Your first reaction to the news that a college offers a class in YouTube might be to dredge up old “underwater basket-weaving” jokes; learning the school is in California, might be less surprising – after all, Stanford offers a course in Facebook apps.
But the guys that made Google came from there so we cut them some slack.
Pitzer, though, which sounds nearly vulgar (we’ll assume it’s named after someone and try not to be impolite by pointing and giggling), doesn’t have quite the recognition as Stanford, but was named one of the best 50 colleges by US News & World Report, so they must be doing something right over there.
The Yale Daily News Staff named Pitzer one of the “most artsy schools,” too. We’ll also assume that to mean a certain, well, unorthodox approach to learning, and that they might not be able to throw a football.
But it’s all good…this isn’t the Eighties and Alpha Beta’s not running things anymore.
“That’s the beauty of college these days,” says Droz.* “You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit.”
Well, I think we’re just talking one class here, and not a major…yet. I did take a weight-lifting class in college, and karate, and acting, and one called International Approach to Dress (they called me crazy until they found out it was 49 girls and me in there) – you know, classes to help round out my education.
“Classes: nothing before eleven,” says Droz. “Beer: it’s your best friend, you drink a lot of it.”
What do you do in YouTube class? Well, you study what goes on on YouTube. The students have their own area on the site where they post videos and comment, and use YouTube as a tool to study American culture and Internet culture, and of course, American Internet culture. I’m back to counting words in my essays.
What exactly the class is seeking to learn about YouTube wasn’t clear in USA Today, but that initial WTF twinge you had wasn’t helped any by wondering how posting a video of yourself juggling is a form of study.
But Alexandra Juhasz, a Pitzer of a media studies professor there (couldn’t resist), brings up a more compelling reason to study YouTube later in the article: raising issues about “corporate-sponsored democratic media expression.”
And that is a big issue. We’ve got a raging conversation going in the comments section of our article on CBS and bloggers about that very thing, and I’ve raised it previously when YouTube struggled with international censorship concerns.
A commentator at TechCrunch by the handle “Wakarimasen,” (Japanese for “don’t understand,” but without a pronoun antecedent it’s hard to know if he or she means himself/herself or Arrington), says:
it’s absurd to think that academic study should not examine a prominent contemporary phenomenon like youtube. this class may need some fine-tuning, but is sorely needed in our increasingly technological world.
I think Wakarimasen gets it, and most likely Pitzer gets it too. This citizen media thing is important and revolutionary and should be studied, even if users admit, from one of the latest student videos posted, they “look at dumb things” on YouTube.
*Yes, I’m quoting fictional characters. You got a problem with it? Talk to Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. “CRITICS!” says Ogre. Get’em Ogre.
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Category: Online Marketing
On a new “coolest brands” list, Google didn’t manage to come in first, second, or third. Gasp! The search giant didn’t rank fourth, either. But Google did get fifth place, and, considering some of the other companies on the list, there’s absolutely no shame in that.
After all, if someone were to tell me that they used Google, I think they’d get a raised eyebrow and a silent stare. If they told me that they drove an Aston Martin, well, I can pretty much guarantee a positive reaction. So you’ll see no complaints in this article about Aston Martin earning a name as the absolute coolest brand.
You will, however, see a bit of whining about Ferrari coming in eleventh and Lamborghini placing seventeenth. I accuse Superbrands and about 2,000 voters of not loving cars enough.
Anyway, a name that was in more direct competition with Google (in terms of ranking) was “iPod” - this term ranked second. The number four spot went to Bang & Olufsen, which, out of the top five, leaves just the third coolest brand unidentified. And Google shouldn’t complain much about having this brand ahead of it, since YouTube, which nabbed third place, is actually owned by Google.
The rest of the top 20 is available at The Independent, but, just to cover the search-related bases, I’ll say that neither Yahoo nor Microsoft made that cutoff.
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The final stage is so important – and unexpected – that I’m going to quote Maximum Tadpole again: “You won’t believe me, but don’t do anything but look at traffic for a month. Check rankings every day and most importantly, the keywords that people are finding your site with. Use those to decide if you should create entirely new pages to target JUST those words or to write content targeting those keywords. As you move into top positions for the easier words, go after the hard ones.”
That may perhaps sound strange; wouldn’t it make more sense to change the existing content by using the terms for which more people are searching rather than adding more pages? Not necessarily; it depends on what they’re searching for, and why they’re searching for it. As an example, Maximum Tadpole noticed 300 searches over one week on his site for a piece of equipment used in eye surgery. He’d mentioned it once in an article that actually had little to do with the equipment. A little more investigating revealed that people were searching Google for the equipment, finding his site, then searching his site for it.
Obviously, this was an unfulfilled need just begging for help. So he dedicated an entire page of his site to that piece of equipment. It is now one of the best pages on his site.
