SEO package deals could save your business from being flushed away – almost literally. Rather than using SEO package deals, does your online marketing go a little like this: save up enough money to pay for an article service to create a whole batch of custom SEO articles, submitting them all across the web, then do nothing for weeks while you save up for the next assault? Rinse and repeat. If so, then your article marketing strategy is what I tend to refer to as ‘lavatorial’.

In other words, every once in a while you flush, but in between you’re really just sitting there doing nothing much more than reading the odd magazine and tidying the loo rolls.

Don’t worry – you’re far from being alone, and at first glance most businesses can’t see just how damaging that tactic is. Flushing Google once in a while, even with good quality custom SEO articles is not the way to promote your website effectively, for several good reasons.

The first good reason is that Google pays relatively little attention to sporadic floods of content, giving each article much less credibility than it would if published in a way that was much more distinct from the others being submitted at the same time.

The second good reason is that by flooding the web with masses of high quality custom SEO articles, you may well catch the attention of the search engines the first time, as they may suspect that you will maintain the publication rate. As soon as your flush is over, and your site returns to silence, the search engines will lower the credibility given to your articles, rendering them much less effective. This may also make future submissions be considered to be of less interest to them as well.

Think of SEO package deals as being a little like trying to get the attention of a politician. They are very busy people, (doing what I can’t say for sure but they always seem busy.) What’s the best way of achieving this? Writing a single letter and then dropping the matter? Going up to them at a rally, shouting and ranting and raving for twenty minutes before dropping the matter? Or persistently badgering them, regularly contacting them, building up a network of supporters who also continually pester them, keeping the momentum and the awareness going until eventually the matter is taken seriously and action is taken?

Clearly the latter has long proven to be the most effective method, and it is in just the same way that SEO package deals can help your custom SEO articles to be put to good use. Rather than wasting your SEO articles in an occasional flush, using an article service to continually pester the directories and the search engines by dropping a regular stream of content is a far more effective way of ensuring that each and every article works much harder for your cause.

Here’s another example: Imagine a hundred people suddenly arrived on your doorstep to ask you to please draw the curtains when you’re getting dressed in the morning. How many of those would you remember? How much creditability would you give to each individual’s genuine desire for you to cover up a little? Not much perhaps.

But imagine if every fifteen minutes there was a knock at your door, with a single individual standing there – just one of the hundred. Eventually over time those hundred people would all come to you with their pleas, but individually you’d probably take each one of them more seriously, and after a while you would start to take the whole campaign more seriously.

It’s this regular, constant badgering of the search engines which is what high quality SEO package deals are all about, and by finding a professional article service which can create custom SEO articles and submit them over time you are more likely to see your business grow, and gain much more of the search engines’ attention.

This week marks the second anniversary of the first live internal demo of the intelligence community’s A-Space project, groundbreaking for the IC in its goal of collaborative use of social media across agency lines. Somewhere in Maryland, a remarkable government employee and friend named Mike Wertheimer should pause and quietly celebrate the fruition of his early evangelism for it.

I was still a government employee then, but wrote about the effort at the time here on Shepherd’s Pi (“A-Space: Top-secret social networking“). It makes me chuckle to remember back to those days when it was still mostly unheard-of for IC employees to blog openly on the public web about current technology projects. Now you can’t shut ‘em up!

It made sense, I thought, to set down a few notes at the time for several reasons:

1. A-Space was intended by Mike’s Analytic Transformation team of the Office of the DIrector of National Intelligence (ODNI) to take advantage of social-media advances then occuring rapidly on the internet, more rapidly than behind our firewalls. I had joined Twitter for example in March 2007, but few of my IC colleagues had Twitter accounts or access from work machines. Same for Facebook and LinkedIn. I blogged about A-Space because I felt we needed to socialize externally the path we were following internally, in order to attract good ideas and assistance from Silicon Valley and technologists who had little knowledge of intelligence work.
2. The time would come when A-Space would be all grown up and accepted as a success, I hoped – and at that point “paternity” could become an issue. We had seen the same thing happen with Intellipedia, which has had several bouts of being claimed as a CIA creation rather than its more community-minded actual roots – and I thought it might be best to set the record straight early on. As Winston Churchill said about World War II, he intended history to treat him fairly “because I intend to write it.”
3. I had announced my “retirement” from government service and was ready to go back to the private sector, and was frankly intent on setting a mark with A-Space so that later leadership might be less inclined to reverse course, against the use of social and collaborative tools.

So here we are, two years on.  I am relieved that A-Space lives! At this point in their lives Twitter and Facebook were themselves  not quite into their hockey-stick growth cycle as social-media phenomena. Think back to Facebook of early 2006 (it was launched in February 2004), or Twitter of March 2008 (it launched in its first alpha baby SMS steps in March 2007.  If you’re interested, Flickr holds some interesting screenshots of the very early Twitter beta screens by their designer).

