Google Excites Site Owners with New Conversion Numbers

Google Excites Site Owners with New Conversion Numbers

from Top News - WebProNews by Chris Crum

Google has just started sharing more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools.  Google used to just report the average position at which your site's pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now users can click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site's pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site's pages appeared at in the results associated with that query. Google also shows a list of your site's pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.

http://bit.ly/cFWgDD

Seven Steps to Online Marketing Success

Seven Steps to Online Marketing Success

from CMSWire.com - All News by Chelsi Nakano

One quote from Daniel Kraus stood out to me during his presentation at this week's SugarCRM conference: "It's not honesty, it's marketing."

The Magnificent Seven

Naturally, the whole room chuckled..........

http://bit.ly/cAfj9G

Opera Mini iPhone App Downloaded 1 Million Times On First Day In App Store (Robin Wauters/TechCrunch)

Opera Mini iPhone App Downloaded 1 Million Times On First Day In App Store (Robin Wauters/TechCrunch)

from Techmeme

On its first day of availability on the App Store since it was - surprisingly, to many - approved by Apple, Opera Mini for iPhone (iTunes link) was downloaded one million times.  —  Opera this morning announced......

http://bit.ly/aHZwjq

Getting More Targeted Traffic

Getting More Targeted Traffic

from Ezine Articles Planet blog By John P Haskel

If you already have a website online know how difficult it is to get targeted traffic to your site. In this article I'm going to go over the tried and true ways to increase your web sites targeted traffic and your search engine ranking. If you simply follow the tips below you will be well on your way to your online business success.

http://bit.ly/ag8NBO

The Changing Web We Weave: Evolution of The 404 Page

The Changing Web We Weave: Evolution of The 404 Page

from WebmasterFormat by WF Admin

It’s probably one of the first things you saw when you started surfing the web: an error 404. If your ill-fated surfing session was recent, you may not have even seen a “404” just an ordinary page kindly informing you that you either mis-typed the URL or the page has moved. If your first 404 was more than a few years ago, you probably got slapped with the 404 error of old: “404 Not Found,” or something similar. But now it’s 2010, and with users of every conceivable comfort level browsing the web, it’s crucial to use a 404 page that keeps as much traffic flowing through your site as possible.

http://bit.ly/9TbQcJ

Who's #1 in broadband? 1Gbps fiber for $26 in Hong Kong

Who's #1 in broadband? 1Gbps fiber for $26 in Hong Kong

from Ars Technica by nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson)

According to people like Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's CEO, the US is number one in broadband, no question about it. But one only has to look around the world to see just how specious such claims are.

Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199... or US$26 a month.

http://bit.ly/c7ZXKA

It's Time to Rethink Your Approach to Analytics

It's Time to Rethink Your Approach to Analytics

from CMSWire.com - All News by Chelsi Nakano

Most organizations have spent precious little energy on an analytics strategy, and even fewer have structured their organizations in such a way as to give analytics data the life it deserves.

Phil Kemelor of consulting firm Semphonic asserts these things and more. You — yes, you there — are probably not so good at using your data. And if you don’t fix that soon, says he, the coming multi-channel analytics tsunami is going to overwhelm you. Either that or you’ll just keep right on going, flying blind — while your competitors continue refining.

http://bit.ly/bnjUNa

5 Dumb Design Mistakes That Crush Copy (And How to Fix Them)

5 Dumb Design Mistakes That Crush Copy (And How to Fix Them)

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Copyblogger

Content is king, but if the king looks like a toad, no one will know he's royalty. On the one hand, your blog theme might be drop-dead gorgeous. But if your writing isn't compelling, readers won't stick around to read it. Even worse, your writing might be fantastic . . . but if your design doesn't stop web surfers long enough to read the first few sentences, you're doomed. Great design makes good copy sing. Everything you write becomes clearer, easier to navigate,

http://bit.ly/9VO1qw

Content and Usability

Content and Usability

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Journal

It's not always an obvious connection, but the content on your website affects its usability. How? The easiest way to think about it is by putting yourself directly in the user's seat. Think about it. You go to a website that provides search engine optimization services. Although you might decide to hire the person or company behind the site, right now you're in the research phase.

http://bit.ly/dbn1E7

Is Social Media Becoming Boring?

