On January 27, 2010 Apple revealed the iPad, to the world. The potential of this product is amazing and truly could help the news industry reinvent themselves, in an interactive way. If you missed the keynote or didn’t make it all the way through Steve’s presentation here is a pretty cool “edited” version, to give you the “jist” of the iPad.

What this “Incredible, Beautiful, Amazing” tool didn’t doesn’t won’t support is the Macromedia Adobe Flash player. In an article from Wired Magazine, Jobs is quoted as saying “Adobe is lazy. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

With big name players like YouTube, who is testing support for their player, in HTML 5.0, it seems this feeling isn’t just in Steve’s head. As a matter of fact, Mashable released the results of a poll they ran: “Who would win in a fight: Adobe Flash or HTML5?”

HTML5 handily knocked out Adobe Flash. With 3,891 votes, HTML5 garnered 61% of the polls. Adobe Flash was able to muster 1,779 votes (28%), while 660 said it was a tie (10%). See actual results below:

read the full post from Mashable here

Sorry for the brash headline, but my experience with Cameta Camera has me so fuming that I wanted to make sure I shared it on my blog and optimized it so others would find it also.

I’ve been shopping a Nikon D300s for a few weeks now. I’m a Nikon user and all my lenses are Nikon; so Cannon is not even a thought for me. The (camera) body retails for $1,589. That’s for the USA version of the camera, not the grey market shit you’ll find on eBay. I normally purchase from either Cameta Camera or B&H Photo. Sometimes, I venture to Berger Brothers, but they’re always more expensive. Cameta is a 10 minute drive from my house and B&H Photo is an hour drive into NYC. Both well known, both authorized Nikon dealers. Cameta generally wins my money only because of their proximity to my house.

Last Monday (Presidents Day) I went into Cameta, “just shopping”. I was going to have funds on Friday but wanted to see if they’d give me a package or deal on the D300s, MBD-10 (battery grip) and the SB-800 or SB-900 (Speed lights). Cameta has always had the “holier than thou” attitude. One that I often forget, but always remember after leaving their store. A deal was not an option. Ray (the sales guy) was very helpful. He took his time to learn what I was shooting and what my goals were. He quickly suggested that I consider purchasing a Nikon “factory-demo” version. It was explained to me that all of the bodies had very little actuations, were meticulously inspected and refurbished (if needed) and held to the highest standards. Not to mention they came with the same warranty that I would get if I purchased the “brand new” model. A total savings of $210. To me this allowed me to get the body and the MBD-10 for around the same as what I expected to spend. Ray assured me that they had six bodies in stock and would have one for me on Friday or Saturday.

I showed up on Saturday (2/20/2010), a few minutes after 10am. Ray was not working today but used car salesmen blank (sorry, I forgot his name) will be happy to help me out. I read him the list of what Ray and I had gone over and kept giving recognition to Ray for his help. He looked on his computer and said “oh man, we have none in stock”. He then proceeded to call “the warehouse” and they didn’t have any in stock either. He suggested I buy the D300s in retail. He said the factory versions always have problems. And I quote “out of 6 at least 4 of them always have to be sent back to Nikon”.

I expressed my disappointment and the conflicting stories. He even went so far as to try and sell me the D300. At one point he asked if I had a camcorder. I said yes. He said I really don’t need the D300s, the D300 would be fine. Seriously? You’re down-selling me? You’re telling me what I want?

I wont lie, I really wanted the camera and would have considered buying the retail/new version if they would have worked with me, even a little. I said to him that $1,589 was the same price they’re asking for on eBay. He confirmed. At which point I was just mad and clearly not buying the camera from them. I was fun to ask the question “doesn’t it  save you the percentage and fees with eBay as well the fees and percentage from PayPal?” He actually turned to me and said “come on guy, that’s the salespersons commission”. Seriously? And like that, a customer with cash in hand left the store. Not a hey wait or can you come back on Wednesday or why don’t you leave your number and I’ll have Ray call you when we get more in stock. They just let me leave.

Sorry Ray, but you wont get my sale. Sorry Long Island, I can’t reinvest into the Long Island community. And that just sucks.

What did I do? I used bing.com’s cash back program and bought the D300s from Abe’s of Main (in N.J.). Get this:

• It was cheaper – $1,504.50 (yes, they’re an authorized Nikon Dealer)
• I get 4% cash back – $60.18
• NO TAX
• Shipping cost me $35

Funny, in my quick investigating on Bing’s cash back site I discovered that Cameta pays 8% cash back. Not a bad savings, but too late. I took my business else where.

