Attributor’s FairShare Guardian service monitored 913 popular books in 14 categories in the fourth quarter of 2009.  FairShare tracked the number of successful downloads completed for each of the 913 titles on four file sharing sites that make download data available (4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com and docstoc.com). Across those four sites, a total of 3.2 million downloads took place.

Across the top 25 one-click hosting sites a total download figure of over 9 million copies was projected with an estimated loss of $380 million. Each book’s retail price and category information was collected from Amazon.com.

Among the 14 book categories tracked, piracy was most common in the business and investing category with an average of 13,000 free downloads per title. The professional and technical category trailed followed by science, computer and Internet.

The 913 titles in this study represents works from publishers totaling 13.5 percent of the U.S. book publishing market. Projecting the $380 million value to the entire industry results in total potential piracy of $2.8 billion.
 

Related Articles:

>Illegal File Sharing In The UK Declines

>Streaming Music Turning Users Away From Music

>French Lawmakers Take Up Revised Internet Piracy Bill

Go to Source

Partners in Vevo include Universal Music Group, Sony Entertainment and investor Abu Dhabi Media Company. The site is powered by YouTube.

Vevo says its top ranking is an achievement because it did not launch until December 8 and it was not live for the full month of December, which comScore bases its results.

"The Vevo Network, which is still in its infancy, has debuted at the top of the comScore rankings for unique visitors across the Entertainment-Music category in the U.S.," said Rio Caraeff (President and CEO, Vevo).

"The interest and enthusiasm our users have shown has been both gratifying and inspiring. We are also proud to deliver such strong traffic results straight out of the gate to our content and marketing partners, which solidify their early belief in the Vevo vision. We listen very closely to all of our partners and fans, and have been incorporating their feedback to continue to improve upon the Vevo experience."

 Music videos from Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Drake, Lady Gaga, Jay Sean, Shakira, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and Young Money are the most popular on Vevo this week.

The Top 5 U.S. Entertainment-Music networks on the web, according to comScore Media Metrix data, for December 2009 include: MySpace Music, AOL Music, Warner Music and MTV Networks Music.

Related Articles:

> Vevo Reaches Content Agreement With EMI

> Vevo Gets Official Launch Date

> AT&T Strikes Ad Deal With Vevo

Go to Source

“Near me now” uses your location aware cellphone (currently only iPhone and Android devices) to search for surrounding businesses by category (restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATMs and banks, and more), then returns any nearby matches based on their proximity to you. So if you’re standing outside or near a restaurant you’re considering, all it takes is firing up Google, tapping the “Near me now” link, and then choosing the category. It really is considerably faster than typing (especially on mobile devices), and might be worth working into your mobile searching toolkit.

Go to Source

Gender advertisements of the 1970s are but one category and decade among hundreds available to blow your mind at the Vintage Ad Browser. You can even search by color, which works remarkably well. Artifact-heavy low-res JPGs on the site link to higher-quality versions on third-party sites. All images are shown under fair use.

Go to Source

Go to Source

Go to Source

Looking for really affordable premium WordPress themes?

Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.

There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.

WP No Category Base

The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.

There’s one downside to this method (actually the reason why WordPress decided to use the category base). If you’re going to use the same slug for both a page and a category (‘news’ for example), clicking on a link similar to http://yourdomain.com/news/ WILL take you to the category archive, and never to the page. So, be careful when choosing you permalink slug by keeping them unique.

For those using WordPress as CMS and not as a blog engine, this downside might prove useful when creating a page based navigation. Adding a page with a slug ‘news’ will redirect that menu link to the news archive, which is indeed useful.

Download the plugin: WP No Category Base

The plugin works with WordPress versions from 2.3 up to 2.8.4.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

As a subscribe reader of Blogsessive, this is my gift to you: a guide to corporate blogging (but not only) that will help you in your blogging adventures! Download now, for FREE!

©2008 Copyright by Blogsessive – Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us, so that we can take legal action immediately.