This week Joab Jackson, senior technology editor at Government Computer News has an update titled “A-Space Melds Social Media and Intelligence Gathering,” quoting Ahmad Ishaq, who manages the project at DIA for the ODNI. I like giving him praise – not just because I hired him, but because he is doing  a bang-up job in difficult circumstances. Let’s just say that he and his team have been dealing with my third bullet point above during the last couple of years.

One of Ahmad’s smart tactics has been to enlist supportive users from multiple agencies as vocal advocates. The GCN article provides an example illustrating the cross-agency collaboration that was mandated by the 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission reports, and which A-Space and its sister tools are helping to realize:

A Homeland Security Department analyst needed to identify a person whose face was found posted on several street and stop signs in a region of the United States. So he posted a scan of the poster on A-Space and received information and photos from seven other agencies. With that information, he could run an image search of the face, which ultimately provided identification.” -Government Computer News

There’s been a lot of change in A-Space since I left – in the requirements, in the emerging business practices, in the software baseline used, and – perhaps explaining some of that – in the contractor team used. That’s all fodder for another article, perhaps.

Whither Analytic Collaboration?

What I prefer to focus on is the future potential of this tool and others in enabling progress for intelligence analysis and collaboration. Ahmad gives one window in the GCN article, and it’s a topic he and I have talked about recently:

[A]llowing analysts to share all this information is only the first step of A-Space. Ishaq and his team are exploring ways of making all the information that is being generated machine-readable. Ishaq would like to incorporate elements of the Semantic Web tools, which would allow them to draw inferences from existing material.

“Right now, the communication is between person and machine,” he said. “We’re trying to take it a step further, to machine-to-machine. So the end-user logs in to the computer, and everything he could possibly want would be there, without doing searches or clicking around.” -Government Computer News

But I’m sure that Ahmad would be among the first to agree that technology is perhaps among the lesser factors which will contribute to the success or failure of analytic collaboration (and “transformation” – an overused term but a worthy goal). Much more important are the social and cultural aspects of the workforce, the workplace, and the changing nature of intelligence work itself  – in response to and support of a dramatically changing foreign policy approach, driven as much by political transition as by societal shifts.

For the moment, let’s keep the focus on the tools though. As A-Space continues taking its own baby steps, it is worthwhile to consider the experience of its older sister Intellipedia – and that sytem’s progenitor Wikipedia. 

Early this year, GCN carried another Joab Jackson article claiming: “Intellipedia Suffers Midlife Crisis.” Much chatter ensued. Some of the challenges dealt with in the article are being addressed internally by the likes of the IC’s Chris Rasmussen, with new and complementary efforts such as Intellipublia (see Federal Computer Week, “Intelligence community wrestles with Web 2.0 tools for information sharing“).

The looming question rises about the overall significance of Web 2.0 style tools.  Dr. Mark Drapeau argued early this year in a widely read piece that “Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crsis.”  Now, more concrete and noteworthy stats are emerging about the hallmark Web 2.0 tools which inspired many of the IC’s efforts.

Could Crowd-Sourcing Max Out?

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported on new research  (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“) showing that “unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.” They’re leaving Wikipedia and not being replaced by as many new volunteers, undercutting the “many-eyes” approach that crowd-sourcing relies upon. The numbers are striking: “In the first three months of 2009, Wikipedia lost more than 49,000 editors, compared to 4,900 a year earlier,” reports ZDNet based on the new research (more details here: “Is Wikipedia Maxed Out?”). An influential Econsultancy.com blog now asks in response: “Is free user-generated content dying?”

It is worth keeping an eye on the pulse of Intellipedia and A-Space, as their activity levels wax or wane. Unlike Wikipedia, they are work systems, not free web tools. So the issues there are the differential adoption and longevity of enterprise tools, as explored in Andrew McAfee’s excellent new book Enterprise 2.0.  

For the new intelligence tools, much will depend on their inclusion within agency official processes and analytic-tradecraft training programs. As Chris Rasmussen has pointed out about A-Space, it may still be true that “not a single agency recognizes A-Space content as official.” But social collaboration is more and more an accepted and critical requirement of all information technologies – we’re certainly reflecting that at Microsoft, and have been busy building such capabilities into the new Office 2010 suite (info and free beta sign-up here).

The wave is not going away (well, Google Wave might go away… see here and here and here and oh never mind…)

Who best reflects the pulse of A-Space and Intellipedia? There are many intel-watchers in my blogroll over on the margin, who chart the progress of the IC’s collaborative ways. I can also recommend Chris Dorobek’s reporting on the topic for FedNewsRadio; see his piece from July 2009 ”Intel on the government 2.0 front lines – and a new report assessing A-Space” and more recently his article “November’s Signal column: The Intelligence Community Writes the Book on Collaboration” – both have insight and supportive links as well.

