Jade Cloward’s BLOG

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Feb 22, 2010

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Vancouver, British Columbia (CNN) -(Coverage for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia begins at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT tonight, February 12th, on NBC.) *The most popular question in Canada recently has been who will light the Olympic caldron at Friday night’s opening ceremonies.

Speculation has focused on NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, but others have campaigned for Betty Fox, the mother of the late Terry Fox, a national hero.

In 1980, Terry Fox, battling osteosarcoma, set out to cross Canada, running about the equivalent of a marathon each day to raise money for cancer research. But Fox, who had a prosthetic right leg, had to quit after 143 days as his cancer spread. He died less than a year later.

The idea of a hologram of Fox carrying the torch the final steps also has been floated.

Hundreds of millions of people are expected to tune in on televisions around the world for the event, which begins at 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET). There will be no worries about the weather; these are the first ceremonies to be held in a domed stadium.

Canada hopes to make a good impression on viewers of the games, which will take place over 17 days.

*Source

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The Next 10 Online Trends.

1. Mobile Web
2. SEO
3. Social Media
4. Online Retail (e-commerce)
5. Advertising Online
6. Reputation Management
7. Mobile Marketing
8. Website Content
9. Open Source
10. Cloud Computing

{ Mobile Web }

MOBILE. Every web-savvy business knows smartphone use is on the rise. But few are actively developing for mobiles by creating websites specifically used for handheld devices.

As more and more mobile users flock to gadgets with larger touchscreens and internet browsers, such as the iPhone or Google Nexus One, the mobile space will become bigger and SMEs need to get on board. If your website isn’t accessible through a smartphone or app, users will give up and go somewhere else losing you traffic and potential sales.

“The big change is that these smartphones are allowing people to use tools in the same way a laptop did in the past, which is opening more users to the internet on the go.”

{ SEO }

Using search engine algorithms in order to get your site on “page one” has been a tactic used by online businesses for years. But SEO experts say the process of getting a website known will become even harder in 2010 with the rise of personalised and real-time search. [Do your SEO, and do it right! Watch steady growth over time. It really does take 3-6 months.]

{ Social Media }

Facebook and Twitter were the standout social networks from 2009, and their popularity will surge in 2010 with both introducing new features, including paid accounts for business.

But businesses need to pay attention to the trends on these sites. Creating a social media strategy is no longer optional, it is vital to the health of a company and its ability to tap into an online user-base.

Some experts say if you aren’t engaging online, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to gain new customers and fans who will effectively market for you if given enough reason.

{ Online Retail }

More and more Australian businesses are selling online, but compared to the US we have a lot of catching up to do. Online spending has grown from 1% to 3% of overall spending over the last 10 years, compared to the American equivalent of 7%. “The whole market in general is maturing. I think some of the people who didn’t want to do it originally are now deciding they have to do it, because if I count the number of competitors I have now compared to last year, there’s certainly a lot more out there.”

{ Advertising Online }

The internet advertising industry continued to grow in 2009 and will do the same in 2010, but the next 12 months is expected to see the ongoing development of mobile advertising.

Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau forecast the online ad market to pass $2 billion by next month, representing a 27% increase from 2008. While the downturn forced spending down in 2009, it’s safe to assume that figure will rise in 2010.

{ Reputation Management }

Most businesses are at least operating a website, but even those rejecting the online space need to be aware of how fast rumours and allegations can fly in the digital age. Several companies have had their reputations tarnished within hours from the activities of either rogue employees, or a botched advertising campaign.

“The answer is, companies have been pushed into conducting a social media marketing campaigns without research and without adequately addressing the risk factors associated with social media.”

“2010 will see companies embracing the need to address the inherent risks of social media, with enterprises moving towards a scientific and empirically based approach to managing risk.”

{ Mobile Marketing }
While mobile advertising may be taking awhile to heat up, many businesses are developing new and interesting mobile marketing campaigns to draw people into their stores.

Google has developed a system whereby users take a picture of a barcode with their mobile phone and use the search engine to find information. Closer to home, Hoyts Cinemas currently runs a promotion where movie goers with Bluetooth activated on their handsets sometimes receive discount offers via text messages when they walk into a lobby.

But it isn’t just big companies which are using mobiles for marketing. Peter Shipman, who owns a casual Mexican restaurant in the US, bought ads in university newspapers to advertise a barcode sent through text messages used to claim discounts.

{ Website Content }

“Content-is-KING!” The growth of the internet has allowed businesses to publish content of their own, including blogs, pictures and even videos. King says SMEs should think about creating some sort of content on YouTube or similar sites such as a tutorial, and see a fan base grow.

