Central Perk

miercuri, 23 noiembrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Tips and Tricks for Getting More Out of Google [infographic]
Owl Loves Its Head Scratched
Pepper Spraying Cop Becomes Internet Meme
Midnight Rider: The World’s Biggest and Heaviest Limousine
Most Popular Cars of the Future [Infographic]

Tips and Tricks for Getting More Out of Google [infographic]

Posted: 23 Nov 2011 12:16 PM PST

Get More Out of Google, Tips en Tricks for Students Conducting Online Research

With technology advancing as quick as it does, we sometimes forget the simple things that brought us here. To educate the students of tomorrow, we've got to continually remember the basic, but crucial tips of one of the biggest tech giant in our day has to offer – so get more out of Google.

More Infographics.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: hackcollege

Owl Loves Its Head Scratched

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 11:14 PM PST

Who knew that owls enjoyed getting scratched on the head as much as any cat? This barred eagle owl, which looks more like a Furby than a living thing, coos and closes its eyes in contentment when someone touches its head, and then grimaces unhappily as soon as the hand leaves.

Pepper Spraying Cop Becomes Internet Meme

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 09:46 PM PST

Last week, news broke out that U.C. Davis campus police pepper-sprayed non-violent students protesting on campus as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The videos shot of the scene showed a policeman, Lt. John Pike, walking up to the protesters, pulling out his pepper spray and then dousing them at close range. As expected, over the weekend, the incident went viral.

The Internet found a way to shame Lt. Pike for his actions. An accompanying Tumblr blog called Pepper Spraying Cop has now sprung up and that notorious photo is being photoshopped into everything from Edward Hopper paintings to Pink Floyd album covers to Star Wars stills.

Midnight Rider: The World’s Biggest and Heaviest Limousine

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 09:00 PM PST

The 25-ton, 70 foot long Midnight Rider is the world's heaviest limousine, according the the Guinness Book of World Records. Technically a "Tractor-Trailer Limousine," it was built between 1997 and 2004.

The owners of "The Midnight Rider" built it in order to recreate the possibility of relaxed, long-distance, luxury travel that used to be available via railroad. It has been classified as a one of a kind "Tractor-Trailer Limousine" with its 1870's Presidential Pullman Car décor. It's 70 feet long, 14 feet tall and holds up to 40 passengers. There are 3 separate lounges, a full-sized bar, and of course a bathroom.

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 07:42 PM PST

If you have been keeping up with sci fi movies in the past few decades, chances are you have seen plenty of futuristic cars. Thanks to the advancement of technology, cars of the future are becoming a reality. How would you like a battery-powered car? One with the strength of nearly 600 horses? Forged aluminum wheels? Those cool doors that open upward? They can be yours… in the world of tomorrow!

Source: compareautoinsurance

Seth's Blog : Please consider WEIRD

Please consider WEIRD

My latest book, We Are All Weird, came out 8 weeks ago, to very strong reviews and gratifying feedback.

It's likely you haven't had a chance to read it yet. I hope you'll give it a shot. (The Kindle edition runs on all computers and tablets and you can read it for free if you're an Amazon Prime member).

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book:

The mass market redefines normal

The mass market—which made average products for average people—was invented by organizations that needed to keep their factories and systems running efficiently.

Stop for a second and think about the backwards nature of that sentence.

The factory came first. It led to the mass market. Not the other way around.

Governments went first, because it's easier to dominate and to maintain order if you can legislate and control conformity. Marketers, though, took this concept and ran with it.

The typical institution (an insurance company, a record label, a bed factory) just couldn't afford mass customization, couldn't afford to make a different product for every user. The mindset was: This is the Eagles' next record. We need to make it a record that the masses will buy, because otherwise it won't be a hit and the masses will buy something else.

This assumption seems obvious—so obvious that you probably never realized that it is built into everything we do. The mass market is efficient and profitable, and we live in it. It determines not just what we buy, but what we want, how we measure others, how we vote, how we have kids, and how we go to war. It's all built on this idea that everyone is the same, at least when it comes to marketing (and marketing is everywhere, isn't it?).

Marketers concluded that the more the market conformed to the tight definition of mass, the more money they would make. Why bother making products for left-handed people if you can figure out how to get left-handed people to buy what you're already making? Why offer respectful choice when you can make more money from forced compliance and social pressure?

