(TrendHunter.com) Although I’d like to leave my elementary day corduroy phase in the past, it seems it’s catching up to me. Perhaps I’ll even allow it to considering this Levi + Opening Ceremony corduroy collection. I mean,…
New research suggests that sitting for extended periods may lead to future health risks. Wow, scientists, wow (what did you really do with all the grant money?).
Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die.
“After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals,” Ekblom-Bak said. She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down.
…in a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? At least for a minute until you study the informational graphic a little closer and discover the actual purpose behind this “research”. Spot it? Nice try, Nintendo. We’re onto you.
You sitting down? Experts say it’ll kill you [msnbc]
Thanks to High Tide, who’s pissed he’s gonna have to start wearing pants to work.
Last night Facebook announced that they would be upgrading their Translations application to include an awards feature to reward top translators. The gaming techniques are similar to those employed by the team behind Causes, the third largest application on the Facebook Platform. With over 300,000 users translating via the system and over 70 languages now available on Facebook, it’s important that translators continue using the system.
The most important reason is that applications still rely on translators using the Translations application in order to internationalize their own applications. Facebook currently isn’t releasing information about the number of daily or monthly active users within their Translations application, but it’s an important component of Facebook which now has a majority of their user base in other countries.
The new awards fall into three categories: voting participation, words published, and translations published. It’s interesting to see Facebook using game mechanics to drive more interaction within the application. There was already a leaderboard which lists out the top translators, however the new award icons are an added bonus for the most active translators. Each award will be issued on a daily basis.
It will be interesting to see how many languages Facebook can get translated into. While there are over 6,000 languages in the world, 52 percent of the languages are spoken by populations of less than 10,000 people. 72 languages in two years isn’t a bad start for Facebook who is now one of the largest global online brands.
Many a times, webmasters who are penalized don’t agree that they have done something wrong with the Google guidelines. 90% of the webmasters complain that they don’t know what’s happened and Google has taken an unfair step by banning or penalizing them.
Even so, we all know that they aren’t right. Google bans/warns a site based on valid reasons. But it could be possible that, we aren’t able to find the problems on our site before they do. Webmasters have to accept it.
So, how do we make sure one’s site is not doing anything against Google guidelines ?
Use this tool – Spam detector. It checks for a couple of (not all) most common SEO blackhat methods on your site, and finds out if Google might consider it against their guidelines.
I can assure that it will find something “stupid” but I’d suggest that you take their advice seriously. For instance, it found that DSB has some text in the footer area that might be considered as hidden text. I hadn’t found it earlier – impressive !
So, if you want to make sure you stick to Google guidelines (most of them) and are not doing anything black-hat, check out the tool.
It checks the following factors on a page.
1 – Hidden text
2 – Doorway pages
3 – Keyword stuffing
4 – Unnatural text
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It’s iPhone 4 day! We’ve already seen rumors of a touch-sensitive case and an iMac-inspired concept. Now comes two actual patents filed by Apple that hint at stylus functionality and a customizable GUI.
According to Apple Insider, the first patent was filed in July 2008, and proposes a stylus outfitted with a conductive tip that would be compatible with the iPhone’s screen. It also includes the option of a powered stylus that could include sensors capable of measuring force and angle.
It’s possible—probable, even—that this is just a defensive patent by Apple to prevent third parties from creating a comparable device for iPhone use. But with the imminent arrival of iPhone 4, it’s at least something to consider.
The second patent, from July 2008, seems more likely to be actually implemented. It allows for different user interfaces based on one’s location—possibly similar to HTC’s Sense UI—as well as offering optimized controls for when the phone is docked versus portable.
Makes sense to me, and seems in line with Apple’s ease-of-use dictum. We’ll know soon enough either way. I’ve already got lots of ideas about my own Pre-Party mode, most of which are unprintable. [AppleInsider]
The iTunes Store is close to hitting 10 billion song downloads and to celebrate Apple is giving a lucky boy or gal a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. Of course, no purchase is necessary to be entered into the drawing.
To throw your name into the hat, you can either purchase a song from the iTunes store or fill out this form anytime between today and whenever the 10 billionth song is downloaded. The important part is that:
The prize will be awarded for the entry (either through a song download or through the non-purchase online entry) sent immediately following the download of the 9,999,999,999th song.
I just wonder what the winning song will be (assuming that it’s a purchase-based entry that wins). [Apple]
The history of ultrasound began with SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging) for submarines and has many applications with varying degrees of success since then.
