Central Perk

miercuri, 21 septembrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

If We Could Use Photoshop in Real Life
The Notorious International Breakdance Event 2011 - All Battles All
Oktoberfest 2011
Pakistani Truck Art

If We Could Use Photoshop in Real Life

Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:36 PM PDT

Photoshop would make the real world a whole lot more fun. Just look at all the things we could use it for.

The Notorious International Breakdance Event 2011 - All Battles All

Posted: 20 Sep 2011 10:31 PM PDT

The Notorious International Breakdance Event 2011 held in Heerlen, Holland and Featuring the Best Bboys from around the World.

This hip-hop dance festival featured talented b-boys around the world. Infact more awesome then step up..

Oktoberfest 2011

Posted: 20 Sep 2011 09:35 PM PDT

On September 17th, the 178th Oktoberfest opened in Munich, Germany, with the traditional tapping of the first keg of beer by Munich's mayor, Christian Ude, shouting "O'zapft is!" ("It's tapped!"). Oktoberfest is a three week-long celebration of Bavarian culture that delights around five million people each year making it the world's largest fair.

Last year, visitors drank more than 7 million one-liter mugs of beer. Attendance is free, but the beer will cost you: The price of a mug at any of the 14 tents this year comes to €9.20 ($12.60 U.S.). Gathered here are some of the scenes from Oktoberfest 2011's first weekend.

Related Posts:
Oktoberfest 2010
Oktoberfest 2009
Oktoberfest 2008 in Munich
Smoking Hot Oktoberfest Lederhosen Babes

Pakistani Truck Art

Posted: 20 Sep 2011 09:09 PM PDT

Pakistan, the country today is known for terrorism and extremism but it has beautiful culture and lovely people. In this post we are discussing wondorous truck and bus decoration of art of Pakistan. This extraordinary tradition has it's routes in the days of the Raj when craftsmen made glorious horse draw carriages for the gentry. In the 1920′s the Kohistan bus company asked the local Michaelangelo, Ustad Elahi Buksh, a master craftsmen to decorate their buses to attract passengers. Buksh employed a community of artists from the Punjab town of Chiniot, who's ancestors had worked on many great palaces and temples dating back to the Mogal Empire.

It was not long before truck owners followed suite with their own designs. Through the years the materials used have developed from wood and paint to metal, tinsel, plastic and reflective tape. Within the last few years trucks and buses have been further embellished with full lighting systems.

This art is so Pakistani, that the freight trucks which are built by Ford, General Motors, Hino Pak etc in beautiful aerodynamic shapes are first retro-fitted with very Pakistani stlye bodies and a special 'viewing deck' at the top of Driver's cab. The 'viewing deck' is a very multipurpose extra space. It is used by 'cleaners' to sleep at night and also to load extra luggage when needed.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Private Beta of Social Analytics in the PRO Web App: 1,000 Spots Available

Posted: 20 Sep 2011 05:30 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

In two weeks, we'll be making the first spots available for the beta of a highly anticipated (and heavily requested) feature: social media analytics inside the PRO web app. The beta will launch with Facebook and Twitter, and in months to come we may add LinkedIn and Google+. For now, though, we'd love to get up to 1,000 beta testers into the service - we need to run for ~1 month to study how the data collection performs and scales before we release it to everyone using PRO (14K+ accounts and 30K+ campaigns).

Here's the link to the survey & signup. Just fill that out and when we're ready, we'll start adding you to the beta. Note that we might not be able to include everyone in the private beta, and it may be a trickle (50-100 accounts) in the first week or two (starting the first week of October).

The social analytics feature is designed to track:

Growth of your Twitter + Facebook accounts
Traffic from Facebook + Twitter (via connection to Google Analytics)
Key metrics from Twitter:
- Followers
- Retweets
- Most Retweeted Content
- @ Replies
- @ Mentions
- Interaction Analysis (see screenshot below)
Key metrics from Facebook:
- Fans
- Likes
- Fan Posts (quantity of posts on your wall by fans)
- Mentions (any post to your wall that mentions your page's name)
- Admin Posts (your posts)
Comparison of your FB/Twitter accounts against Competitors (for public data like fans/followers)

Over time, there may be more functionality as well, but we wanted to start by tracking some of the key reach metrics that we've seen carry value (I mentioned a bunch of these in my post on social media KPIs).

Here's a bunch of screenshots (note that some of these aren't finalized nor showing all the features):

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Screenshot 4

Hopefully, you're as excited as we are. If so, we'd love to have you join the beta by signing up here!

Once we've done some thorough testing, we hope to have this rolled out to everyone using the web app in November, and will be iterating and improving thereafter. Thanks for all the support, and big kudos to the Moz engineering + product teams, who've put together something pretty damn cool here :-)

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President Obama at the U.N. General Assembly

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, September 21, 2011

President Obama at the U.N. General Assembly

This week, President Obama is traveling to New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Yesterday, he participated in the Open Government Partnership event, reiterating our commitment to making governments more open, transparent and accountable to their citizens. He also addressed a meeting of international partners to show support for the new Libya and plan for a post-Qaddafi future.

Have a question about any of the issues that the President discussed this week?

Tune in to an Open for Questions with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting on Friday, September 23rd at 12:00 p.m. EDT.

President Barack Obama listens to remarks during a high level meeting on Libya at the United Nations North Lawn Building in New York, N.Y., Sept. 20, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Klout Score Optimisation or Influencer SEO

Posted: 20 Sep 2011 06:15 AM PDT

Recently there has been much talk about Klout. You could call it a swelling hype. Usually a new service goes all out to get noticed but Klout has been around for quite a while. Over time the service which attempts to identify and classify influencers on social media has gained considerable influence itself.

There are already lots of lists with Klout score optimisation techniques.