There will be other ODNI and constituent agency efforts to provide cutting-edge collaborative and analytic software and techniques. A-Space will be improved upon, no doubt.

The real test of A-Space – while we have it – and its intelligence utility will come in secret moments of crisis, but also in less-flashy use of consistent collaborative processes which over time contribute to the uncovering of truth for our decision-makers and national leaders. Of necessity, most successes will be unseen by the outside world… and likely, most failures as well.  For now, a happy beta anniversary to the A-Space team and its users.

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Semantic short-term memory (STM) deficits have been traditionally defined as an inability to maintain semantic representations over a delay (R. Martin, Shelton & Yaffee, 1994). Yet some patients with semantic STM deficits make numerous intrusions of items from previously presented lists, thus presenting an interesting paradox: Why should an inability to maintain semantic representations produce an increase in intrusions from earlier lists? In this study, we investigated the relationship between maintenance deficits and susceptibility to interference in a group of 20 aphasic patients characterized with weak semantic or weak phonological STM. Patients and matched control participants performed a modified item-recognition task designed to elicit semantic or phonological interference from list items located one, two, or three trials back (Hamilton & R. Martin, 2007). Controls demonstrated significant effects of interference in both versions of the task. Interference in patients was predicted by the type and severity of their STM deficit; that is, shorter semantic spans were associated with greater semantic interference and shorter phonological spans were associated with greater phonological interference. We interpret these results through a new perspective, the reactivation hypothesis, and we discuss their importance for accounts emphasizing the contribution of maintenance mechanisms for STM impairments in aphasia as well as susceptibility to interference.

from Neuropsychologia

Eine Überblick bzw. Zusammenfassung von mir über das Thema was euch hoffentlich weiterhelfen wird.

Häwdtfan

Beschreibung

Ein Framework ist selbst noch kein fertiges Programm, sondern stellt den Rahmen
innerhalb dessen der Designer/Developer eine Anwendung erstellt zur Verfügung.

Ein Framework ist eine Reihe von Werkzeugen, Bibliotheken und Best Practices, die uns versuchen Arbeit abzunehmen.Wie? In denn man Routinenaufgaben in generische Module wiederverwendet kann.

• Ein Layout-Framework ist somit ein Arbeitswerkzeug zur Layouterstellung.
• Ein Universelles Layoutkonzept mit vielfältige Variationsmöglichkeiten.
• Eine vorgefertigtes „Gerüst“.
• Ein Arbeitswerkzeug zur Layouterstellung.
• Ein Framework gibt somit in der Regel die Anwendungsarchitektur vor.
• Ein Framework nimmt uns Arbeit ab indem Standardtasks vordefiniert sind.
• Frameworks helfen uns effizient und schnell ans Ziel zu kommen
  (Daher Kostenvorteile was auch an den Kunden weitergegeben wird. )
• Konzetration auf das Wesentliche!

Ziel

Das Ziel ist es, dass der Designer auf Aufgaben, die einzigartig für ein bestimmtes Projekt sich konzentrieren kann, anstatt das Rad jedes Mal neu zu erfinden in denn man Werkzeuge noch mal verwendet.

Produktivitätssteigerung!

Methoden, Arten von Frameworks

• Grid Frameworks (Anwendungsorientierte Baukästen, Grid- Basiertes Layout)
  • Layouterstellung mit HTML
  • Vordefinierte Gridklassen

• CSS Frameworks (Entwicklerorientierte Baukästen, Spaltenbasiertes Layout)
  • Vordefinierter Markup
  • Layouterstellung mit CSS

Beispiele dafür? (Werden nicht alle benannt!)

Grid Frameworks

• Blueprint CSS
• 960.gs
• YUI

CSS Frameworks

• Yaml
• A CSS Framework

Unterschiede

An der Stelle muss ich sagen dass es wirklich besser ist wenn ihr euch die Frameworks runterladet und die selber testet z.B. Yaml Builder und 960.gs. Ich persönlich finde diesen Weg als den besten weil so könnt ihr selber den Unterschied sehen und auch merken in denn man es ausprobiert 

Grid Frameworks

• Vordefinierte Gridklassen
• Layouterstellung mit HTML

CSS Frameworks

• Vordefinierte Markup
• Layouterstellung mit CSS

Beim Frameworks handelt es sich nun um Stylesheets mit einer Auswahl fertiger Klassen für diverse Spaltenraster im eigentlichen Inhaltsbereich einer Webseite.

