Web Design Ireland

posted by Robert on May 31

Three basic ideas for AdWords clients whose businesses are otherwise brick-and-mortar can help them determine just how well their campaigns are working.

Believe it or not, there are businesses that don’t sell their products online. It tends to be true with small- to medium-sized firms that operate within a local area. They may have a website and an online campaign, perhaps with AdWords, to raise awareness of their company with web surfers.

The Inside AdWords crew suggested some simple ways to spot how well the campaign budget has been performing for the business owner.

First, ask customers where they heard about the business. If they say ‘Google’, either in person or on an online form at the business website, that’s easy enough to track.

Next, take note of the numbers of conversions (sales, leads, calls, etc) that take place before and after starting a campaign. Do the same thing when changing the campaign’s text or keywords. An increase in conversions likely indicates the change worked.

Finally, set up a separate email address or phone number for placement on the website. Leads that arrive through that contact point can be attributed easily to the site.

Pretty simple stuff, but tracked effectively it can be very beneficial, and applied to any online campaign as desired.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

I talked with Microsoft’s Surface computing team today. Here’s some more details I learned.

1. Price. Will cost $5,000 to $10,000 and only be available to commercial customers (hotels, casinos, etc). Price depends on number of units purchased.

2. Consumer availability? They are working on other surface computing products, but didn’t have anything to announce yet. There are a few roadblocks to getting one of these in your home. First, it’s expensive to build one because it needs holographic glass, an enclosure, a projector, two cameras, and a computer. Second, they still are working on software so that it actually does something beyond the whiz-bang demos they showed off this morning on stage.

3. Demos won’t all work the way it seems in the videos. The demos you are seeing of photos flying out of a digital camera when placed on the device? That requires that digital camera to be synced and “tagged” with a bar code. The table can see bar codes on things, but you’ve gotta stick a bar code on them first. My cell phone hasn’t been tagged. Neither has my digital camera. So, if I put them on the table they wouldn’t do anything.

4. Microsoft isn’t writing all the software. I asked whether we’d be able to play Blackjack on a table. They (the Microsoft team) couldn’t answer. That part of the functionality will be left to third-parties to write. So, a table that is in a Sheraton property might have completely different functionality than one somewhere else.

5. Can’t scan paper yet. Some of the scenarios I saw demoed included scanning of paper and documents. That isn’t yet included in the current version.

6. When will it be out? It should be installed at first customers by the end of the year. First public demos (other than at this week’s “D” conference) will be in June in New York at a Starwood property. I’ll try to get more info on that.

I’ll keep trying to get more answers and I encouraged the team to come over and answer the questions people left in my comments.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

Perhaps Google’s algorithm isn’t as difficult as we all think?

No, I haven’t been sitting in front of the microwave for too long again. Before you rip me to pieces, give me a few seconds to explain myself!

Possible Technology Limitations

Now, we all know that Google has one of the largest server farms in the world, estimated upwards of 250,000 individual servers spread worldwide. In spite of this fact, many people lost sight of the fact that Google only has a finite (albeit large) amount or resources.

If we estimate that Google crawls 100 million+ new pages per day, they are likely to encounter a billion or more new links on a daily basis. I think it is plausible that given the ‘100 factors’ supposedly composing the algorithm, Google may find itself running short on server power while crunching all the incoming data. For example, many of the ‘factors’ which are assumed to influence an outgoing link’s value are dependent on characteristics of incoming links. This could continue recursively back through many layers of the page heirarchy. Links are only one example of hard-to-crunch data; undoubtedly there are more costly factors to take into account.

Additionally, one needs to consider latency times to transmit data between server farms located on all different continents. For instance, data transmitted from Eastern Asia would take likely 100ms to reach the Continental US. Since page information is likely distributed among the various server farms, there could be signifigant transport delays involved in obtaining the data for a larger algorithm.

Remember that a certain proportion of Google’s server farm is not dedicated to their ranking algorithm; much of their hardware contains the finalized results which they serve out. Not only that, much of the hardware contains duplicate information: for instance, there are numerous data centers serving out identical information to search requests in the United States; a similar situation is seen in most foreign countries.

Geniuses and ‘Good’ Algorithms

Cringely’s recent article on PBS once again brought to the forefront one important fact: Google is composed of genius engineers and computer scientists. Every computer scientist knows that the ‘best’ algorithms are the ones that solve the largest number of potential cases in the least amount of steps, in the simplest fashion possible.