Is Social Media Becoming Boring?

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Techipedia

For most, social media is new and fun. For others, though, social media is old and is falling out of favor. I'm seeing it happen of users who were happy about social media when it became hyped but are now realizing that they're not yet ready to hold onto social media any longer. It's boring, too challenging, and uninteresting. Catering to individuals seems to mean you need to bend to their will at every turn.

http://bit.ly/b9Tur5

The Medium Is The Message In Link Building

The Medium Is The Message In Link Building

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Julie Joyce

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proposed the idea “that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study.” He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. He gave ...

http://bit.ly/dcKsf3

Fast Mobile Broadband Costs Vary Greatly Worldwide

Fast Mobile Broadband Costs Vary Greatly Worldwide

Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service

Operators all over the world are rolling out mobile broadband services that offer 21M bps using HSPA, but what they charge customers differs dramatically, from US$75 per month in Australia to just $25 monthly in Austria.

http://bit.ly/d8GZIA

8 Secrets of Success Within SEO

8 Secrets of Success Within SEO

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by SEOmoz

Posted by chenry How does a person become successfully in the world of SEO? I wish I could tell you all the secrets but if I knew them, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti, sipping mai tais, instead of writing this post. About a year ago I ran across a video of Richard St. John giving a quick 3 minute presentation at TED about the 8 secrets of success and started to wonder if those same 8 secrets where true within the SEO industry. Take 3 minutes,

http://bit.ly/ajmr7y

Mary Meeker: Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet

Mary Meeker: Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet

from GigaOM » Mathew's Posts by Mathew Ingram

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley isn’t just any Internet analyst. She was covering the sector when the brokerage firm was the lead underwriter for Netscape Communications’ initial public offering in 1995, was dubbed the “Queen of the Net” by Barron’s magazine in 1998 and was covering the space in 2004, when Morgan Stanley helped launch the Google IPO. Now a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of the global technology research team, she has released her latest massively detailed “State of the Internet” report, which she has been putting out periodically since 1995. She presented the report during an event this afternoon at Google, which was streamed live as part of the Events@Google series.

http://bit.ly/9hp8Y0

Google on Net Neutrality, Its Fiber Buildout and Cloud

Google on Net Neutrality, Its Fiber Buildout and Cloud

from GigaOM » Stacey's Posts by Stacey Higginbotham

Google’s core philosophy about opening up access to the world’s information is the reason behind the company’s pro-net neutrality stand, the building of its own fiber network and its search for protocols for moving information between cloud providers. Google discussed its information liberation efforts at the search giant’s Atmosphere event held today as part of its efforts to push enterprise adoption of cloud computing.

http://bit.ly/blvQDg

Americans Conducted 15.4 Billion Core Searches in March 2010

Americans Conducted 15.4 Billion Core Searches in March 2010

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Watch Blog

According to comScore qSearch , Americans conducted 15.4 billion "core searches" in March 2010, with Google accounting for 65.1 percent search market share. Click to read the rest of this post.

http://bit.ly/bC4iTT

Discovering What Web 2.0 Really Means

Discovering What Web 2.0 Really Means

from WebProNews - Social Media by Brandon Leibowitz

Many people who use the internet daily run into the term web 2.0 and many of those people don’t know what it means. This is actually very understandable considering that for most people the internet does not seem any different than when they were first exposed to it. In order to truly understand web 2.0, it is necessary to understand the difference between the internet as it is today, and as it was back during the first internet boom of the late 90’s.

http://bit.ly/d65sWv

Browser Wars: Apple, Mozilla Tweak their Entries

Browser Wars: Apple, Mozilla Tweak their Entries

Gregg Keizer at PCWorld

Apple and Mozilla last week took a page from Google to beef up the stability of their respective browsers, Safari and Firefox.