Inhalte

Mögliche Inhalte bzw. Stylesheets  eines Frameworks:

• Reset.css
• Base.css
• Typography.css
• Layout.css
• Browser.css
• Table.css
• Form.css
• Print.css

„ Yaml liefert zusätzlich die vom Benutzer erstellte Struktur mit. (Html Code)“

Vorteile und Nachteile

Vorteile

• Tabellenfrei (CSS)
• Schnelle Entwicklung, Schnelle Ergebnisse
• Cross-Browser Kompatibilität (IE Bugfixes, Bugprävetion)
• Einheitliche Code Basis
• Normalisierung der Code
• Einhaltung von Standards
• Vermeiden von alltäglichen Fehlern
• Steigerung der Produktivität
• Verbesserter Workflow bei Team-Arbeit
• Flexible und Pflegeleicht
• Modulare Aufbau
• Wohl geformten Markup

Nachteile

• Einarbeitungszeit für das Framework
• Frameworks erzeugen mehr Code als notwendig (Overhead)
• Eigenschränkte Kreativität durch Vorgaben (Individuelle Layouts brauchen individuelle Lösungen);-)

Stumbled onto a cool little “project” dubbed EllerDale.

Pretty straight forward: it aggregates real time search results from Twitter, Wikipedia and other sources into easily interpretable categories.

If you want to stay up to date with Google (who doesn’t!!?!?), you can zero in on their “profile” and watch as multiple links regarding Google populate right before your eyes!

Dan’s ADD Meter Score: 100

Chances I will remember to check it more than twice: 5 (out of what you ask?!?! um…15)

You can try EllerDale for yourself here

Semantic short-term memory (STM) deficits have been traditionally defined as an inability to maintain semantic representations over a delay (R. Martin, Shelton & Yaffee, 1994). Yet some patients with semantic STM deficits make numerous intrusions of items from previously presented lists, thus presenting an interesting paradox: Why should an inability to maintain semantic representations produce an increase in intrusions from earlier lists? In this study, we investigated the relationship between maintenance deficits and susceptibility to interference in a group of 20 aphasic patients characterized with weak semantic or weak phonological STM. Patients and matched control participants performed a modified item-recognition task designed to elicit semantic or phonological interference from list items located one, two, or three trials back (Hamilton & R. Martin, 2007). Controls demonstrated significant effects of interference in both versions of the task. Interference in patients was predicted by the type and severity of their STM deficit; that is, shorter semantic spans were associated with greater semantic interference and shorter phonological spans were associated with greater phonological interference. We interpret these results through a new perspective, the reactivation hypothesis, and we discuss their importance for accounts emphasizing the contribution of maintenance mechanisms for STM impairments in aphasia as well as susceptibility to interference.

from Neuropsychologia

Still spinning in circles? Use an article service to take your article marketing out of the rut and into the race. Article spinners have proven to be incredibly popular, because they’re incredibly simple and speed up the process of creating variations of a single article to avoid duplicate content penalties.

Except, of course, they rarely work.

As a professional, UK based article service I not only pride myself on having an excellent grasp of the English language, but also an excellent appreciation of what it means to create web optimised articles. I also maintain a high ranking article directory which receives hundreds of articles a day.

Of the several hundred articles submitted to me every day, I would estimate that around 80% of them have been written using an article spinner. Of those, around 90% are declined or deleted before I’ve even read as much as the first two lines.

But wait a minute – how do I know that 80% of the articles submitted to me are written by an article spinner in the first place? The answer is so simple. If you had spent the hours that I have reading the puerile drivel submitted under the guise of internet marketing, you’d have picked up long ago the tell-tale signs of an article written by a computer rather than by a real, live human being.

Let me give you an example. Purely out of personal interest I paid around £40 for one of the web’s most popular article spinners. I’ve never used it for my article marketing – I wouldn’t dream of it. But it has provided plenty of amusement!

Take the following sentence, which is the kind of language I might use in my search engine optimised articles: ‘Search engine optimised articles need to be written in such a way that they are also optimised for latent semantic indexing, requiring enough contextually relevant vocabulary to ensure a high level of relevance is attributed to it by the search engines.’

Now let’s throw that sentence into an article spinner and see what it comes up with: ‘Look combustion efficient features requisite to be graphic in specified a way that they are also reduced for inactive meaning compartmentalisation, requiring sufficiency dependable germane lexicon to ensure a falsetto tier of connectedness is ascribed to it by the activity engines.’

You see my point? Honestly, you couldn’t make that up. Appropriate vocabulary or germane lexicon? Which was written by a computer, and which by a human? It is rarely hard to tell. I had someone write to me the other day whose article had been declined four times. She asked me why. I was quite surprised because her email was written in perfectly good English – excellent English in fact. Yet her article had been declined because the grammar, syntax and vocabulary simply didn’t make any sense.

She admitted (unnecessarily in my view) that she had used an article spinner, and replaced the submitted version with the original, which I was happy to publish immediately. But if I had discarded her earlier efforts so quickly, how many other submissions had suffered a similar fate? How about the search engines? They clearly understand that people are using article spinners, and are also fairly likely to spot such errors as describing ’search engines’ as ‘look combustibles’. Increasingly search engines are penalizing those article marketers who are using article spinners.