“There are a lot of smaller to medium-sized businesses which have really operated with a focus of specifically gearing themselves towards publishing on YouTube, and they really make a go of it – and we give them a global audience to do so.”

{ Open Source }
Once upon a time, businesses wouldn’t trust open-source programs in favour of branded, more trustworthy software solutions. But now open-source has given SMEs a way of operating high-end programs without substantial costs.

With popular programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Open Office, WordPress and Joomla now gaining notoriety, organisations are beginning to realise open-source programs aren’t just technically inferior rip-offs, but legitimate alternatives.

{ Cloud Computing }
Two years ago “cloud computing” was viewed by many businesses as a buzzword with no particular meaning, used by tech-heads who didn’t quite know what they were talking about.

Now, using cloud services has become an essential for businesses. Whether they are backing up their data or using a piece of software hosted on external servers, cloud computing is now a part of everyday operations for many SMEs.

*Definition: Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that’s often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.

*Source: SiteProNews

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Facebook is one of the fastest growing social networking websites and is quickly becoming a powerful and cost effective portal, ideal for organisations to create that ‘brand connection’ in the Web2.0 world.

What are Facebook applications?

Most Facebook users today use 3rd party Facebook applications to add some fun and personality to their Facebook profile. Their purpose is to generate content that the user finds is relevant or of interest to them.

There is virtually an application for everything, ranging from a Facebook application that reminds a user when their favourite band is coming to town to a slide show of a collection of sentimental photos. The great thing about Facebook applications is that if it is to be added to a profile, the users listed as a individual’s ‘friends’ are sent an option of also using it. The application then circulates at such a rapid rate exposure is viral.

Facebook applications - Are the software programs that allow users to connect, interact and entertain themselves and their ‘friends’.

*Resource for article

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1) Site Speed… 2) Mobile… 3) Online Video… 4) Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search… 5) Using Twitter to Network Locally… 6) Increased Awareness of Local… 7) Consolidation

Another year in the world of SEO has come to an end, and it’s time to put together your SEO strategy and to-do list for 2010. A new year means another chance to capture rankings, to try out new marketing strategies and to take advantage of the areas where the search engines are looking to expand and place new importance. Because, despite what some may think, SEO for small business is not becoming less important. It’s more important than ever.

With that in mind, here’s a look at the SEO trends to watch out for in 2010.

Site Speed—It was during last month’s PubCon Las Vegas show that Matt Cutts, the head of Web spam at Google, told the audience that site speed may be used as a new ranking factor for 2010. Google’s goal is to help its users to find information as quickly as possible. How quickly a site loads definitely fits into that.

With all the site speed chatter as of late — say no to panic. Do, however, take steps to decrease the load time of your site. The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site. If you don’t know how fast your site is loading, tools lke WebPageTest or Pingdom Page Load offer easy ways to test it out. If you do need some help getting your site up to speed (no pun intended), there are number of free resources available to help.

• HTML Validation

• CSS

• Page Speed Firefox extension

• Closure (compiles JavaScript into compact, high performance code.)

Mobile—It’s been “the year for mobile” every year for the past five years and this year is no different. A recent Nieslen study found that there are now 56.9 million people looking for information on mobile Web sites (up 34 percent from last year). The push towards mobile has been heavily backed by the emergence of smartphones like the iPhone, Google Android and the popularity of Blackberry device. Combined, they mean that 2010 is the year where small businesses not only have to create a mobile presence, but where they have to create an optimized one, as well. Research says most consumers are not happy with the performance of mobile Web sites. Ignoring mobile means not only losing out on that initial transaction, but all future mobile transactions from that customer. That’s bad business. Can you really afford to do that?

Your first step to capitalizing on mobile is to find out how your site performs on small devices. Sites like BrowserCam (a paid service that offers a 24 hour/200 capture free trial) can give you an idea of how pages are loading, whether certain functionality is disabled, where it’s hanging up, etc. Once you’ve made sure it’s functional, take advantage of all Google’s new mobile services and free online coupons. If Google’s putting resources toward something, it’s probably a smart idea for SMB owners to follow suit.

Online Video—Last year YouTube became the second largest search engine. This year it continued its dominance, bringing in more than 11 billion streams in November, up 17 percent the previous year and even down just slightly from the month before. If you haven’t been playing with the love affair that is SMB owners and video, it’s time to start. Because your competition probably is. Also, with news that the bigger companies may be pulling back, it opens up a big door for SMBs to hop in there and use video to take back valuable search space with the help of Universal Search.

Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search—When Google put real-time search updates into the SERPs they unleashed a potential online reputation problem of epic proportions. They essentially opened the floodgates to give angry customers immediate power in the search results. You no longer have a window to reach out to an angry tweeter to ask them to amend their update or tone down that blog post. Google is pulling from tweets, from blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand.

For a small business owner, your best line of defense is to build a listening station that will help keep you abreast of conversations as they happen. Waiting 24 hours to be notified of a fire may be 24 hours too late.

What do you do?

• Use Twitter Search to track mentions of your name, your competitors’ names, important keywords, locations, etc.

• Use Comprehensive Google Alerts to track blogs and news sources talking about your brand.

• Use Social Mention or WhosTalkin to track anything the first two may have missed.

• Start work on owning your Google 10 to neutralize anything bad that may pop up.

Using Twitter to Network Locally—In 2009 small business owners got comfortable using social media. In 2010 it’s time to take the connections they’ve made online and learn to leverage them off. For many SMB owners that will mean looking to Twitter to network locally and then grabbing that conversion in the real world. For example, if you own a local catering business, you don’t just want to use Twitter to be helpful and build your company brand. You also want it to drive business into your physical locations so that you can benefit from those relationships.

That will mean using tools and information like tweet location, the Advanced Search features of Twitter itself or third party tools like Twitter Grader or Twellow. More and more we’re seeing the tools and apps designed to integrate into social media to help create virtual neighbors. Applications like FourSquare are just the beginning.

Increased Awareness of Local—Tried and true SEO is more important now than ever before. If you haven’t tied up all your local listings and profiles, it is beyond time to do that. The search engines, especially Google, are looking at the consistency and completeness of your local listings in order to rank you for relevant queries. That’s a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it! Corner the four corners of local search, go through the process of claiming all your local listings, dominate Yelp, manage your customer reviews, get quality citations and do everything you can to build the authority of your site on the Web.

Consolidation—Another trend we’re going to see with SMB owners this year is a move towards consolidating Web properties in order to make the ‘whole’ stronger. For example, a lot of small business owners have blogs that are currently located on Blogspot or Wordpress.com.  I think we’re going to see a lot of people start to move these on-site in order to build link equity and build a site that, overall, is stronger. When you have a blog located on a separate domain it means you’re trying to build links, authority and a community on multiple sites. You’re splitting your efforts. With Google changing things at whim and social media sites challenging our privacy, it’s going to strengthen the sites that you do have complete control over. There are plenty of free Wordpress guides onsetting up Wordpress and how to optimize it.

That’s my take. What SEO trends do you expect to see in 2010?

Resource:

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1- Don’t target keywords target markets – Keywords come and go and search behavior and user intent is whimsical this is why you should target markets instead of keywords. Since no two people think or search alike, you have to play the law of averages in your favor by finding the most trafficked and relevant keyword clusters to funnel traffic to your pages. This means targeting groups of keywords then finding which ones gain traction first.

There are pivotal keywords that act as a semantic thread that run throughout the theme of your website, so, by finding, consolidating and unifying those pages with internal links (the only links you have 100% control over); by the time you need to acquire links for ranking factor from other sites, you are miles ahead of your competition.

These 5 simple SEO solutions for common SEO mistakes can save you time to market and countless hours of frustration trying to reverse engineer competitors, simple keywords or rankings.

2- Consolidate the focus and intent of your pages – Don’t try to target too many keywords with one page; you are better off by using a new page to target a new keyword to use “exact match” naming conventions, title tag prominence and on page consistency.

In other words, if you are going after the key phrase “internet marketing services” and your website has other related posts on marketing, the first thing would be to title the page Internet-Marketing-Services.html , aspx, cfm, .php or whatever programming platform you are using.

Then use internet marketing services in the H1 tag, once in a link (even as an on page anchor #) and feature the keyword in the first paragraph preferably closer to the beginning of the sentence.

Then if you have any other occurrences of the keyword on other pages, link them to the page that will act as the preferred landing page.

Even bolding the keywords when they appear or using them in block quotes (bulleted lists) can also increase the relevance signal for the keyword on a granular level as far as taxonomy for search engine spiders is concerned. SEO is about the layers of overlapping signals that reinforce relevance simultaneously.

The mistake would be trying to make that page rank for web marketing services, online marketing service and all manner of related phrases from using off page link building tactics. If you are targeting other unique keywords, then create unique content-rich pages for each to provide a tip of the iceberg for search engines.