Apple's move may also result in a faster future Safari that's able to use the multiple cores in most modern machines' processors, an analyst said.

http://bit.ly/99xN52

The Mercenary's Guide to Building Your Internet Marketing Empire

The Mercenary's Guide to Building Your Internet Marketing Empire

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Copyblogger

I don't kill people for money (I do that for free). I'm not wanted in 17 countries. And I don't ride on a steel horse. But by many standards, I'm somewhat of a mercenary. It started a few years ago, when I cut my teeth online by playing around in the internet marketing game. Before I'd heard of Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, or Sonia Simone . . . I'd heard of Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, and Jason Moffatt.

http://bit.ly/a875PN

Beginner's Guide to Link Metrics

Beginner's Guide to Link Metrics

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Journal

In the beginning, search engines were crap. I don't mean to knock the pioneers, but they simply relied too heavily on what webmasters said their websites were about. That's why porn sites ranked for searches like, "the whitehouse." People are shameless - if they can scam their way into money, you'd better believe they'll do it. Follow the incentives. When Google came onto the scene, touting founder Larry Page's new PageRank metric, things changed.

http://bit.ly/bc1iDy

Announcing Florie Brizel?s talk on ?Mobilology?

Announcing Florie Brizel’s talk on “Mobilology”

from The Next Web by Boris

Every previous conference we’ve organized has had a common theme. Not a subject we made up but something that just dominated each discussion. I remember Twitter being the unofficial mantra last year and the iPhone the year before that.

You can sense that this year will revolve around the iPad. And rightfully so. It is not just a new product from Apple but a whole new product category that will change how we use computers, websites and how we look at books, movies and content in general.

http://bit.ly/c8N2No

An Internet for Everybody

An Internet for Everybody

Susan Crawford / New York Times:

LAST week, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the legal authority to tell Comcast not to block certain uses of its Internet access services. This decision has become a rip-the-Band-Aid-off moment …

http://bit.ly/9q3seW

Paid Content: the New Paid Link

Paid Content: the New Paid Link

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by SEO Book.com

Paid Links Are Spam Buying links is considered spammy by Google because it is a ranking short cut which subverts search relevancy algorithms . And so Google considers it a black hat SEO practice. Links are somewhat hard to scale because (outside of those who create a network of spam ) it is time intensive to find the right sites, negotiate a price, and then ensure appropriate placement.

http://bit.ly/dxPOnB

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by SEOmoz

Posted by gillian We all know that theres gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. Avinash Kaushik affirmed recently at SMX Toronto , that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail. The problem is that the long tail is hard to track and analyze. For example,

http://bit.ly/a91Qw7

Why a Bad Economy Is the Best Time to Start a Business

Why a Bad Economy Is the Best Time to Start a Business

from TechCrunch by Guest Author

While researching my latest book, Viral Loop, an in-depth look at how companies like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Skype and others grew so big so fast, it occurred to me that each of them was founded when the economy was flat, bad, or worse, in recession. I suppose that describes virtually any company founded since the dot com bust, but what’s interesting is that it also characterizes some of the most successful companies in history, some that trace their roots back more than a century.

http://bit.ly/abcfLV

Cup of Joe: Marketing Is For People With No Friends

Cup of Joe: Marketing Is For People With No Friends

from Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim by Joe Hall

It struck me the other day that I worry about other people’s marketing efforts way more than my own! In fact, I don’t worry about my marketing efforts at all. Because I don’t do marketing for myself. That’s right I don’t do any marketing for my business. A few of my SEO colleagues like to tease me about how badly my site is optimized. I have never bought a paid ad for my business. I do not offer any type of affiliate promotions.

http://bit.ly/ccu9z7

It?s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Matt McGee

Google has kept a promise it made last year: Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and is already in place for U.S. searchers. But Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very [...]

http://bit.ly/b0IIX3

Don't blink: Hard-charging FCC turns broadband plan into action

Don't blink: Hard-charging FCC turns broadband plan into action

from Ars Technica by ars@lasarletter.net (Matthew Lasar)

Federal Communications Commission watchers everywhere, gird thy loins. However frenetic you thought it was in FCC-land back during the media ownership, Comcast P2P, or Sirius XM merger wars, forget it. The Commission has just laid out the road map and schedule for implementing its National Broadband Plan, and it looks pretty relentless—crucial rulemakings lined up back to back through the rest of the year and into 2011.

And to heck with that court decision invalidating the FCC's sanctions against Comcast for BitTorrent throttling, proclaimed FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on Thursday. "The court did not question the FCC’s goals," he declared. "It merely invalidated one technical, legal mechanism for broadband policy chosen by prior Commissions."

http://bit.ly/bqWWAl

AT&T Overhauls Image -- Is it Afraid of the Big Bad Verizon iPhone?

