B(abble)log - Archives
As always, there was a lot of good reading this week. Here's some of the stuff that caught my eye...
- Holiday shopping for the geek in your life? SEOmoz has 50 Perfect Gifts for Webophiles, Bloggers & Internet Marketers. Thanks Randfish...it was an amazing post!
- Marketing Profs’ David Finkel and Diane Kennedy, authors of The Maui Millionaires for Business, share the 10 Biggest Business Blunders and how you can avoid them.
- You know about Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty from Unilever, right? Well, it has spawned a similar campaign from Procter & Gamble. My Black is Beautiful supports multiple brands in the P&G portfolio and is aimed at urban African-American women. But hey, just because it's not a terribly original idea doesn't mean that it isn't great to see more brands supporting a more realistic portrayal of beauty. Read more here at the Buzz Bin.
- People-power forces Facebook to make changes to its Beacon advertising system. It’s big enough news to warrant BBC coverage.
- A consortium of publishers and news sites are proposing a new system of how search engines can index Web sites, in what could be the first change to the protocol since 1994. The MIT Technology Review has more.
- Experts share their best practices in this article: 10 Blogging Tips From 10 Bloggers, courtesy of Joe Kutchera at iMedia Connection.
- Thanks to Mitch Joel’s post on Technorati Rankings, I discovered The Blogger’s Guide to SEO by Aaron and Giovanna Wall. Thanks Mitch!
- Want to help designers improve the user experience? Take this user-interface survey and wait for the results at the end. Very interesting!
- As winter is upon us and darkness inspires hibernation (*yawn*), here are 5 Simple Steps to Power Up Your Productiivity, from the Dumb Little Man.
- Okay, so maybe it wasn't the most enlightening reading this week, but this made me laugh out loud. So, say you're Scotland and you're looking for a new slogan to lure tourists. You plunk down £125,000.00 Would you expect a little more than this?
Bonus:
The Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo happens next week in Chicago with Keynote speaker Seth Godin. As an incentive to attend, SES is offering a free download of their previously recorded Webcast where Seth speaks on topics from his newest book “Meatball Sundae”. The download is free, runs over an hour and is available until January 31, 2008.
Friday Fun
This time-waster concentration game as part of a campaign for Zippo lighters that runs until December 16. Play it here.
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Google’s corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” has always made me smile. And yesterday, it lived up to that motto when the company announced a new initiative called “RE < C”, which stands for Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.
The search engine giant intends to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Several industry analysts are worried about Google’s priorities and wonder if it is stretching itself too thin.
Personally, Google’s decision inspired me. Sure, I at home I recycle and compost… but what can I do to make my business greener?
In addition to the usual suggestions of opting for reducing the amount of paper waste and using energy efficient lighting, I dug around the InterWeb and came up with a few other ideas.
Take your laptop off the grid.
David Widger over at the blog Marketing Green provides an incredible list of green online retailers, green directories and a plethora of ways to make green choices.
EcoGeek reports that Target has become the first major retailer to sell refurbished goods: ipods, flat screen TVs and the like.
Think of giving away corporate gifts this year, check out Swagologie, an eco-friendly option.
These are from my morning walk, after I packed the kid off on the school bus. I love this time. Winter is here and the drudgery of shoveling hasn't yet set in!
I really like this one. It's got a bit of a surreal feeling. Completely unintentional, more of a happy accident while I was looking up, slipping on an icey patch and clicking on the button to take the photo!
One of the things I love about some Canadian winter days are their B&W look, even when in full colour.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about alt attributes. The alt attribute is the alternative text or substitute text you see when an image or graphic cannot be displayed on a Web site. As well, even when an image is visible to a site user, the alt text appears when the cursor is placed over an image in some browsers.
When it comes to optimization, does an alt attribute really matter? In and of itself – no. But if you care about user experience, then, yes very much.
Why is alt text important? Because it is text:
- For people using mobiles and other handheld devices
- For people with disabilities using assistive technology, including refreshable Braille displays or screen readers
- For people with low bandwidth connections, who may opt not to load graphics
- For search engines, so they can interpret the meaning of images and graphics using the alt attribute
As you can see, mostly alt text is for people. And, let’s face it, they’re the ones that really matter.
