Monday, January 31, 2011
Resolution Urges White House To Keep UN Away From Net - Tech Daily Dose
ICANN governs the internet. Would you like the UN to take over?
The Open Internet: A Case for Net Neutrality
A Guide to the Open Internet
Network neutrality is the idea that your cellular, cable, or phone internet connection should treat all websites and services the same. Big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to treat them differently so they can charge you more depending on what you use.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently debating legislation to define limits for internet service providers (ISPs). The hope is that they will keep the internet open and prevent companies from discriminating against different kinds of websites and services.
What is net neutrality?
Why should I care?
CLICK to find out.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Orlando Web Design (newbies welcome) (Orlando, FL) - Meetup
If You have an interest in web design, graphics design, this group is for you. This is a social group please do not join expecting to meet your next client. I would like to do some group projects where everybody benefits. If we do a website and it starts generating income, all the members that participated will share in the rewards or profits. If you have no design experience you are welcome to join. Perhaps we can get the group to build your site. or you may choose to work with somebody in the group. If any members want to be organizers or co organizers, it is possible for you to schedule a class and maybe teach new people for a fee. I want this to be a fun group (no sales pitches) I honestly believe we could brainstorm and do a project as a group. This is how myspace got started. We will have other meetups such as dinners etc. If you are studying design or just want to meet creative people come on out.
Let's check this out
Social media
Insightful look - overcoming first job jitters
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
WPBeginner - Beginner's Guide for WordPress
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million
Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million
Entrepreneurship: four guys, less than a year
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Mozilla Leads the Way on Do Not Track | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Mozilla Leads the Way on Do Not Track
Better privacy on the internet? What do you think?
Renewed Push to Give Obama an Internet "Kill Switch" - Tech Talk - CBS News
Renewed Push to Give Obama an Internet "Kill Switch
What do you think?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20029302-501465.html
Saturday, January 22, 2011
The twitter universe
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/28524827870494720
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Friday, January 21, 2011
SEO - Google -50 penalty
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/28340234919870464
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
YOUTOUR Orlando
UPDATE: The Orlando Sentinel article I read on the 19th was about a show that occured on the 18th
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Royal Pingdom » Does Internet Explorer have more than a billion users?
Does Internet Explorer have more than a billion users?
Posted in Main on April 16th, 2010 by Pingdom
How many users do the various web browsers really have? We often hear about market share percentages, but we rarely get to see any actual user numbers.
So let’s try to estimate how many people are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Not in market share percentages, but the actual number of people.
Estimating browser user numbers
We estimated browser user numbers by combining the number of worldwide internet users with web browser market share statistics. That should give us a decent estimate of the number of users of each web browser platform.
According to Internet World Stats, there are more than 1.8 billion internet users worldwide. This means that each percent market share is the equivalent of 18 million users. Imagine, even web browsers with less than one percent of the market have millions of users.
We used market share data from Net Applications, a widely quoted source for web browser market share. Their latest numbers are for March 2010.
After we have presented the results here below, we will examine if the numbers we came up with are reasonable. The short answer is yes, but we’ll explain why a bit further down so we can get right to the numbers first.
User numbers per browser
Combining the market share data with the internet user numbers, we get the following numbers for web browser usage. We have included both the market share percentage (next to each browser name) and the number of people using each browser.
A few observations
Provided these numbers are correct, or at least close to the truth, we can draw some pretty interesting conclusions. Here are a few that jumped out at us:
- Internet Explorer has more than 1 billion users. Since the arrival of Firefox in 2004, IE has gone from a market share of over 90% to little more than half of the market, but IE still rules the web by a huge margin.
- Google Chrome now has more than 100 million users. Reaching 100 million users is quite a milestone for such a new browser, even one backed by the almighty Google.
- With more than 400 million users, Firefox and Facebook have a similar-sized user base. Admittedly, that is comparing apples to oranges, but it’s interesting that Mozilla has built an open source platform of that size.
Users per browser version
If we break down the statistics into individual versions of the various web browsers we get some really nice data points. Keep in mind that the chart below doesn’t contain browser versions with less than 1% market share.
Chart note: Browsers or browser versions with less than 1% market share were not included.A few observations
Once again, provided these estimates are close to the real thing, we can draw some interesting conclusions:
- According to this estimate there are still more than 300 million people who use the dreaded IE 6. This is based on an 18% market share. There are other market share estimates that put that number close to 11% (StatCounter), but that would still be almost 200 million users. Not a small user group by any calculation.
