WHILE IT WOULD PROBABLY BE OBNOXIOUS TO FINISH THIS POST IN CAPITAL LETTERS, TODAY’S CELEBRATION GIVES ME THE NECESSARY LEEWAY, SO STOP COMPLAINING. IN REGARDS TO THE DAY’S SIGNIFICANCE, CAPS LOCK DAY WAS STARTED IN 2000 BY DEREK ARNOLD, AND WHILE IT WAS INTENDED TO MAKE FUN OF CERTAIN LANGUAGE CONVENTIONS — AND THE PEOPLE WHO ADHERE TO THEM, APPARENTLY — IT’S GROWN TO BECOME AN INTERNET MEME. THERE’S ALSO A SITE, REMINDING PEOPLE OF THEIR OBLIGATIONS.

THE ORIGINAL DATE FOR ACKNOWLEDGING THE TRUE EFFECTIVENESS OF CAPITAL LETTERS, BUT IT WAS EXPANDED TO INCLUDE JUNE, 28TH, AS A WAY TO HONOR THE LATE BILLY MAYS. CONCERNING THE MOTIVATIONS OF CREATING A CAPS LOCK DAY, ARNOLD SAYS:

International Caps Lock Day is in fact a testament to the small mindedness of certain Western individuals: the majority of the world’s population writes in scripts which have no concept of letter casing. Therefore it is advised to laugh at anyone who invokes this day as an excuse to dismiss local typographical conventions: they are simply making an ass out of themselves.

ALTHOUGH I WAS TEMPTED TO CONVERT THAT TEXT BLOCK INTO CAPITAL LETTERS, I FIGURED A RESPITE WAS DESERVED, PROVIDED YOU EVEN MADE IT THIS FAR. NEEDLESS TO SAY, SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE AREA CAPS LOCK DAY IS MOST CELEBRATED, ESPECIALLY TWITTER. THE REASONS FOR THE CELEBRATION, HOWEVER, IS THE REASON CAPS LOCK DAY WAS INTENDED:

INDEED YOU WOULD, ROY. HE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO NOTICED THE FAILED #capslockday HASHTAG, EITHER. IN FACT, THE LOWER CASED OBSERVATIONS ALMOST BECAME A TREND OF ITS OWN:

WHY, YES. YES IT ABSOLUTELY SHOULD. THAT BEING SAID, OTHERS, THANKFULLY, HAD SOME FUN WITH THE TREND:

THE CASE CONVERTER ALSO WORKS IN REVERSE, FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T LIKE READING ARTICLES IN ALL CAPS. WHATEVER THE CASE, SEIZE THE CAPS LOCK DAY AND ENJOY YELLING AT EVERYONE VIA TEXT. IT’S CATHARTIC. TRUST ME.

AT&T has issued a press release, announcing the news. Starting from March 11th, and ending on March 31st, calls and texts from the US to Japan are on the house. Here are a few details from the announcement:

- Text messages to Japan, which originate from a US wireless number are free.

- Wireless customers will receive free international long distance on calls made from US and Puerto Rico to Japan.

- Wireline customers will be comped for 60 minutes of call time. Though it states in the release that users will have to call AT&T to receive credit for the minutes.

The free call time will either show up as no charges, or as credit applied towards the call.

Mark Collins, senior vice president, Voice and Data Products, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said this of the initiative, “We want to help our customers connect with loved ones in Japan in anyway we can” he continues, “Connecting with family and friends is most important at times like this- we want to make it as easy and worry free as possible for our customers.”

Updated: Verizon has just tweeted their plans to allow free calling to Japan as well.

Time Warner Cable has joined the list of telecommunication companies to allow free calls and texts to Japan. They’re also a part of a group of carriers which are providing free access to Japan TV as well.

"In the early days of email, messages were simple text meant to be read on a terminal. But with the growth of the web came the advent of HTML email, and overnight people began expressing themselves through bold and italics, colors and images, and whatever else their creativity inspired," Google says. "If you like to use a specific text style for your messages, you’ve had to change the font every time you’re about to start typing out an email."

The purpose of this new Labs feature is to change that. If you turn the feature on, you can easily control how your message looks and alter that setting when you need to.

"If you live and breathe code, now you can set your default text style to a monospace font. If your life is purple, your email can be, too," the company adds. "But remember: whatever you see is what your recipients will see, so be nice to them and try not to clog the intertubes with ginormous bold italicized red script."

Just like with any other Gmail Labs feature, you will need to go to the Labs tab in your settings and activate it. If you’ve not messed around with Gmail’s Labs features, you will likely find some other useful features to activate as well.

Related Articles:

> Gmail Aims to Save Embarrassment Yet Again

> Gmail Gets a New Label Feature

> Google Adds Google Docs Previews to Gmail

The search engine could have another avenue for gathering information from the world it sees. A pair of Google’s engineers applied for a patent that would enable machines to read text included in pictures.