This past week LongIsland.com was sold for $370,000. That’s right, I said three-hundred-seventy-THOUSAND dollars. It’s been years since LongIsland.com changed their design. I have heard they have one or two employees who maintain the site. It’s obvious from the banners they have that their is a sales person or persons responsible for selling. Doubtfully a dedicated sales rep, but none-the-less someone is selling to Long Island companies that are buying.

Last year when I was working on another project (one I won’t give the benefit of a link from my site let alone a mention) Rick Latona [the company representing longisland.com] reached out to the owners (of my company @ the time) and offered the domain, its inventory of pages and staff for $1.2 million. It wasn’t in the cards for them and honestly I’m happy they didn’t. I understand that was a reduced price from the prior year. Either way the domain went to auction last month and sat dormant. Sat dormant while Long Island big wigs with big dreams but shallow wallets sat by in hopes of a lower asking price. And it happened, the domain name’s reserve price was lowered to $350,000. It sold the same day for $370,000. Coincidentally the average price for a house on Long Island.

The new owner has not been revealed. I have my hunches on who it could be. I can confirm that it’s not Prime Visibility/Andrew Hazen nor is it the Long Island Radio Group. I can also say (in certainty) that it’s not the Long Island Press… so hmmm…

Some stats from the auction page:
12 Month 2009 Metrics: Average monthly page views 584,000 Average monthly uniques 179,000 70% of all US visitors are from Long Island

Stats:
Alexa Ranking: 126,628
Overture Score: 409
Inbound Links: 319
Maximum Cost Per Click: $0.20
No. Of  PPC Ads: 225
Domain Age: 13 years
Pagerank: 5
Pages in Google Index: 5690
Competing Search Results In Google: 80,300,000
Local Search Volume: 6,120,000
Global Monthly Search Volume: 6,120,000
Auction link: http://www.proxibid.com/asp/Catalog.asp?aid=25586&p=1&srch=search%20catalog&sort=3

I wont lie, I would have loved to have been at the helm of this domain name. Especially where I am now. There are so many possibilities that can be done with this domain name and it certainly does very well organically.

- Joe

It’s no secret that most likely everyone in your office has (at least) a Facebook account. You’ll find a handful of them who even have twitter accounts. The last two companies I have worked with have been (and still are) very vocal about having their employees retweet (RT:) things they wanted viral. I guess that’s cool. I mean if you’re comfortable becoming a non-paid billboard, then yeah, it is cool.

Far be it for me to tell you how to run your office, I won’t. But we all know that putting a carrot at the end of the stick makes people do more and work harder. Especially when it’s money at the end of the stick. So lets say you have a campaign that needs to go viral. You have a handful of uber-popular (facebook/twitter) profiles at your disposal and really want to motivate them.

Why not incentivize them to help make your message viral? Why not run a contest and see who drives the most traffic to your page/campaign. In our office we run these contests regularly. We have two levels of winners:

• 1st prize (generally $100) for most traffic directed to the page/campaign.
• 2nd prize (generally $50) for either longest (average) time on site or highest (average) page view.

It’s actually very simple and for the sake of this tutorial, I’m using Google Analytics. I am certain this can also be accomplished with Omniture and I think WebTrends but don’t quote me on that one.

Google will allow you to URL encode variables into your URL. Specific variables that they You need to follow their format as far as variables (see below) they even supply an online tool that will help automate this process Google Analytics URL Builder. But the end results are fantastic.

• Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required – Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: utm_source=facebook
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required – Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.  Example: utm_medium=viral || utm_medium=ppc
• Campaign Term (utm_term) – NOT Required -  Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.  Example: utm_term=Long+Island+News
• Campaign Content (utm_content) – NOT Required – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.  Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Required – Used for keyword analysis. If you notice from the screen shot (above), this is the variable that I use to track employee names/initials.

As I mentioned though, they have a fantastic tool:

Once you “Generate URL” (Step 3) the new URL is generated:

http://www.somewebsite.com/thatpage.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=joeg

This URL will now allow you to track all incoming traffic from each of your employees.

Viewing the traffic is easy:

• Log in to your Google Analytics account
• On the left side click Traffic Sources to expand the sub-menu.
• Select Campaigns from the list.

That’s it! Your information should be right there. Remember though, Google Analytics are not real time. I normally finalize my reports and numbers between 11am and 12am.

TIP: Click “Add to Dashboard” at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.