- IE 8 alone has almost as many users as all Firefox versions combined.
- Even a browser with a 1-2% market share has a ton of users. Just look at the 32 million users for Opera 10.x.
Are these numbers reasonable?
The problem with this little study is that our methodology depends on two data sources that are by their very nature estimates. They will not be 100% correct, so our results won’t be 100% correct either.
With that in mind, it is only prudent that we test our results against some known numbers to see if they make sense and are reasonable. In other words, can we trust them?
Let’s compare our results to a few known data points:
Comparison 1: The latest version of Firefox
Firefox 3.6, released this January, has as of today been downloaded more than 376 million times according to Mozilla. Figuring out the number of users based on this is close to impossible, but it can at least tell us if our numbers are too big.
According to our estimate, Firefox 3.6 had 203 million users in March (the market share data is from March). In March, Firefox 3.6 had much fewer downloads than it does now, and we also have to take a bunch of other factors into consideration: users with more than one computer (home and work, for example), reinstalls, and so on.
What we can take away from this number is that an estimate that there are over 200 million Firefox 3.6 users doesn’t seem unreasonable. It may even be a bit smaller than the real number.
Comparison 2: Opera users
Just a few days ago, Opera announced that their regular browser has 50 million users. That is pretty close to the 43 million users our estimate gave us. In fact, it’s very close, especially considering we were working backwards from two estimates. It’s only off by 14%.
So the user numbers are actually HIGHER?
They could very well be. We need to keep in mind that the number of internet users is growing all the time, and the data we used is not completely up to date.
The 1.8-billion number from Internet World Stats (IWS) is according to their site from December 31, 2009, which is almost five months ago. The number of internet users is bound to be higher now.
Also keep in mind that IWS in turn relies on data from a number of other sources, such as governments, various organizations and companies, and those numbers may not be as up to date, for example lagging several months or more behind. If you’ve ever tried getting hold of official data for things such as internet penetration, you’ll know that this is highly likely. This would further skew the data to a lower number.
If we go backwards from Opera’s 50 million users and assume that their market share from Net Applications (2.37% to be exact) is correct, that would land the number of internet users worldwide on 2.1 billion. Which, who knows, could very well be very close to the actual number of internet users right now.
Regardless, we have established that our estimates are reasonable. They won’t be perfect, but they don’t seem to be widely off the mark, and may even be a bit on the modest side.
Conclusion
Web developers, whether they like to admit it or not, often focus most of their attention on their favorite browsers, usually Firefox and WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Chrome.
This study, however, shows how massively important it is for web developers to make sure that their sites work well in Internet Explorer. Seeing the enormous numbers that hide behind those market share percentages does put things in perspective. Even the dwindling IE 6 still has a huge user base (anywhere between 200 to more than 300 million users). Some services can probably get away from supporting IE 6 depending on what kind of audience they have, but at least make sure that IE 7 and up work, and work well.
It also shows that it pays to make sure that websites work in less common browsers like Opera. In spite of having a very small market share (“hey, it’s less than three percent!”), tens of millions of users hide behind that number. Do you want to pass that up? And why force those people to use another browser just for your site?
Royal Pingdom » The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000
The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000
Posted in Main on October 22nd, 2010 by Pingdom
It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.
Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.
We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.
Worldwide Internet users, 2000 and 2010
First off, the one thing you probably wanted to know right away. Here is how much the Internet has grown since the year 2000.
There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today.
The chart really says it all. There are more than five times as many Internet users now as there were in 2000. And as has been noted elsewhere, the number of Internet users in the world is now close to passing two billion and may do so before the end of this year.
The Internet hasn’t just become larger, it’s also become more spread out, more global.
- In 2000, the top 10 countries accounted for 73% of all Internet users.
- In 2010, that number has decreased to 60%.
This becomes evident when viewing the distribution of Internet users for the top 50 countries in 2000 and in 2010. Note how much “thicker” the tail of the 2010 graph is.
Thanks to this growth, there are now many more countries with a significant presence on the Internet. Here’s another way to see how much things have changed:
Countries with in 2000 in 2010 1+ million users 38 95 10+ million users 8 32 100+ million users 0 2 Internet users by world region, 2000 and 2010
Now that we’ve established that the number of Internet users is more than five times as large as it was in 2000, how has that growth been distributed through the different regions of the world?