Mass wasn't always here. In 1918, there were two thousand car companies active in the United States. In 1925, the most popular saddle maker in this country probably had .0001% market share. The idea of mass was hardly even a dream for the producer of just about any object.

At its heyday, on the other hand, Heinz could expect that more than 70 percent of the households in the U.S. had a bottle of their ketchup in the fridge, and Microsoft knew that every single company in the Fortune 500 was using their software, usually on every single personal computer and server in the company.

Is it any wonder that market-leading organizations fear the weird?

The End of Mass

This is a manifesto about the mass market. About mass politics, mass production, mass retailing, and even mass education.

The defining idea of the twentieth century, more than any other, was mass.

Mass gave us efficiency and productivity, making us (some people) rich. Mass gave us huge nations, giving us (some people) power. Mass allowed powerful people to influence millions, giving us (some people) control.

And now mass is dying.

We see it fighting back, clawing to control conversations and commerce and politics. But it will fail; it must. The tide has turned, and mass as the engine of our culture is gone forever.

That idea may make you uncomfortable. If your work revolves around finding the masses, creating for the masses, or selling to the masses, this change is very threatening. Some of us, though, view it as the opportunity of a lifetime. The end of mass is not the end of the world, but it is a massive change, and this manifesto will help you think through the opportunity it represents.

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6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 12:47 PM PST

Posted by richardbaxterseo

And so it ends. By the time this post goes live, Yahoo Site Explorer will be gone. Let’s take a moment to silently reflect on the passing of a once great SEO tool.

Thankfully, there are a heap of Yahoo Site Explorer alternatives, with arguably more powerful features available than Y!SE ever had. Today, we’re going to take some fresh link data from your favourite link information mining tool of choice and supplement the hell out of it with even more data. Yey – let’s build a better Yahoo Site Explorer replacement.

A Special Thank You

This (long overdue) post wouldn’t be possible without the assistance of one of the SEO industry’s most unsung heroes – Niels Bosma. He’s the genius behind SEO Tools for Excel, which has opened up another level of SEO data analysis for Excel geeks all over the globe.

I’ve written about Niel’s amazing work over at SEOgadget before, so check out these links for a primer on the basics or an introduction on how to find lost links and get SEOmoz API data into Excel. When you’re done, we’re good to take it to the next level.

Here's the finished product, click the image for a massive, full screen image of this awe-inspiring spreadheet.

#1 - How Many Likes, Google+’s and Tweets Were Received to My Linking URL?

Let’s start nice and easy with a count of the number of Likes, Google+’s and Tweets received by a URL. What’s not to love about a page that received a lot of social love? These two queries will churn happily through your link data until you’ve got more social than you can shake a stick at.

Retrieve the Google+ count for a URL:

=GooglePlusCount()

Get the number of Tweets to a URL:

=TwitterCount()

Get the number of Facebook Likes to a URL:

=FaceBookLikes()

#2 - Are My Links Live and Accessible to Search Engines?

When you’re looking at link data, you’re looking at an internet that has been and gone. At least, you’re looking into the past – and we all know that link decay is an everyday part of the evolution of the internet. To take a super accurate snapshot of your link data, you really need to know if your link is still live.

On that note, check out this clever little formula:

=IF(XPathOnUrl(C2,"//a[contains(@href,'seogadget.co.uk')]")="","NOT FOUND","FOUND")

Translated, it means, “If you found a href link on this page with seogadget.co.uk in all or part of the href, say ‘FOUND’. If the response to that query was a blank cell, say ‘NOT FOUND’.” So you know, the SEO tools XPathOnUrl function returns nothing when no result is found.

#3 - Did Google Even Cache that Link?

In his post on automating SEO, Russ pointed out that not all of your backlinks may have been indexed by Google, and that you should identify them and link to them to get them discovered. That’s a very nice idea Russ! Russ’s solution was excellent, but required some fancy scripting work.

Assuming you’re not tracking new referrers with snazzy custom filters in Google Analytics, here’s an easy way to do it with Linkstant and the =HttpStatus function.

linkstant

First, grab all of the new referring URLs. I do that with Scraper for Chrome. Export the URLs and then in a new Excel tab, put this URL in to cell A1:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:

A cache: request will respond with a 404 if the URL is not cached. So, a simple concatenate, followed by a "=HTTPstatus" will give you a list of URLs that Google has cached.