It’s time to put away the kids’ spinning top and start moving article marketing forwards. I have never spun a single article, and write about one submission article per week, in return for which my site is above the crease on page one of Google for most of the relevant keywords, including many which produce more than a billion results. Proper, professional article writing does work. It’s time to find out just what a difference an article service can make to your business.

There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 09); it’s a traditional launchpad for cool new stuff. I thought I’d point out several of the government-relevant announcements and technology roll-outs.

I specifically want to spotlight something called Codename Dallas, and how NASA and others have begun using it. In the keynote this morning Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told PDC attendees (and his streaming-video audience) that a landslide of new sensors and observational systems are changing the world by recording “unimaginable volumes of data… But this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kenetic, unless we unlock it and innovate in the realm of applications and solutions that’s wrapped around that data.”

Here’s how we’re addressing that, with a bit of step-by-step context on the overall cloud-computing platform enabling it.  The steps are: 1. Azure, 2. Pinpoint, and 3. Dallas.

Today is the big public roll-out of the Windows Azure Platform for cloud computing and a full complement of new services for it,  including a Java SDK, REST and open source support and interoperability with MySQL, Tomcat, memcached, and even PHP development with Eclipse. The Windows Azure site is here, or just check out a brief summary of today’s Azure announcement and its array of cloud services. 

As part of the Windows Azure rollout, we’re announcing the new Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.  It includes an “app store,” as well as store-like shopping for experts and professional IT services. Pinpoint is open to everyone, and free to join, and is already at launch the largest directory of qualified IT providers and their software built on Microsoft technologies. The app store alone is cool, as you can try, buy, and download software through direct links to software purchase pages, demos, and trial downloads.

One of the featured sets of services available through Pinpoint is our Codename “Dallas” service, Microsoft’s Information Services business, which developers and information workers can use to find and manage Web services and datasets  – free or paid – to power their apps, on any platform. Dallas is built completely on the Windows Azure cloud platform, which includes a SQL Azure cloud database, so you get the ability to store structured and unstructured data whether from Dallas’s “data-as-a-service” or your own collections, to invoke and examine the data without having to parse it, to use REST services to manipulate and move the data, and to analyze the data using the new PowerPivot high-end analytics for Excel 2010 spreadsheets, for example.

Large-scale datasets already available through Dallas include government, financial, weather, news, corporate, international and reference sets including those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, Data.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting today, “Dallas” is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP). 

Tech news sites are already reporting the “competitive drive” propelling Dallas, for example The Register puts it this way: 

Microsoft Dallas Muscles Google Data Crusade: Microsoft is hoping to out-Google Google by unlocking the world’s information and slapping a GUI on the front end. Today, the company unveiled Dallas, which chief software architect Ray Ozzie said would deliver “data as a service.” He described it as a “game changing” subsystem of Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing and storage service.

There’s a lot you  can do with a data platform like that. The federal government’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra moments ago addressed PDC 09 live via remote video and announced that the U.S. government has been busy building new capabilities using Dallas and the Azure cloud, and he showed a very neat example: the NASA “Be a Martian” site. From the detailed press release:

Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.

The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.

“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.” [emphasis added]

So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls “small pieces loosely joined.”

There’s more coming this week that I believe government folks will like, including one of my favorite projects: Thursday’s unveiling of the Microsoft Semantic Engine.  My team back at my old government hangout did a lot of pathbreaking semantic-analysis research and development, and I hope that they will find this very cool stuff indeed. Not allowed to say more yet -  though I see that others in semantic-web circles are eager to hear more. Stay tuned!

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Article service professionals and SEO article writers can often be a rather cagey lot, keeping their cards close to their chests. Or are their hands clutching at nothing in the hope you don’t realise? The fact is that a great many article service companies are clutching at last year’s article writing methods and search engine optimisation tricks. In fact, if an article service suggests that there are tricks to writing articles which will appeal to the search engines, they’re almost certainly woefully out of date.

But don’t let that lead you to believe that there are no appropriate or successful methods, because there certainly are. The difference is that ‘trick writing’ simply doesn’t work anymore, whereas good quality, solid writing will almost certainly outstrip the competition.

It’s crazy to even think for a minute that powerful global search engines such as Google and Yahoo would be fooled by a few home based scribblers ploughing reams of content onto the web which would fail even a primary school level of English. They’re a little cleverer than that, and to not give the search engines such credit is to fail before even getting started.

The trick to article marketing is that there is no trick – it’s almost entirely about common sense, good solid content, readable English, and articles optimised for humans rather than merely robots.

Of course, those article services still working under the assumption that it’s 2007 will be claiming that it’s important to think about keyword densities. This is almost laughable if you think about it. Firstly, it’s well known that Google frowns on keyword densities of anything more than about 1-2%. Anyone working towards 5% or more is liable to not just have their articles and websites demoted in the search results pages, but may well find their site blacklisted entirely.