Go to Source

Nokia and Rogers Wireless have confirmed the immediate availability of the Nokia 6750, also known as Nokia 6750 Mural, which very much falls in to fashion phone category of handsets thanks to its sleek styling, hidden display and illuminating external screen.
(…)
Read the rest of Nokia 6750 Gains Rogers Wireless Release [Nokia 6750 Mural Fashion Music Phone Yours on Rogers From $100]

© TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities, 2009. |
Permalink |
No comment |
Add to
del.icio.us

Go to Source

One of the most important elements of your blog, is the content that you painstakingly put together to gain readers and keep the online masses surfing your waves. So why do so many bloggers not take the extra time and give more attention to their archives?

Afterall, without an easy to navigate archive section, then all of that great content that you crafted will become lost in the backpages of your post progression as you continue to crank out the content. It seems that once a post has served its initial use for us, that we carelessly discard it to the forgotten areas for the post to die, rather than institute an accessible archive that will allow those past posts to continue to deliver the punch you packed within.

Our archives allow for an overall easier experience for our readers, by giving them simple access to the content they are looking for. Or more to the point, the information that they do not know they are looking for.

What I mean by that, is this. On occasion, we have users come to our site without a specific target in mind, they are simply browsing for interesting reads. By setting up a thorough collection of your posts, those browsers will have a much easier time surfing for a destination among your archives, keeping the reader engaged and skimming through the content that could have easily fallen through the cracks.

So in this post, I am going to offer some pointers on creating a quality archive section for your blog that will serve as an inspired homage to the awesome content that it contains.

Creating a Template

The first thing you will need to do is to create a WordPress Page Template for your archives page. Here we’ll be creating archives.php in our wordpress theme folder.

So here’s the code we are going to start with, then I am going to give you some options to actually customize the page the way you want it.

NOTE: Since the Template Name is Archives, the page must be named archives.php.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

<?php
/*
Template Name: Archives
*/
?>
 
<?php get_header(); ?>
 
<div id="archives">
 
	This is where we will actually be building the archives page.
 
</div>
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Posts by Date

While listing archives by date isn’t usually that helpful for finding a particular post or topic, it is a good way to establish your blog (remember that longevity = reader confidence). I recommend simply listing these archives by month to conserve space.

The following code will list the archives by month with no limit to the number of months it will display.

1

<?php wp_get_archives(); ?>

The following code lists the archives by month displaying only the past 12 months.

1

<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&limit=12'); ?>

You can set the type and limit to whatever your preference is. You can find more information about your options for parameter settings at the WordPress Codex Get Archives Page.

Posts by Category

This will be the most important section of your archives since most readers are not looking for a particular date but for a specific topic.

If you just want to generate a list of your categories use the following code.

1

<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>

If you would like to exclude certain categories (for example, blog updates) use this code. In this example, categories 10 and 12 will be excluded. To find the id for the category you want to exclude, go to your admin area and go to Posts > Categories. Right click on the category you want to exclude and go to Properties. The category ID number will be at the very end of the address line.

1

<?php wp_list_categories('exclude=10,12'); ?>

If you would like to show posts from each category, a great plugin that I use on Arbenting is Latest Post from each Category. With this plugin you can choose how many posts from each category you would like to display including the option to list every post from each category.

Most Popular Posts

It is always helpful to direct your visitors to your most popular posts because the content has proven to connect with a range of people. For this you will need the WordPress Popular Posts Plugin.

Then place the following code wherever you want to display your most popular posts. This default will have an h3 header ‘Popular Posts’ and will list 5 posts via their linked titles.

1

<?php if (function_exists('WPPP_show_popular_posts')) WPPP_show_popular_posts(); ?>

You can also alter these parameters with the options listed at the plugin’s FAQ page.

For example, the following code will have the h4 header ‘Our Most Popular Articles’ and will list 10 posts via linked titles as well as the number of views the post has received.

1

<?php WPPP_show_popular_posts( "title=<h4>Our Most Popular Articles</h4>&number=10&format=<a href='%post_permalink%' title='%post_title_attribute%'>%post_title% (%post_views% views)</a>" );?>

Most Commented Posts

Highlighting your most commented posts will direct your readers to the most active discussions on your blog, sparking more interaction with your audience which is always beneficial in building a strong readership.

First, you will need to install the Most Commented plugin.