This is probably not the best way, but it works just the way you'd expect it to, most of the time:

=CONCATENATE($A$1,[@URL])

Where $A$1 is our cache request URL.

Next, use this function to get the http status of the URL:

=HttpStatus([@Column1])

Grabbing the HTTP status of your URL list will give you a list of results like this:

a list of URL links that may or may not be indexed at Google

#4 - Get Search Volume Data for Your Inbound Anchor Text

An interesting way to identify links that might be a little above the radar, penalty-potential wise is to look at the search volume for the inbound anchor text used in the link. I mean, if you’ve got a lot of massively overcooked, highly competitive anchors from PageRank 0 sites, you’ve got a problem.

If you’ve got an Adwords API key, then it’s a piece of cake to use the Adwords API Extension for Excel – simply take a copy of all anchor text in the data, copy it to a separate table, de-duplicate it and run this array formula:

=arrayGetAdWordStats(KW,"EXACT","GB","WEB")

Then, do a VLOOKUP back in your main table and you’ll have search volumes for every anchor text used in your inbound links.

#5 - Extract the Domain From the Linked to URL

In my link data I really like to know if there are any potential problems with the domain I’m getting links from. PageRank 0 links, with extremely competitive anchor text could spell trouble, or at least some less than savvy link purchases. We're spending a lot of our time lately cleaning up this sort of thing, and this method makes it a whole lot easier.

Check out this formula as a very simple way to extract the characters up to, but not including the first trailing slash in a URL (assumes there's a "http://" at the beginning of the URL):

=MID([@URL],8,FIND("/",[@URL],8)-8)

If some of your links are from homepages (which often they are), simply add this extension to display the full URL, should there be no trailing slash in the URL:

=IFERROR(MID([@URL],8,FIND("/",[@URL],8)-8),MID([@URL],8,LEN([@URL])))

#6 - Get PageRank for the Linking URL and Domain

Yes, you heard that right. The old school link auditor in me can’t shy away from the fact that while PageRank is pretty useless as an overall proxy to rankings, it will come in handy if you’re trying to get a sense of the overall quality of the backlinks of a website. Like I mentioned above, a lot of PageRank 0 links from cruddy sites, with highly competitive inbound anchor text might be something you should make yourself aware of.

Here’s how:

=GooglePageRank()

What Could You Build?

There are a few more tricks left that you should go and explore in SEO Tools. I also happen to know there’s an SEO Tools v3.0 coming very soon, and it will kick ass! Though I’m really grateful for Yahoo Site Explorer, I’m not going to miss it. It’s sort of like an Overture Keyword Tool situation. When that disappeared, there was outrage, now, silence.

Have fun rolling your own tools and, as always I'd love to hear how you're getting on! - follow SEOgadget on Google+

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Introducing Social Analytics in SEOmoz PRO

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 02:40 AM PST

Posted by Miranda.Rensch

Hi there, Mozzers! It's me, Miranda. It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and I’ve missed you! Today, I have something super exciting to share with you: our newest addition to SEOmoz PRO, Social Analytics!!

zOMG, we have been working super hard on the new Social Analytics section; we’re excited for you to try it out and let us know what you think. This is the first step towards our bigger vision for offering social analytics and quantifying the impact of social efforts. In this first version, we support Facebook and Twitter, but we definitely plan to support additional social applications in future versions.

Let me take you on a quick tour!

Connect Accounts

You can connect your Facebook Page (any page a user can “Like”) or Twitter account, or both! You can currently connect one account of each type.

social analytics connect facebook or twitter account

You can also compare the growth of your network against a few competitors or peers.

compare accounts

Social Dashboard

On the Social Dashboard, you can see the size of your network for each account, a snapshot of the interactions that have occurred on that account (likes, shares, retweets, etc), and if you have Google Analytics connected, you can see traffic to your campaign’s domain from each social account.

Social Dashboard SEOmoz PRO

Monitor Your Network

You can see a historic view of how many followers / fans you gained each day and compare that to the followers / fans of your competitor / peer accounts.

See social network size over time.

You can also monitor the rate at which you gain or lose fans day after day compared to competitor or peer accounts. This helps you see if you or a competitor is gaining momentum in network growth. If you see a spike in your growth rate, it might mean that something you posted that day (or something posted about you) resulted in you gaining more followers than normal.

