Sunday-Edition

Leading Internet search engines have begun incorporating social media tools
to meet the niche needs of the ‘long tail’ market

Move over SEO, SMO has arrived. With Internet users contributing, tagging
and ranking content in Web 2.0, search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and
Altavista have been compelled to re-engineer their algorithms to incorporate
social media search. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) is giving
way to social media optimization (SMO). Read the rest of this entry »

If your looking for well written books covering an array of technologies and design then check out Friends of Ed (an Apress Publishing Company). They offer the source code and sample files for all there publications which makes for a nice resource for learning something new (book purchase not required for source code download).

The MVC paradigm is a way of breaking an application, or even just a piece of an application’s interface, into three parts: the model, the view, and the controller. MVC was originally developed to map the traditional input, processing, output roles into the GUI realm. Think of it this way:

Input –> Processing –> Output
Controller –> Model –> View

The user input, the modeling of the external world, and the visual feedback to the user are separated and handled by model, viewport and controller objects. The controller interprets mouse and keyboard inputs from the user and maps these user actions into commands that are sent to the model and/or viewport to effect the appropriate change. The model manages one or more data elements, responds to queries about its state, and responds to instructions to change state. The viewport manages a rectangular area of the display and is responsible for presenting data to the user through a combination of graphics and text. Read the rest of this entry »

New Rule: Stop giving me that pop-up ad for classmates.com! There’s a reason you don’t talk to people for 25 years. Because you don’t particularly like them!? Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days–mowing my lawn.

New Rule: Don’t eat anything that’s served to you out a window unless you’re a seagull. People are acting all shocked that a human finger was found in a bowl of Wendy’s chili. Hey, it cost less than a dollar. What did you expect it to contain?? Trout? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start off by saying the iPhone is a very cool and unmistakably innovative product. What I’ve got put together here can in no way replace Steve’s gift to the mobile world. But, I think you’ll be interested to find that while you can’t match the style of the iPhone, you can mimic and even best many of its features for less. Read the rest of this entry »

There are iPhone doubters, and then there’s David Platt.

Platt’s remarks in yesterday’s “With hype high, iPhone may have to fight a flop” story by Reuters reporter Franklin Paul were really just the tip of the iceberg. Last week on his “Suckbusters” weblog, Platt published one of the craziest-ass things I’ve ever read, Read the rest of this entry »

Featuring iLife integration, audio and video entries, extensive document importing and instantaneous searching and filtering, not to mention Mail, iWeb and Address Book integration, a dash of blogging and AppleScript and Spotlight support.

Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. Scholars, teachers, students, professors, scientists, thinkers, the business minded and writers of every persuasion use it on a daily basis to connect the written word with the media most important to them.

I highly recommend downloading Journler for Mac OS X

There’s an old joke about airlines that goes something like this:

Q: How do you make a small fortune in the airlines?
A: Start with a large fortune!

The general rule of thumb in any competitive business: If there’s a profit to be made, someone with much deeper pockets is probably already trying to get in on the action. That’s one reason Southwest Airlines is one of a few generally profitable standouts in the airline business, despite being known for its low prices. Its balance sheet, touting more cash and short-term investments than long-term debt, is exceptionally strong for its industry. The lack of a heavy debt anchor allows it to charge less than its competitors for essentially the same service. As a result, it has thrived in an industry where players such as Northwest (NYSE: NWA) regularly flirt with bankruptcy and surviving firms like SkyWest (Nasdaq: SKYW) and Pinnacle Airlines (Nasdaq: PNCL) struggle with the impact of those bankruptcies on their own businesses.

Not just an airline problem
The same rule of deep pockets chasing profits applies to just about any industry. The most vulnerable companies, much like the airlines, suffer from an ugly combination of high capital costs and relatively light non-financial barriers to entry. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure this is a real news-flash, but this weekend I was talking to someone about my job when I realized that being a Web designer was no longer “sexy.”

Back in the 90’s I’d relish the opportunity to tell people what I did. Back then it was “so cool” to be a Web designer. Now that I think about it, the further back I go the cooler it was.

And not only did others think it was cool, I actually did all sorts of sexy/cool work. Flash intros, creative “play-spaces”, lots of fun “meet the Web team” projects, and all sorts of interesting and off-the-wall paid work also.

Oh and we drank beer on the job while playing Unreal Tournament at the “request” of our CEO at one job. Can’t beat that!

Yep, Web design in the 90’s was all about “fun”, “sexy” and “cool.” Not so anymore. At least not for this Web designer.

Why do you think that is?

I think it’s because I actually know what I’m doing now.

Look at what it takes to create, what I think anyway, is a great Web site: Usability, goals, standards, information architecture, best practices, accessibility — these things aren’t really sexy.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still a whole lot of “sexy” and “cool” in Web design. It’s just that those sexy moments are less frequent.

That’s probably a good thing. It could be argued that “sexy” and “cool” played a huge part in the whole .com crash of the late 90’s. I do kind of miss those days, but I think the change has been good, for all of us.

Experiment with your user logs to measure how successful your site is at adding new readers and retaining your regular customers.†Any good business has to know who its regular customers are and how the new customers are getting their information. From this research, you can then build lasting relationships and form new ones for long-term website growth!

If you are like most webmasters or bloggers, you are constantly searching for fresh ideas to add content to your website. You are already well aware that adding more pages to your site will enhance your search engine rankings. You realize that you require more keyword phrases to find their way into searches. The question arises as to where to find ideas that appeal to your visitor traffic. The answer may lie in your own visitor traffic logs. Read the rest of this entry »