An InformationWeek report said the patent would allow tasks like searching videos by keywords appearing in the content, as one example.

“The method includes receiving an input of one or more image search terms and identifying keywords from the received one or more image search terms,” said the patent abstract.

“The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image.”

Pulling off a technology that could do this would be quite a feat. Google’s patent goes beyond typical optical character recognition, where documents are scanned and read by software. In a real world full of myriad typefaces and languages, it seems Google will have a challenge in implementing the patent, should they have plans to do so.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/patent-for-google-teaching-robots-to-read-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/pubcon-alternative-discovery-seo-2007-12 http://www.webpronews.com/pubcon-alternative-discovery-seo-2007-12#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:42:29 +0000 Navneet Kaushal http://www.webpronews.com/?p=42562 Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDF's, doc's, PODCATS and RSS feeds.]]> Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDF’s, doc’s, PODCATS and RSS feeds.

Moderator:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
• George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC

First speaker is Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google. Some of the first points he makes are:

• His company does not index RSS/Atom content
• Social networks encourage feed distribution
• Feedburner’s "pro" features are free of cost
• Includes TotalStats and MyBrand
• Sitemaps support feeds – RSS feeds work as a poorman’s sitemap

Rick talks about the evolution of feed publishers. In 2004, blog and visuals overlap. Feeds today include all kinds of content.

Clickthrough Tracking

Earlier, they used a 302 but now they let Webmasters choose between 302 or a 301.

MyBrand

DNS skills NEEDED!

One can map the CNAME

Significance of Full Text Over Excerpts

• It is stupid to not push your full content in a feed. There are only particular cases when a partial feed is right
• Many data says full feeds are better.
• Encourages people to check out Techmeme and how they bring in feeds and create relationships based on the links and the data in the feeds.

Noindexr

• Yahoo! And Google are followers
• Turn it on in Feedburner

Robots.txt

• Force services to consume feeds or not

Use ‘Auto-Discovery,’ in order to announce the availability of your feeds to bots and browsers. If you use a podcast, do not just ping it to the MP3. Make a page and point the podcast to it . Search engines are text-friendly.

Facebook lets users import "notes"

• Rick Klau takes a poll of the number of users who import feed into Facebook account
• Almost 25% of the audience raise hand
• Rick starts to tell how to set it up

Next up is Stephan Spencer, Founder & President of Netconcepts. Spencer asks the audience if there are bloggers and how many use WordPress.

Blog SEO

• Easy enough for a child to do
• 16 year old blogger
• For passive content, you can make 1000$ a month
• Shows her blog

Optimizing your blog

• Rejig your internal linking
• Tag clouds
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next and previous posts

Build inbound links

• Add Technorati tags to your posts
• Become part of bloggers blogrolls
• Trackbacks & comments wont help with link gain

In comparison, hyphens are more ideal than tags.

• Title tags
• Blog name
• Don’t use the same text for the page title and the post title

"SEO Title Tag" plugin for wordpress

• Download an SEO Title tag Plugin from netconcepts.com
• Employ the plugin to optimize title tags
• Plugin also allows for mass edits

Related Posts

• Increases inter-linking on the site
• Can use plugins or just call out and do it manually

Blog should be ranked according to what we want to be named for.

Anchor Text

• Post’s title should have a link the the perm page
• Use neat-o-tool (webuildpages.com)
• There should be internal links to old related posts within the body of the blog.

Heading tags

• Category name on category page
• Yes for post titles, no for dates

It’s a good idea to use optional excerpts in order to minimize dupe content. Build unique content.

Sticky posts

• Should always appear at the top of the page
• Great way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. e.g. adhesive plugin

relnofollow

• With this you will not pass any juice

noindex

• This tag passes juice but blog will not appear in the SERPs
• This tag could use a robots.txt to do the same thing

Optimizing your feeds

• Full texts and not just summaries
• Add twenty or more, ten is not good enough
• Multiple feeds
• Add keyword-rich items
• Brand name must be mentioned in the title
• Your most important keyword should be included in the site

Last speaker from the panel, George Aspland, the founder & president of eVision is up now.

George laid emphasis on how to achieve rankings and CTRs via SERPs. For this one needs plenty of formattable text. The text needs to be well optimized. Title is key.

Google SERPs for a PDF showed:

• Document without any title
• Text included within images

Aspland recommends pdfs as they serve well in the long run.

Link to the PDF

• Try to get links from indexed pages
• Promote link pop

PDFs can have links

• Some even have active links
• Logo also works as a link to the website

Converting URL’s in a pdf into an active link

• Links should be highlighted
• Export/print your PDF
• Open PDFs with acrobat. Acrobat also helps with editing.