The history of ultrasound, medically, has been primarily a diagnostic technology although it has been tested for therapeutic uses. Scientists and doctors have been capturing images from inside the human body since the 1940s and, despite its varied history, ultrasound has become one of the most widely used medical diagnostic tools in modern medicine.
- When invented the ultrasound? 1826.
- Who invented the ultrasound? Swiss physicist, Jean-Daniel Colladon.
- How was it discovered the ultrasound? Colladon uses a bell under water to determine the speed of sound in water.
- How is the ultrasound to what is available in 2009?
- Many studio sound vibrations (waves), transmission, propagation and refraction throughout the 1800s.
- English Lord Rayleigh published in 1877 "the theory of sound" and described for the first time a sound wave as a mathematical equation, forming the basis for future practical work in acoustics.
- The Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani, in 1794, demonstrated the ability of bats with precision navigation in the dark through reflection echo inaudible high frequency sound or ultrasound.
- Very high frequency waves of sound above the limit of human hearing were obtained by the English scientist Francis Galton in 1876, through his invention of Galton's whistle.
- Austrian physicist Christian Doppler and Buys Ballot in 1845, showed the Doppler effect in sound waves: loudness of a sound change if the source or the target was moving. A very significant history of Doppler ultrasound as it began.
- It was discovered in Paris, France in 1880 by Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques Curie, the electrical potential occurs when mechanical pressure exerted on a quartz crystal.
- The opposite of what was mathematically deduced from principles of thermodynamics by physicist Gabriel Lippmann in 1881. It was then possible for the generation and reception of "ultrasound".
- The detection systems were developed underwater sonar to underwater navigation of submarines in World War
- The first working sonar system was designed and built in the United States by Canadian Reginald Fessenden in 1914. It can detect an iceberg underwater from 2 miles away. Powerful electronic amplification was necessary for the development of ultrasonic instruments:
- The French physicist Paul Langevin and Russian scientist Constantin Chilowsky developed an ultrasonic echo sounding device called hydrophones, the basis for development of Navy sonar pulse echo.
- The discoveries and developments parallel to echo sound, as electromagnetic RADAR;
- ENIAC, the first digital computer;
- Transplants and point-contact.
- Medically, heating and disruptive effects of ultrasound have been applied to therapy, and then as a neuro-surgical tool, before being used in the 1940s to the diagnosis.
- Then Karl Theo Dussik, neurologist / psychiatrist at the University of Vienna, Austria, and his brother Friedrich, a physicist, first used in medical diagnostic ultrasound, trying to locate brain tumors by measuring a beam of ultrasound through skull, producing echo images of the ventricles of the brain recorded photographically on heat sensitive paper.
Late last week Google announced it was graduating social search from beta and making it active for everyone. I got a heads up from Barry Wise of KnowEm a day later, and we spent some time talking about what this meant for marketers. I thought I’d share some of our conversation with you.If you have a Google profile (like I do) and have any websites associated with your profile, when you are logged into that profile, your SERP’s may be affected by this new change. Google opted everyone in by default, so there’s no way to turn it off (other than by signing out or using anonymous browsing). Google has decided to ignore the “&pws=0″ parameter flag that they ignore for personalized search, a decision I really hope they consider changing.
Google is looking at the profiles associated with you and crawling who you are friends or associated with. Google uses that information combined with XFN tagging to decide what other results to show with your results. IMHO this is what the caffeine update is really all about. It’s about associating social information and real time social activity with your searches and incorporating this information to hopefully produce a better result.
To show you how different the results can be, here are three different sample keywords from two different people:
Depending on how much overlap there is between your social graph (ie the people you “friend” on social websites) you may have similar or completely different results. It’s highly unlikely that two people will have identical results, unless they work at the same company and have similar social graph (an unintended consequence that will flummox search agencies to be sure).
I’ve said this many times in the past: Google considers personalized search part of their POD, and it’s a strategic goal for them from the top down. Like it or no,t it’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. People are getting different personalized results and now they have the possibility of getting two additional personalized results based upon what their friends are doing/saying online.
In my opinion if you aren’t involved in social media at this point you are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. You’re missing out on the opportunity to get yourself a SERP listing at the lower part of the page. To be honest I haven’t seen enough searches to know whether, if you have an organic listing above, you might be locked out of a second listing below. However if you get a lot of social engagements that get talked about, shared, or retweeted by other people, that will definitely show up, giving you a second slot.