Back in 2000, Asia, North America and Europe were almost on an even footing in terms of Internet users. Now in 2010, the picture is a very different one. Asia has pulled away as the single largest region, followed by Europe, then by North America, and a significant distance exists between the three.
It’s also highly notable how the number of Internet users in Africa has increased. In 2000, the entire continent of Africa had just 4.5 million Internet users. In 2010 that has grown to more than 100 million.
Top gainers in terms of Internet users
Region New Internet users since 2000 Relative growth Asia 710.8 million 622% Europe 370.0 million 352% Latin America / Caribbean 186.6 million 1033% North America 158.1 million 146% Africa 106.4 million 2357% Middle East 60.0 million 1825% Oceania / Australia 13.6 million 179% Top countries, 2000 and 2010
Let’s start with what the situation looked like ten years ago. Note how the United States had more than twice as many Internet users as any other country.
Top 10 countries on the Internet in 2000
# Country Internet users 2000 1 United States 95.1 million 2 Japan 47.1 million 3 Germany 24.0 million 4 China 22.5 million 5 South Korea 19.1 million 6 United Kingdom 15.4 million 7 Italy 13.2 million 8 Canada 12.7 million 9 France 8.5 million 10 Australia 6.6 million Now compare it with the situation today (we included the position in 2000 within parenthesis):
Top 10 countries on the Internet in 2010
# Country Internet users 2010 In 2000 1 (4) China 420.0 million 22.5 million 2 (1) United States 239.2 million 95.1 million 3 (2) Japan 99.1 million 47.1 million 4 (13) India 81.0 million 5.0 million 5 (14) Brazil 75.9 million 5.0 million 6 (3) Germany 65.1 million 24.0 million 7 (18) Russia 59.7 million 3.1 million 8 (6) United Kingdom 51.4 million 15.4 million 9 (9) France 44.6 million 8.5 million 10 (61) Nigeria 44.0 million 0.2 million Comparing the top 10 in 2010 with that of 2000, the countries have been shuffled around quite a lot, with China now firmly at the top.
New arrivals in the top 10 are India, Brazil, Russia and Nigeria. This of course means that some other countries have dropped out. South Korea is now at number 11, Italy at number 15, Canada at number 20, and Australia at number 27.
And look closely at the numbers for Nigeria. In 2000, the country had 200,000 Internet users. Contrast that with today’s 44 million. That’s quite a boost.
Although the United States has lost its position as the largest country on the Internet to China, it’s still one of the “big two.”
- The United States and China are currently the only two countries with more than 100 million Internet users.
- China has more Internet users in 2010 than the entire Internet did in 2000. The country has actually grown with more Internet users than the entire Internet had in 2000.
Top gainers (countries)
Since we’re looking at how things have changed between 2000 and 2010, we thought we’d include a section here showing which countries have grown the most on the Internet.
Top gainers in terms of Internet users
Country New Internet users since 2000 Relative growth China 397.5 million 1767% United States 144.1 million 152% India 76.0 million 1520% Brazil 70.9 million 1419% Russia 56.6 million 1826% Japan 52.1 million 111% Nigeria 43.8 million 21891% Germany 41.1 million 171% France 36.1 million 425% United Kingdom 36.0 million 234% There’s another interesting segment, countries that have managed to grow their numbers with tens of thousands of percent. These are countries that had a very weak Internet presence ten years ago, but have now managed to gain much wider access to the Internet. One of these countries, Nigeria, has even grown to the extent that it’s now the 10th largest country on the Internet.
Top gainers in terms of relative growth of Internet users
Country Relative growth since 2000 Growth in Internet users Afganistan 99900% From 1k to 1 million Congo, Dem. Rep. 72900% From 500 to 365k Uzbekistan 62420% From 7.5k to 4.7 million Somalia 52900% From 200 to 106k Albania 51900% From 2.5k to 1.3 million Congo 48940% From 500 to 245k Tajikistan 34900% From 2k to 700k Azerbaijan 30642% From 12k to 3.7 million Nigeria 21891% From 200k to 44.0 million Bosnia-Herzegovina 20486% From 7k to 1.4 million Although most of these countries are still relatively small on the Internet, you have to remember that some of them either don’t have huge populations, or are in less-than-ideal situations in terms of for example infrastructure. But there’s no doubt that developing countries are starting to catch up.