How do you write a good alt attribute? There are two things to keep in mind: your keyword phrases and how the page would look without the images.
Here are the basics:
- For images that are purely decorative (spacer gifs, etc.) leave the alt attribute blank. (No one wants to be greeted with “spacer.gif” 20 times, or, for our visually-challenged friends to have endure their screen reader continually blurting it aloud.)
- For images that contain text (taglines, magazine or newspaper excerpt, etc.) replicate the text in full.
- For images that contain charts or graphs, try to summarize the content. (“Graph showing population by city, across Canada”)
- For a photograph, describe the image (“Photo of my Mum at her birthday party”)
This week privacy concerns about Facebook were burning up the blogosphere, with repercussions for advertisers. But there was a lot of other stuff going on as well, here's a selection:
- B.L. Ochman posts a video tracing Facebook’s investors back to the intelligence community and warns that there is no privacy online.
- Chris Brogan was surprised to see an ad with a topless woman appear on his Facebook home page. Facebook’s contextual ad serving goes against their own terms of service. Adele over at McAlear Marketing told me about this one, and pointed out the irony of Facebook's decision to shut down the account of a woman who had posted breast-feeding photos.
- The Wall Street Journal reports on how Facebook’s new Beacon program, which tracks members’ activity on advertiser’s web sites, has a powerful opponent in the MoveOn organization.
- Do you wonder how videos go viral? Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group, shares how he makes it happen. All is not as it seems on the Internet (but you knew that already).
- Starbucks launching their first TV campaign ever. AdAge discusses why they would pick old school TV as the medium.
- Reaching “millennials” is the target for many brands. Here are 10 observations about what college students don't know about marketing and the implications for marketers, from Carol Phillips at Advertising Age.
- I wrote about the world’s largest ad in Dubai back on November 3rd. And the naturalsearchblog takes it one step further offering tips on how to optimize your roof ads for Google Maps.
- Working on your About page? Skelliwag offers advice on how to write a great one.
- Smashing shows us how to give our typography life by setting it in motion.
- Last month Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, of Wired Magazine, and author of The Long Tail has took a hard line approach to unwanted email by publicly outing 100 people whom he has blocked. Here are some words of advice on how not to get banned for PR professionals from Chief Marketer.
Friday Bonus
Montreal Tech Watch announces Razzle.ca launching November 23 (today). The site will offer one deal a day and the business model has already been proven very successful in the US and Europe. Their launch-day deal is one-third the price, or $91 cheaper, than a major online retailer!
Remember Burger King’s subservient chicken from a few years ago? Well, AdRants tells us about subservient Santa, in kid-friendly and naughty versions.
I hate it when companies lie, don't you? I was perusing the Guardian this morning and came across an article by Mark Sweeney, "Renault Pulls N-Word Ad."Here's the offending ad.
Here's the part that gets my goat (If I had a goat.): The Renault UK spokesman said, "The N-word headline is one of three print advertisements that are complemented by three radio commercials explaining the game and Renault's offers. Any misunderstanding of the N-word is totally unintentional. However, this specific print advertisement will be removed with immediate effect, so as not to cause any offence."
"Any misunderstanding of the N-word is totally unintentional." It's mindboggling that someone has the audacity to say that. Of course that was the intention. "Oh you thought we meant THAT n-word? Ha, ha, we really only meant "No."
Pathetic. How on earth was that ad ever approved?
Then let's add a little insult to injury, don't apologize. Don't say, "Yes, we made a mistake." Instead mutter something about it not being intentional. Shift the blame to the viewer. In case it causes YOU offence, we are removing it.
Grrrrrrrrr.
An implied racial slur is always deplorable.
Here's what's been going on this week...
1. Catch up on the happenings in this week’s Social Media scene with the weekly round up by Jerimiah Owyang, from Forrester research.
