100,000 Lucky Developers Selected To Test Google Wave

September 30th, 2009 by Dan Morrill

Google is getting ready to roll out Google Wave, and while it is unlikely that I’ll get an invite, I can still be remarkably interested in what could be a product that will solve some of the problems that I see in how to develop smaller communities of interests around colleges, friends, and others that are a more private and inviting environment than what currently exists as an option for people.

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Developing a Digital Footprint

September 15th, 2009 by Danny Brown

Whether you like it or not, you already have a digital footprint that you can’t fully control. People are talking about you; dissecting you; and making decisions about you every day of the week.

You don’t even have to be online to have a digital footprint – people and businesses that don’t have an active web presence are being talked about. By their customers; their clients; their past and futures. So if all this talk is going on and you’re late to the party, isn’t it already too late?

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Writing Site Content Through A Block

September 1st, 2009 by Peter Da Vanzo

Anyone who writes a regular blog knows about writers block. But no matter how much time you spend staring at that blank page, the article just never writes itself.

Pity.

So how do you overcome writers block?

Here are a few tips.

Topic Selection

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of topics to write about, the problem is we often feel we need to say something new. The reality is that not much is genuinely new. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Read the rest of this entry »

Are Bad CAPTCHAs Hurting Your Customer Base?

August 20th, 2009 by Anil Batra

CAPTCHA acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a way for sites to block spam. According to Wikipedia it is

“A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. Thus, it is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test, because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen.”

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Your Site Load Time Can Effect Your SEO Ranking

August 5th, 2009 by Matthew Elshaw

Have you ever considered how your website’s loading time might impact your search engine rankings? It might be time to take a closer look at this as Google and Yahoo! have both brought some attention to the issue recently.

Google’s stance on the issue has always been that page load times do not have an impact in their algorithm – until now. As part of their initiative to speed up the web, Google have said that page load times could become a consideration in the future.

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Correctly Using 301 Redirects For Multiple Browser Types

July 21st, 2009 by Richard Hearne

Interesting case I came across yesterday. A URL which 301 redirected went to different URLs in different browsers.

First thought – the server was redirecting different UAs to different pages. But no, the redirect was exactly the same regardless of UA.

So how come different browsers ended up in different locations? In fact the Location was the problem:

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Creating The Perfect Website Landing Page

July 6th, 2009 by Courtney Mills

A recent video from the Google Analytics Teams is a must watch if you’re trying to put together the perfect landing page for your website.

Called “GWO in 60 Seconds”, the video explains how you can combine Google’s Website Optimizer tool and Google Analytics to produce the most effective landing page.

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Learning To Understand Web Analytics

June 24th, 2009 by Matt Bailey

Hearing the questions from so many that come to my seminars, one would think that analytics was difficult or hard to grasp. Seriously, it has caused great wonder as to why the concept of analytics would prove such a perplexing and daunting task to so many people. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Make Your Site Social Media Friendly

June 3rd, 2009 by Lee Odden

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines.  Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

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Moving Forward In Anticipation Of Web 3.0 Strategies

May 20th, 2009 by Sally Falkow

We’re all aware that Web 1.0 is over and we’re trying to get up to speed with Web 2.0.  So what’s around the corner with Web 3.o? Peter Granat, CEO of Cision Europe spoke to the attendees of Media Relations Summit 09 about the future of PR and technology today.   The migration to online news is a well known fact now and not only is this affecting larger newspapers - 300 regional newspapers have disappeared. Read the rest of this entry »