Conclusion
If anyone ever thought the Internet was something of a fad, those mouths have been permanently silenced during the past decade, and these numbers show why.
We also like how the Internet is becoming more widely distributed across the world. It’s no longer a club dominated by a few top countries.
And you have to admit that it’s interesting looking back and realizing how relatively small the Internet was back in 2000. The 361 million Internet users from back then seem a tiny amount compared to today’s (almost) 2 billion.
Royal Pingdom » The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts)
The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts)
Posted in Main on November 12th, 2010 by Pingdom
How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?
This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.
This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.
These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users.
Why connection speeds matter
Why would you be interested in knowing how Internet connection speeds are distributed among various countries? Here’s why:
- As an Internet user, you can get an idea of how your own Internet connection speed holds up against others in your country.
- As a Web service provider or website owner, you get an idea of what kind of Internet connection speeds your customers are likely to have in different countries. This is highly relevant if you want them to have a positive user experience. This naturally applies to web developers in general as well, who should be well aware of the capacity of people’s Internet connections.
Thanks to data directly from the world’s largest CDN provider, Akamai, we were able to create this report for you. Real connection speeds for Internet users from all over the world. The data is from the second quarter of 2010, so it’s up to date.
(Just in case you don’t know about them, Akamai is the big dog among content delivery network (CDN) providers. The company has servers all over the world and reportedly can handle as much as 15-20% of all Web traffic on any given day. This puts Akamai in a unique position since they can measure actual download speeds all over the world on a consistent basis.)
Average connection speeds
Before we go on to see how each country’s connection speeds are distributed, let’s look at the average connection speed for each country.
As we mentioned before, the number you see within parenthesis next to each country is its worldwide rank in terms of Internet users, i.e. its size on the Internet. The chart is sorted by the average connection speed.
Some observations:
- South Korea, as is well known, is something of an Internet speed king, and that’s made abundantly clear in this chart. At an average connection speed of almost 17 Mbit/s it thoroughly outclasses the competition.
- China, although the largest country on the Internet, still lags behind when it comes to Internet connection speeds. Its average of 0.86 Mbit/s is far below the world average of 1.8 Mbit/s (see below).
- And speaking of China, Hong Kong, technically a part of China but separated in most surveys for statistical purposes, is clearly far ahead of its mother country. With Hong Kong’s average connection speed of 8.6 Mbit/s, it’s second only to South Korea.
- It’s also interesting that all three top positions are in Asia.
- Of the top 10 in this “speed list,” three are from Asia, and seven from Europe.
- Canada beats the United States, barely, with 4.7 Mbit/s versus 4.6 Mbit/s.
Worldwide averages
The average connection speed for Internet users worldwide, not just among these 50 countries, but all countries, is an average of 1.8 Mbit/s. As an average, this is actually pretty good, but as you’ve seen, there are plenty of extremes in either direction.
And here’s how the various connection speeds are distributed. Once again, this is not among these 50 countries, this is for the world seen as a whole (from Akamai’s perspective).
It’s quite encouraging that as many as 22% of the connections are 5 Mbit/s or faster, and even more that more than half of all connections are 2 Mbit/s or faster.
Connection speed distribution
Now on to the prettiest of these charts… What you see here below is how the connection speeds of each country are distributed, just as in the worldwide chart. It’s great for giving you a good overview of the situation in each country, since an overall average can only tell you so much.
The country list is sorted by average connection speed.As this chart shows, the slowest connection types (less than 256 kbit/s) have almost been eradicated in many countries. However, in many developing nations these still make up a significant portion of the connections.
Real connection speeds are what matter
The speeds in this article are actual connection speeds. We’re not showing what people are paying for, we’re showing what kind of real-world speeds they are actually getting. After all, we all know that ISPs don’t always deliver the kind of connection speeds that they promise in their ads.
As we mentioned earlier, Akamai was kind enough to provide us with the connection speed data for this article, which made all the difference. (A big thank you to David Belson at Akamai for his help.)
So now that you have this report in front of you, why not take a close look at how fast the Internet is in your country? And how does your own connection measure up?
Data sources: Akamai for connection speeds, Internet World Stats for Internet user numbers.
We’ll be doing at least one more post based on the data we got from Akamai, so keep your eyes open.
Royal Pingdom » Internet 2010 in numbers
Internet 2010 in numbers
Posted in Main on January 12th, 2011 by Pingdom
What happened with the Internet in 2010?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.