AT&T Overhauls Image -- Is it Afraid of the Big Bad Verizon iPhone?

from PCWorld Latest Technology News

Ads and PR won't save AT&T if Verizon starts offering Apple's hot-seller.

AT&T, everybody's favorite whipping boy, is attempting to overhaul its image as a "lifestyle company" and apply -- gasp! -- a positive attitude in its advertising.

http://bit.ly/ayVwuJ

Dead? Hardly. Ruling all but ensures net neutrality

Dead? Hardly. Ruling all but ensures net neutrality

By Johna Till Johnson at Computerworld

Network World - As I predicted last month, a federal appeals court recently overturned the fines imposed by the Federal Communications Commission on Comcast in 2007. The ruling was overturned on the grounds that the FCC lacks jurisdiction over telco Internet access offerings.

This decision has a number of ramifications, which I'll go into shortly. But first: Some people are saying this ruling sounds the death knell to net neutrality.

http://bit.ly/csI43K

Search Growth Slows In The U.S.

Search Growth Slows In The U.S.

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Are the search industry’s best days behind it?  The growth in the number of U.S. search queries is slowing down dramatically.  According to the latest numbers from comScore’s qSearch estimates, overall search volume growth slowed down to 7.6 percent in March, 2010 from 10.4 percent growth in February, 2010 and 33.1 percent growth in March, 2009.

http://bit.ly/c3mPJR

FCC pushes forward with broadband agenda

FCC pushes forward with broadband agenda

from CNET News.com

Despite court ruling, commission says it still plans to implement aspects of the National Broadband Plan it presented to Congress last month.

http://bit.ly/c7dA8F

Yahoo: Dominate Search Results Like Matt Cutts

Yahoo: Dominate Search Results Like Matt Cutts

from WebProNews - Social Media by Chris Crum

Yahoo is posting a series of "how-to" articles for social media on the company's advertising blog. Interestingly enough, the subject of the latest edition is "How to Dominate Search Results Through Social Media Sites," and the example Yahoo's Laura Lippay points to as how to do it is Matt Cutts, who of course works for Yahoo's chief rival, Google.

http://bit.ly/cawxy9

3 Ways To Use Google?s Search Results For Keyword Research

3 Ways To Use Google’s Search Results For Keyword Research

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Aaron Wall

Years ago, on a planet far far away, people used to optimize for keyword density. But as relevancy algorithms have improved people have moved away from keyword density and toward keyword diversity. Covering a broader net of closely related keywords on your pages yields a better chance to rank for some of the billions of [...]

http://bit.ly/az3BSa

Verizon Tries to Patent Spot Pricing for the Cloud

Verizon Tries to Patent Spot Pricing for the Cloud

from GigaOM » Stacey's Posts by Stacey Higginbotham

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today published a patent application from a division of Verizon Communications for a way to offer market-based spot pricing for cloud computing. The application was filed in October of last year but published today. It could mean that Verizon plans to offer spot pricing for its cloud computing product, or it could just be the result of another overzealous legal department trying to corner the market on a way of doing business.

http://bit.ly/c9hu6g

Yahoo Searches Gain 3% of Market Share

Yahoo Searches Gain 3% of Market Share

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Journal

Hitwise has just released the summary of all U.S. searches conducted for four weeks ending March 27. While we were not surprised that both Google and Bing's market shares went down, what's quite surprising is the fact that both Yahoo and Ask.com gained a significant percentage of all the searches. Google search accounted for 69.97%, down from 70.95% in the previous month. Yahoo search increased to 15.04%, up by 3%, Bing search with 9.62% down by -1% and Ask.

http://bit.ly/aAdE5H

Internet Ad Revenue Hit Record High In Q4 2009

Internet Ad Revenue Hit Record High In Q4 2009

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Matt McGee

Recession? Economic slowdown? Financial gloom-and-doom? Not online, and not as far as Internet advertising is concerned. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3 billion in Q4 of 2009, a 2.6% increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 14% increase over Q3 of 2009.