But to consider why the concept of keyword density targets is so laughable, just think about why Google has settled on being happy with around 1-2% keyword density. The answer is so simple it’s almost too obvious for most people to see.

Imagine writing an article about mobile phones, and imagine your chosen key phrase was ‘buy a mobile’. If you were genuinely writing an article for, say, a magazine or a newsletter, then you’d be writing in a natural manner, without forcing the keyword or keyphrase in any way. But your key phrase would still occur, because it’s what the article is all about.

So, in other words, writing about a subject in a sensible, natural way is likely to generate about a 1-2% density of your keyword or keyphrase. That’s why Google are happy to accept that level of keyword occurrence, and that’s why writing naturally in a way which is largely indistinguishable from the kind of article which would appear in print and offline is now the most successful way of article writing for the web.

The search engines now scan articles to identify the likely context. Once the context has been identified, the relevancy is decided based on the proportion of context sensitive vocabulary which occurs in the article compared with the majority of other articles written on that subject.

So if I was writing an article on how to ‘buy a mobile’ then it would be reasonable to expect words such as ‘SIM’, ‘handset’, ‘reception’, ‘call’, ‘tariff’ and so on to occur. By pushing the keyword phrase too much, the search engines will demote the article. By focussing on the keyword so much that the rest of the article is merely filling will reduce the credibility and relevance of the article in the eyes of the search engines, and so it will be demoted.

It is only by writing articles in a way which ensures the chosen keyphrase is used sparingly, with the rest of the article incorporating contextually relevant vocabulary in a natural way that your articles will earn their keep. You can either call this a trick, or just call it good, sound writing, targeting people not robots. For some people it can be more difficult to write in this way than to write for the bots and spiders, in which case using an article service is likely to help ensure your SEO articles are read, not rotten.

Posted at bleepingcomputer.com forum

My boss gave me his old XP after his company closed. There are two users on it, his name, and my name.

Is there any danger if I delete his user name, and just use mine. I am not certain if there is some administrator password.
I know that I have full admin rights. I have removed most of the old data and archived it on a USB Mybook and on a USB Scancor 64 gig. I feel it would free up some resources if I delete his old profile. On the other hand, I would regret it if I deleted his profile and the machine stopped working properly, since I do not have the original install disks for Windows XP, and there is no real problem in leaving his user profile there and just never using it.

Also, I dont really have the expertise to reinstall Windows. And his machine also has some software that we find useful, like Quick Books, which would be difficult for me to reinstall. I suppose I am really answering my own question, namely, it is better to leave well enough alone, and, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

We did have a second XP at work that had all sorts of problems with the 4 of the user accounts. We had to give that machine to someone who purchased parts of the old company. But I did not dare delete those other user accounts, I just changed the name to DO NOT USE, and put a password on them, to discourage someone from accidentally getting into them.

I also had one strange experience with that particular machine. I purchased a CHEAP USB extender, and installing it seemed to mess up the machine. I think if I had purchased a Belkin, or some quality brand, then the problem would not have happend. But ever since that experience, I am hesitant to try a USB port extender, fearing that it will mess up a machine.

One machine we have at home, a Dell XP professional, is five or more years old. I was always afraid to mess around with it, fearing it would stop working. When I got 2 extra machines, I felt like I should take courage and try to really fix up the first machine, and take some risks. I had always used AVG by Grisoft free antivirus, for about 8 years, on an old Compaq which became useless, and then on this XP. It did seem to give some false positives. ANd what was HILARIOUS, when I installed malwarebytes, it flagged it as MALWARE! Ha ha! I had an old copy of free Sygate firewall, which was great in its day, but had stopped working. And I had a Norton firewall which we never updated because it would have cost money.

So, I decided on Avira Antivir FREE, and their forum was VERY helpful in giving me the courage to take some risks and clean up that machine. I uninstalled AVG, Sygate and Norton. Then they pointed me to two different uninstall utilities provided by Norton and McAfee to remove ALL traces of those programs left behind by normal uninstall methods, since those traces might interfere with Avira. So many people praised malwarebytes.org that I started using it all the time, and it was NOT malware as Avg claimed. The Avira forum directed me to Online Armour free firewall which works great.

Many at the Avira forum also swear by Ccleaner which has a registry cleaner. You can analyze the registry, make a copy of it which I have successfully used to RESTORE, and then, do things in tiny steps. You dont want to tell it to repair everything at once. If you have to restore then just boot into save mode, right click on the registry backup and it offers you the option to MERGE those entries back into the registry.

I must say that the older a machine gets, and the more you install and uninstall (plus the occasional virus or trojan), the flakier the operating system gets, until one reaches the point where the only option is to do a fresh install of the original operating system, or make it a pure Ubuntu machine.

