)


81. Montreal Biosphère (Canada)


82. Esplanade Theatres, Singapore


83. La Pedrera (Barcelona, Spain)


84. National Congress Building (Brazil)


85. Robert Bruno's steel house (Lubbock, Texas)

Chinese Six Year Old Is Social Outcast

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 01:41 PM PST

This young boy has lost his parents to AIDs. Ah Long is only 6 years old. He was born with HIV. He lives in his parents' shack in Guangxi Province, China. And he has to fend for himself because most people are afraid to get close enough to care for him. His only friend is his dog.

Long's 84-year-old grandmother won't let him live with her. She sometimes visits him helping to plant some vegetables and do some cooking. The local school won't let him attend classes, because other kids' parents promised to kill him if he comes closer to their children. Doctors won't treat his wounds.


The civil bureau provides Ah Long with 70 yuan monthly subsistence allowance. This is about $10. Surely, this is not enough for this little kid to live on.

Ah Long studies all by himself. He grows cabage and leek, and raises chickens.He does his own washing and much of his own cooking. His best and only friend named Lao Hei is the only close soul he has left. Long's dog sleeps with his master and plays with him.


From time to time kind-hearted people bring him clothes, food and old blankets. One man, for example, brought Long 20 kilograms of rice and 5 kilograms of noodles. Another man brings him a weekly newspaper to keep up with the world's latest news.


























Source: english.people.com

Jodhpur: The Blue City of India

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 01:25 PM PST

Jodhpur is the second largest city in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It is also referred as the Blue City due to the blue-painted houses around the Mehrangarh Fort.

Why the population of the fortress city – the Blue City as it is universally known – took to painting their houses in various shades of blue is not completely certain. Yet most believe it is to do with the prevailing caste system in India.

It is thought that Brahmins – members of the priestly class – first took to coloring their houses blue (yet perhaps it should really be called indigo) to signify their domicile and to set them apart from the rest of the population. Soon, however, the rest of the population followed suit. History does not tell us which brave non-Brahmin was the first to do it, yet it happened and since that day the people of Jodhpur have steadfastly maintained this tradition.

Never Send Cakes by Post

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:30 PM PST

If you want to surprise someone with a great cake, then just take your time and deliver it personally. Or just place a Fragile sticker on the box. It may help. Otherwise your cake will be totally damaged like the one in this post.

Asian Art of Self-Defense

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:18 PM PST

The Shocking Numbers Behind Cell Phone Usage (Infographic)

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:15 PM PST

200,000,000,000,000 (two hundred trillion) text messages are received in America every single day, which is more than an entire year's worth of regular mail that's received in America. 3339 is average number of texts sent by an American teen each month.

More Infographics.

Click to Enlarge.

Source: onlineitdegree

Open a Locked Suitecase

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 08:41 PM PST

Demonstrating how easy it is to break into and reseal a locked suitcase using a pen. Unfortunately, suitcases are insecure and generic locks are not able to protect you. Tampering and resealing can happen in seconds! Ensure this does not happen to you.

Hockey’s Most Badass Goalie Masks

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 08:23 PM PST

The mask goalies wear in hockey have come a long way. Hard to believe there was a time when they'd raw dog it in the net. Those dudes had serious balls taking rock hard pucks to the dome. While the masks of yesteryear were primitive, they were also pretty scary. Even Jason Voorhees is like, "Take if off, dude. You're buggin' me out." So, with the NHL All-Star Weekend approaching, we decided to take a look at the most kick-ass, bad-ass masks in the sport. Try not to wet yourself. See the pics after the jump!
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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Summary of the #FutureSearch Talk with Google, Bing & Blekko

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 03:12 AM PST

Posted by Tom_C

Wow. Today has been interesting - I woke up to the news that Bing copies Google search results and I've ended my day watching a live cast debate between Google, Bing and Blekko over on BigThink.

This post wraps up some of my thoughts and insights from the news and the discussion because I think there were lots of very interesting tidbits and hints from the search engines. For a more complete blow-by-blow account check out the live blogging coverage from SearchEngineLand.

Image credit used with permission

Although there was talk of other things in the discussion, the two main points of interest in my eyes were:

1) Bing "Cheating" by Copying Google's Results

Danny does a phenomenal job of explaining the issue over on SEL so I'm not going to re-hash the details but the conversation got pretty heated between Matt Cutts and Harry Shum from Bing. Matt is typically very calm on these kinds of panels and this was the most heated I've seen him for a while(the last time I saw him mad like this was at SMX Advanced 2008 when paid links were a hot topic).

Matt clearly pointed the finger at Bing and accused them of copying results. Harry's answer was a little elusive but essentially boiled down to "we both do it". While clearly both Google and Bing are using user data to influence rankings Matt did say (and I'm paraphrasing here but the sentiment is correct) "we categorically deny that Google uses clicks on Bings website to influence Google results".