2. Tessa Wegert from ClickZ talks about how contextual advertising on Facebook and MySpace are challenging the boundaries of social networks.
3. Seth Godin ponders the brand-free market.
4. Kevin Dugan from The Bad Pitch Blog covers the top 10 things you should NEVER say to the Media.
5. It's no chump change: Word of Mouth worth $1 billion to marketers.
6. Pagination - Examples and Good Practices: What you need to know to improve your Web site’s usability from Smashing Magazine.
7. Getting a new site? Read Julie batten's article on SEO design and development best practices.
8. Over at SearchEngineLand, Stephan Spencer goes into detail about effective tagging for usability and SEO.
9. Marketing Sherpa Case Study: SEO tactics to quadruple lead generation.
10. Thinking about AdWords and AdSense? Get the lowdown in this insightful primer by John Wall.
FRIDAY BONUS:
The Web 2.0 bullshit generator.
Because you need to know... here is the two billionth photo uploaded to Flickr.
I get phone calls weekly from people who say something like, "I launched my site six months ago and I'm not getting any traffic." This is what is known in the industry as the "build it and they will come" myth. The reality is, a well-crafted site and great content are just the beginning. New site owners must also start to build their online presence through incoming links.
Yesterday, Marketing Profs ran a very good article by Miles Galiford entitled, "The Link-Building Bible: Over 100 Tips, Tricks and Tactics for Rapidly Building Link Popularity." I encourage every new site owner to read it.
Enjoy, enjoy! I'm off to find some cough lozenges, wrap myself in a blanket and try to shake this cold. Talk to you all near the end of the week.
A friend of mine sent this over with a note saying, "How clever of a design firm to create a free dingbat font of Canadian icons as a way to promote their business. Ya never know when you might need an icon of a mullet or zamboni!"
Well, I couldn't agree more!
Check out the very clever font, and brilliant marketing give-away, from Vancouver's 10four Design Group. The font, Adanac, is free to download here. Here's a peek at the lowercase...
As you know, the Canadian loonie has been soaring and yet consumers haven't felt much of its trickle-down effect at their level. I'm so proud of my pal, Tabatha. For the last few months she has been comparing prices between American and Canadian online retailers and contacting retailers who have not changed their prices to reflect the stronger Canadian dollar. She's also been sending her findings to the media, and yesterday appeared on Global Toronto in a piece talking about which stores have adjusted their prices and which have not.
Go to Global and then click on "Good and Bad Stores" from Thursday.
Go Tabatha, go!
Are you sitting around in your office thinking to yourself, "Man, I wish I could improve my vocabulary and help the starving of the world at the same time."?
Me too!
I came across FreeRice.com, a very odd site, via Gawker. Essentially, you are presented with a word and four possible synonyms. For every word you get correct, Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. It was so bizarre I thought it was a joke. (Who counts out those grains? What happens if I get it wrong...does some poor kid lose food? WTF?!) But it appears to be on the up-and-up.
So if you're feeling the urge to save the world and show off your language skills, check it out!
![Digg!](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://www.acriley.com/web-content/pivot/entry.php?id=216&title=Feed the Poor. Improve Your Vocab.&bodytext=
[[image:freericelogo.gif:Free Rice:left:0]]Are you sitting around in your office thinking to yourself, "Man, I wish I could improve my vocabulary and…&topic=Fun Stuff Online Content Words){kind=small}
Amy is the latest viral video offering from the Canadian Campaign for Real Beauty folks. Created by Tim Piper, the video features a very catchy tune by Toronto's Howie Beck.
You can customize the video by changing the name. So, go ahead, send it off to a friend!
The shopping paradise and real estate frenzy known as Dubai now has another claim to fame - the world's largest ad. According to The Guardian, the advert, for Sorouh Real Estate, covers more than 20,000 sq m and will be seen by an estimated 14 million people. Sorouh Real Estate is paying UK based company, Ad-Air, an undisclosed amount of money for the mammoth ad. Ad-Air has also acknowledged that it has rights to 30 airports globally, so expect to see similar giant ads at both Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago O'Hare next year.
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