We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.
Prepare for a good kind of information overload.
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
Websites
- 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
- 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.
Web servers
- 39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.
- 15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.
- 4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.
- 5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.
- 55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.
Domain names
- 88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
- 13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
- 8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
- 79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
- 202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
- 7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.
Internet users
- 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
- 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
- 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
- 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
- 266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
- 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
- 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
- 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
- 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
Social media
- 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
- 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
- 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
- 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
- 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
- 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
- 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
- 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
- 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
- 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.
Web browsers
Videos
- 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
- 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
- 84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
- 14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
- 2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
- 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.
Images
- 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
- 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
- 130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
- 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
- 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The Top 8 Web Development Highlights of 2010
The Top 8 Web Development Highlights of 2010
Web Designers need to about the "backend stuff"
Hotpot!
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/25014620263546880
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Interesting?
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/24886883473432576
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Your PC Hardware: From A to Z [Download or Read Online]
Your PC Hardware: From A to Z
Even the best software is useless without hardware, yet how many of us actually know how their computer works? Teach yourself by reading the latest free guide form MakeUseOf: “Your PC, Inside and Out.”
How WordPress Themes Actually Work [INFOGRAPHIC]
How WordPress Themes Actually Work [INFOGRAPHIC]
More than 10% of all web pages use Wordpress. Everbody uses themes and there are thousands of them. Time to look at how they work
Free fonts from google
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/google/status/24626266795679744
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Saturday, January 8, 2011
Html5 the good and?
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/planetoftheweb/status/23879419684720640
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Friday, January 7, 2011
****4 Predictions for Web Design in 2011****
4 Predictions for Web Design in 2011
http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/web-design-predictions/
This is a MUST READ for web designers
SEO AERT! YouTube - Google WebmasterHelp's Channel
Google Webmaster Central
This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors. Learn more at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-5...
Intro to Online Video: 6 Tips for Creating Engaging Video - ReachCast Blog, Plano, TX
Intro to Online Video: 6 Tips for Creating Engaging Video
Last updated 22 hours ago
Creating entertaining, interesting videos can be a great asset to your online marketing plan. Videos are a quick and easy way to reinforce your brand, increase organic discovery on search engines, and connect with consumers on social media. To start creating and sharing engaging videos, follow these simple tips.
Get real.
Online video is a great way to provide consumers with a realistic look into your business. Showcase your business’ personality, but being too goofy can turn consumers off and decrease your credibility. Before you film your video, write out a few key points that you want your viewers to take away from your video, and practice what you want to say before filming. But make sure to shy away from sales and marketing messages – you want your video to feel like a conversation, not a commercial.
Pick interesting topics.
Choose video topics that are entertaining or useful for your audience. Consumers enjoy seeing – and sharing – entertaining content such as an interesting story about a new product or an instructional video that demonstrates your expertise. For instance, if you own a gardening center in Houston, you could create a short video about how to plant roses in Texas with step-by-step instructions. Another approach is to create videos that answer common customer service questions, like this one from Evernote. If you find the content interesting or helpful, chances are, your target audience will too. And remember, the more interesting your topics, the more people will want to follow you and share your videos.
Keep your videos short.
The rule of thumb for online videos is to keep them around two minutes or less. If you have a lot of information or footage to share, break it up into a series of shorter videos. Anything much longer risks losing your audience’s attention. Plus, creating a video series entices people to keep checking back for the latest “episode.” What’s more, videos contribute to a dynamic Web Presence, giving consumers more content to discover when they search for your business name, products, or services.
Make them look stellar.
To create videos with the best quality, you can use an inexpensive HD video recorder, like the Flip video cam, and take the time to edit your videos with professional software. And if you don’t want to worry about filming, editing, and uploading your videos, we suggest hiring a professional to create one for you. A quick way to dress your videos up – and give a boost to your organic traffic – is by adding five seconds of branding at the beginning and end of your video. Include a screen that displays your business name or logo and a URL to your website or blog, so consumers know where to go to learn more about you.
Optimize for organic search.
If you don’t already have one, create your own YouTube channel and post your videos there. Since YouTube videos often receive prominent placement on Google, they can really improve your organic search results and drive more traffic to your business. When you upload a new video to YouTube, create a title based on the keywords you want it to show up for when someone conducts a search, such as “The Easy Way to Plant Roses in Texas.” Add a thorough description and 10-15 keyword tags about your content and your business, including your business name, to maximize your organic discovery.
