700 people were lined at the length of the Brooklyn Bridge before its 125th birthday. All of them bring along their cameras and created the wave of flashes with the cameras across the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Video after the break.
[via ImprovEverywhere]
Tags: Camera, Brooklyn Bridge, flashes
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Sony Ericsson has confirmed their press announcement at Amesterdam on June 17, while the Communicasia is also being held from 17 to 20 June 2008 in Singapore. Visitors will get to see the new mobile phone. There’s no info on what phones they will announced in the press event, high possibilities these two models will be announced: the Sony Ericsson P5 (Paris) and the G702 (Bei Bei).
[via Slashphone]
Tags: mobile phone, cell phone, handset, handphone, phone, communication, sony ericsson
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Dave Winer is crazy. I talked about it earlier this week. One of the Technosailor.com spies reported back with this exchange between Dave and Robert Scoble.
Another tremendously busy day to end a tremendously busy week. I am truly worn out. It took all I had in me to go with Marshall and Noah to check out Indiana Jones tonight. Aaaaaaand - well, I haven’t heard one person say that it sucked, but I thought it sucked. The sets were bad, and that stupid crystal skull looked like plastic and that it had plastic wrap packed inside of it - in fact, I’m pretty sure it was and it did. The end was pretty good, and parts of it were ok, but there was a LOT of stupid and bad mixed in. They could have made Harrison Ford look cool, but instead they kept pointing out how old he was. I mean, he is no spring chicken, but I think accentuating the “gramps” was a little too much. I guess if they had tried to make him look cool I would have thought that was stupid too. Maybe it’s me.
I’m starting to stress wondering what I am going to do with the kids this summer, I think I mentioned that yesterday. Maybe we will go to Texas City next week and spend some time at the beach house. At least there is a pool and the beach. Or not - Ryan is coming in tomorrow, I forgot about that. Noah has a camp to go to the next week, Uncle Allen (who knows EVERYTHING) is coming the week after that, and they head to PA at the end of June for a week. I guess we will make it through June. For now, I must sleep.
Comments (No responses yet)Earlier today I was asked to take a look at a blog of a reader to give it a critique. On arriving on the blog I immediately noticed that at the top of every article on the front page of the blog there was a copyright notice which ascribed the copyright to a ‘free article’ website. On opening each post I saw that at the bottom of each post was a paragraph byline from an author with links back to their own websites. Classic ‘free article’ stuff.
The concept of ‘free article’ websites is simple. Authors wanting to build their web profile and incoming links to their sites write articles and submit them to a ‘free article’ website. The free article website then allows any website owner to republish those articles as long as they do so with the links that are in them in tact. In this way the author of the article gets links (which helps their search engine ranking), the article site also gets free links back to them and the person using the article gets free content.
Everyone wins right?
Wrong…..
I won’t unpack whether the article writer wins (that’s a whole other post) but as a blogger republishing free articles on your blog you could actually be doing more harm than good to your blog.
Let me illustrate this with a simple exercise:
On searching ArticlesBase.com (a free article site) for ‘blogging’ to see what articles they have there an article titled ‘13 Steps to Successful Blogging’ comes up in the search results (as pictured below):
I highlighted a segment of the article and plugged it into Google within “quotes” to see how many exact matches I could get for it (to see how many times the article has been republished).
Here’s the search results on Google:
Google sees that phrase ‘about’ 54,000 times!
1. A key to growing blogs is unique and useful information - if you want to grow a blog into a profitable and sustainable venture you need to provide your readers with useful and unique information. Post the above article and you’re 1 in 54,000 (and counting).
2. A key to growing blogs is personal voice and connection - if your blog is filled with free articles you’ll end up with a collection of content that is disjointed, that doesn’t personally connect with readers and is devoid of personality. Blog readers will subscribe and become loyal to a blog when they feel a personal connection and want to track with someone over the long haul. Not when they see a disjointed collecting of articles by a different person every day.
3. A key to ranking well in Search Engines is ‘Unique’ content - using an article that appears 54,000 times on the web almost guarantees that it’ll never be found by one of the biggest sources of traffic out there - Google. For starters you’re competing with 54,000 other versions of the same article, secondly you’re competing with the ‘free article’ sites you got the post off (remember they generate millions of links from their free articles) and on top of all that Google hates what it calls ‘duplicate content’ and works hard to not rank highly content that is republished over and over again. The article above does appear in the rankings for a search for ’successful blogging’ in the #1 position - but the site that ranks for it is a free article site.