The discussion then descended into a debate about HOW Google and Bing get their data - the most obvious data sources being the Bing toolbar and the Google toolbar. The discussion here become a little bit finger pointing with Matt accusing Bing of sneaking the toolbar onto user's PCs via IE, while Bing responded by essentially saying no one reads T&Cs anyway so what does it matter (a pretty weak argument!). I could write a whole post about this but let's stay on topic shall we?

The conversation boiled down to the fact that yes, Bing uses user data on Google as a ranking signal - but that these keywords were outliers and that Bing does not just copy results. An official blog post from Bing reiterates this position.

So where does this leave us? The thing that most excites me here is that people are starting to talk about how user data might affect rankings. This is something I've long suspected influences rankings but there's been real division within the industry. Rand even did a whiteboard friday a year ago essentially saying user data isn't much of a signal. One of Rand's arguments is that usage signals are easily gamed - but it's clear that Google are watching these things closely.

Personally, I really hope this starts more of a discussion and more transparency from the search engines about how usage data influences rankings.

TL:DR:

  1. Both Google and Bing use user data as a ranking signal
  2. Bing uses data about Google, Google doesn't use data from Bing
  3. Google (or maybe just Matt?) are pissed off about it.

2) Is Demand Media Spam?

The second question boiled down to, "should Google ban Demand Media from the index?". I'll paraphrase the responses here:

  • Google - no, we look at page level and algorithmic updates to determine quality
  • Bing - the only reason there is this spam is because of adsense (weak argument Bing!)
  • Blekko - yes, we have.

Wait, what? Blekko really came into their own on this question - revealing lots of very interesting information. Blekko said that they have banned many content farms from their index as a result of enough people marking URLs from their domains as spam. TechCrunch broke the news this morning. The top 20 sites banned are:

ehow.com, experts-exchange.com, naymz.com, activehotels.com, robtex.com, encyclopedia.com, fixya.com, chacha.com, 123people.com, download3k.com, petitionspot.com, thefreedictionary.com, networkedblogs.com, buzzillions.com, shopwiki.com, wowxos.com, answerbag.com, allexperts.com, freewebs.com, and copygator.com.

Rich from Blekko went on to make the point that analysing massive data sets (I missed where from exactly? anyone know?) we can see that the total number of URLs getting visits from search engines is in the region of half a million. Compared the the 100s of billions of URLs that search engines know about. Rich used this data to say that if someone's searching for health related content they should land on one of the top 50 health sites where the content is written by medical professionals. Later on in the discussion, Rich talks about how Blekko wants to bring a wikipedia-style level of control to web search by letting anyone create a slashtag of niche sites (an example he gave included "gluten free").

Matt countered this by saying that if you search for decormyeyes (the glasses merchant that got a lot of press a few weeks ago) on blekko you don't get the website, suggesting that this is a negative user experience. Compare the following:

I think that specific example is kind of moot. We're talking about a niche query for a banned domain. More interesting in my eyes is the question of what do you do with demand media? I don't have the answer (otherwise I'd be rich!). I think Blekko's approach is interesting but ultimately will fall short since I don't believe that restricting queries to a certain subset of sites is the right approach - people want to be able to find forum postings, blog posts etc even about authoritative topics. Remember that user intent can vary wildly between two users, even for the same search query. I think Google's approach here is terms of providing a sampling of results for different intents (QDD - query deserves diversity).

In essence however there was nothing new from Google on the topic of content farms and Demand Media. The only news is that Google are developing a Chrome extension to allow you to block certain sites from your personal search results (and share that data with Google). This should be released soon, Matt has a working copy on his laptop apparently.

Bing, on the other hand, dropped in a fascinating comment. While talking about how you might go about determining algorithmically the level of experience of the author there was a suggestion that the authority of a piece of content might be tied to the author independently of the site. I don't think this is necessarily that new, after all the concept of citations in Google Scholar has been around for ages, but it got me thinking that especially with social data playing more of a role I wonder if we'll see personal brand authority being passed (somehow?!) to the piece of content they write. So for example if you all retweet this post, next time I write a blog post for Distilled perhaps that page will have slightly more authority than it would have otherwise. Could this be how we solve the problem of trusted sites rolling out millions of pages of low quality content?

Out of interest - this makes the humans.txt protocol a little more interesting....