Every competitive keyword should have a relevant landing page (close to the root folder) to serve as the apex of the hierarchy for that keyword.

You can also use a singular, plural format service/services and alternate in the meta description to lock in additional keywords based on similar search phrases.

However, they will not engage until you have topically aligned the page in question with (a) enough links internally or (b) enough deep links from other sites to allow it to stem into other keyword variations.

3- Don’t Disproportionately Rely on Your Home Page for Rankings - Spread links evenly throughout a site using deep links. Deep links implies linking to a specific page with a specific keyword related to the target phrase.

This way when someone searches for yellow widgets, they don’t end up on your blue widgets page or at the home page (which will just cause confusion) or antagonize the user since there is no indicator of relevance.

The more focused your pages, the easier it is to cross the tipping point to gain a ranking for that exact match phrase. Don’t let your site suffer from theme diffusion from not having multiple unique landing pages.

4- Don’t ignore the Long Tail – Ranking for one word root phrases is nice, yet, you cannot afford to neglect the long tail phrases (key phrases using three of more words or local or regional references) while having enough flexibility to appear for the long-tail phrases which are typically closer to conversion as well. Someone typing in “buy a car” vs. “black 2009 ford mustang in new jersey” represent two different types of consumers. In this case, the latter is closer to conversion.

5- Traffic Must Convert of SEO is a Moot Point – Getting traffic is only the beginning, yes, increasing traffic is the gist of search engine optimization, but start with a goal in mind. Don’t look past visitors as numbers on an analytics dashboard, they are people with needs and are there for a reason.

So often people want SEO when the call to action, value proposition and graphic appeal of the page leaves much to be desired. If you have a destination page optimized for a specific keyword, then do your best to make that page emanate relevance for the main phrase as well as have a singular conversion objective for consumers to carry out (not multiple conversion points overlapping leaving them confused).

–> Reference

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Upcoming Flash CS5 will allow you to publish iPhone Apps.Today at Adobe MAX, Adobe announced that the upcoming Flash CS5 will allow you to build and export Flash Content as an iPhone App. This is not the same as Flash coming to the iPhone, it just means that instead of writing apps in Objective-C, folks can use ActionScript 3. Designers everywhere are already buzzing:perhaps time to re-purpose all those old intro screens? Perhaps the real question is: Do consumers win or lose?

-> MetaFilterBLOG

HOW IT ALL WORKS - Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure + ActionScript 3 + API’s!

 

We enabled this by using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure. LLVM is a modular, flexible compiler system that is used widely in a variety of projects. The key reason we choose LLVM is its flexibility and applicability to iPhone development.

We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.

By doing the compilation step, we allow developers to create applications using their Flash skills and their knowledge of ActionScript 3. In the process, we also expose the APIs that developers are familiar with so they can not only use the ActionScript language but follow the customary app-building model. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app.

->AdobeDevelopment

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[October 5th, 2009 ]…Building Applications for the iPhone with Flash -

This morning during the day 1 keynote at Adobe Max 2009, Adobe announced that the next version of Adobe Flash (Flash Professional CS5) will include support for creating stand-alone applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. As you can imagine, this is something that we are really excited about, and we expect there to be a lot of questions. This post should address some of those questions, and point to additional resources with more information.

So, what exactly did we announce?

The next version of Flash Authoring will enable developers to create stand-alone iPhone applications using Flash technologies (including ActionScript 3). These applications are just like any other iPhone application and can be distributed via the Apple iTunes Application store. Indeed, there are already a number of applications created with Flash on the store today.

One thing I want to stress is that this is for standalone applications, and is not the Flash Player for mobile Safari (which is something we continue to work on). The end result is a native iPhone application, and not a SWF that runs in the browser. We compile the SWF to a native application using LLVM. There is no requirement for the Flash Player / Adobe AIR Runtime to be installed on the device or included in the application. The end result is a native iPhone application.

Currently, this project is in private beta, and we plan to release a public beta of Flash CS5 with support for building iPhone applications before the end of this year. We are not accepting any new people for the private beta, but you can sign up to be notified when the public beta is available.

We have posted a developer FAQ on labs, which addresses a lot of the questions we expect you will have (we will continue to update this as necessary). The FAQ also includes some information that will be helpful if you want to start working on some content in anticipation of the public beta.

–>(resource:) MikeChambersBLOG

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Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we’ve taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center, making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front, and allowing you to control the ads you see with interest-based advertising. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google’s philosophy, and today, we’re happy to announce that we’re doing even more.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

www.google.com/dashboard.

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