The long and short of it is that as a blogger you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice by using ‘free articles’.
Forget Independence day, also known as June 4th, also known as the day that Presidential hopeful Barack Obama claims the Democratic nomination for president. We’ve suffered through five months of primaries and caucuses and all of the tree decorations that have been this Democratic primary season. Today, we stand five days shy of the Montana and South Dakota primaries that will wrap up all 48 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
Michigan and Florida don’t get the distinction of being called states, in this post, due to their decision to buck the party system and make their own rules. Damn those independents!
So, though Obama appears poised to claim the victory, we thought we’d take the technical approach to the nomination process and figure out what Google Fights has to say.
According to Google, Barack Obama has won 85% of the vote for a total of 3441 delegates.
One wonders why it has taken this long to find a nominee…
Update: Digg it if you wish.
Welcome to the Friday Review Round-Up! Each Friday I scour the blogosphere for product reviews that I think are well-written, informative, and just plain interesting. My goal in doing this is to not only find reviews that deserve some attention, but to also help the review blogger community as a whole. We all work hard at what we do and we deserve recognition for it! So, without further ado, here are my picks:
*Mama Maven from Reviews from the Delaney Diaries reviewed Maiden America non-slip barrettes for kids at http://delaneydiaries.typepad.com/reviews/. Sounds like I need these for my daughter’s fine yet unruly hair! Read her review of Maiden America barrettes here.
*Amy at Mums the Wurd reviewed Matilda Jane clothing for kids. Her site is under construction but knowing Amy (which I do!), it will just be even more fabulous when it’s done. Read her review of Matilda Jane clothing here.
*Proving that not every review has to be a gushing fountain of praise, Leeanthro wrote a review for The Full Mommy of the Baby Einstein Baby’s First Sounds DVD in which she says why she was not a fan of it. Read her review of Baby’s First Sounds DVD here.
*Emily posted a review on Props & Pans of a product made by Mark, an offshoot of the Avon company. It’s a mattifying lotion that apparently soaks up oil without drying out your skin, something I could use myself! Read her review of Mark Matte Chance here.
*SassyFrazz reviewed Automoblox, which, HELLO AUTOMOBLOX P.R. REPS PLEASE EMAIL ME! My daughter would go NUTS for those four little people that fit inside the car! Sounds like it was a big hit at her house. Read her Automoblox review here.
*Shannon Hutton, one of my roommates at BlogHer last year, who was a new blogger last year, and now writes the Momsational blog on the Sparkplugging website, which is FANTASTIC and CONGRATULATIONS, Shannon!, wrote a review of the photo processing site Snapfish, and gives a link to get a free flipbook and 50 free prints from Snapfish.
When you visit these blogs to read their reviews, feel free to tell them that MomReviews sent you! And join me next Friday for another Friday Review Round-Up!
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So, we moved offices today. Not a huge move, we moved across the hall. With all the growth we’ve had over the passed year, we outgrew our old office and needed more space!
The move went fairly swell. Joe did a lot of the heavy stuff, while Salim watched. Darcie and Rachel feng shui’d the place. Everyone else pitched in and it was all streamed live.
The best part of the move was actually a week long affair. On Tuesday, Chad and Jeremy were the only ones not in the office, and a great idea came about for a trick to play on them. We decided to tell them that we were going to paint the office on moving day some really funky colors so they would need to wear painting clothes today.
Chad threw a fit claiming to be “allergic” to paint fumes. Sure Chad. Because the whole office was in on it, we really had him going.
Jeremyaccepted it so quickly that we were sure he was going to play a joke on us. We thought that he had clued into the prank (mostly because this isn’t the first time something like this has been played on him. Halloween.) and was planning some sort of great retaliating joke. Nope. Turns out he’s just very trusting. And was actually excited about the bright green and orange we were planning on painting the boardroom. On Wednesday, he called his wife and asked her if she knew where his lumberjack shirt was so he would be able to use it to paint. The whole office was in an uproar (but we had to pretend we were laughing at Salim had said, though Salim is never funny).
So he showed up today in his regular clothes (because he does have a very important meeting with respectable adults), but brought his paint clothes. Joey even dressed up in his overalls to add effects. We made him put his clothes on before we told him the bad news that there was no painting going on.