Share your videos everywhere.
Now that your video is uploaded to YouTube, how do you get more people to see it? You can post it to other video sites, like Metacafe, Blip.tv, or Yahoo! Video. Also share your video on social sites like Facebook®, Twitter®, and LinkedIn®, where your fans and followers can view, comment, like, and share it. Don’t forget to add your videos to your website, blog, and Cast page, as videos have been shown to increase consumer action and conversion, like contacts or direct visits to a business.
Learn More
To help you create and market your online videos, ReachLocal offers TotalVideoNow, a turnkey video production service, and ReachCast, a Web Presence Optimization service that puts more of your content in more places to get more customers. To learn more about these solutions, contact your ReachLocal representative.
Tamara Farley helps equip small business owners with information about local online advertising, social media marketing, and more as a blogger for ReachCast and ReachLocal.
How much do I charge for Web work?
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2010 Mashable Awards Winners
Mashable Awards 2010: Announcing The Winners
http://mashable.com/2011/01/07/mashable-awards-2010-announcing-the-winners/#
2010 Mashable Awards Winners
With more than 1.3 million nominations and votes, we’re pleased to announce the 2010 Mashable Awards winners.
The Mashable Awards, our annual contest highlighting the very best of tech and the web, received a record number of votes this year. After entering the final round, we narrowed the list to the top five nominees in each category based on your votes. The winners received the most votes from readers like you, and we want to thank each of you for participating.
The winners were announced Thursday at the Mashable Awards Gala, which was hosted by comedian Baratunde Thurston, The Onion’s director of digital, at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity theater at the New York New York Hotel. The gala featured a special Cirque du Soleil Zumanity performance, appearances from guests like Antoine Dodson, as well as the DJ/VJ stylings of remix masters Eclectic Method. Stay tuned for more highlights from the Mashable Awards show, but in the meantime we’d love for you to join us in celebrating this year’s winners.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Best Social Media Management Tool: HootSuite (
)
HootSuite is an advanced social networking dashboard aimed mainly at professionals who need to leverage sites such as Twitter and Facebook for their business needs. HootSuite relies on a freemium business model. Its free version allows you to add five networks and supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (
, Foursquare, MySpace ()
, PingFm and WordPress ()
.HootSuite is best for actively managed accounts because its design focuses on streams, which are housed in customizable tabs. You have the flexibility to organize tabs by account, network or content, making it easier to monitor a specific type of feed more closely.
Most Creative Social Media Campaign: Stand Up For WWE
In an effort to “set the records straight” about inaccurate media portrayals, World Wrestling Entertainment launched the Stand Up For WWE campaign, using social media and video to gather support from its fans. It also posted a list lesser known facts about WWE and inaccuracies and corrections to media portrayals from across the web with facts accompanying the claims. The campaign included videos with its superstars as well as the likes of President Barack Obama.
Best Social Media Customer Service sponsored by BlackBerry (
)
: Eurail.comEurail.com is an e-commerce site for Eurail train passes for travelers from all around the world. Eurail offers rail passes to non-European residents wanting to explore Europe.
Its social media presence is focused on customer service and the company regularly updates and replies to its customers on its Twitter (
account, Facebook Page and more.Best Internet Meme sponsored by Dynadot: Bed Intruder
The “Bed Intruder Song” from Auto-Tune the News (
was the most-watched, non-major label video on YouTube ()
this year with 47.5 million views. The auto-tuned parody of a news cast featuring Antoine Dodson inspired hundreds of others to create their own videos as a tribute. The song even hit the Billboard Hot 100 across every single genre.Best Music Discovery Service: Fizy
Fizy is an international music site based out of Turkey that was designed with the goal of being simple and easy to use. It’s simple. It enables you to listen to music track-by-track, create playlists and play songs from your homescreen that you may have never heard of. Just a simple search and it plays the tracks you’re looking for. If the track has a video available, it will show you that as well. It has a database of more than 75 million mp3s. The site supports 26 languages.
Best Use of an API: Qwitter Client
Qwitter uses Twitter’s API to notify you when any of your Twitter followers stop following you. Simply give the system your Twitter name, an e-mail address to contact you, and you’ll receive a summary e-mail at least once a day telling you the users who have stopped following you. It’s that simple, and yet highly useful.