Then insert this code wherever you would like the posts listed. This will show the 5 most commented posts on your blog. You can also alter this number to however many articles you would like to display.

1

<?php mdv_most_commented(5); ?>

Highlight Your Favorite Posts

If highlighting posts that are your personal favorites is a route you want to go, you will need to create a category titled something like Favorites, and then add all of the posts you want listed here into that category. Using the following code will list all posts in your ‘Favorites’ category.

1
2
3
4

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=Favorites'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile;?>

A Search Box

And just in case the reader still does not find what they are looking for on the page, it is nice to provide them with a search box.

If your theme doesn’t already have a searchform.php file, you will need to create it. Simply paste the following code into a new text file and save it as searchform.php in your theme folder.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<form id="searchform" method="get" action="/index.php">
  <div>
     <input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="15" /><br />
     <input type="submit" value="Search" />
  </div>
</form>
</li>

Then, paste the following code wherever you want the search box to appear in your theme.

1

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>

Wrap Up

So, here is our final archives page template. Obviously you will need to create some styling elements to style the page to match your client’s theme.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34

<?php
/*
Template Name: Archives
*/
?>
 
<?php get_header(); ?>
 
<div id="archives">
 
	<h3>Monthly Archives</h3>
	<?php wp_get_archives(); ?>
 
	<h3>Archives by Category</h3>
	<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>
 
	<?php WPPP_show_popular_posts( "title=Posts by Popularity&number=5&format=<a href='%post_permalink%' title='%post_title_attribute%'>%post_title% (%post_views% views)</a>" ); ?>
 
	<h3>Most Commented Posts</h3>
	<?php mdv_most_commented(5); ?>
 
	<h3>My Favorite Posts</h3>
	<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=Favorites'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile;?>
 
	<h3>Search the Blog</h3>
	<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>
 
</div>
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now that you have the template complete, upload it to your theme folder, log in to wordpress admin and create a new page. In the right hand column you will see Template listed under Attributes. Choose the Archives page, give the page a title and simply publish.

What have you done with your archives page? Feel free to show off links in the comments!

After 450,000+ nominations for 80,000+ nominees, we’re left with just 5 finalists per category in The Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition, our annual contest highlighting the very best the social web has to offer.

To find out if your favorites made it, and to vote for the winners (limited to one vote per category per day), head over to the site using the link below. Voting closes at midnight on December 13th, 2009.

Vote in the Finals of the Open Web Awards 2009>>

Thanks to our Partner: MOTOBLUR

MOTOBLUR from Motorola was built expressly for the way people communicate today. It’s the only service that automatically delivers and organizes your conversations, contacts and content from all your favorite sites and sources in easy-to-manage streams. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, text messages, Gmail or work e-mail, MOTOBLUR keeps track of it all and serves it up on a customizable home screen and integrates it through the phone. Plus, with MOTOBLUR you have peace of mind, because all of your info is backed up and secure. Discover MOTOBLUR on Motorola CLIQ available at T-Mobile. It’s time to spend less time managing life and more time living it.

Tags: openwebawards

Go to Source

The Initial Offering

We’ve launched with only a handful of beautiful choices; however, if you don’t find the one you need today, remember that we’ll be adding to this list on a daily basis (hint hint, authors).

Airmail

“Airmail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template! Perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

Atlantica

“Atlantica Mail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template; perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

CleanMail

“CleanMail is a simple yet sexy email template package with 5 different color schemes!”

TheClub

“theClub is a darker color two column template geared towards the nightlife! With this template, you get the original CSS as well as the ready-to-mail inline CSS .”

Quantum Email Newsletter

“A modern & clean HTML email template; comes in three colors: green, blue & pink.”

So if you Have a Moment…

Pay a visit to our newest category on ThemeForest, and considering picking up a new template. On the other hand, if you’re an author on ThemeForest – time to create some tables! There’s money to be made!

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

Go to Source

When I launched Cats Who Code in June 2008, there was a “Blogging Tips” category, in which I posted some posts about affiliate marketing, blogging advice and making money online tips.
Even we had some really nice articles in there, Cats Who Code is mostly a Web Development blog and most of my readers are more interested in stuff as such as jQuery or WordPress than how to make some money with affiliate marketing.