I have always felt more comfortable with a desktop that comes with a RESTORE DISK, than with some laptop (like the old Dell laptops of 8 years ago, that had NO restore disk, and required a skilled technician to spend an hour or two reinstalling drivers). I am looking forward to the day when I can do everything with something like Ubuntu, and can always REINSTALL to the latest version and start over with a clean slate. AND the more that we have in the Internet “CLOUD” and not tied to some expensive proprietary software on our hard drive, difficult or impossible to reinstall, then the easier it is for us to resort to an OS reinstall as a solution to our problems. AND if we regularly back up everything, and plan ahead with libraries of what we installed and how we installed it, then recovery is perhaps only a weekend’s worth of work for “the weekend warrior”.

I am finding delicious.com book mark utility combined with a wordpress blog and clipperz.com for password storage to be a great tool to document everything I am doing, and also to share what I have learned with others who are trying to accomplish the same sorts of things.

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My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

My personal, trusted search agent, my husband, cut out an article for me about DemandMedia, an innovator in offering a service for web owners to pull algorithm driven, highly moentizable content – fast and cheap.

Then a few minutes later I read about Cheaptweet.com and how it uses an algorithm to mine Twitter feeds for deals on clothes, electronics and services.

I began to notice a pattern.

The next day I read about new search methods that were smarter through, you guessed it, algorithmic technology.

Now with a thud, I realized, a bit to my horror, that algorithmic logic drives a big part of our lives. It drives our searches and, as a result, what we learn about. It drives which ads we see and crunches through a formula to present us with the most relevant, contextual based ad possible. It filters what offers we see or don’t see online.  And the ever iterative algorithmic engines can even choose our future mates.

I even think some algorithm predicted the end of the world to happen sometime in 2012 *sigh*.

It then blindingly dawned on me (better late than never) that my perception of the world was being shaped by algorithms – aggregation of data points. I was taken aback by the fact that my world perception was not formed as I thought by my experiences with real people – but by mechanical machines spitting out numerical answers to questions I had not yet asked.

I realize I see the world through number colored lens. I am not sure I like the effect.

This shouldn’t be bothering me – but it does. What about you?

Judy Shapiro

http://twitter.com/judyshapiro

Oggi ho dovuto reinstallare il PC dell’ufficio, e dopo quattro anni di onorata carriera ho messo in pensione Windows XP.
Naturalmente ho scelto di installare Windows 7, uscito recentemente. E la prima impressione è stata molto positiva.
Non è mia intenzione far pubblicità a mamma Microsoft, di certo non ne ha bisogno, ma stavolta sembrano aver fatto veramente un buon lavoro.
Pochi giorni fa lessi un articolo su Wired, dedicato a Ray Ozzie, nuovo Chief Software Architect di Redmond, dal quale emerge in modo chiaro la volontà innovatrice del nuovo “timoniere”.
La direzione è stata indicata in modo chiaro: dati, applicazioni e servizi, tutto su web.
Il futuro parla di cloud computing, di Windows Azure, di Office Web Apps, e di altre nuove applicazioni e servizi che hanno lo scopo dichiarato di battere il grande (e al momento unico) concorrente Google.
La guerra tra i due giganti si giocherà anche attorno ai rispettivi motori di ricerca, Google e Bing, e a come ciascuno dei due contendenti sarà capace di sfruttare le nuove tecnologie legate al semantic web.
Bisognerà studiarci e lavorarci, non tutto sarà chiaro e immediato, di certo gli stimoli sono tanti e importanti, una rivoluzione è alle porte.

How will we interact with a computer that truly understands us? This is the question behind this exploratory article.

Computer, open a geographical map, then overlay ebay auctions craiglist and twitter data, then filter information by keyword “cheap”+ “dog”

Computer, analyze the contents of my refrigerator then do a price comparison for each product missing based on sales within grocery stores within a 10 mile radius of the house, then give me the location of the store that will provide the greatest cost savings along with the list of items to buy. Oh, and computer can you also send the directions to the car navigation system? I plan to leave the house right now.

Computer, cross reference my wife’s friend’s activities and give me a general map of what she has been doing for the last week.

Computer auto generate a blog entry based on all my articles with the following tags: transhumanism Ai dystopia nwo.

————————————————————
Computer I want you to calculate all of my son’s time in virtual reality this week, then compare it to the amount of time using the computer to do research for his homework assignments. Print the information in a bar graph format, then send it directly to his mother. Send him a copy via digital neural mail, with the following holo recording.

Commence recording: What the fuck, John! I just saw that you posted 75% in analytic calculus yet you spend all your time dicking around in virtual realms. How are you ever going to get into a good middle school at this rate? I’m suspending your access to virtual reality.
End Holo recording.
—————————————————————

Computer, give me an average price performance chart for the following company: Novament, and compare it to the sales growth of world wide virtual agents.

