The Advantages of Hiring an SEO Agency
January 31, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Select your SEO agency wisely and you’ll be on track to improved online traffic and more engagement from your online audience. Folks in the business know that improved audience engagement is a surefire indication of incoming rises in profits or in the faster attainment of the particular goals of your site. If the purpose of your online portal is to recruit volunteers, you’ll have an immensely easier time going about it if the majority of the inquiries you receive from online visitors come from people who want to participate. You are probably all too familiar with how taxing it can be to your resources to field questions or comments unrelated to your enterprise.
Dealing with these types of issues is where SEO companies excel. They are the places to turn to when your in-house staff doesn’t have the time, or expertise, to craft compelling write-ups that can captivate and persuade readers; or, maybe they’re unable to implement changes to your site’s design that makes it be more in tune with major search engines.
What else can an SEO company do for you? It can help you construct a better image of whom, precisely, your core audience is. If you want to expand beyond it, say reach folks in a neighboring town that could be more responsive to your business, then delving into SEO work is the way to go. And although search engine optimization is primarily concerned with the search engines, part of its work today also involves “social media optimization.” Say Yes to improvements by saying Yes to SEO.
Effort Underway to Replicate Silicon Valley Near Harvard University
January 30, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Last Friday, inside Harvard University’s Maxwell Dworkin lecture hall, Patrick S. Chung, W. Hugo Van Vuuren, and Harry Weller introduced the Experiment Fund, which will represent “seed money” along with structural and networking support to exceptional student entrepreneurs in the Cambridge-Boston area. Among those eligible for funding will be students from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University.
The fund is also being wielded as a promising cork to a genuinely unflattering brain-drain: Cambridge-centered entrepreneurs tend to leave town for the advantages that California’s Silicon Valley offers. Two of Harvard’s highest high flyers, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, after all, famously dropped out of the school to develop their own tech companies.
The idea behind the fund is to provide budding scholar-entrepreneurs with the tools they need to propel their ideas forward without needing to leave the school or geographical area altogether. With the fund, approximately four to six startups would be eligible for early capital in sums ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.
The Harvard Crimson quoted from an email sent by Harry Weller in which he explained that the fund was “not an incubator or grant-giving organization,” but a resource for investment that can help campus scholar-entrepreneurs “grow with seed capital, consistent guidance, and unparalleled access to experts.”
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http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/27/experiment-fund-seas-investment/
New Search Tool Out as Social Web Tells Google: “Don’t Be Evil”
January 23, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Download the “bookmarklet” released today by an ad-hoc group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, and you might get better search results from Google.
Last week, Google announced that information from its fledgling social network, Google+, would be surfaced in its search results all while effectively suppressing data from other competing, and much more popular, networks. Google claims the suppression (unfair censoring?) is unavoidable because it could not adequately index data from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn due to their reluctance to publicly share all their data.
Understandably, the folks behind the other networks — which do actually supply a significant amount of public data — were miffed. But they took quick, and pointed, action. The bookmarklet that’s now available, and which has Google’s famous motto for its name, “Don’t Be Evil,” uses Google’s own search capacities to demonstrate how the current setup of data suppression is avoidable, after all, and how the dominant force in search is using its brute force to manipulate results in a way that serves its own interests.
If you want to use the tool, go to http://www.focusontheuser.org/ and download it.
So far, only one name from the group of engineers is known: Blake Ross, a co-founder of Firefox who’s currently Facebook’s Director of Product.
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http://www.focusontheuser.org/
Pretty-In-Pink Valley Girl Interviews Sheryl Sandberg
January 20, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Facebook’s new digs in Menlo Park were recently visited by Jesse Draper, the host of “The Valley Girl,” an online talk show based in the Silicon Valley. Draper was on the hallowed (for tech devotees) premises to interview the company’s celebrated chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. During the interview, Sandberg chatted about her first job as an office assistant; she greeted patients for an ophthalmologist boss — her father — during her tenure. Sandberg also shared tidbits about her subsequent stint as an aerobics instructor.
The show’s cameras made sure viewers got a good eyeful of the newly opened quarters. Highlights included a communal office bike, touch-screen soda machines, endless snacks, and a concrete message wall that replicates the spirit of the well-know virtual walls found on typical Facebook profiles.
Finally, Sandberg laid bare what impresses her the most about the company she helps run: the big “impact” that Facebook has in people’s lives, including her own, in matters that go beyond the daily toil of work. She even spoke of having felt less alone after sharing publicly, through her Facebook profile, an obituary she wrote for her recently deceased grandmother. She said she read every one of the Facebook comments she received following the post.
In addition to her high-powered position at Facebook, Sandberg also sits on the corporate boards of Starbucks and Disney.
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SOPA and PIPA Disowned By President, Republican Senators, and the Public
January 19, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
On Wednesday, Internet users came together to denounce two bills making their way through the American legislature: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as SOPA and PIPA. Many took directly to the streets, but the overwhelming majority expressed their opposition by spreading information about the issue on online social networks, signing petitions, writing emails to congress, calling their representatives’ offices (incredibly retro for some), and of course, tweeting about it.
Among the biggest organizers of the widespread protests were Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, and Reddit. These organizations have a lot to lose if the bills become laws. The regulatory measures being considered threaten to hold these institutions, already profoundly entrenched in people’s everyday lives and heavily dependent on user-generated content for their business, legally accountable for the copyright infringes of their millions (soon to be billions) of users.
The extent of the opposition demonstrated yesterday even caused two Republican senators to withdraw their support for the bills: Senator Marco Rubio, from Florida, and Senator John Cornyn, from Texas, no longer back the bills. President Obama expressed his non-support Saturday.
Speaking to the New York Times, Cary H. Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America delivered a quip telling of the uphill battle currently faced by the entertainment industry: “It’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.”