A well designed algorithm conveys a sense of beauty to a computer scientist; there is nothing like taking a huge, ugly algorithm written quickly to solve a problem, and refining it into a short, effective, and quick piece of work. A simple but effective algorithm has an elegance around it that is recognized by all who work with it.

Conclusions

As a result of the makeup of Google’s employee body, I would suspect work is constantly being done to simplify the Google algorithm while maintaining the same level of effectiveness it currently has, and I believe it is quite possible that the algorithm that is currently in place is much simpler than we have been led to believe. There is financial benefit to using a ’simple’ algorithm: by cutting down on machine time, Google would be able to get better use out of its machine time, which has obvious financial implications.

What are your thoughts? Personally, this is just a theory: until we know better, I am just going to continue with my mental picture of the ‘big’ algorithm, and all the various on-page and off-page factors we traditionally assume they look at.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.

People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.

What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.

I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

Funny, he was at the Maker Faire last weekend talking to everyone and showing off his latest thing. He builds demos for Bill Gates and he was the one who first showed me the PlayTable. Now called “Surface Computing.”

He handed me a stack of glass chips. I put one down. It revealed a video playing on the surface. You can see the same demo now two years later. My demo was of a prototype at Microsoft’s TechFest conference which was for employees only.

Anyway, surface computing is real and is wild. I want one of these in my house, but it is too expensive. Anyway, here’s how it works:

1) It has a piece of holographic glass that can display images that a projector shoots at it.

2) It has a projector underneath.

3) It has two cameras, aimed at the glass which can triangulate on objects on it.

4) It has software, written in Windows Presentation Foundation, that take advantage of the new hardware.

So, how does it recognize the glass chips placed on top of it? Easy, each chip has an invisible bar code in infrared-reflecting ink. Your eye can’t see it. The cameras can.

The problem is the expense. It costs a few grand for the glass, another grand or two for the projector, $50 for each camera, and then you need a computer underneath.

Which is why they didn’t announce you can buy one of these for your house.

Other cons? This thing does a killer demo. But can it do much more than the demo videos show? I’m not yet sure. It’s the kind of thing that’s killer for the first couple of hours but that gets old fast if there aren’t a bunch of real-world applications that you can do on the thing.

I’m watching the videos and seeing a lot of those same kind of killer demos but not much that would make me spend $5,000 on one of these.

How about you?

One thing, though. I love Andy Wilson. He’s an amazing developer. To me it’s totally amazing that he was helping kids out at Maker Faire. I wanted to grab each one of them and say “do you have any idea who you are talking with?”

UPDATE: I just discovered that surface computing was being worked on for more than five years now and that it highlights one of several directions that were pursued within the Surface Computing team, under Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft.

Robert Scoble

posted by Robert on May 31

Millions of people use Google’s Web services every day. Now the search giant wants to actively recruit the geek elite of software programmers.

On Thursday, the company will host its first Google Developer Day, attracting 5,000 people to 10 locations around the world, including the San Jose Convention Center in California.

High Impact

What’s new:

Google will host its first Developer Day in 10 locations on Thursday, part of a ramped-up effort to encourage developers to build mashup applications with Google Web services.

Bottom line:

Google’s efforts to woo developers–similar to other Web properties like Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo–are designed to promote creation of mashup applications and make the Web a more compelling development platform.

The conference is part of a company goal is to cultivate a better relationship with programmers, particularly those on the cutting edge of mashup development, a relatively new style of application development that combines information from different Web sites.

In conjunction with the conference, the company on Wednesday announced Google Gears, a Web browser plug-in that allows Web developers to add offline access to Web applications.

Google Gears is part of the company’s strategy to court developers in order to make Web applications more capable–a goal that it is taking substantial steps to achieve, particularly for a company whose primary business is online search.

The company employs some of the key engineers in open-source software projects, including Linux kernel contributor Andrew Morton, and gives outside developers access to its services, often for free. Employees even write tools, released with liberal copyright and usage terms, to make the lives of Web developers easier.

Although not always obvious, these programs feed into its overall business strategy. From Google’s point of view, the more good Web applications, the better.