Must-Follow Personality: Super Junior
Super Junior is a Korean pop boy band with 13 members and a strong presence on social sites like Facebook (
. The band, which was formed in 2007, attracts millions of views on YouTube.Best Social Media Service for Small Business: ReachCast
ReachCast is a social media and web presence management tool for small businesses that specializes in search discovery, social media marketing and conversation and reputation management through a distributed presence and custom tools to reach local consumers.
Currently in beta, the service offers content publishing, reports, tracking and social media integration.
Entrepreneur of the Year: Doug Walker
Doug Walker is one of the creators behind That Guy With the Glasses website, which showcases content for movie buffs and video gamers.
The site was launched in 2008 and is home to episodic series including Walker and other contributors. Walker is best known for his series 5 Second Movies, The Nostalgia Critic and Ask That Guy with the Glasses. Before the website, Walker was a video personality on YouTube, where he created satirical video reviews of movies.
Best New Gadget: iPad
It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a year since Apple launched the iPad, a device that has turned the tablet form factor into a must-have. Apple is expected to sell 13.3 million iPads this year, up from… well, up from zero iPads in 2009. It’s not just the fact that Apple single handedly created a new multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, but that it’s redefining all of computing. Notebook sales have dropped since the iPad’s introduction. Apple accelerated the rise of HTML5 with its tablet device at the expense of Flash. Its influence is already affecting countless web apps. Oh, and it’s redefining the meaning of “mobile.”
Most Promising New Company: PSGive.org
PSGive.org is a site focused on increasing awareness and funding of non-profits by enabling users to participate in online events. Users buy tokens to participate in events that give you a chance to win cool prizes, like the iPad, while benefiting a charity of your choice. In some ways it is like an online charity auction.
Must-Follow Non-Profit: @TWLOHA
To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a non-profit focused on advocating for hope and help for people struggling with depression, self-injury, addiction and suicide. It leverages various social sites to inform, inspire and invest in treatment and recovery for people who need help. Since 2006, the organization has responded to more than 150,000 messages from people in 40 different countries and has worked to spread the message of hope to universities, concerts, festivals and churches.
Best Location-Based Service: Foursquare (
)
Foursquare, the mobile location-based service, had a year of tremendous growth that paved the way for other location-based services, including Facebook Places. The service recently surpassed 5 million users, increasing its user base by a factor of 10 in just nine months. At SXSW 2010, the company announced it had more than half a million users. It also recently opened an office in the bay area.
Best Online Game: “Farmerama”
Farmerama is a free online game similar to FarmVille that focuses on tasks around tending a virtual farm by completing farming jobs like tilling the land, planting trees, sowing seeds, raising animals and more. The game has more than 20 million registered users. It also enables you to invite your friends to help you with growing your farm. You also compete against other farmers online and can barter and trade with them as well. The challenges largely revolve around the goal of raising the most cattle. The game of course includes plenty of social activities that enables you to communicate and converse with other players online.
Best Website User Experience: Gaia Online
Gaia Online is an anime-themed social networking site. Founded in 2003, the social and forums-based site originally began as an anime community and moved toward social gaming and forums with some 1 million posts made daily with 23 million registered users. The site includes virtual currency known as Gaia Gold, which is distributed regularly to users as a reward for activity and participation, and Gaia Cash, which can be purchased with real money and is used to buy virtual gifts. The site includes various mini games, which can be played to earn gold and virtual items. The site also includes virtual worlds, such as Gaia Towns in which users can interact with one another’s avatars.
Breakthrough Website Design: Twitter
Twitter rolled out a new version of its web interface in September. The new Twitter homepage redesign was robust, transforming the site to be more like a stand-alone application, offering support for multimedia, keyboard shortcuts, and easy access to various types of content. The new design also has different dimensions (originally based on the golden ratio).
Best Web Video: Jay Park
Jay Park is a Korean-American actor, singer and dancer who has leveraged video to entertain his fans. The American-born personality initially became famous after getting the lead role for Korean pop boy band 2PM. At the end of 2009, he left the band to focus on a solo career in the U.S. In 2010, he posted a cover of B.o.B.’s “Nothin’ On You” on YouTube, which received 1.5 million views in the first 24 hours. It prompted Warner Music Korea to release the track, which went to number one on Korean music charts.
