Impact of Legal U.S. Online Gambling on Search and the Web

The search industry may profit from increased PPC advertising cash. However, forum and blog comment spam will no doubt increase and endless new content will hit the web, taxing search engine crawlers. …

The search industry may profit from increased PPC advertising cash. However, forum and blog comment spam will no doubt increase and endless new content will hit the web, taxing search engine crawlers. ...

http://searchenginewatch.com/

Twitter Continues to Innovate

Social networking has permeated almost every aspect of today’s world. Too many people are logging into their individual accounts to connect to the rest of the world. Twitter has been one of the prime movers of the social media movement. Along with Fa…

Social networking has permeated almost every aspect of today’s world. Too many people are logging into their individual accounts to connect to the rest of the world. Twitter has been one of the prime movers of the social media movement. Along with Facebook, Twitter has ... Read the Rest

http://searchconcepts.com

Elixir Interactive Online Reputation Management Case Study

Elixir Interactive has shared a very unusual online reputation management study. What is unusual is that the interactive marketing agency, which provides online reputation management and search engine optimization services, and it’s well-respected CEO…


Elixir Interactive has shared a very unusual online reputation management study. What is unusual is that the interactive marketing agency, which provides online reputation management and search engine optimization services, and it's well-respected CEO and President, Fionn Downhill, are the targets of a mean-spirited and scurrilous attack.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/

RatePoint Product Review

RatePoint is in truth a one stop shop for businesses large and small to be able to grow their company through a variety of online marketing resources. RatePoint drastically improves your customer user experience by helping you increase your web marketing in areas like email, ratings & reviews, online surveys and social marketing. RatePoint can [...]

RatePoint Product Review
RatePoint is in truth a one stop shop for businesses large and small to be able to grow their company through a variety of online marketing resources. RatePoint drastically improves your customer user experience by helping you increase your web marketing in areas like email, ratings & reviews, online surveys and social marketing. RatePoint can help any business listen to their customers and their audience a bit more in order to improve and streamline their business for the future while adding a significant grade of communication to the mix.

Let’s take a look at the different ways RatePoint can help your business:

Ratings and Reviews Feature from RatePoint:
RatePoint offers a variety of testimonial tools and services that can help a business take the voice of their customers and audience and really leverage them to grow their business. Customers really like to see other happy customers that have worked with your business prior. The RatePoint tool will actually allow you to collect testimonials and customer satisfaction data from all areas including the social networks and email.

Here is a video from a guy named Rob that works at RatePoint:

Email Marketing Features from RatePoint:
RatePoint also offers an industry leading email marketing service to help you keep up with your audience. Their technology offers maximum performance as far as email deliverables go with an outstanding 98-99% inbox rate. That means that a majority of all the emails that go out almost always avoid the spam filter leaving a very high success rate to get in front of your audience. If you are a business who does not interact through email newsletters and marketing on a regular basis with your past customers and email list you could be missing out on a great deal of new potential business.

Online Survey Features from RatePoint:
Online surveys are a great way to start an interaction with your audience that might have never performed any actions with you. RatePoint offers a survey product that allows you to learn as much as you can about your contacts and your audience. In order for a business grow into the future you need to collect raw data at some point on your audience. The only way you can make necessary tweaks and changes to your business is by studying your audience and listening to what they have to say about you, your industry and your company. RatePoint will help you learn everything you need to know by creating custom surveys for you in order to grow well into the future.

Social Media Marketing Features from RatePoint:
RatePoint will build and connect your social accounts right to their tools so you can immediately connect with your audience in the social networks through regular interaction. Send out your newsletters and any other correspondence right through Rate Point’s dashboard in just minutes and hit your entire social network with one swipe.

RatePoint offers small and large businesses a one stop shop to get a variety of online marketing done with ease. RatePoint will coach all businesses through each step to ensure that all communication is being conducted with maximum efficiency. RatePoint realizes that not every business knows how to break into the online space and start communicating with their audience. Let RatePoint take the guessing game out of web marketing for you.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

Twitter Adds More Adjustments

Being one of the most popular social networking websites in the web today, Twitter has already established its influence in our world today. Millions of people log into their Twitter accounts everyday for a variety of reasons. Most people do it to catc…

Being one of the most popular social networking websites in the web today, Twitter has already established its influence in our world today. Millions of people log into their Twitter accounts everyday for a variety of reasons. Most people do it to catch up with ... Read the Rest

http://searchconcepts.com

Your Homepage Should be Clean

I come across home pages of many websites that look like they are about to give a person a seizure. Blinking buttons, too many call to actions and a lack of focus can really hurt a business or a website in many different ways. A website home page should always funnel down quickly to the [...]

I come across home pages of many websites that look like they are about to give a person a seizure. Blinking buttons, too many call to actions and a lack of focus can really hurt a business or a website in many different ways. A website home page should always funnel down quickly to the action needed.

1. Focus: Don’t feel like you have to shove everything you have onto the home page of your website. If you have a good brand and business people will make it around your website and find what else you have to offer. You don’t have to hit your audience with every single promotion your business offers right when they arrive at your website. Focus on the most important news or information they need to see and sprinkle the rest into your other pages.

2. Call To Actions: Call to actions are very important to have but you have to keep it minimal. Too many call to actions could really affect your business in a negative way. The last thing you want is your visitors feeling like they have too many things they need to do when they arrive at your website and they just end up leaving. If they leave for this reason chances are they will most likely not return back.

3. Synergy:
Keep the synergy of your homepage the same from top to bottom. I often times see websites that have ads and content that just look very disjointed throughout the home page. Content should always be written in the same font and ads and images should always have the same consistency.