This is why CWC “Blogging Tips” category quickly became neglected and just a few posts were written. Though, I really like that kind of tip and I also thought that my experience as a blogger could benefit some people. This is why, on October 10, 2009, I decided to create a “sister-site” to Cats Who Code with a content dedicated to blogging tips. Cats Who Blog were born.

As a part of my blogs network, Cats Who Blog features my cat Fisto. The drawning was made by Zira Zulu, who had created mascots for Cats Who Code and WpRecipes as well.

What you’re going to read on Cats Who Blog.com

Cats Who Blog mades its debut a month ago, so I already have some nice articles for you to read. Here a selection:

• How to write a great blog post title
• How to manage multiple blogs efficiently
• 20+ blogs that use the Comment Luv plugin
• 7 essential things to do to protect your name and branding
• How to display Adsense ads only when you want to
• 10 professional WordPress themes to start your online business
• Talking about success : 7 questions to Pavel Ciorici of WpZoom
• How I made delicious.com front page one week after launching my blog
• Top 10 WordPress plugins to monetize your blog

Also, please note that I just published a great post about 10 WordPress hacks to make more money online.

Now, what about the existing “Blogging Tips” category on Cats Who Code? As I now have a blog fully dedicated to that subject, this category will be closed. Existing posts will be moved to Cats Who Blog, or deleted when their quality isn’t good enought in my opinion.
Of course, my readers opinion matters so don’t hesitate to let me know about what you think.

Now, it should be time for you to go to Cats Who Blog and discover it. Or you can already grab the RSS feed so you’ll never miss any of my posts there.
And don’t worry, a very cool Web Development tutorial will be published right here on Cats Who Code on wednesday!

Get 20% off on the MyHomePro Premium WordPress Theme by using this exclusive code: wpcats20.

Introducing CatsWhoBlog.com

Go to Source

NeedCube is a unified central place for people’s needs. Before NeedCube it was not possible to have one’s all needs registered at a central site. One had to find out the category of one’s need and search for the relevant ad sites. This is over. NeedCube is a keyword based engine which asks only five questions about one’s need: what, when, where, how many, for how much. The answers are tagged, indexed and stored in the database based on relevancy. One registers one’s all needs and the sellers may come and search for the stuff they have to offer and see if anyone needs the same thing. If there is a match, the transaction can be completed.

NeedCube is focusing on the DEMAND side and not the supply. It is for the needs of people!

Seller could come and find people who need their stuff!

http://needcube.com/

Go to Source

The new design is beautiful, clean, organized and well-structured. It invites the eye to scan and find something interesting with the goal of clicking through to another page.

The previous design was somewhat cluttered and not very inviting; the content looked liked it was being forced into an unstructured space. The new layout is very different and embraces a number of modern web design and usability best practices and trends.

So, let’s look in more detail at not only the notable improvements, but some of the questionable design and usability decisions.

Grid-Inspired Layout

I’m using the phrase “grid-inspired” because the new design seems to be based on a grid, but the precision alignment of elements is not exactly there.

Taking a cursory look at their primary stylesheet, they appear to have loosely based their style and grid on the Blueprint CSS framework.

Their CSS reset bears many similarities to the Blueprint framework, and the word “blueprint” is included at the top, so this would be a logical assessment based on my own limited knowledge of Blueprint.

After analyzing a screen capture of their home page, I’ve concluded that if they based the new layout on a grid, the specifics of that grid would be: 16 columns, 50px per column, with 12px gutters (the space between columns), totaling 980px in width.

Below is a visual representation of my grid estimate, as a Photoshop mock up:

Even though the elements on the page do not follow the kind of alignment and balance that would customarily be expected of a grid layout, there is a noticeable improvement in this layout over the previous design, shown below:

The new layout keeps all page elements inside the 980px-wide container — unlike the clunky-looking previous design that had a fluid-width header that spanned the entire page above a fixed-width content section.

Also, while the old design couldn’t seem to decide between rounded corners and square, the new design consistently features square corners with subtle bevel effects separating appropriate elements, as shown in the image below.

Although the format is grid-like, it is, as mentioned, not a strict grid format, and the sections below the fold stray quite a bit in structure from those above.