If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting to get involved in social media now is the time. However this sword has a double edged aspect. To get the most out of your efforts you’ll need to get involved and stay involved. Making a few half-hearted attempts isn’t going to bring you any results. Getting involved in social media may not be easy, but neither is balancing one one leg when you’re 8 months pregnant while performing wudang double sword maneuvers. But both can be done if you make it a priority and commit to making it work for you.
Advertisement: Find out how to get your bloggers talking about your products ViralConversations.com. #8
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.
Google’s Social Search – Affecting a SERP Near You
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Posted by Danny Dover
As SEOmoz has matured as a company, our SEO team has shifted away from treating SEO purely as an art and more toward treating it as a science. There is certainly the necessity for both perspectives but I believe we are now much more centered.
As a result of this shift, we have been running more tests and analyzing more data. Before I get into the topic of our latest test results, let me provide some important points to establish context.
- There is overwhelming evidence that from a "ROI on time spent working" perspective, there is much more value in link building and creating content that is link-worthy than obsessing over search engine algorithm fluctuations like PageRank sculpting. Link building is human oriented and thus more inline with the long term goals of the search engines. Links also have the added bonus of being easy to measure and thus easier to prioritize.
- We can’t directly measure how PageRank flows so we can only infer results. This needs to be acknowledged when interpreting test results. That said, we also can’t directly measure objects outside our solar system and this solution of inference has become the basis for modern Astronomy. (If it is good enough for NASA, it is good enough for SEOmoz ;-p)
The Experiment
We chose the following five PageRank sculpting methods to test:
Rel=‘nofollow’ - The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. <a href=’http://www.example.com’ rel=‘nofollow’>example</a>
Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.
Iframe – Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.
Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.
Control Case – Null test with standard links.
Page Setup
We then built five standardized websites that used these different methods (one used iframes for its test links, another one used Javascript for its test links, etc..) and included one normal link with the anchor text of a phrase that was completely unique on the Internet.
Each website in the experiment used the same template. Each keyword phrase was targeted in the same place on each page and each page had the same amount of images, text and links.
The variables were:
- links (based on experiment type)
- colors
- photos (although alt text was standardized)
- text (randomized text based on proper English grammar using a standardized word-set)
We then did everything we could to make sure that all of these pages received the same amount of link juice from external sources.
The null result would be a random assortment of experiment types ranking in the SERPs.
The alt result would be one experiment type outranking all of the others.
Redundancy
We then duplicated this experiment eight times in parallel. This meant 40 different domains, 40 different IP addresses, 8 different WHOIS records, 8 different hosting providers and 8 different payment methods. (We then went outside and drank)
We ran this test for 2 months.
The Results
| PageRank Sculpting Method | Average Rank in Google |
| Nofollow | 2.4 |
| Link Consolidation | 3.0 |
| Iframe | 3.1 |
| Javascript | 3.2 |
| Control Case | 3.2 |
As you can see, the nofollow method ranked an average of 1 place higher (0.7) in the SERPs than the control result. This is significant when you realize the total is out of 5.
It appears that the iframe method and link consolidation were slightly effective but the margin was so small that they could be contributed to error.
As expected the Javascript method did not work at all. (Since the external scripts were blocked, the engines never saw the links)
The Bottom Line
Despite what the search engine representatives say, nofollow is still an effective way for sculpting PageRank. If you have nofollow sculpting already installed, don’t remove it. If you don’t have it installed, implementing it probably won’t make a drastic change but we encourage you to test this when it is responsible to do so.
I invite you to share your interpretation of these results in the comments below. As with any experiment, these results are not valid unless they can be reproduced and stand up to the critique of others. What should we do differently in future experiments?
During media megaconglomorate News Corp’s earnings call—which owns publisher HarperCollins—the Dark Lord Rupert Murdoch reveals, “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.” Ruh roh.
And here’s the deathblow: Murdoch says News Corp‘s deal with Apple “does allow some flexibility and higher prices” and now Amazon’s willing to renegotiate.
It seems brutally clear that every publisher is going to shift to the agency model: They set their own price for books, and whoever’s selling it takes a cut. Sure, they get less absolute dollars per book than selling it wholesale—say, selling it to Amazon for $15, who takes a $5 hit to sell it for $9.99—but they’re convinced it’ll preserve the value of books. I’m sure that’s exactly what’s going to happen when ebook prices everywhere creep up by several dollars—people will totally think they’re worth more. [MediaMemo]