Your home page needs to be very clean at all times. Even if you are an ecommerce website you need to pay close attention to your home page. There is a thin line between just right and scaring people away. Often times when a web visitor gets scared away from a website they do not come back. Keep the home page focused and structured to exactly your business goals and your bounce rate will decrease over time.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography


  

Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is people — professionals and newbies alike — who make it truly remarkable. It’s the photographer behind the camera. It’s their imagination, passion and talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent, a way of looking at different things and imagination is together more than enough for a great shot. It’s also the ability to envision the final result in your mind which is important.

Pinhole camera is a simple home-made camera (toy camera) which only uses film or CCD sensor (more recently) enclosed in a fully opaque container and does not use any lenses or any kind of optical instruments. You can easily construct this camera yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image onto a photographic film or a CCD sensor.

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole PhotographySpacer in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography
 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography  in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography  in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is people — professionals and newbies alike — who make it truly remarkable. It’s the photographer behind the camera. It’s their imagination, passion and talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent, a way of looking at different things and imagination is together more than enough for a great shot. It’s also the ability to envision the final result in your mind which is important.

Pinhole camera is a simple home-made camera (toy camera) which only uses film or CCD sensor (more recently) enclosed in a fully opaque container and does not use any lenses or any kind of optical instruments. You can easily construct this camera yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image onto a photographic film or a CCD sensor.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty on creating a pin hole camera by yourself, you can use your DSLR with some modifications (replacing camera lenses with a pinhole). Also, pinhole cameras are available in the market: and they are quite popular, too — after all, you don’t have to worry about the focus and distortions as there are no lenses involved. Also, you might end up with lovely motion blurred photographs.

In today’s weekend post we present beautiful and inspiring photographs shot using a pinhole camera. Please notice how photographers use the camera creatively to produce quite remarkable images. At the bottom of this post you will find links to some photographers and references to related resources to get you started. Also, we listed related Flickr pools which contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved with this techniques. Get inspired, folks!

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

Beautiful Inspiring Pinhole Camera Photographs

Tarquin Coates

Tarky in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tetsuya

Tetsuya in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

The calmness of blue by Andrew Watson

Drizzlecombe in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Daniel Tückmantel

Daniel in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Invader by TEIKO

TEIKO in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Mackeson

Rock in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Danielle Hughson

Manyfires2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tea Room

Tearoom2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

A. Wallis

Wallis5 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

An Oceanic Ghost Forest by Danielle Hughson

Oceanic Ghost in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Zeb Andrews

Zeb Andrews in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Mackeson

Mackeson3 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Danielle Hughson

Manyfires8 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Scott VanderStouw

Bananas in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tea Room

Tearoom4 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Scott Speck

Scott Speck in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Scott Speck

Chain-in-space in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Mackeson

Mackeson2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Bruno Malegue

Bruno Malegue2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

gonebiking

Gonebiking in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

The Iron Cycloid by Scott Speck

Iron Cycloid in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Matteo Bagnoli

Matteo Bagnoli in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

The Sleeping Zebra by Scott Speck

Zebra in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Sarah Knopf

Ponkie in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Follow The Tunes by Tim Franco

Tim Franco in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Bill Bresler

DexterMill2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

nhung dang

Nhung Dang in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Darren C.

Daren in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Scott Speck

Madona in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tea Room

Tearoom in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Celeste Brignac

Travelgirl in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

A. Wallis

Wallis in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Darren C.

Darren in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Zeb Andrews

Zeb Andrews2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Kakki

Kakki in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Kent Mercurio

Six Kent Mercurio in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Mackeson

Rock in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Sara

Sara in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Erik

Erik in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Zeb Andrews

Zeb Andrews5 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Michael C. Pastur

Michael in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

mist-y

Mist-y in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Zeb Andrews

Zeb Andrews7 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tea Room

Tearoom1 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Always de Sun

Always in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Remarkable Photographers

And here is a brief overview of some remarkable photographers from Flickr. These are some of great photographers that will come to your mind every time you think of pinhole photography. They have added a new demission to photography: their photostreams are full of beautiful photographs.

Zeb Andrews

Src1 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Tea Room

Sr2 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Scott Speck

Sr3 in The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Further Resources


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The Facebook Movie (no, not THAT Facebook movie)

In an effort to educate and entertain, the Nestat Brothers’ YouTube Channel posted this Facebook Movie. It’s not the one that everyone’s talking about coming out soon…
… or is it?

In an effort to educate and entertain, the Nestat Brothers’ YouTube Channel posted this Facebook Movie. It’s not the one that everyone’s talking about coming out soon…

… or is it?

http://soshable.com

Extensive Web Tools for the Artist in You

With the advancement of technology, being an artist has become easier and more convenient. Artists usually draw inspiration from their surroundings. But conceptualizing is just one part of the process. Artists need a medium in which to translate these …

With the advancement of technology, being an artist has become easier and more convenient. Artists usually draw inspiration from their surroundings. But conceptualizing is just one part of the process. Artists need a medium in which to translate these concepts into a tangible work of ... Read the Rest

http://searchconcepts.com

Foursquare Wants To Pair With Google, Yahoo, Bing And Other Search Players

Foursquare, the location-based social media site, is aware of the value of its data for searches and has started talking to “a lot of different potential partners,” including industry majors such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in order to clinch data d…

Foursquare, the location-based social media site, is aware of the value of its data for searches and has started talking to "a lot of different potential partners," including industry majors such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in order to clinch data deals.

Click to read the rest of this post...

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