http://bit.ly/cuoHTm

Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs

Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Guide

by Jennifer Laycock With so much social media focus on sites like Twitter, FourSquare and Facebook these days, it's easy for companies to neglect one of the single most powerful social media tools available: their blog. In fact, for companies who are looking to increase their search engine optimization efforts, a well-crafted blog can make a dramatic difference. In fact

http://bit.ly/cykIIM

Craig Newmark: Social Networks Are Shifting the Balance of Power

Craig Newmark: Social Networks Are Shifting the Balance of Power

By Mathew Ingram at GigaOM

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society, away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots.

http://bit.ly/a50Wtw

Social Networking Habits Vary Considerably Across Asia-Pacific Markets

Social Networking Habits Vary Considerably Across Asia-Pacific Markets from

SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its latest report on social networking activity in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding China) based on data from its World Metrix service. The study found that 50.8 percent of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors. Facebook

http://bit.ly/bOZoJA

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 6, 2010

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 6, 2010

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Matt McGee

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Report: Some Google ‘Hot Topic’ Searches Return 90% Malicious Links A blog post from cloud security company Zscaler suggests that some Google searches recently returned results with 90% malicious links, and the spammers are [...] http://bit.ly/bWg0FE

Groups Launch Effort to Get Broadband to Older US Residents

Groups Launch Effort to Get Broadband to Older US Residents

from PCWorld Latest Technology News

Technology vendors and groups are launching Project GOAL to connect older adults with broadband. http://bit.ly/cEr8yl

Is Your Site Under Google Penalty?

Is Your Site Under Google Penalty?

from SEOCentro - Latest SEO News by Search Engine Journal

One of the most important aspects of taking care of a site's search 'appropriateness' is knowing what can get you penalized by Google (or any other search engine for that matter).  Knowing how to assess the situation correctly so that you can tell if you have just been served a penalty can help you significantly to get the site back at the top for your search terms. Unfortunately,

http://bit.ly/bWuWTk

Is Trust In Social Media Dying?

Is Trust In Social Media Dying?

from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing by Jordan Kasteler

1 person liked this

Social media has exploded in recent years in its use to gauge customers’ likes and dislikes and to identify consumer buying trends. Users have migrated from trusting traditional media for reviews, ratings, and recommendations to trusting what their peers have to say in social media. The new age of digital and social media is [...] http://bit.ly/dlTpDH

Join the Conversation: Are you ready for IPv6?

Join the Conversation: Are you ready for IPv6?

from EETimes

The pool of available Internet Protocol addresses could run out before the end of 2011 under today's IPv4 software, prompting a widening circle of companies and organizations to press for support for Internet Protocol version 6 in anything connected to the Net. http://bit.ly/adbvu5

Exploits unneeded to attack via PDF files

Exploits unneeded to attack via PDF files

from CNET News.com

Researchers devise ways to get malware onto computers, and even into clean PDF files, without exploiting any holes in the PDF reader software or using JavaScript.

http://bit.ly/bjqDKO

If Google Indexing Goes Real-Time, What Will it Mean for Ranking?

If Google Indexing Goes Real-Time, What Will it Mean for Ranking?

To PuSH Content to Google, You'll Need Trust

By Chris Crum

Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process.

http://bit.ly/aTQr80

Google fiber losers, unite! (And then build your own network)

Google fiber losers, unite! (And then build your own network)

from Ars Technica by nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson)

Now that Google has wrapped up the application period for its open access, 1Gbps fiber testbed, we know that more than 1,000 US cities want the network. Only a couple will get it, though; what's going to happen to everyone else?

Broadband consultant Craig Settles and Greensboro, North Carolina fiber booster Jay Ovittore have joined forces to start "Communities United for Broadband." The idea is simple: create a place where communities can share strategies for moving forward with high-speed broadband plans—even if Google says no to their bid.

http://bit.ly/cM4soj

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Whats the best open source content management system for designers?