Hope this was helpful to you and your campaigns are successful. Best of luck!

- Joe

Do your search (on your WP powered blog). Your URL should look something like this: http://www.somesite.com/?s=derek+jeter. In that example I did a search for Derek Jeter, on my site. But my goal is to create a feed, so I can view all stories/pages about Derek Jeter in my feed reader. Ready for this? Add &feed=rss2 to the end of the URL string. The URL should now look similar to http://www.somesite.com/?s=derek+jeter&feed=rss2

Walah! You now have your feed, from a search query.

It’s snowing, here in Long Island. It’s not amounting to much, but parents all over (this morning) were nagged by their children to see if school was closed? With the internet being second nature to people, one parent went on Google and typed in Long Island School Closings. They found our page, (clearly with a time and date stamp on it) from 12/21/2009 and saw that their school was in fact closed. She then proceeded to call all of her friends and neighbors, informing them that their school was closed.

By 10am, we received this letter:

Your web site today listed the XYZ Schools as a two hour delayed opening today (January 8, 2010) due to snow.For your information, the school district opened on time.  You listed many other schools as delayed opening or being closed.  They also opened on time.
I am going to recommend to our school superintendent that she have no contact with your paper any longer regarding school closings.  Maybe other parents in other school districts will take the same action based on your providing misinformation this morning.

This was a good learning lesson, in that we did not have one centralized place for “School Closings”. The writers published the story as an article. An easy fix for that was to create a new section named “/schoolclosings”.

Because I want to utilize the SERP position we had for that term,we created outbound links from the page, that Google knew of and directed it to our new page. We did our proper optimization (H1, H2, summary description) of the new page. We also changed the text on the page to read “No School Closings Reported for 1/8/2010″ – only below the link to our new page.

Sometime next week I will request that Google removes the old page from their index. It’s a very simple two-step process:

• Add a line to our robots.txt file ( Disallow: /2009/12/long-island-school-closings-and-delays/)
• Using the Google Webpage Removal Request Tool, request that they remove the outdated content.

Again, it was a very easy fix and a great exercise for everyone involved.

Really this is more of a mental note or a place to store this information, maybe someone will find this helpful? If you view the screen capture below, you’ll see the last article about Saudi Attitudes in Birmingham shows the publication name as gaurdian.co.uk. Meanwhile CNET News and Cult of Mac (blog) are shown using the publication names they’ve chosen.

It’s really a very simple process and one that shouldn’t take more than a few days to be corrected. Simply go  http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_update and fill out the appropriate information. As with any request to Google, I highly encourage you to be logged in to your Google account.

This request should come from the contact person Google News had (originally) on file, or you can expect delays and questions.

This popped up for me today because I just reformatted our Google News Sitemap and resubmitted it. I used the full name of our publication and honestly never thought to look otherwise. It does make a difference and when I logged back into my Google Webmaster Tools I was surprised to find all those error messages, resulting from the sitemap I uploaded, yesterday. Your Google News sitemap publication name must match the name Google News shows.

Once the change is done, you” receive an email confirmation from them. At that time you’ll also need to resubmit your News Sitemap.

Please note that this change will affect only new articles. Your old
information will continue to appear on articles already included in Google
News, and these articles will expire after the usual 30 days. We
appreciate your patience during this process.

Not sure what your listed publication name is? That’s easy, just use the site: operator (example: site:www.cnn.com), followed by your domain name, in Google News. The publication name is listed just below your title.

Fast forward a few months into this new revenue generating area and Google makes it very well known that this is not acceptable. Matt Cutts released a post on his blog “How to report paid links”, dated 4/14/2007. Shortly after links on these well known sites disappeared. Matt Cutts is currently the head of Google’s Web spam team.

Don’t get me wrong, in the “black-hat” (SEO) world, this is still a common practice. It’s just not as obvious, anymore. To show you how obvious it was, Matt posted the following example that was posted on a site dedicated to linux:

People have become more and more clever in disguising links and hiding them. What I’ve seen is people using div tags to place text <insert random number> pixels away from the viewable area ( x axis = -500) or just making the font size zero.

I recenlty came across a site that had a pretty nice (non-flash) transitional effect on the page. Like any other code guy, I viewed the source code, to my surprise though I found this (at the bottom of the page):

The weird thing was that it didn’t show up on the home page. Weird, right? OK, sarcasim aside I did drink the paid link kool-aid back in 2006 but I never hid the links. They were present on the page as “Links you may like”. Hiding links and text is pure black-hat SEO. So I took great pleasure in notifying Google.

