There is no better way to bond with fellow employees than practicing your shooting skills together. A few weeks ago, OmniSpear decided to host a company airsoft shooting competition for a prize of $100. The rules were simple, each person had 5 shots and whoever scored the highest points on their respective targets won. Luckily for Steve Gillson, he managed to score 45 points and took home the prize!
Highlighted comments include:
Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
“We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
“Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
“We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
Using Google Adwords? Here’s how to make sure your CPC ads are on the right track.
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link for free. You can also embed your chatroom on your blog, myspace, personal site and many other portals. And, you can invite people through simple mail notification and twitterings.
Great short read on common mistakes made by programmers:
http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/2009/07/07/5-top-non-technical-mistakes-made-by-programmers/
9 Must-do WordPress SEO Tips that you might have missed:
http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/07/9-must-do-wordpress-seo-tips-that-you-might-have-missed/
Check out SpyFu (spyfoo.com). SpyFu allows you to type in a keyword and see how many Google Adword advertisers are on that particular keyword. It also gives you a breakdown of the following:
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The free service is limited to the Top 10 or 20 result set in most cases. Monthly subscriptions are $59.95.
www.spyfu.com
Are you or your clients still printing out and scribbling on revisions of a web project to convey the changes you want? Sending countless e-mail attachments back and forth between you, your team and clients? New markup tools make it easy to provide feedback on design, content and code without ever leaving your web browser.
Solution # 1:
Notable.com – Complete Website Feedback / Project Collaboration SaaS ($44 per month)
Notable.com allows you annotate any part of a page, even if you’ve never touched HTML. Visually leave feedback where the actual problem appears within the site. In addition to doing inline feedback, Notable.com keeps track of who suggests what and tracks the history of feedback made from each team member / client contact.
Key Features:
• Add inline feedback for both website layouts and code
• Quickly and easily collaborate centrally or remotely
• Review feedback history to spot trends in mistakes
• Easily add additional people to review and provide feedback
Cons:
• May be too pricy for small web development shops (starting price is $44.00 per month)
Feedback within Code Example
Feedback on top of a web design example
Solution # 2:
Aviary.com – Falcon Image Markup (Free!)
Aviary’s Falcon Image Markup Tool allows you to make screen shots of your web project and make simple inline markup. While not as slick as Notable’s service, Falcon is still useful for providing quick feedback. Best of all, it’s free! All you have to do is sign up for a free account and install a Firefox-compatible toolbar. The toolbar allows you to quickly capture and notate
Key Features:
• Free!
• Easy to use, FireFox plug-in makes screen captures easy
• Fast loading, even on slow connections
Product Video:
One of the most common questions I’m asked is how to get a web site to the top of Google or any other search engine. While there is no simple answer without spending a bunch of money, the following list should help you avoid some of the common mistakes made.
1. Using Wrong Keywords – Keywords are extremely important. You should figure out what keyword phrases mean the most to your website or offering, and to the people who are searching for your site. Try to focus on a small group of the most important keywords that customers may actually be searching for, and not every keyword combination under the sun.
2. No Smart or Solid Navigation Structure – Most optimal URL’s contain relevant keywords with minimal slashes and dynamic characters. Keep the pages and names true to the content, and the engines will appreciate it.
3. Incorrect Title Tags – Thinking that one title tag will work throughout your site won’t work. Each page should have a unique title tag to explain what the page is about. These titles show up in the Search Engine Results and help persuade visitors.
4. Splash Pages – Splash pages can sometimes leave your home page empty without much focus. If you insist on keeping a splash page, be sure to add relevant content and some form of navigation to keep search engines spidering through your site.
5. Balancing Code and Graphics – Your site should consist of a healthy balance between code (HTML) and graphics. This is key both to search engine visibility and conversions.
6. Lack of Keywords in Content – Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.
7. Images for Headings – Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet.
8. Using JavaScript Menus – Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider building a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.
9. Not using Sitemaps – Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Almost all the major search engines support sitemaps.
10. Not Keeping Content Fresh – If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines
