A Showcase of Infrared Photography

This may not be terribly webtastic, but it’s still AWESOME:

Today, we take you to get a tour of the world in a way that most never sees it. All the way through this surrealistic lens, the planet is transformed into an energetic and often magnificent landscape. In this collection, we are featuring some of the best infrared photography for your inspiration.
Well, in just about every problem solving circumstances, one tends to be ordered to think outside the box to get a solution. Fundamentally, it is all about of expecting us to see beyond the ordinary to discover the unexpected solution. One innovative field that seems to excel as a bonfire for taking this approach, and viewing the world in an extremely unusual way than the majority of us is photography. For instance, today showcase which looks into some great examples of eye-catching infrared photography which represent the standard and consequences of looking beyond the ordinary to get the extraordinary results. Enjoy!

Our Previous post about Infrared Photography

Summer at the Lakes II

Washington January 2010 Infrared

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Seriously, go check out the rest of them here: http://www.webdesigncore.com/2011/11/21/a-showcase-of-infrared-photography/

A SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer….

Sharables, part of The Next Web, brings some hilarity.

Earlier, while bored on a train, I asked Twitter what their favorite one liner jokes were. This one, from @TomWalsham was unquestionably my favorite. If anyone knows who originally came up with it, please let us know in the comments or via email.

Update: The joke apparently did the rounds last year when The Atlantic tried to establish who first came up with it, no conclusive answer unfortunately.

sdf

Site Speed, now even easier to access

Google Analytics Blog sometimes makes me tingle.  This isn’t really one of those times, but still:

Speed matters. Faster loading pages mean more visitors land on your site instead of waiting in frustration or leaving. The Google Analytics Site Speed report will help you learn which of your pages are underperforming, so you can address this potential barrier to your conversions.

The Site Speed report was launched a few months ago, but it required site owners to add an additional Google Analytics tracking code to see data in this report. Based on increasing user requests we are now making this feature available to all Google Analytics users and removing the requirement to modify your Google Analytics tracking code. As of today all Google Analytics accounts will automatically have the Site Speed report available with no extra work required from you.

Want to check out Site Speed in your account? It’s easy. Go to the content section and click the Site Speed report. There are three tabs within the Site Speed report for you to review: Explorer, Performance, & Map Overlay. Each provides a slightly different view of your site speed performance. The Explorer tab provides an overview of load time by page. The Performance tab buckets your site speed performance by page load time. The Map Overlay tab provides a view of your site speed experienced by users in different geographical regions (cities, countries, continents). Below are snapshots of the Performance & Map Overlay tabs.

 

If you have already been using the Site Speed report through the additional tracking script, you can keep using the report as before. Since the tracking code “ _trackPageLoadTime” is no longer required to enable Site Speed report, going forward Google Analytics will simply ignore it.

Interested in understanding the details of the Site Speed report sampling rate, tracking of virtual pageviews, and impact of redirects?

• Sample rate – Google Analytics samples your page load times to generate this report. For the more technical minded users you can adjust this sampling rate by adding to your Google Analytics code the function – setSiteSpeedSampleRate.

• Support for virtual pages – If a virtual path was used in the _trackPageview call, that path will now also be associated with any site speed data collected from that page.

• Redirection time – Redirects are now counted as part of the “page load time” metric, so it represents the total time a user perceives of your site loading. Current users of the Site Speed report may notice a small increase in page load times as a result of this update.

Still have questions? Check out the Google code site and Help Center articles on Site Speed. We hope you’ll gain insights from this newly updated report and be able to use it to optimize your pages.  Please share with us your thoughts on this report and any suggestions for future updates.

- Nir Tzemah, Google Analytics Team

Since it was announced that this is a ranking factor, I’ve paid attention, and when they merged your Analytics Data with your Webmaster Tools Data, it’s clear that they’re finally visibly bringing it all together.

How Human Evaluators Might Help Decide Upon Rankings for Search Results at Google

SEO by the Sea has an interesting one about what “might” happen:

A Google patent granted last week describes how the search engine might enable people to experiment with changing the weight and value of different ranking signals for web pages to gauge how those changes might influence the quality of search results for specific queries. The patent lists Misha Zatsman, Paul G. Haahr, Matthew D. Cutts, and Yonghui Wu amongst its inventors, and doesn’t provide much in the way of context as to how this evaluation system might be used. As it’s written, it seems like something the search engine could potentially make available to the public at large, but I’m not sure if they would do that.

In the blog post Google Raters – Who Are They?, Potpiegirl writes about the manual reviewers used by Google to evaluate the relevance and quality of search results by parsing through a forum where people have been discussing their experiences as reviewers for Google search results and collecting information about how the review program works. It contains some interesting information about the processes used by people who have been working to provide human evaluations for Google’s results, including a discussion of two different types of reviews that they participate in. One of those involves being given a particular keyword and a URL, and deciding how relevant that page is for that keyword. The other involves being given two different sets of search results for the same query, and deciding which set of results provides the best results for the query term.