Drastically Improved Header Section

One of the most apparent improvements in the new design is the header section.

The horizontal navigation bar is modern, clean, and clear. The search box, signup option and login link are in the top-right corner, where they should be.

And, although it is not customary in modern design to center the site logo, in this case it works. It creates a very dominant, vivid, brand experience that is not easily forgotten.

Another nice feature of the navigation bar is that it indicates by means of color and graphics which links are primary, which are secondary, and which will open in micro-sites or sister sites. The latter are indicated by right-pointing triangles (”Money” and “Sports” — more on this below).

Effective Use of Space

On the right-hand side of the page, below the primary ad unit, they’ve included an accordion-style content switcher, allowing the user to view previews, in a relatively small area, of content related to a number of different topics.

Emphasis on Video & Story Popularity

In the previous design, video had fairly strong emphasis, featured in a box on the right side. In the new design, video is a major category in the primary navigation bar, given virtually the same visual importance as the “Home” link.

Video stories are featured throughout the site, and are clearly indicated by the customary “play button” link on photos that link to video content, as shown below:

Another category given the same importance as “Home” and “Video”, as shown in the image above, is the “NewsPulse” section, which is new and still in beta.

This section displays news stories by popularity (which seems to be calculated by total page views, not comments), and allows the reader to filter the results by category or story type.

Strong Category Pages

The main category pages (”U.S.”, “World”, “Politics”, etc.), accessed from the primary navigation bar, work similarly to the home page.

In fact, if you didn’t know what page you were on, you might think you were on the home page. The “U.S.” category is shown below:

Each of these sections conveniently displays top stories, latest news, and other items related to that category.

The black and white captions below images, also featured on the home page and on article pages, are eye-catching and easy to read, without the use of overly-fancy graphics or font styles.

Strong Article Pages

The article pages, for the most part, maintain the vivid branding of the home page. Body text is nicely displayed in 14px Arial with a very readable line-height.

Although some elements on the pages seem somewhat small, I personally like the way the font size of the article body stands out on the page, so the reader can stay focused on it.

Also, on the left side of each story, there is a section called “Story Highlights” that summarizes the current story in a few bulleted-list points. This shows that CNN’s designers are aware of the online tendency of users to “scan” lengthy material.

Information Overload

Of all the negative aspects of the new design, probably the first problem that is immediately evident is the overload of links and information on the home page — although it is more structured and organized, as discussed earlier.

The home page is about two and a half screens long, and includes sections that duplicate items in the main navigation bar, with about a half dozen sub-links under each category. These sections appear below the fold and are shown in this image:

Since CNN is one of the most popular sites in the world (38 million unique visitors each month), these sections will receive considerable traffic in comparison to other sites, however, because they appear so far below the fold, and because there are so many links, the relative amount of traffic visiting those links through the home page would likely be quite low.

Important Sections Buried?

As pointed out above, a lot of information on the home page appears well below the fold. And, significantly, it appears that some important content is completely buried at the bottom of the home page, more than two full screens below the header.

For example, a section entitled “Hot Topics” appears near the bottom, on the right side, just above some promos and ads.

It seems to make more sense that this section would replace the accordion content switcher, or else be incorporated into the accordion.

The ads and promos that appear below the “Hot Topics” also appear to be more important than their location reveals. Again, although such a high traffic website would receive many clicks on these areas, the click-through rate in comparison to the sections and ads above the fold would likely be drastically different.

Of course, CNN’s producers know what content is most important, and they understand their users’ habits better than anyone else — but these layout and usability challenges are helpful to analyze should other developers face similar decisions.

Usability Mysteries

There are a few elements on the new site that may not be designed for optimal usability.

One example is the right-pointing triangle that appears on each of the micro-site links. At first glance, I wasn’t sure what those triangles were for. They appear to indicate some sort of a JavaScript slider section that would pop up.

Some users not paying full attention may even mistaken them for downward-pointing arrows that produce drop-down menus.

Is there a better way to indicate a same-window micro-site link? I’m really not sure. Maybe something similar to the well-known Wikipedia icon would have sufficed — but then that would present the problem of users assuming that the links opened in a new window, which in this case is not true.