Turning any text or image into an active link

• Instructions available in his site. Click here

PageRank & PDFs

• Both of these follow the same pattern as regular sites

Testing it

• Downlaod "optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
• Add links to 2 charities
• Post PDF and pass along
• Check out results in couple months

How to analyse PDF search results with Click Tracks

• Find which PDFs were entry pages to a site

Comments

Tag:

This story is NOT going away. Even if this particular story goes away, there’s a bad taste in our mouths because Facebook tried to do something that clearly wasn’t for the users. When David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, says that you have a real PR problem.

Yet when I look at TechMeme I don’t see ONE SINGLE INTERVIEW that Mark Zuckerberg, or top executives at Facebook, have given ANYONE.

Hell, don’t like me or other bloggers? Then give a press conference with professional press.

ANYTHING would be better than the way that Facebook is handling this.

This is what happens when a startup gets a controlling PR belief system. Steve Jobs can pull that off. Not many companies can.

Facebook’s PR machinery is hiding its head in the sand and hoping this story goes away.

Hint: it’s not.

Do the press conference. Admit you screwed up. Take your shots. Look into the camera and say you’re sorry.

Crisis PR hint: don’t answer company bashing with text messages. Do it in video and with live events. Have the CEO do it.

Or don’t. It’s your reputation, not mine that’s at stake here.

Or, maybe, Zuckerberg is about to get fired from his CEO job? That’s the gesture that’s being communicated to the world by not appearing in person and doing a press conference.

It’s amazing to see how fast Zuckerberg’s stock is falling in the conversation networks I’m hanging out in.

Comments

What’s this have to do with social media marketing and why is a social media agency sharing the information?

While we’re all working to figure out social media marketing and how it’s going to work, there’s a pretty big platform change racing toward us. With PC sales declining in Japan already (and the rest of the world ahead of the U.S. in mobile technology), we need to keep in the back of our mind that much of this is going to port to the small screen, potentially fairly soon.

And as ad models evolve, fitting meaningful (to both the consumer and the marketer) ads on the small screen is a challenge that needs to be solved. More likely, in my view, is that someone smart will find a way to give away packages of SMS messages in exchange for sponsorships.

But, social media marketers, let’s keep the cell phone future in your thoughts as we move forward. Facebook has going mobile web (picture below from this article on CrunchGear). Everyone will eventually go mobile. How does that impact your social media marketing plans?

Comments

Close to one in five of the Louisville based company’s orders are currently made online. Rivals such as Domino’s Pizza promote mobile orders with Web-enabled phones.

Papa John’s Chief Executive Nigel Travis said the company is the first to offer text message ordering on such a large scale. "Text ordering will allow us to reach a different group of customers who prefer text over online and email," Travis said.

To use the text service customers register online to create accounts. They can save four favorite orders, along with the delivery address and payment preference. Users can select "FAV1", "FAV2", "FAV3", or FAV4,’ to text message orders. Papa John’s sends a reply and the customer has the option to change or confirm the order.

Papa John’s will also send promotions and advertisements to the cell phone users who sign up for the text service. Users can choose to opt out of the ads. Jim Ensign, vice president of marketing communications at Papa John’s said the company would be careful not to deluge customers with promotional messages.

"Consumers today are looking for more convenience," Ensign said in an interview with the Courier-Journal. "That’s the way people live today. They can’t be tethered down to one way of doing things."

1.2 billion messages per week (or around 4,000 per second) is the current rate, and in an interview with the BBC, the MDA’s head, Mike Short, admitted, “It has exceeded our forecasts quite significantly.”  You can hardly blame his group, though – those are astonishing figures, and given some of the headlines related to this milestone, they appear to have caught everyone off-guard.

“Text Maniacs Send Billion Messages A Week,” states a DailyRecord.co.uk article.  “Brits go text crazy,” suggests womenintechnology.co.uk.  And the AHN chips in, “Britons Addicted To Text Messaging.”

Granted, the UK’s interest in text messaging doesn’t look like much next to China’s – about 8.3 billion text messages are sent each week in that nation.  Still, since computers are more prevalent in the UK, it’s interesting to see that cheap rates and text messaging’s overall convenience have also caught on there.

The MDA and Short say that Brits are on track to send 52 billion messages in 2007.

Lindsey Abrams of Patriot, Indiana, says she began receiving text messages that were meant for other Facebook members after she received a new cell number from Verizon in November 2006.

The text messages contained explicit language, according to Abram’s civil complaint. Allegedly she was charged 10 cents per message and was told she could not block the Facebook text messages without blocking messages she wanted to receive.

Abram’s lawyer wants to make the lawsuit a certified class action, and maintains that other subscribers with recycled phone numbers have been inundated with unwanted Facebook text messages containing party invitations and unwanted sexual advances.

Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney representing Abrams, said he wants to make Facebook take action so it members would not be able to send text messages to recycled phone numbers.

Facebook would not comment on the suit saying its company policy not to discuss lawsuits.