Design Reviver (Free subscription) | 04/02/2010

Choosing the perfect CMS for any project is one of the most important aspects of web design – and the hardest. There are so many CMSes available and each offers so many different features and options, how can you possibly pick the best? For the most part it comes down to opinion, reputation and whatever [...]

http://bit.ly/dgifIk

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Web Cms News & Articles

Week in Review: Making Money with OSS, SharePoint 2010 Sought for Collab and SoMe

By Irina Guseva | Saturday April 3, 2010

This week in the CMS industry (don't start the acronym war on me), we saw WCM vendors change jobs to become analysts and continued sparks (or flames for some) around the (seemingly never-ending) debate on whether WordPress is a CMS.

http://bit.ly/a6kXRT

Half of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists

by Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim

PRWeek has published the results of its latest study on the media and journalists—and bloggers are increasingly including themselves among their ranks. Just last year, only a third of bloggers considered themselves journalists; now 52% do. However, only 20% receive most of their income from blogging (but that’s up from 4% last year). Just a month ago, New York City recognized bloggers as journalists; surely the trend will only continue to rise.

Social media continues to have an increasing impact on traditional media. PRWeb reports that “91% of bloggers and 68% of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, [but] only 35% of newspaper and 38% of print magazine journalists suggested the same.”

More...

http://bit.ly/b6F3AL

PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey Finds Digital Divide Between Journalists and Bloggers

by Zemanta at SearchEngineWatch

On April 1, 2010, PRWeek and PR Newswire issued a press release ... that was no joke. It highlighted the key findings of the "2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey."

The survey, sponsored by PR Newswire, polled a total of 1,568 traditional and non-traditional media and, for the first time, 1,670 PR practitioners. In cooperation with CNW Group, the survey also included Canadian media and professionals.

Building on prior surveys from 2008 and 2009, the study gauged the attitudes and ideas of traditional journalists and bloggers, as well as PR professionals, to gain an understanding of the present state of the media profession and the trends that are continuing to shape the industry.

More...

http://bit.ly/biN3vq

Second Site: Online Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

By Denise J. Deveau CRM Buyer

"There is no reason a site can't be accessible," said Accessibil-IT's Adam Spencer. "Yes, it's an extra step, but a conscious one that needs to be made. In the grand scheme of things, the cost to roll it out is significant, but not something that will break the bank for any large organization."

As the population ages, financial institutions and other service providers will have to learn to adapt their marketing approaches to appeal to a sector that has high disposable income and substantial spending power. In some cases, they will also have physical limitations that will impede online activities, including vision loss.

Besides the fact that an aging population brings with it a growing number of people with vision loss, the business and legal case for making Web content accessible to the visually impaired is becoming increasingly strong.

More...

http://bit.ly/bd7BgD

Trick Gmail into thinking you're on an iPad for two-pane goodness

by Josh Lowensohn at CNet News

Google on Friday announced that it's got an iPad-centric version of its Gmail Web app that gives users a two-pane reading view of their in-boxes. The funny thing is, you don't even get this on the normal version of Gmail, or on most mobile clients.

You can, however, trick Gmail into thinking you're on an iPad with some tweaking. All that needs to be done is to change the browser's user agent, which can be done with just a small amount of effort on some browsers. Here's how to do it in three of them (in order of easiest to most difficult):

Full Story

http://bit.ly/c7fkyX

The most popular social sharing options on the top blogs

by Pingdom at Royal Pingdom

Most blogs encourage sharing of their content on services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and so on, usually via prominent buttons in connection with each post.

It’s a win-win situation for the bloggers and their readers. The bloggers make it easy for their readers to share content they like, and by sharing, readers drive more traffic to the blogs.

A ton of social sharing options are out there, but which ones are bloggers relying on the most? That’s what you’ll find out here below.

Examining share button usage

To get an idea of how common the various social sharing options are we went through the Technorati top 100 blogs and examined what kind of share buttons they are using. Too keep the scope of this survey within reason, we focused on the more common options out there.

We looked at dedicated, visible buttons for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious and Google Buzz.

Read the Story

http://bit.ly/cWbkne

A New First In Mobile: Data Traffic Outstripped Voice Traffic Last Year

by Tricia Duryee at mocoNews.net

Mobile data has been growing at a fast clip since the iPhone went on sale almost three years ago. But with the introduction of many more data-focused devices, the industry continues to break records.

In a report released today, telecom consultant Chetan Sharma tallied up the financial statements of carriers from around the world to get a comprehensive look exactly what happened last year. For the first time ever, he said that on a global basis mobile phones were used more for accessing data than they were to make calls, and that global data traffic exceeded an Exabyte of data. What’s more, if this pace continues he said both North America and Western Europe will exceed an Exabyte each in 2010, and that the total number of mobile broadband connections will exceed the number of fixed connections. In all, there’s 4.6 billion cellphone subscribers worldwide with a penetration rate above 68 percent.