The accordion content switcher, discussed earlier, also has a few usability problems. First, when JavaScript is disabled, the accordion is rendered useless and doesn’t display any content.

It should expand by default to display all content, or else display one of the items. Also, the hyperlinked headers for the accordion sections should still link to their respective sections, but they don’t.

Another problem with the accordion content is that, since the text it contains is so small, it is not always clear what is clickable inside the accordion. This makes the links less distinct from the rest of the accordion content.

In the image below, the red arrow I’ve drawn is pointing to two bulleted list items. The text in those list items is hyperlinked, but this is not obvious at first glance.

Some Sections Still Reflect Old Design

As will be the case with any redesign of a site the size of CNN’s, some sections will still reflect the old design until all pages are fully integrated.

This is usually the case with older content that won’t be visited as often, but in the case of CNN, some important sections still have the old skin.

Two examples are the about and contact pages.

Small Typography

One particular design issue that does not conform to modern web design trends is the use of small text and small typographic elements.

The small size of the font in the accordion content was discussed earlier. There’s also the “share” toolbar that appears on article and video pages, the “Latest News” section on the home page, the “Sign up” and “Log in” links in the header, and the text links below the fold on the home page, to mention a few.

Would the “share” toolbar, shown above, be more effective with bigger typography? What about the “recommended” section, shown below, or other sections with smaller type?

Conclusion

The new CNN.com site has added a number of features not discussed here that relate more to their news services and customized content. The first link below contains a video presented by CNN that discusses some of the new features.

I definitely think the new site presents a much more beautiful and interesting user experience than the old, and aside from the weaknesses in the accordion content switcher, the drawbacks to the new design are not really that significant.

It looks like a lot of time and planning went into the design of the new CNN.com, and I think web designers and those interested in improving usability on their own sites would do well to consider and try to learn from some of the changes presented on CNN’s new website.

Further Reading

• Welcome to the New CNN.com (Video on CNN.com)
• The New CNN.com (First Screenshots on TechCrunch)
• New CNN.com Goes Live: What Do You Think?

This post was written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Louis Lazaris, a freelance writer and web developer. Louis runs Impressive Webs where he posts articles and tutorials on web design. You can follow Louis on Twitter or get in touch with him through his website.

What do you like or dislike about CNN’s new site design? Share your comments below.

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: t6tC4H

Go to Source

According to mobile analytics company Flurry, there’s been a surge of ebook-related applications for the iPhone. Based on their research, which included sampling over 2,500 applications and 40 million consumers accross four mobile platforms, this category is so popular on the iPhone that it overtook even the extremely popular games category.

Looking at that data, one might come to the conclusion that iPhone is the next big thing when it comes to mobile book reading. It might even take on Amazon’s darling, Kindle! And while I think there’s definitely something to it, one needs to look at that data closely before jumping to conclusions.

First of all, while there’s been a lot of new book-related apps for the iPhone lately, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are using them more than before. Flurry claims that in October, one out of every five new apps launching on the iPhone has been a book. OK, but how hard is it to release a book compared to a game? Is it possible that there’s been a lot of books for the iPhone simply because it’s easy to create them?

Flurry backs its data up with some older numbers about actual consumer demand for ebooks on the iPhone; according to them, in August 1% of the entire U.S. population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Again, I’d like to see some precise figures: were these books paid for, or were they free? Are comic books included in the category? How about tips and tricks – a lot of such short e-books are highly popular in the App Store?

Finally, there’s the fabled Apple Tablet, which – if it ever actually materializes – would be a direct contender to Kindle. iPhone is a versatile device, but its screen is definitely too small for comfortable reading of longer titles. If Apple launches the Tablet, it’s obvious that users would prefer that device for their book-reading needs.

All that said, the iPhone is great for certain types of e-books: short titles, comics (I’ve tried the Comics app and, contrary to my suspicions, reading comics on it has definitely been bearable, perhaps even pleasant), various guides, tips and manuals – all of these work well even on iPhone’s screen. Combine that with the possibly-upcoming Tablet, and yes, Apple might one day be a very, very serious contender in this space.