Some remind me of old school SEO. Indeed, some people propagate short cuts to boost your Klout influence artificially.

While many people rightfully contest the true importance of the Klout score, it’s still one of the best ways to measure influence on the Web without resorting to simplistic metrics such as followers counts. Klout also combines several profiles into one metric. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts among others, so that you get an overview of your overall authority or activity.

Klout measures influence by relying on activity levels.

So when you stop tweeting, your Klout score dwindles quite quickly. Thus some of the most important influencers who are less actively social networking have a Klout score below their actual authority. Until Klout counts blog subscribers or website traffic as signs of influence, the Klout score does not reflect true authority on the Web – just the social media presence.

Knowing all the drawbacks, Klout score and the metrics that are used to calculate it are still very useful:

Network Influence
Amplification Probability
True Reach

People from outside your industry or niche can quickly assess who is actively participating in the social media conversation on the topic of their interest. So when they want to spread something on social networking sites, they might approach these people. There is even one company in the fashion sector that announced a party where the entry depended on the Klout score. If yours is below 40, they wouldn’t let you in.

My Klout score is luckily above 50, which is good but not great. Strangely enough the official SEOptimise account - with many more Twitter followers and thus a higher “true reach”, as Klout puts it – has more or less the same Klout score. The explanation is probably simple – SEOptimise as a company does not socialise as much as I do as a person.

Our social media presence is more about broadcasting than about networking. Most companies social media accounts fall into this category, so that individual people and their personal accounts have (by and large) higher Klout scores, it seems. When the account holder and the brand are one, as in the case of Smashing Magazine and Vitaly Friedman, the score seems to be highest.

According to Klout, Vitaly Friedman is more influential than Barack Obama.

This might come as a surprise to people who are not interested in web design and similar resources, but not to me – especially as Barack Obama has neglected his social media accounts after winning the election back in 2008. His teams didn’t tweet much for months after the election, for instance. Still, most people might expect Obama to be more influential on the web than even the most popular bloggers.

There are two ways to use Klout for SEO: optimisation of your own profile as an influencer, or finding influencers for the topic you want to become known for. Today I’d like to focus on the making your own profile on Klout score higher. As you know, I don’t like technical SEO tricks but instead choose to practice human SEO. Nothing is better than to boost your Klout Score. How can you achieve it?

Add all the important networks – at least Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – so that you get a realistic assessment of your reach.
Encourage your readers and followers to connect with you on Klout as well. It’s not as time consuming as Facebook or Twitter but has more direct effects on your score.
Use your existing networks actively and share great content regularly.
Invite people who influence you and are not yet registered to Klout. Once they join and fill out their profile their score gets higher, and thus yours do as well.
Give Klout to people who influence you; they may give you K+ as well when they know you already or check out your profile.
Import your lists from Twitter so that everyone who is already on them gets notified as being on your list.
Check the list of topics you are influential for and customise it by deleting the topics you don’t care about. Most people only look at the first three topics you are an influencer in.
Socialise with people who have a Klout score similar to yours – do not just focus on those having huge numbers but no time to even notice you
Encourage your friends who are influential on the web but not yet on Klout to participate in the Klout measurement: the more their Klout score reflects their true influence, the better will be your score as well.
Add a Klout badge to your website and use a browser extension to identify influencers on Twitter.com.

That said, I strongly encourage you to join Klout and make sure your Klout score is representative of your influence. In the US, Klout already organises special product presentations just for influencers.

I can imagine that in future your Klout score might get very important in real life and that you’ll get discounts as a Klout-certified influencer.

Are you on Klout? Tell us your user name in the comment section. Let’s influence each other!

* CC image by Ken Yeung

Seth's Blog : We Are All Weird

We Are All Weird

My new book launches today. (Link includes translations to three languages and worldwide availability, too).

If you think you'd like it in hardcover, hurry, as we only put a limited number in stock and we have no plans to reprint. Kindle too, of course, without limits.

What are you going to do with your weirdness? Or the weirdness of everyone around you?

During the age of mass (mass marketing, mass manufacturing, mass schooling, mass movements) the key was normal. Normal was important because you needed (were required) to fit into your slot. Manufacturers insisted because profits depended on it.

Normal diets made it easier for mass food manufacturers to generate a profit. Normal driving habits made it easier for mass car manufacturers to reach their production minimums. Normal behavior made you easier to control.

But what happens when mass disappears? When we can connect everyone, customize and optimize--then what happens to normal?

Normal is so ingrained in what we do every day that it's difficult to notice that your tendency toward the normal is now obsolete.

This book is personal, heartfelt and urgent. I hope that you'll take the time to read it. In the words of the philosopher Dr. Seuss, "We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."

I'm going to dive into the details here over time, but since you're in a hurry, here are a few early reviews:

"This is a book about giving a damn. It's about caring about what you do and (as importantly) who you do it for. Professional apathy is a relic of a dead era and, as Seth teaches brilliantly, a mentality you cling to at great peril. Everyone with a pulse and a paycheque should be living We Are All Weird."

--Chris Taylor, Founder of ActionableBooks.com (book summary here)

"This book will resonate with anyone who wants to lead a tribe, be authentic, dance to the beat of their own music and make a difference in the world. If your inner critic (the resistance) has been telling you that you are not enough, your work is not good enough and who do you think you are to make a difference, then buy this book. Let your freak flag fly high!"

--Sherold Barr, Master Coach + Freedom Fighter

"Seth has done it again. Open this book to almost any page. Read it, and change your thinking, your work, your life, or better express your art. Weird how he does this, isn't it?"

--Rob Berkley, Executive Coach, VisionDay.com

PS We've done some interesting things with the publishing of this book, and as always, I share the best parts on the Domino blog.