TL;DR

  1. Blekko deals with Demand Media by banning them (not scaleable?)
  2. Google have developed a chrome add on that allows you to block sites from your own search results
  3. Bing blamed Google for causing spam with adsense (weaksauce argument.....)
  4. Bing hinted that perhaps author authority is a factor independently of domain authority

Wrapping Up

Well it's been a rollercoaster day. Personally I don't think this news is that revolutionary (good article by Matt McGee here about how it's not as big as we've been making out) but I do think we'll see a lot more public discussion of user data, how it's collected and how it influences rankings which is a good thing in my eyes.

In closing - I'd like to give Danny a massive pat on the back, I think the level of journalism in the original article was world class. Keep up the good work Danny.


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Is SEO Immoral?

Posted: 31 Jan 2011 04:00 PM PST

Posted by randfish

Inquiring Quorites want to know:

Is SEO immoral?

We search for relevance via the search engine. By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant. Thereby, wasting the user's time and resources. It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result.

Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?

Normally, I'd just leave a response on the Q+A site itself, but in this case, I felt the topic warranted some broader coverage. Let's start by dissecting the points of the question, then tackle the overarching theme.

"By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant."

This statement strikes me as fundamentally untrue. SEO, like any form of influence humans can have on one another, can be used for good or evil. The great part about SEO, in particular, is that using it to promote irrelevant results is, generally speaking, a fool's errand. I'll illustrate why:

Spam for Pink Bicycles

SEO is almost never applied to make non-relevant results rank for unrelated queries. And, I'd go one step further, arguing that if white hat SEO didn't exist, millions of search results would be far worse, as fewer high quality, relevant results would make their content accessible to search engines and well-targeted toward queries.

Complaining about SEO in this fashion seems akin to complaining about demographic profiling in brand advertising. It may irk you that when watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, clever advertisers have figured out that you enjoy the delicious, salty cheesiness of Cheetos® snacks* and thus, interrupt Jon's witty banter with pictures and sounds about their product. However, a world without ratings metrics, profiling and advertiser savvy would almost certainly show you far less tempting commercials.

The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) attracts billions of investment dollars and massive amounts of marketers' energies to accomplish three key goals:

  1. Determine what people are searching for and create content that serves them well
  2. Make sites, pages and material accessible to search engines so they can display it when relevant searches are performed
  3. Improve the ranking of already accessible pages so they draw in greater quantities of visitors

The beauty is that in an open, commercial market, those who do the best job creating useful content and marketing it in smart ways earn links and references that lead to higher rankings and greater traffic.

"It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result."

That strikes me as an extremely astute statement, and one that has a host of logic to back it up. Search results are like advertisements, in that you can show to ignore them or engage with them. They require far less time/energy than a traditional brand advertisement, but they also carry no greater weight or special impact. They're merely opportunities to click and discover if you've found something useful + relevant.

I also like the advertising analogy because in SEO, as with advertising, the goal isn't simply to show the ad, it's to inspire action. A terrible ad for a great product is just as useless as a great ad for a terrible product (perhaps worse). Thus, showing irrelevant results or attracting clicks that won't convert or take action is futile. The ad only works if the product can close the deal.

"Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?"

If SEO is misleading, then so is every other form of influence and marketing (and in many cases, SEO less so than the others). Human beings who were born in the 20th and 21st century recognize marketing and know what it means, how it works and who it serves. I had a good Twitter discussion with Paul Martin of Epiphany on this subject today:

Conversation on Twitter w/ Paul Martin

Admittedly, my responses are terse and not as TAGFEE as they should be (challenging to achieve this and provide content in 140 chars. but worth trying harder in the future). But, I'd stand by the general assertion that Google doesn't need a warning label, nor is their sometimes less-than-exemplary fight against content farms cause to abandon hope of good search results or paint them as immoral/unethical. If a site is producing bad content, fight fire with fire - make something better and/or link to something better. I'll start - this is how to make Sardine Spaghetti. Now it's more likely that those querying for a delicious dinner will come across that great link vs. content farmed junk.

Sardine Spaghetti

Oh man that looks good...

Let's wrap up by talking about the central tenet of the question - Is SEO Immoral?

I believe it would be hard to find a human being on the planet who believes that all three aspects of SEO - researching and producing content people want; making content accessible to machines and promoting already accessible content - are a violation of generally accepted moral principles. There are certainly those on the web who take offense to the manipulation inherent in SEO, but I believe that to be intellectually honest, those who do must also accept that this same manipulation exists in all forms of marketing and promotion. From polishing apples in grade school to writing college applications and resumes to optimizing our Facebook photos to ensure that ex-boyfriends/girlfriends see only our good side, life involves marketing.

It's the "how" that determines whether a marketer or a search engine passes vs. fails the morality litmus test.

p.s. Credit for the inspiration goes to someone made anonymous by Quora; thanks to Outspoken Media for their recent coverage of the site.

* Cheetos® is a registered trademark of a bunch of geniuses who put addictive chemicals in plastic bags.


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