Tags: e-reader, ebooks, iphone, Kindle

Go to Source

So in essence, if you don’t want certain kinds of sites showing up in ads on your site, you could block them. Google shows how the different ad categories contribute to your income, so you can take that into consideration.

Today Google announced that it will be providing users with more ad filtering options. Soon, the option for 3 more filter categories will be added for a total of 8 different categories. These will be coming in the next few weeks.

"To get started with category filtering, sign in to AdSense and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab," says Google’s Arlene Lee. "You can choose from the listed categories, which include religion, politics, and dating, and your selections will be applied to ads in English no matter how they’re targeted."

"Please keep in mind that filtering ad categories may affect your AdSense revenue — we recommend first reviewing the percentages displayed in your account to understand the amount of revenue you may be blocking," she reminds users.

Google says its continuing to work on additional filtering capabilities as well, but does not get into specifics. They are of course encouraging feedback.

Go to Source

Social networking sites in the U.K. accounted for 13.8 billion display ad impressions in August 2009, representing more than 25 percent of all display ads viewed online, according to a new study by comScore.

Telecommunications companies were the heaviest social networking site advertisers, serving more than 949 million display ad impressions on social networks in August, or about 7 percent of all display ads delivered in the site category.

The retail advertiser category ranked second with 753 million display ad views, followed by banking brands with 248 million, travel brands with 213 million, and entertainment brands with 181 million display ad views.

Among the top 10 advertiser categories on social networking sites, teen content advertisers delivered the highest amount of their ad impressions in the social networking category at 37.3 percent. Online dating advertiser (33.8%) and retail advertisers (30.1%) also delivered an above average proportion of their ads in the site category.

A demographic analysis of display ads on social networking sites in the U.K. found while ad delivery skewed somewhat younger than average, all age segments were reached with a notable percentage of display ads.

Display-Ad-Demographics

15-24 year olds were the highest indexing age segment, accounting for 29 percent of display ad impressions while representing 23 percent of the total category audience. Those between the ages of 25-44 received ads at a slightly higher than average rate, while those 45 and older received ads at a lower than average rate. Each of the five age segments accounted for at least 15 percent of the category audience and 10 percent of ad impressions.

“CPMs on social networking sites have traditionally suffered relative to other content categories, in part because of the perception that much of the audience are younger consumers with lower spending power,” said Mike Read, comScore managing director, Europe.

“However, these data suggest that every demographic segment is reached via social networking sites and that no particular age segment accounts for an overwhelming percentage of ads delivered. Given the overall reach and volume of ads delivered on social networking sites, brand advertisers who ignore this channel may be missing a significant opportunity and enabling their competitors to gain a dominant share of voice in the channel.”

Related Articles:

> Making Money With Social Media

>Facebook Can Drive More Traffic Than Google

> Social Media Will Not Replace Search

Go to Source

Let’s get this clear before we move on – there is simply no better way to improve your search engine ranking than writing great content. Simple as that. SEO is not a substitute for writing brilliant stuff.

2. Leave worthwhile comments

An increasing number of blogs are DoFollow, which means search engines see the link as a backlink (which is obviously good). With that in mind, if you read something that you find interesting, then leave a comment and potentially it’ll have a benefit to your ranking. However, (regular readers will know what is coming!) under no circumstances should you leave a comment that says anything like: “thanks. I try out on my new blog. BIG BLOG LINK”.

I don’t know if there are ten commandments in blogging, but that should be one of them; if you are going to leave a comment then make it worthwhile! Offer something constructive; perhaps your own thoughts or tips on the subject. By all means say thanks, but make sure that that is not all you say.

3. Make “blogging friends”

One of the things I love about WordPress is the community. It’s not been too long since I “joined”, but it is immediately noticeable how willing people are to help, offer tips etc etc. However, one of the things I have found really valuable is help from other WordPress bloggers; I’m an author on WPHacks, and Kyle’s help has been simply brilliant – his advice has been priceless, and from an SEO perspective, having WPHacks linking to my site has undoubtedly helped.

The tip here: go guest posting! Find the biggest site In your niche and go and write for it! Not only will you get a backlink, but you might even gain some more visits out of it!