“If the apps that show up in Google search results are more dynamic and more appealing, people will do more searches and be on the Web more,” said Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google’s developer products. “Because the Web is Google’s platform, we’re interested in improving it as much as we can.”

Related story
Google kicks offline Web apps into gear

The new Google Gears open-source software brings offline access to the Web browser.

By giving developers access to its services through application programming interfaces (APIs), Google relies on third parties to extend what it offers. An application that displays Google calendar information on a mobile phone, which is not something Google engineers had done, is apt to drive more usage of that calendar.

As Web applications become more functional, developer programs have become important strategies for Web properties Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo, which itself first hosted a Hack Day for developers last fall.

An active “ecosystem,” or network, of partners creating linked services drives traffic–and revenue–to the hosting site while extending their offerings.

Take our building blocks, please
During the Developer Day keynote speeches, Google executives will describe how the company’s developer program is organized to promote creation of mashups. In addition to California, conferences are being held in London; Paris; Madrid; Moscow; Sydney; Beijing; Yokyo; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Hamburg, Germany.They will outline the two types of “building block” services the company intends to release: those that extend Google services and those that developers can use as part of their own applications.

For example, Google Maps is a popular component for building completely new applications that plot information from one source, such as customers or hiking locations, on a Web map.

Meanwhile, the Google Gadgets API lets third parties build mini-applications that reside within–and enhance–the Google home page or Google Desktop.

“These developers are generating a just huge amount of traffic for their own services by developing these gadgets,” Blake said. “In return, though, Google’s personalized home page is only good because of the outside developers who make it good.”

Similarly, tools like Google Gears, available as open source, enhance Ajax development and encourage people to use the browser as the center point of computing, Blake said. Its goal is to make Ajax style development, which doesn’t require proprietary plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight, as capable as possible, he said.

Open source plays a big role at Google and its developer program. Chris DiBona, the open-source programs manager at Google, will deliver talks at the London edition of Developer Day where he plans to discuss the Google’s activities in open source.

Google is a high-profile user of several open-source products, including a variant of Linux used in its data centers, the MySQL database and others.

Engineers participate in open-source projects for products they use, but beyond that, Google wants to promote the underlying ethic of open source, DiBona said.

“One of the reasons that I think open source is popular as it is is because it gives the customer, the developer, leverage again. They’re not held hostage and not being locked in,” he said. “We want to express that kind of idealism through our interfaces and open-source software has shown us the way to do that.”

As Google releases more APIs for its products, it will try to make them “as open as possible” by providing documentation and technical specifications for protocols, as it did with Sitemap protocol, which makes sites easier for search engines to crawl.

Being as open as possible with development technology helps promote creation of good applications and a positive end-user experience on the Web, DiBona said.

Adopting open-source practices with its developer products like Google Gears and APIs also allows Google to upgrade more rapidly and, as a company, keep moving fast, DiBona said. Changes in APIs can break mashup applications; an open-source “ethic” allows the company to make upgrades, he argued.

In theory, other companies could serve customers who wanted to stick with older versions of Google APIs, he said. More importantly, the ability to upgrade quickly means “we’re constantly trying to sell the upgrade…One of the things we really don’t want to do is we don’t want to slow down Google,” DiBona said.

Source: http://news.com.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

During the interview with Walt Mossberg at the D Conference, Steve Jobs apparently let slip (according to the transcript from Gizmodo and Engadget), that even though the Apple

iPhone won’t start out the gate with support for third-party applications, Apple is open to it and is working on making that possible later this year. Both transcripts imply that Jobs was concerned about security issues, which is what presumably was holding up the process. The lack of third party support was one of the biggest complaints about the iPhone when it was first announced earlier this year, so if Apple actually makes this happen, it’ll make a lot of people happy (And one of them is me). Now if only they’ll work on 3G support as well…

Source: http://news.com.com

posted by Robert on May 31

Thousands of hours of user-generated video madness will soon be available through Apple TV, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Wednesday.

Jobs revealed the partnership with YouTube during his talk at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. Starting next month, Apple TV users will be able to select “YouTube” as an option from the device’s main menu and view thousands of the most viewed and most popular videos on the site.

Apple TV is designed to connect a wide-screen television with content purchased or downloaded over the Internet by a Mac or PC. Until now, however, Apple TV users looking for content were mostly dependent on television programs or movies they had purchased through the iTunes Store. There’s no browser inside the interface that would let users access other Internet videos, though they could move their home videos to Apple TV.