 

In the Youmoz blog post Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries, Tom Anthony describes a process someone can use to measure changes to click through rates when taking a set of search results from Google and making changes to it. It’s an interesting idea, and may be worth experimenting with.

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Read the rest here.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that this is actually what’s happening.  Or may even happen in any probability.  I do think more humans need some input over at Googs, preferably ones that spent their youth with sunlight on their skin and had kissed someone romantically (a real someone) before they left Uni.

Secrets of Optimizing Content Your Mamma Never Told You

SEO Theory sometimes makes me glad that I stepped out of the SEO game.  Not because they’re crappy, but because they’re awesome.  Teh Interwebs is in safe hands with articles like this about:

Search Engine Optimization is not just about search. When you optimize your content for search you also need to optimize it for publication and strategy.

Let me ‘splain.

Why Normal SEO Practices Are Not Optimal

The search optimization tasks for content fall under the categories of choosing keywords for which you want to produce relevant content and then creating interesting content. If the content is neither relevant nor interesting then you’re not optimizing your content. Hence, the average spam Website that scrapes or spins content is NOT optimizing content (nor is it optimizing for search). Just because you get indexed and may have links that pass value doesn’t mean you have achieved optimal performance.

Search engine optimization is technically supposed to be about obtaining the most possible visibility through search, the most possible traffic from search, the most possible conversions from search — in short, the most reward or value from search possible with the least amount of effort possible. That doesn’t mean you should always be looking for low-effort tasks as the spammers do that and they are NOT optimizing for search.

Content performs optimally when it generates as much value as any one article or page can generate — that may include search referrals, it may include links, it may include brand mentions and other signals considered by search engines — it’s never all about the conversions. Your SEO sucks if you do not look beyond the conversions.

The more interesting your content is, the better it performs in its implicit and explicit search optimization roles. But your content also needs to be relevant to an optimal set of expressions (not keywords, but expressions). While you’re busy with your keyword research the world is busy creating new expressions or attaching new meaning and value to previously existing expressions. Simply because you don’t live under a rock you WILL be in tune with some portion of that change.

That attunement with change in the idiomatic processes of society should inform your content. If you are following formulaic SEO strategies then your attunement declines and your content becomes LESS optimal. In other words, doing all the things that the SEO pundits tell you to do is the exact opposite of what you need to be doing in order to optimize for search.

But if that’s the case, then why do so many SEO formulas seem to work? The answer is pretty simple: They work indeed but they don’t work as well as they should. They cannot work that well because formulas resist change. Change is the only constant in the searchable Web ecosystem and any method or process that resists change is doomed to eventual obsalescence. No one has found a particularly useful new function for the keywords meta tag, for example, so it has become obsolete.

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Read the rest (it’s long but awesome) here: http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/11/21/secrets-of-optimizing-content-your-mamma-never-told-you/

I liked it even before I saw the word ‘splain.  Too good.

“Minor” Google Panda Update On November 18th

Search Engine Land brings more panic:

Google tweetedthat they have pushed out a minor update to the Google Panda algorithm this past Friday afternoon.

The update impacts less than one-percent of searches, which is why Google labelled this a “minor” update.

There have been a number of updates since the 2.5 update on September 28th. We have been calling those updates Panda fluxes.

Google is making a conscious effort to provide more weather reports for when they do major of minor updates with the search algorithm.

Previous Panda Updates

Here’s the Panda update schedule so far, as we’ve tracked and had confirmed by Google:

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)

Since then we have not been tracking the Panda fluxes that closely.

So far, the weekend complaints over this “minor” Panda update have not been that dramatic. If we see an uptick in complaints, we will let you know.

I can’t wait to hear how this shakes out.  It might be that people only freak when it’s an update with a new name, but I can imagine most blog reactions can be along the lines of, “GAH!  AHHHHHHHH!!!  AH!  Not another update, we’re still recovering from the last one!  GAHHHHHH!”

Sometimes, I love when this shit happens because I get to feel so smug.  Heh.

Google being sued over ‘ripoff’ site

The Australian has an article that brings back some not-so-nice memories for me:

A FORMER senior South Australian Health Department researcher is suing Google, claiming she has been defamed on websites administered by the international company.

Janice Duffy, who has been unable to work since August last year, has lodged defamation action in the South Australian District Court because the search engine has refused to remove links to an international site.

The website, ripoffreport.com, allows people to leave comments about companies or people they believe are acting dishonestly.

The website alleges Dr Duffy has stalked psychics and is an embarrassment to her profession.

It also contains potentially defamatory claims about several Australian businesses and a federal magistrate.

Dr Duffy said she had contacted the US-based Google and Google Australia to remove the site or allegedly defamatory remarks since she noticed the posts in 2007. They refused to do so.

“I pleaded with the website and then Google to remove it,” Dr Duffy told The Australian.

“I started this action because I thought Google would remove it if I started proceedings. If I could have had it removed I would have moved on with my life.”