Full Story

http://bit.ly/cg1YeK

Is There an ?Internet Operating System??

By Mathew Ingram at gogaom
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When Tim O’Reilly talks about something technology or Web-related, plenty of people listen. After all, he not only runs a media company that publishes authoritative books on technology, he runs conferences about the issues that arise out of technology’s impact on business and society, and he helped popularize the term “Web 2.0,” among other things (although some people would rather he hadn’t). So it’s worth taking some time to look at what O’Reilly said recently about “The State of the Internet Operating System.” In that post, O’Reilly looks at the various parts that make up what he believes to be an operating system for the Internet era.

The idea:

As O’Reilly notes at the beginning of his post, this isn’t the first time he has raised the idea of an Internet Operating System. The first time in print appears to have been 2002, although the author and publisher admits that he forgot to hit the publish button and didn’t wind up actually posting it until 2004. Among other recent discussions of the topic, O’Reilly did a presentation called “The State of the Internet Operating System” in November of last year

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Prefab May Give Any Software Open Sourciness

by Katherine Noyes at technewsworld

Prefab doesn't touch an application's source code. It gets its apparently unlimited capabilities for modifying software by futzing with the pixels that display on the screen. The companies that issue software licenses -- and their lawyers -- may be less sanguine about the tool's potential than its developers and the many computer users who might like to customize their desktops.

A new tool developed at the University of Washington has the potential to make all software effectively open source -- in a way.

Rather than manipulating the software's code, however, the application -- dubbed "Prefab" -- hijacks what it displays and makes it customizable.

"Microsoft and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) aren't going to open up all their stuff, but they all create programs that put pixels on the screen," explained James Fogarty, the assistant professor of computer science and engineering who is leading the project. "And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program's apparent behavior."

Because Prefab works from the pixels of the interface, "we can't see anything that's not included in the interface," Fogarty told LinuxInsider. "We're not opening the source of the application itself."

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Get $1 for Every Blog You Add to This New Network

New article network lets you add free content to your old, stale, blogs and pays you $1 for every blog site you add to the network. Get the details in the link:

http://ping.fm/PEkhZ

We Just Tested Twitter?s @anywhere Platform (Screenshots)

by Jason Kincaid at Tech Crunch

During his keynote at SXSW last month, Twitter CEO Evan Wiliams announced an upcoming new platform called @anywhere, which would allow third party sites to integrate Twitter features (he also showed off some of the partners who would be featuring the platform, which you can see in the image at right). Twitter didn’t give a launch date for when sites would start integrating the new platform, but it looks like we’ve just come across the first site to feature @anywhere. Meet Eggboiling.com.

The site, which will almost certainly be pulled down soon after this post is published, is clearly a testing environment for @anywhere, but it’s currently open to the public. Update: Twitter has taken the site down. It features the following (all shown in the screenshots below): various variable states; a button to ‘Connect With Twitter’; buttons to follow twitter users @jack, @biz, and @ev; a test hovercard that allows me to see @wendyverse’s latest tweets and follow counts at a glance, and a test box that lets me tweet. It isn’t particularly easy on the eyes, but it works well enough.

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Bringing Internet privacy into the 21st century

Microsoft, Google, AT&T, and other tech industry leaders agree: We need to update the rules protecting our digital privacy

By Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld

Finally, there's something Google and Microsoft can agree on: Our electronic privacy protections are in serious need of an overhaul. They, along with Intel, AOL, AT&T, the ACLU, and a dozen other household names, have formed the Digital Due Process coalition, aimed at urging Congress to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) -- the only thing keeping Johnny Law from pawing through your digital life.

The ECPA was passed into law in 1986. To put that in context, the first Notes From the Field columns appeared in print issues of InfoWorld that year, back when I was just a cub reporter. Ronald Reagan was still president, even if he may not have been aware of it at the time. The Web was still three years from being invented. The term "spam" still referred to canned luncheon meat, and a 300-baud modem represented a state-of-the-art Internet connection.

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Should Open Source Be An Enemy Of The State?