Now, Apple has designed a hook into YouTube that will let Apple TV owners access the most popular videos that have been converted into the h.264 standard, said David Moody, vice president for Mac hardware marketing at Apple. The full catalog of YouTube videos will be available later in the year, as YouTube converts the rest, Moody said.

Apple also announced that it will make a higher-capacity version of Apple TV available Thursday. The current Apple TV product costs $299 with a 40GB hard drive, but a version with a 160GB hard drive will now cost $399.

Source: http://news.com.com

posted by Robert on May 31

Google engineers have enabled what Internet surfers for years have yearned for–Web applications that work offline.

The search giant on Wednesday launched Google Gears, a browser plug-in that will let people run Web applications when they’re connected to the Internet or not.

The company released the source code for the Google Gears software in conjunction with Google Developer Day, a daylong conference in 10 locations.

The goal of Google Gears is to create a single, standardized way to add offline capabilities to Web applications, said Linus Upson, engineering director at Google.

The initial code is aimed at JavaScript developers who write Ajax-style Web applications. It runs on Internet Explorer on Windows; Firefox on Windows, Mac OS and Linux; and on the Safari Mac OS browser.

Google expects to have a consumer-ready release of Google Gears, which will be under 1 megabyte in size, “within months.” It also expects to submit the code to a standards body so that it will eventually be built into all standards-compliant browsers, Upson said.

“It’s been a long time since the Web has gained new fundamental capabilities. I think it’s been about 10 years,” said Upson. One of the key capabilities of Ajax development–XMLHttpRequest–came out in 1998 and took years to catch on, in part because of applications like Google Maps.

Google engineers took on the task of bringing offline access to Web browsers because customers of its hosted Web applications complained about not being able to work when disconnected, Upson said.

“One of the reasons we’re doing Gears is that developers here at Google have really pushed the envelope on what can be done in the browser so engineers are hitting barriers harder and faster,” he said.

The first application to have offline access through Google Gears is Google Readers, the company’s RSS reader. Once people install the browser plug-in, they can read RSS content when they’re offline and synchronize with the RSS feed provider when they get back online.

As part of the announcement, Google said Google Gears has been endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open-source Firefox browser, as well as Flash developer Adobe Systems and Opera Software, which makes the Opera browser.

Under the covers
By releasing the Google Gear code, the company hopes to get feedback from developers before releasing a consumer plug-in.

The software itself has three components–a local Web server which runs in the browser, the open-source database SQLite for storage, and browser extensions that allow multiple JavaScript jobs to run in parallel.

With that architecture, end users will be able to run Web applications even if they have flaky network connections or if the Web server they are accessing is bogged down. Having a browser capable of running multiple JavaScript scripts, or threads, means that the browser is less likely to get locked up.

“What we wanted to enable was to make applications that essentially run off local data even when you’re connected to the network because defining or detecting that (connection state) is very hard,” said Upson.

The local SQLite database, while small in size, is capable of saving gigabytes of data, although Google intends to set up Google Gears so that Web application providers have to ask permission from users to store data locally.

Google engineers have already started work on adding full-text searching to SQLite, Upson said.

Other companies have taken on the challenge of making Web applications run offline before but there still lacks a generic, widely used method.

Source: http://news.com.com/

posted by Robert on May 31

eBay released a statement on Wednesday afternoon confirming that, as speculated, it has acquired Web site discovery service StumbleUpon. The price, according to eBay, is approximately $75 million.

eBay’s most famous acquisition is arguably Internet telephony service Skype, which it purchased in 2005.

“StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust,” eBay’s senior director Michael Buhr said in a statement. “StumbleUpon’s downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay.”

At last count, StumbleUpon had about 2.3 million members, and buzz about the site had spread largely by word of mouth.

The $75 million price tag is more than previously expected. Earlier this month, when eBay was reported to be in “advanced talks” to acquire StumbleUpon, the numbers being tossed around were about $45 million. Rumors about an eBay-StumbleUpon deal first began to circulate in early April.

It was a day heavy with acquisition announcements. Also on Wednesday, CBS announced a $280 million purchase of music social network Last.fm, and Fox Interactive Media confirmed its long-rumored acquisition of image-sharing site Photobucket.

Source:  http://news.com.com/