Where do I go to tell Google about paid links?

Google has set up a page where users can keep their anonymity;  report pages: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en

I decided to use the spam report, while logged into my webmaster account. I personally have nothing to hide and why not add credibilty to the report. I couldn’t even imagine how many faceless, nameless reports Google must receive about paid link sites. With that said I used https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en.

In less than 48 hours, I received the following message (in my Google Webmaster account):

Thank you for submitting a spam report for this site: http://www.<somesite>.com/

We take the quality of our results very seriously, and we thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammy websites from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.

We appreciate your taking the time to help us improve our service for your fellow users around the world. By helping us eliminate spam, you’re saving millions of people time, effort and energy.

Around the same time I noticed that all of the pages that Google had in their index for this site have now been fully removed from. Doing a query of site:www.<somesite>.com yields zero results. They don’t even show up for their name. Nada, nothing!

For the few hundred dollars this company might have received to promote Plavix, I sure hope it was worth losing all their organic traffic from Google.

I bet you’re saying right now that nobody is as busy as you, right? That you just don’t have the time to read every email, when the sender sends it. I know that during the work day, I can barely fit in lunch let alone click on a link that you think I might like, find helpful, is porn or is sure signs of the next big affiliate/money making craze.  I personally do most of my responding between 8-10pm. This is the time the kids are in bed, I’m on my recliner and I have the time to read about what you think I should know or might find interesting.

If you’re a Twitter user you should be very familiar with seeing (redirect) links from bit.ly. Back in May of 2008 Twitter parted ways with tinyurl.com and introduced bit.ly to the community. In your “tweets”, twitter will automatically convert your link to a bit.ly (masked/redirect) link once your URI reaches 31 characters. If you have exactly 30 characters in your URI, the tweet will be delivered to your followers/list as you designed it, with your URI in tact. Once you reach character 31, truncation occurs and the URI gets trimmed to 27 visible characters and an ellipse (…)  30 total. For affiliate marketers trying to pass off their links, this is a dream.

Sure, it’s another redirect service that will mask your links. But there is soooo much more to it. For example, you can track if your links where clicked, how many times, if they went viral, etc.

How do I create an account with bit.ly?

Let’s start from their main page (of www.bit.ly), yes you do need to create an account. The service is free and registering requires you to enter your email address, a desired user name and password. You can also use the site without registering first, but then you will lose the ability to track and monitor your links.

Now take the URL you’d like to convert, copy and paste into the main input text field on the page.

It’s really self explanatory and I’ll leave it to you to play some more. What I really wanted to share was a technique on how to track if your link was opened.

Earlier this week I had to send a link out to a few V.I.P. people. I also wanted to re-distribute the link to my facebook  and twitter profiles. Because the landing page I was sending people to was not my page/URL and encoding some variables in the URL (for tracking) was not possible. So I recreated the redirect a total of five times, using bit.ly.

You may have noticed when you pressed the “Shorten” button that you were presented with a new area, that looked like this:

I created a “slug” that is rather easy to decipher “000rs-111209″ was it’s name. To me this told me that Roy Smith </fictitious name> received this link on 11/12/2009. Of course you can encrypt these links how ever you’d like. For this post, I wanted to keep it simple.

Within an hour of sending all the emails I was able to see that all five of my links were clicked on. Within that same hour I received one response/confirmation. It wasn’t until later that night that I had heard from three of the four remaining. I was able to start all of those conversations with “I see you read the article I sent you, what did you think”? It is a little presumptuous, but it gets the job done and even makes for good conversation when asked “how did you know?”

News Corp’s network consists of more than 110 national and suburban newspapers. The New York Post and the ever popular and extremely (organically) visible site, The Wall Street Journal. Not to mention News Corp. owns the Fox Corporation.

In the interview he claims that they will allow for the first paragraph to come up on the search engines. I’m assuming he’s talking about the meta description. Anything after that is subscription-based. This is something I’ve become familiar with as (New York) Newsday has recently implemented a similar strategy. Their subscription based model is to help subscriptions to either their weekly (at-home) delivery or the triple-play package (TV, Internet & Phone) by their parent company, Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC).

I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.

My favorite quote from his interview is “There are no news Websites or blog Websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million.” This just shows you the kind of man this is. Making a couple of millions sits right next to breaking even, in his eyes. I would think sites and papers like WSJ.com or NewYorkPost.com are doing much better than breaking even, but obviously my warped perspective must start above a couple of million.