4. Use Header tags correctly within posts

So far we’ve focused more on tips that you can’t really apply directly into your blog, but here is one you can do straight away: use Header tags and use them correctly. If your post has seperate headings (like this one!) then tag them appropriately. Below is a guide to how you should head things up:

H1 – this tells Google this is the most important thing on the whole page. For that reason, it should contain post titles, not your blog’s title. The following code will do the trick:

<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

H2 – this is the second most important content on the page, so should be used for sub-headings (as they are being used in this post). You can set headings by clicking on ‘Paragraph’ in the visual editor (as shown in the image).

Using header tags correctly to increase WordPress SEO

H3 – use for sub sub headings and sidebar elements

H4 – sub sub sub headings and perhaps go this low for sidebar elements.

5. Create a sitemap

Sitemaps tell search engines: here is my content. By giving search engines your content, it gets indexed and you get visits. Or something like that. The point is that sitemaps are an essential part of a blog’s SEO strategy and there is no excuse for not having one. Thankfully for WordPress users, you can easily create a sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin! Install it, set it up and tell Google where your new sitemap is. Done.

6. Use a search engine friendly title tag

Don’t underestmate the importance of a good title tag. Making sure your title matches the content of your post accurately is highly important; when people are searching, if you’ve got a great post on the subject but your title is about your cat then it won’t be found! The code below is an SEO’d title tag that you can copy straight into your current theme:

><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | <?php bloginfo('description'); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_search() ) { ?>Search Results for <?php /* Search Count */ $allsearch = &new WP_Query("s=$s&showposts=-1"); $key = wp_specialchars($s, 1); $count = $allsearch->post_count; _e(''); echo $key; _e(' &mdash; '); echo $count . ' '; _e('articles'); wp_reset_query(); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_404() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | 404 Nothing Found<?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_author() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Author Archives<?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?><?php wp_title(''); ?> | <?php
$category = get_the_category();
echo $category[0]->cat_name;
?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_page() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | <?php
$category = get_the_category();
echo $category[0]->cat_name;  ?>|<?php wp_title(''); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_category() ) { ?><?php single_cat_title(); ?> | <?php $category = get_the_category();
echo $category[0]->category_description; ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_month() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Archive | <?php the_time('F, Y'); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_day() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Archive | <?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if (function_exists('is_tag')) { if ( is_tag() ) { ?><?php single_tag_title("", true); } } ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>

(via ProBlogDesign)

As if that weren’t enough, the next tip will let you customize your title tag even further…

7. Don’t use SEO plugins, use single post meta boxes!

An increasing number of themes are coming with options for adding meta data, changing the title etc etc. The good news is they’re really easy to implement yourself, as I explain in this post (complete with something you can download, copy and paste into your own theme yourself!). What it does is create a box on your post writing page which you can fill out and when saved, you’ll create a number of custom fields with the values of what you typed in. Read the full tutorial on creating in post meta boxes here.

8. Use alt tag on images

Without an alt tag, search engines can’t tell what a certain image is. Again, WordPress users have got it easy; they can just fill out the description when they upload an image and hey presto. It’s an easy thing to do, so make sure you do it!

9. Super SEO for your comments

With thousands of WordPress plugins available, it is very easy to think to yourself “Do I need this plugin that does something I could very easily implement myslef”. Why you shouldn’t use as many plugins as you can find is a post for another day, but for now take my word for it; it’s a bad idea to install a lot of plugins. However, there are some situations where you’re allowed to use a plugin. This is one of them. The SEO Super Comments plugin dynamically generates pages for all your comments, making them indexable by search engines. Now you can rank higher for “Hi. Great post. Thanks. [big link]!”

10. Use “Pretty Permalinks”

The final tip for today is use Pretty Permalinks! Under the settings tab in the WordPress backend, click ‘Permalinks’. You’ve then got a number of options, but I’d suggest you use a ‘Custom Structure’ and have either /category/post-name/ or /post-name/. The code below will do either:

<!-- for /category/postname/-->
/%category%/%postname%/
<!-- or for /postname/-->
/%postname%/

So there we are. Ten tips to improve your blog’s SEO. Now go and reap the rewards!

Go to Source