While governments around the world adopt open source, U.S. business groups say we should fear it.

By Amy Vernon at Network World

Try to wrap your brain around this: thanks to Obama's adoption of open source to run the White House website, the U.S. should be on the U.S. Trade Representative's "Special 301 watchlist," according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance. The watchlist calls out nations that don't honor intellectual property protections.

OK, that's not technically true — the United States was nowhere to be seen on the IIPA's watchlist for 2010 — but given the organization's stance on open source, the fact that the Obama Administration announced last year that the WhiteHouse.gov website would be revamped on an open source platform (Drupal) means that it's against the free market and is evil. Or, at least, very very bad

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Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

By DAVID POGUE at The New York Times

In 10 years of reviewing tech products for The New York Times, I’ve never seen a product as polarizing as Apple’s iPad, which arrives in stores on Saturday.

This device is laughably absurd,” goes a typical remark on a tech blog’s comments board. “How can they expect anyone to get serious computer work done without a mouse?”

“This truly is a magical revolution,” goes another. “I can’t imagine why anyone will want to go back to using a mouse and keyboard once they’ve experienced Apple’s visionary user interface!”

Those are some pretty confident critiques of the iPad — considering that their authors have never even tried it.

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Google Real-Time Search Results Powered by Pigeons on Red Bull?

by Zemanta at SearchEngineWatch

Google has a long tradition of perpetrating April Fools' Day hoaxes. According to my sources, who are located in India where it is already April 1, 2010, one of the April Fools Day pranks to watch out for this year is the announcement that Google real-time search results are powered by Pigeons who've been given Red Bull, whose slogan is "it gives you wings."

Google launched its April Fool tradition in 2000 with a new "MentalPlex" search technology that supposedly read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query.

Then in 2002, Google revealed that the technology behind PageRank was PigeonRank, a cost-effective and efficient means of ranking pages that didn't involve animal cruelty.

In 2004, the company announced there were job opportunities for the Google Copernicus Center, its research center on the moon.

On April Fool's Day 2006, the company introduced Google Romance on its main search page with the observation, "Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance."

On April 1, 2008, Google released Adsense for conversations. Meanwhile, YouTube Rickrolled all of its users that day by linking all its featured videos to Rick Astley's song "Never Gonna Give You Up."

So, what will we see this year? I think my sources in India are pulling my leg. The email tipping me off was signed, "Sloof Lirpa," which as we all know is April Fools spelled backwards.

http://bit.ly/b04640

Beware: It's April Fools' Day

by Mike Krumboltz at Y! buzz

April 1 is the only day of the year when deceit and pranks are not just tolerated, but encouraged. Interest in the "holiday" is palpable in the Yahoo! Search box. Web lookups for "best april fools day pranks," "how to trick a friend," and "funny april fools day tricks" are all making more noise than an overinflated whoopee cushion.

But if you ask us, the most interesting prank-related query is this: April Fools' Day history. Would-be Allen Funts clearly want to know why everybody is allowed to lie to each other on the first day of April. Here's the scoop...

There are several theories regarding the origin of April Fools' Day, and none of them are 100% definitive. However, one does stand above the rest: The Museum of Hoaxes explains that in 1564, King Charles IX of France passed a law that changed the beginning of the year from April 1 to January 1.

News of the change traveled slowly. Those who were either misinformed or slow to make the adjustments still celebrated the New Year on April 1. As a result, they were mocked and pranks were pulled.

The urban legend experts at Snopes.com note that several other theories are worth considering. Some believe that the day falls on April 1 because of the arrival of spring, when "nature 'fools' mankind with fickle weather." Another possibility: The holiday "is thought to commemorate the fruitless mission of the rook (the European crow), who was sent out in search of land from Noah's flood-encircled ark."

Regardless of the origin, people show no signs of giving up the tradition. The number of Web searches for "april fools day prank ideas" are scary high. Everyone (and especially parents) should be on the lookout. That "$1,000 cell phone bill" your daughter hands you might not be the real McCoy.

To help out the gullible and easily tricked, we rounded up some of the most popular prank ideas from Yahoo! Search. Also worth checking out: some of the best online pranks ever, from Christian Science Monitor (remember Facebook's "LivePoke" feature?). Keep your guard up, suckas...

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