See network growth rate over time

You can also see which of your Twitter followers have tweeted about you and which have the most influence based on network size or Klout Score.

See top Twitter followers

Monitor Interactions

You can monitor key interaction metrics for each social account. For Facebook, see the number of fan posts, mentions, admin posts, post likes, and comments for a given time period. For Twitter, see retweets of your tweets, mentions of you, and replies to you. You can also see this data over time.

Monitor facebook interactions Monitor interactions over time.

You can take a look at the most liked and commented on Facebook posts posted by admins of your page.

Monitor Impact

You are able to see the number of visits to your campaign’s domain coming from Facebook or Twitter over time.

Monitor traffic from social applications

Of course, this is a very simplistic method of monitoring impact from social, since so much of the impact of social has to do with gradual brand exposure and trust-building. We’d love to provide more rich methods for monitoring this in the future (especially in terms of impact on search results), so please let us know your thoughts on what you’d like to see.

Reporting

Right now, you can export your social data to CSV. PDF reports will be coming soon!

Export social data to CSV

What’s Next?

This is only the first step in a long-term vision for rich, actionable social analytics. We want to eventually support additional social networks (Google+ and LinkedIn are at the top of the list), provide more insights on how engaging your content is across social platforms, show richer analysis of the impact of social efforts, and possibly suggest actions such as adding accounts you may be under-utilizing or identifying potential fans/friends/followers/contacts.

That concludes our tour of the new social feature. We’ll be doing a free webinar on December 1st at 10:30am PST where Casey and I will give a more in-depth tour of the tool -- you can register here. We would love to hear feedback on this new functionality, on features you’d most like to see next, and about how you use social applications and analytics tools in general. Happy social exploring!

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Watch Live: President Obama Pardons a Turkey

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Nov.23, 2011

Watch Live: President Obama Pardons a Turkey

Americans have been sending turkeys to the White House for the holidays since Ulysses S. Grant was President. But today, President Obama will spare a beautiful bird from the Thanksgiving dinner table - in keeping with modern tradition.

Watch the pardon ceremony at 10:30 a.m. EST on WhiteHouse.gov/Live, and read a blog post on the history of the turkey pardon.

Seth's Blog : The marketing of conspiracy theories

The marketing of conspiracy theories

A conspiracy theory is a complex, alternative explanation for the truth.

By definition, they're not true. Of course there are plenty of things that are the result of conspiracies. Call them conspiracy facts instead of theories. Countries, organizations and movies are often the result of people conspiring together, sometimes in secret. But the facts don't fascinate us, the theories do. (And while I have no doubt that there is widespread deception and a lack of transparency, I'm interested today in understanding why these theories spread and stick).

People don't embrace them because they're true, they embrace them because they are more satisfying, they show agency and intent, and they provide a level of solace by implying external causes to significant events.

At the heart of the marketing of a conspiracy theory is that it must be non-falsifiable.

A key tenet of science is that every useful and productive thesis and theory must be able to be proven wrong. For example, if you say, "I have ESP, but it only works if no one is testing or tracking my results," then of course it can't be disproven. If you say, "Columbus set off on his journey because a voice came to him in the middle of the night and told him what to do but he never wrote it down nor told anyone," then we must either take your word for it or move on. No room for science here.

Which is how they market conspiracy theories. Take a look at the many theories about 9/11 or the 12 men in Geneva who run the world or the Kennedy assassination or UFOs and what you'll see each time is that as soon as anything appears to disprove part of the theory, the theory changes. What is being sold is doubt, not proof. Doubt is something people often want to buy, particularly if it gives them comfort.

Marketers of conspiracies understand this, which is why they always lead with the doubt, always reinforce the doubt that we can't help but feel about just about everything. "Are you sure?" is almost always guaranteed to generate a 'no' as an answer.

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miercuri, 23 noiembrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Seth's Blog : Please consider WEIRD

Please consider WEIRD

More Recent Articles

6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data

6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data

A Special Thank You

#1 - How Many Likes, Google+’s and Tweets Were Received to My Linking URL?

#2 - Are My Links Live and Accessible to Search Engines?

#3 - Did Google Even Cache that Link?

#4 - Get Search Volume Data for Your Inbound Anchor Text

#5 - Extract the Domain From the Linked to URL

#6 - Get PageRank for the Linking URL and Domain