She claimed her personal details had initially been onsold to the consumer website.

Dr Duffy said she had suffered depression and had been unable to work since last year, when she left her job as a senior research scientist.

She feared the references to her, which appeared when her name was typed into the Google search engine, would prevent her from obtaining another job.

“There is evidence that prospective employers search the internet,” Dr Duffy said.

“There are no social profiles of me, no Facebook, this is the only thing about me on the web.”

Dr Duffy said Google had been trying to “deep-pocket” her, and she feared she would not have the finances to continue her action to a resolution.

Google and Google Australia lawyers would not comment on the legal action when contacted by The Australian.

See, this is the kind of [edited] that happened to us all the time at Healthgrades.  We’d get doctors ringing us because their home address was posted on their physicians profile (Medicare’s fault, well the doctor really for filling it out on the form – but not our fault) and threatening to sue us because Google was showing it in their “snippet”.

The snippet is the bit that Goog’s gets from your site and shows in the search results, even if you’ve changed it on your site since, the snippet is Google’s to control.

And this article mentions that this [edited] wants Google to take a website out of its index because she claims it defames her.

How is that Google’s responsibility?

Google serves up websites that have relevant content.  She herself admits there is no Facebook or blog or any other reference to her.  WELL GO AND MAKE SOME.  If you want to show up in Google for a search on your own name, then put your name on some [edited] websites.

This kind of [edited] is what makes it so hard to get taken seriously when you talk about Google.  This is what newspapers report on and what the average person thinks is reasonable.  Far OUT.

Using PPC Run Charts To Identify Problems & Opportunities

Search Engine Land gets in-depth sometimes and I can usually pull a gem out even when those posts are long.

Back in the 70’s, when the World Wide Web was still just a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes, a pair of Stanford grads working out of their garage started a world famous technology company called Hewlett-Packard. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What is it about Stanford students that makes them want to start businesses in their garages?

Anyway, what is interesting about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard practiced a management style known as MBWA, which is short for management by walking around. They felt they would have a better grasp on what was really happening in their company if they would wander through the company and talk with their employees instead staying in their executive office crunching numbers all day long. They were so successful that MBWA soon became a required study in many top business schools around the country.

Taking a page from their book, I’d like to suggest that we SEM account managers can get  a much better handle on our PPC campaigns work if we start practicing  MBCA – management by clicking around.

PPC campaigns, especially mature successful ones, can be truly complex beasts, filled with thousands of interdependent data points.

Speaking from personal experience, I find it is very easy to get completely disoriented when working deep inside the dense forests of keywords, ads, bids, budget and targeting options, and become utterly incapable of deciding what to do next.

When this happens to me, I often I step back, way back, all the way to the account level and try to get a bird’s eye view on what is happening inside a particular account. I always find that working with the  graphical trend line charts helps me regain my bearings and then be able to drill deeply into campaigns and ad groups to diagnose problems or identify opportunities.

These wonderful orientation tools are available free of charge within Adwords, AdCenter and many third party management tools.

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Read the rest here: http://searchengineland.com/using-ppc-run-charts-to-identify-problems-opportunities-101016

25 Incredible Logo Designs Inspired by Plant

Web Design Core lists logo designs inspired by a plant.  Which, I must admit, made me giggle at first, but I ended up liking it:

Logos are the visual representation of the organizations and their businesses, and therefore must be created with extreme care as well as professional approach. In the previous posts, we have already shared an article about Logo Design Inspired by Plants, and in this post we have gathered another ultimate collection of 25 incredibly designed logos that are inspired by plants or trees.
Logo designers are more often than not motivated by some objects they witness around them and nature is the primary inspiration for the majority of the designers. In this round up, you will see how designers have used flowers, tress, earth and objects found in nature to create remarkable and implausible logos.
So get ready to be inspired and feel free to express your opinion via comment section below.

Jardín Botánico La Carolina

ephfx

Art Flora Design

FAIRHEAD CREATIVE

Ecoki

FotoGrow

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Check out the rest here: http://www.webdesigncore.com/2011/11/17/25-incredible-logo-designs-inspired-by-plant/

Best Free Fonts of 2011

Web Design Ledger lists some free fonts (my favourite kind):

With only a month and a half left in 2011, it’s hard to believe another year is drawing to a close. If you’re a long time reader of WDL, you probably know that at the end of each year we publish a series of posts that highlight our favorite freebies and resources from that year. It’s an excellent way to show you what you might have missed, and to give the designers and creators some well deserved recognition.

To kick it off, here are the best free fonts of 2011. There were tons of great free fonts released this year, so it was a difficult task choosing our favorites.

Weston

Infinity

Ostrich Sans

Fabrica

Wisdom Script

Pacifico

RBNo2

Five Minutes

Hyperbola

Dock 11

Seriously, I LOVES me some free fonts, and lists like this are excellent because I can’t be trusted to remember the names of any of these or how they should be used.  Heh.