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Facebook Shedding Its Echo Chamber Name
January 17, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
For some time now, Facebook has been saddled with the unfortunate sobriquet of Echo Chamber. As anyone who’s ever tried knows all too well, ditching an unwanted nickname is more than a little complicated (read: Difficult). But, since the company behind your online life record has the motivation, human resources, and economic means to carry out data studies that can, ahem, empirically disprove the basis on which such an inglorious moniker was erected, Facebook has done just that.
The Facebook Data Team, which harking back to Facebook’s origins in the realm of Ivy League scholarship carries out academic-style research studies, has just cranked out another pointy-headed paper. Eytan Bakshy, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s School of Information helmed the study that looked at how previously unknown information is passed along among Facebook friends. His research underscores the importance of the inordinate amount of weak social ties Facebookers accumulate the longer they remain on the network. According to the paper published by Bakshy and his Facebook team, those weak ties do a lot of the heavy lifting related to the introduction of new information to users, thereby giving a good shaking to the Echo Chamber theory, which postulates that we only read/think/opine like our closest Facebook friends.
More details about the study can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859
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YouTube’s Networkization Ready for 2012
January 16, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
At seven years old, and swaggering with all its 800 million unique monthly visitors, YouTube is on the verge of something new: original, non-amateur video content. The site even has a swank-ily revamped interface from which to present its offerings of polished content.
The video-sharing leviathan, whose parent company is Google, has gotten more than its feet wet in the waters of entertainment production by hiring professional writers, directors, and producers. One hundred-plus channels will be inaugurated, possibly before the summer, by these pioneers of professional YouTube content. Amy Poehler, the comedian pictured at the left, will be one of them.
John Seabrook has been keeping tabs on YouTube for some time, and he rendered his observations in a New Yorker essay that appeared today. According to Seabrook, YouTube is going after a larger chunk of the $60 billion advertisers shell out on television; they currently only spend $3 billion on the Web. But that’s not it; YouTube is also positioning itself to be able to sell its professional channels to television networks and the cable guys.
In the future YouTube is betting on, fifty percent of homes will be hooked up to view Web channels on their TVs. Without a doubt, the company Chad Hurley, Steven Chan, and Jawed Karim founded is also hoping its professional content will persuade users to stay on the site longer than the 15 minutes they’re currently spending there each day.
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook?currentPage=all
Is Google Stretching Its Monopoly’s Muscles?
January 13, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Perhaps all that’s missing from the Larry Page photo you see below really is an old-fashioned top hat, a curlicue moustache, and some coattails before the familiar figure of Rich Uncle Pennybags emerges. Since Google’s announcement earlier this week that material posted on its new social network, Google+, will be given a prominent position in the results of its more-than-iconic search engine, peers, observers, and rivals (understandably) have been crying foul.
Critics of Google’s latest move to “socialize” company products have decried what they perceive to be Google’s flexing of its monopoly muscles. That’s because the company has what some term a “natural monopoly” in the area of Web search — its dominance is beyond dispute. Google’s derided and “risky” move is being attributed to company brass becoming nervous on account of the heat it’s currently feeling from Facebook and Twitter — the giants of the new Social Web. Either to thwart its rivals, or because it really doesn’t feel capable of successfully embedding the social material of other networks at the moment, Google will not be “surfacing” social postings from Facebook or Twitter in the same way as it will being doing with Google+’s.
In a statement, Google defended its actions by saying:
“Google does not currently have access to fully crawl the content on some sites, so it’s not possible for us to surface all that information. Ushering in the new era of social and private data search will take close cooperation, and we hope other sites participate.”
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Myspace TV Coming to a Tablet Near You?
January 9, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Justin Timberlake-endorsed Myspace is back on the scene, and it just may have beaten Apple and Google to a big consumer good: TV on the Web. Specific Media, Myspace’s current owner, issued a public statement concerning company plans to make the service available by early this year. Their idea is to offer network and cable content on any device with a screen and an Internet connection. The big announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show going on right now in Las Vegas, Nevada. In a subsequently published press release, company scribes say that the first channels to be offered by Myspace’s new service will tap deep into Myspace’s immense music video library.
Despite the ambitious date for service launch, Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook was open about the fact that deals with television content providers were still being sorted out. Details about what fees consumers will be expected to pony up for the service are still hard to come by. Sticking to its social network roots, Myspace TV will be outfitted with features permitting easeful shared “virtual viewing,” meaning you’ll be able to watch TV with friends in faraway places at the same time, and talk about it online as if you all were sitting next to each other on a TV couch of yore.
http://allthingsd.com/20120109/myspace-yes-myspace-say-its-going-to-sell-you-web-tv/?refcat=social
Kanye West Tells the World on Twitter that He Is Hiring
January 5, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Kanye West, who’s touring with Jay-Z, and whose daring and gorgeous album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was the toast of 2010 and 2011, has just put out a huge For Hire ad on his, let’s say it, acclaimed Twitter feed. Scientists, designers, writers, social media experts, tech guys (and gals), and even nutritionists are asked to reach out and participate in DONDA, West’s still-in-formation, 22-division “design company.”
The company is named after his mother, Donda West, who died in November 2007 after undergoing elective plastic surgery. Mrs. West was a literature scholar and the former Chair of the English department at Chicago State University.
In his tweets, West proclaims his willingness to invest in creativity and his commitment to making a difference in the world using his talent for “connectivity,” his resources, and his access to the world’s movers and shakers.
Kanye says, “I invest every dime back into creativity… hiring amazing creatives paying for flights, offices … etc…” and continues with “DONDA is a design company which will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce there dreams and ideas…”
If you’re looking for a job, hear ‘Ye out: “If anyone would like to reach out email us at contactDONDA@gmail.com.”
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