So, after you have gone through all of these steps, now what do you do? You take the information you got from Google Analytics about your traffic, analyze it and assess what you need to do. Go through the various steps listed here as necessary. It’s worth noting that this strategy might not be the optimal one for your site, but it should at least give you an outline for thinking about what your site needs and how to tackle its optimization.
Does it work? Well, Maximum Tadpole used this strategy for his client, and Google search referrals went from an average of three per day to 164 per day in one month. That’s a nice increase. Your results may vary, of course, but it’s good to have a plan.
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Once you’ve completed the on page optimization, it’s time to start the off-page optimization of your web site. That means building links. You don’t want to go the route of doing reciprocal link trades or link farms. What you really want to do is think back to the very first steps you took to optimize the site. What value does the site offer? Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you?
Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called mysite.com, which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!”
How strong of a campaign should you conduct? Maximum Tadpole said that he personally requested 100 links per day for five days. Remember, this is just the beginning as far as SEO for your site goes; you’ll do more link requests later, after you’ve completed this first phase.
If you have a site that lends itself well to using social networks to help promote, by all means do so. Here on SEO Chat, you’ll find a number of articles that explain how to use this web 2.0 method of building interest in your site.
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At this point, you need to start thinking like the people you’re targeting. When they search for the valuable products and/or information you’re offering, what kinds of keywords are they likely to use? Temper this by also considering which keywords the site even has a chance of competing for, at least at first. You can go for the more competitive ones later.
To use the example of the free web site on which Maximum Tadpole was working, he explained that “I decided ‘Nurse Careers’ and ‘Nursing Job Advice’ were better choices than ‘Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Nursing Careers’ for the home page.” The secret behind this is that, by “first optimizing for less competitive keywords” you’re actually in a “better position to go after the more competitive ones in the future.” Don’t limit yourself to the home page, of course; you want to write down the best key words for each page of the site.
At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match.
As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images. Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.”
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If you have been doing SEO for a long time, you may have an almost intuitive sense of what you need to do to optimize a web site. You may work on several things at once rather than following a step-by-step process. But when you’re learning SEO or trying to understand what your SEO is doing to your site, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially when it’s your first campaign.This article will hopefully help beginning SEOs to think more clearly about the SEO process, and veteran SEOs to communicate more clearly with their clients. I owe most of the information you’ll read here to SEO Chat forum member Maximum Tadpole. He noticed that many of his clients wanted a step-by-step guide to the SEO process. To help answer that need, he recorded what he did for one recent site that he took on as an SEO client.
The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors.
Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities.
Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them.
Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages.
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When I was in the tenth grade, before anybody’d heard of the Internet except this geek buddy of mine and the geek buddies of his that he connected with like Matthew Broderick did in that movie by plugging his phone into this contraption (this buddy of mine now works for the NSA by the way), my geek-of-all-geeks friend showed me instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb.
I was mildly entertained and suggested we hit Subway before Ravi finished his shift (he always gave us free cookies), never imagining this Internet thing my geek buddy liked so much would even approach the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, which, obviously, caused depressed geeks to kill themselves.
(Perhaps if he’d shown me you could find naked girls on there I might have made more positive predictions for it. It wouldn’t be until we were college roommates that he introduced me to the World Wide Web of Nudity.)
Anyway, the European Union is quite aware of the availability of bomb-making instructions on the Web and is looking into ways to put a stop to it. Just how they’ll do that is unclear, but they’re having meetings, and we all know that when bureaucrats start having meetings then things are about to happen.
ArsTechnica reports that the EU is considering a ban on using the Internet to distribute bomb-making instructions. Officials cite recent terrorism scares in Europe as reason enough to justify it.
EU security commissioner Franco Frattini suggests an EU explosives database, maintained by Europol, with links to member states as an early warning system for when explosives have been stolen or “a new terrorist modus operandi is discovered from credible intelligence informations.”
What that has to with the Internet, and who gave him the right make the word “information” plural with an “s” is unclear, as is the exact criteria for what constitutes “bomb-making instructions,” who has rights to such information, for what reasons, why the information couldn’t be found in books, how basic chemistry websites would be protected, how the measures would apply to states outside of the EU, or how it helps anything at all.
You could read the presentation by Frattini at the Europa website, but I doubt it’ll do you much good. In the mean time, expect more fruitless government efforts and lots of information out there they’d rather you didn’t have.
Source: webpronews.com
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Google’s recent deal with IT outsourcer Capgemini makes Google Apps available through the consultant to its client companies. What are those companies really getting for their $50 annual license?
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| Microsoft Office or Google Apps? |
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(Editor’s note: Google Apps may have reached a point where companies should give it some consideration in given circumstances. Check out our article, and the accompanying interview with veteran Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg, who shares his views of the Microsoft side of the debate.)