In a phone call later between Jeremy and an unspecified caller, we overheard “No, we’re not painting today. (pause). Because they’re assholes.”
All in all a good joke.
Other news: Lee ripped his pants and had to borrow Jeremy’s painting pants. Salim will get his first ever Co-Worker of the Week award in a few weeks because it was promised to him if either Chad or Jeremy showed up in their painting clothes. He’ll probably do something to tick everyone off between now and the time he’s supposed to win so that he will lose his privileges.
Before I begin, I want to thank Mari Adkins and Janice Thomason for taking the time to comment on the last entry. I lacked on replying to your comments, but know that I agree with both of you and will be better responding in the future. Now on with the latest entry.
I’ve been doing this for a long time. Long enough where early on, to make a client happy, I neglected to mention that a graphic/web designer is not hired to be a professional writer/editor. Granted we work with your company’s content, but what we work with, mainly, is the space that the content needs to fit into.
Often enough, people seeking out a designer, regardless of the field, are looking for someone they can pass the buck of their project to. What they fail to realize is someone taking on the full project management, content created, design and implementation will be… wait for it…a firm or agency. What you really need, and I can hear the cries of your budget now, is team of people working on the whole of the project. You do not want the kid you just hired who learned HTML and some flash. You do not want the guy who has a start up doing design, print or web. These people are not, and I will repeat this often, not the people who should be carrying the full weight of the fact that you either can’t spell OR can’t clearly define in text what it is you want them to define visually.
A designer is just that…a designer. You wouldn’t ask your plumber to check your electrical wiring. You wouldn’t ask your electrician to align your spine. The cashier at your local fast food joint doesn’t make your burger.
The responsibility of making sure that the content of your web/print piece is yours. That way, even though it may delay your deadline, helps you know that if the piece launches incorrectly…it’s their responsibility to fix it. If you’re whatever is launched with wrong content that is the result of a sign off that bares your signature…the responsibility for it being wrong ends up falling squarely in your lap. Sure you’re going to be pissed at the designer, but they will pull out your sign off, point out where you failed to review it fully and remind you that you signed off on it. You may never work with them again, but they aren’t out the money of paying for a mistake you allowed them to make. You will be out the money to get it redone by them or someone else, the new printing costs and the time for all of this, because you gave the responsibility of making sure your information is correct…to someone else.
So let’s review, a copy writer writes content, a project manager makes sure the project meets its projected milestones, a print graphic designer creates work on paper, a web designer creates work in digital and a business owner is responsible for hiring the people for the job. Can each of these people be capable of doing the other persons job? Yes, but will it be done effectively across the board? No one can know for sure.
There’s an old saying, “it takes a village to raise a child”. In that regard, it takes a team to fully realize a project you don’t have the time to work on yourself. Whether it’s an agency, a firm, a studio or a team of people your designer suggests; no project should every fully fall on the shoulders of just one industry worker.
Since I’ve gone, briefly, into what a designer doesn’t do; I’d love to hear what your expectations of a designer, print or web, has been in the past. Do you view them as the guru of all things because their end result is something that, hopefully, brings you a ROI? Have you expected them to know the difference between a conjunction and participle? Or did you supply them the things they needed and get out of the way and let them design something?
June 9th draws closer and nearer to the Apple WWDC event being held in San Francisco, and as we do so more images of the next gen Apple 3G iPhone hit the net waves; so many images have been offered up these past few weeks it is easy to say with a fair amount of confidence, just what sort of visually artistic changes to expect with the Apple 3G iPhone.
For instance we already know there have been some changes to the Apple 3G iPhone’s exterior appearance with more tapered edges, narrower chrome bezel, glossy plastic rear which replaces the old Mb-A1 cover of the present Apple iPhone, and reviser docking port connector/speaker area.
Also everyone can continue speculating at what may or may not be as Apple certainly as usual isn’t letting anything official escape. Only silence ever comes from Apple HQ until they are good and ready to say what they have to say.
So here are the latest images being touted over the net waves, and supposedly showing the next gen Apple 3G iPhone casing, which looks to fall in line with mock-ups that have been gleaned from 3G iPhone case moulds, but are they real?
I’m not saying they aren’t, but then again I’m not saying they are, you make you your own mind on this one. With May almost at an end, a couple of weeks more and everything will be answered and clear with the Apple 3G iPhone, let’s hope the whispers about the launch date are similarly true.
Source – allaboutphones