Must-Follow Brand: AllKPop
AllKPop is one of the top destinations for the latest Korean pop culture news and gossip. Launched in 2007, the site has leveraged social media to reach more than 3 million monthly readers and is the most trafficked English language Korean pop blog in the world.
Best Mobile Device: iPhone (
)
This year, Apple released its latest version of the iPhone, selling 1.5 million on the first day. Despite a reception issue that angered its users and poor reviews, Apple still sold millions of iPhone 4 devices and even quickly sold out internationally in countries like China.
Best Mobile Game: “Angry Birds” (
)
Angry Birds is a simple yet very addicting mobile game that has received more than 50 million downloads with 80% of users keeping the mobile app installed on their devices. According to Peter Verterbacka from Rovio, the makers of the game, there are 200 million minutes a day spent playing the game. The game is also making its way to the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Best Mobile App sponsored by Mobile Future: DriveSafe.ly
and radio transmitter compatibility, easy activity, hands free use, reading shorthand in messages and an optional customizable automatic responder.
DriveSafe.ly is a mobile application that reads text and e-mail messages aloud in real-time and responds to the messages automatically without the driver having to touch or look at the phone. It helps you, well, drive safely. The application, available for BlackBerry and Android devices, will soon be coming to the iPhone and Windows Mobile. According to its website, it has prevented more than 380 million texting-while-driving incidents. The app features include Bluetooth (
Best Mobile Platform: Android (
)
Android is Google’s (
mobile operating system, which it bought in 2005. This year, however, the operating system became the top-selling smartphone OS. Android-powered devices also outsold the iPhone this year and the future looks even better as Android grows in popularity among users and app developers.Best Mobile User Experience: eBuddy (
)
, MSN, Facebook, etc. to chat on one aggregate interface from their mobile device. Its mobile messenger is available through mobile web browsers or through iPhone and Android apps.
eBuddy is a mobile and web messaging company that created the first independent browser-based IM service with e-Messenger in 2003. Its technology enables users who use various chats like AOL, Google Talk (
Most Creative Social Good Campaign: Twitchange
Twitchange is an innovative charity auction that enables you to bid on the famous for a chance to have them Twit-talk to you. It bills itself as the “first-ever celebrity Twitter auction,” and offers up a hefty list of celebrities, from Simon Pegg to Pete Wentz. Users donate money for the chance to have these celebrities follow you, retweet you or mention you in a tweet and all the money raised goes to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will then be able to finish rebuilding the Miriam Center, a home for children with cerebral palsy, severe autism and other disabilities.
Most Influential Social Good Champion sponsored by Yahoo! (
)
: John CenaJohn Cena is a WWE personality and actor who leverages his social media presence and influence for good. He’s been heavily involved with the Make-A-Wish Foundation since 2004, granting the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. He’s earned the foundation’s highest honor, the Chris Greicius Award and was later named Wish Ambassador by the organization. He uses his online presence to encourage his fans to take part in the foundation’s mission to grant wishes, and most recently he is encouraging the donation of Delta frequent flyer miles, which he’s already contributed 3 million matching miles for.
Thanks to Our Sponsors
Mashable Awards Gala Partner:
From a group of 20 street performers at its beginnings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil is now a global entertainment organization providing high-quality artistic entertainment. The company has over 5,000 employees, including more than 1,200 artists from close to 50 different countries.
Cirque du Soleil has brought wonder and delight to nearly 100 million spectators in 300 cities on five continents. In 2010 Cirque du Soleil, will present 21 shows simultaneously throughout the world, including seven in Las Vegas.
For more information about Cirque du Soleil, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com.
Mashable Awards Online Partner:
Have you ever wished for your own personal gourmet Chef?
The Fresh Diet is like having a Cordon Bleu chef prepare your meals in your own kitchen. There’s no cooking, cleaning, shopping – just fresh prepared delicious meals, hand delivered to your door daily! Whether you want to lose weight or just want to eat healthy, The Fresh Diet can help you meet your goals. The best news, we’re giving away a FREE week of The Fresh Diet every day on our Facebook page. Just click here to become a fan and you could be the next winner. Join now!
Mashable Awards Gala Premier Partner:
Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn, Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With about 163,000 employees and about 70 plants worldwide, the company’s automotive brands includeFord, Lincoln and Mercury, production of which has been announced by the company to be ending in the fourth quarter of 2010. The company provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. For more information regarding Ford, please visit iPad