Whether your company uses Microsoft Office or not, and plenty do, Google would like you to consider ‘complementing’ that desktop productivity suite with its software as a service options from Google Apps. Capgemini’s deal with Google could lead some clients with large numbers of entry level staffers to switch them to Google Apps.
It looks like a simple question of mathematics at a high level overview. Why put a copy of Office, with all of its sophisticated features, on the desktops of dozens of people who only need basic functionality. Why support patches and updates for Office with in-house staff when Google will do all of that under the hood work for you?
Here’s a brief rundown of what Google Apps offers to those who embrace it: word processing, spreadsheets, email (with 10GB storage), calendar, IM/voice client, web page creation, all available from a corporate-branded, centrally managed start page.
All a worker would need besides the PC and Internet connection would be a headset, for use with Google Talk. That application may not receive much use on the voice side, as we think Google Apps would be destined for “cube farm” setups like call centers.
Google’s document and spreadsheet handling can convert various file formats for viewing. A higher-level staffer distributing an Excel spreadsheet or Word document to the masses would not have to worry about others being able to read it.
If they publish it through Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the document in question can be managed from one place in terms of access and availability.
Capgemini said in its statement about the deal that the benefits of such a software as a service (SaaS) offering goes beyond just tools:
SaaS solutions, such as Google Apps Premier Edition, provide a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy alternative to installed, licensed desktop software; they are delivered over the Internet via a Web browser and do not require companies to install or maintain software locally, or to tap into internal IT resources.
Email management, especially when it comes to the volumes of spam hitting inboxes, creates nonstop issues for system administrators. Instead of bogging down networks and people with the task of maintaining email, Google does the heavy lifting.
Doing SaaS presents a concern, highlighted by Microsoft in its rebuttal. It’s the same concern that led firms to abandon client-server apps in favor of desktop software - the issue of the application server, or a network, going down while people are trying to work with Google Apps.
Outages are not unheard of, even at Google. They aren’t unheard of on the PC side, either. Is the chance of a network or Google outage any greater than that of a PC problem? Watch the video.
There is another aspect to Google Apps that hasn’t received much attention. It could be a factor that impresses the IT department from a security standpoint. Google Apps function with the Firefox browser just as well as they do with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
If Google Apps does fill a need for companies that can’t or won’t provide Office for their lower-level staff, it makes sense to have Firefox as a required browser to accompany Google Apps. These workers would avoid the security issues that sometimes crop up when an IE-centric zero-day exploit appears.
Judging by Capgemini’s talk, offering Google Apps is a small step into empowering a lot of people who would not have such a productivity resource made available to them. Not every company is on a scale where they need a Capgemini to come in and make this happen.
But in this age, all a company needs is an Internet connection, and some time to sign up for and enable Google Apps. It’s an option firms should at least consider before writing that check for Office licenses.
(Requests for comment from Microsoft and Google had not been responded to by the time of this writing.)
source: webpronews.com
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Lenovo’s announcement comes after competitor Dell entered the Chinese market in March by offering its affordable personal computer aimed at beginning Chinese users.
Buyers of the new PC will use a television set as the monitor. The new PC will be available later this year and will retail for $199 to $399.
“Our focus is to get down to the rural market,” said company spokesman Jay Chen.
Chen said Lenovo latest move was not in response to Dell entering the market and that the company has been selling low-cost PC’s targeted toward rural Chinese families since 2004.
“It’s a natural evolution. We are not responding to our competitors,” Chen said. “After three years of market development in low-tier markets we have gained experience and understanding.”
Around 800 million people live in China’s rural areas and incomes average about $560 a year but are increasing at annual rate of over 10 percent according to the AP.
Lenovo said it has plans to set up a rural sales network of 5,000 dealers to reach farmers and other people.
Lenovo is the third-largest makers of PCs, behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Source: webpronews.com
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Web Design Ireland -
Google Maps Makes Use Of Crowdsourcing
“They piloted a process in India where people would mark locations with a GPS and input other data such as directions, locations of shopping centers, parks, gas stations, restaurants etc.,” reports Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog. “Google used input from many different people and correlated conflicts to try and arrive at the best data.”
Note Taylor’s use of the term “piloted,” which implies that this’ll show up in many more parts of the world. That could be good - “Gerardo” of GeoDataMaps seems to like Google’s gear (and the process as a whole), and writes, “This ‘care package’ is a very interesting thing for Latin America people. Please, Google people, make some more ‘noise’ about this. There are many people in our countries waiting to do some local mapping . . .”
On the other hand - and admittedly, this is still a ways off - O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest asks, “How long till we are all contributing to some mapping database every time we go for coffee?” There’s less than a direct line between the two, but some folks are already disturbed by the small chance that Google Street View will record an instant of their day.
For the time being, however, this type of crowdsourcing is just a neat way of improving Google Maps. Keep an eye out for its expansion, and don’t fret - Google’s only asking for volunteers.
Source: webpronews.com
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