Computer, give me my average sugar levels based on food consumption.

Computer, prep my brain for a neural dump.

Computer, replay the the last 5 minutes of neural activity and compare that to my normal activity. These thoughts I’m having don’t feel like my own.

This is a continuation of my post Syntactic and semantic thinkers, in which I mentioned Leone Burton’s book [1] but hadn’t read it yet.  Well, now it is due back at the library so I’d better post about it!

I recommend this book for anyone interested in knowing more about how mathematicians think about and learn math.  The book is based on in-depth interviews with seventy mathematicians.  (One in-depth interview is worth a thousand statistical studies.)   On page 53, she writes

At the outset of this study, I had two conjectures with respect to thinking style.  The first was that I would find the two different thinking styles,the visual and the analytic, well recorded in the literature… The second was that research mathematicians would move flexibly between the two.  Neither of these conjectures were confirmed.

What she discovered was three styles of mathematical thinking:

Style A: Visual (or thinking in pictures, often dynamic)

Style B: Analytic (or thinking symbolically, formalistically)

Style C: Conceptual (thinking in ideas, classifying)

Style B corresponds more or less with what was called “syntactic” in [3] (based on [2]).  Styles A and C are rather like the distinctions I made in [3] that I called “conceptual” and “visual”, although I really want Style A to communicate not only “visual” but “geometric”.

I recommend jumping through the book reading the quotes from the interviews.  You get a good picture of the three styles that way.

Visual vs. conceptual

I had thought about this distinction before and have had a hard time explaining what “conceptual” means, particularly since for me it has a visual component.  I mentioned this in [3].  I think about various structures and their relationship by imagining them as each in a different part of a visual field, with the connections as near as I can tell felt rather than seen.  I do not usually think in terms of the structures’ names (see [4]).  It is the position that helps me know what I am thinking about.

When it comes time to write up the work I am doing, I have to come up with names for things and find words to describe the relationships that I was feeling. (See remark (5) below).  Sometimes I have also written things down and come up with names, and if this happened very much I invariable get a clash of notation that didn’t bother me when I was thinking about the concepts because the notations referred to things in different places.

I would be curious if others do math this way.  Especially people better than I am.  (Clue to a reasonable research career:  Hang around people smarter than you.)

Remarks

1) I have written a lot about images and metaphors [5], [6].  They show up in the way I think about things sometimes.  For example, when I am chasing a diagram I am thinking of each successive arrow as doing something.  But I don’t have any sense that I depend a lot on metaphors.  What I depend on is my experience with thinking about the concept!

2) Some of the questions on Math Overflow are of the “how do I think about…” type (or “what is the motivation for…”).  Some of the answers have been Absolutely Entrancing.

3) Some of the respondents in [1] mentioned intuition, most of them saying that they thought of it as an important part of doing math.  I don’t think the book mentioned any correlation between these feelings and the Styles A, B, C, but then I didn’t read the book carefully.  I never read any book carefully. (My experience with Style B of the subtype Logic Rules diss intuition. But not analysts of the sort who estimate errors and so on.)

4) Concerning A, B, C:  I use Style C (conceptual) thinking mostly, but a good bit of Style (B) (analytic) as well.  I think geometrically when I do geometry problems, but my research has never tended in that direction.  Often the analytic part comes after most of the work has been done, when I have to turn the work into a genuine dry-bones proof.

5) As an example of how I have sometimes worked, I remember doing a paper about lifting group automorphisms (see [7]), in which I had a conceptual picture with a conceptual understanding of the calculations of doing one transformation after another which produced an exact sequence in cohomology.  When I wrote it up I thought it would be short.  But all the verifications made the paper much longer.  The paper was conceptually BigChunk BigChunk BigChunk BigChunk … but each BigChunk required a lot of Analytic work.  Even so, I missed a conceptual point (one of the groups involved was a stabilizer but I didn’t notice that.)

References

[1] Leone Burton, Mathematicians as Enquirers: Learning about Learning Mathematics.  Kluwer, 2004.

[2] Keith Weber, Keith Weber, How syntactic reasoners can develop understanding, evaluate conjectures, and generate counterexamples in advanced mathematics. Proof copy available from Science Direct.

[3] Post on this blog: Syntactic and semantic thinkers.

[4] Post: Thinking without words.

[5] Post: Proofs without dry bones.

[6] Abstractmath.org article on Images and Metaphors.

[7] Post: Automorphisms of group extensions updated.

1. let me Google that for you #humour http://lmgtfy.com/ We have all been there at one point.1:42 AM Jun 10th from Echofon
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5. Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform http://bit.ly/LBPSm9:16 AM Jun 10th from Echofon
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11. @wilw Huge congrats Wil.10:31 PM Jun 10th from Echofon in reply to wilw