Posts tagged Better
Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by … – PR.com (press release)
Feb 3rd
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Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by …
PR.com (press release) With the assistance of Prospect Genius's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, Metro Computer Networks is more visible and accessible for clients who search online for anything from computer repairs to IT consultants. Jason Alford, owner of Metro … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Looking for a Better HootSuite? Try Gremln.
Feb 2nd
If you aren’t happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.
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Like Hootsuite, you can schedule your tweets in advance and the free service allows you to access five different social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can schedule up to five messages per hour for the free service. There are numerous charts and graphs to show you various statistics, such as the number of LinkedIn posts per day as you can see below:
Gremln has lots more to it than just stats, though. It works with Brev.is or Bit.ly to shorten and track your URLs in your Tweets, you can add RSS feeds to your dashboard, and it even has a UI that looks a lot like Hootsuite, if you don’t want to leave that behind.
There are various paid plans that start at $6 a month and expand the number of Tweets per hour scheduled, the number of saved report templates, and that add the ability to include Web analytics so you can track the results of your social networking campaigns to see if they actually resulted in increased Web traffic. And there are ways for work teams to share and jointly manage their accounts, something that Hootsuite isn’t good at. If you are obsessive about your Klout score, you can link to your account and watch it ebb and flow as the company tweaks its algorithms too.
You can sign up here on the Gremln site and try it out.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by … – openPR (press release)
Feb 1st
 openPR (press release) |
Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by …
openPR (press release) With the assistance of Prospect Genius's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, Metro Computer Networks is more visible and accessible for clients who search online for anything from computer repairs to IT consultants. Jason Alford, owner of Metro … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
How to Take Better Food Porn Photos
Jan 31st
Admit it. You’re an amateur food porn photographer. But don’t worry, you’re certainly not alone.
Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don’t communicate that sentiment.
“You need a light source from the side,” says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photograph. “You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can’t do with a single light source.”
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Amateur food photographs exist in part because of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. People sync up their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their smartphones, shoot a photo and feel compelled to share it with their friends. Crappy lighting usually accounts for the horrible photo.
“You’re in a dark restaurant, you have to use a single frontal flash, it looks like shit,” Hamilton says. “Not even a portrait looks good when you’re taking a photo of friends.”
To prove that it is possible to take better food photos from a smartphone, Hamilton goes out to restaurants every week and shoots food photos with his iPhone. Then goes back to his studio and touches them up. He documents the entire project on his blog, The Restaurant Project. Here’s a short video he produced with tips for taking better food photos. Some of the ideas: Avoid incandescent light. Blow out the background. Use simple light and propping.
“The majority of people who are posting photos to Facebook and Twitter are doing it for the pure pleasure of it. They’re not getting business out of it,” says Hamilton. “Whether it’s going to a restaurant like NEXT or going to McDonald’s, they’re still Facebook-ing about it.”
Instagram Filters Won’t Help You Make The Photo Less Food Porn-y
Jon and Curt decided to take this food porn idea too far, creating a horrible Tumblr blog full of all the bad photo photographs you’ve ever dreamed of. A photo I shot has been added to this Internet hall of shame. Here it is.
It’s gorgeous, right? That’s what I thought. So, I tweeted it to Jon and Curt, looking for some sort of approval. “I would argue that this is not food porn,” I said, proudly. I could single-handedly beat food porn.
Curt replied with a typical, quotable Curt line: “GOOD GOD!” “It is to food porn as amateur porn is to porn – even worse.”
Shocked, I tried a few other similarly desperate tweets. Then at last, I admitted defeat: “@curthopkins @jonmwords Nooooo! I’ve cornered myself into an art food porn-ified corner of hellish green triangles.”
Then Jon added my photo to the Tumblr food porn hall of shame.
Why did this photo become food porn? The rest of this conversation occurred on Facebook with ReadWriteWeb’s Editor-in-Chief, Richard MacManus after I commented on his horrific photo of bean slop.
I think we can all agree that those beans look disgusting. But Richard admitted to purposely making the food look more horrific, for Jon’s benefit.
After I asked him, he honestly explained to me why my green cake looked gross.
“It was very artistic, I’ll give it that 
I think the green is what creates the opposite effect…” he FB commented to me. “Well, artistically the photo definitely works – the triangle shaped table, the brown / green colors, etc. In terms of whether the photo makes the cake look more edible, honestly the Instagram filter makes the green look a little sickly (color wise) and it also somehow heightens the sugariness of the cake (it’s shiny and kind of glistens,” he said.
I appreciated his honesty. Interestingly, in this case, it was my seemingly awesome use of an Instagram filter, which I thought might save this from amateur food pornification. Instead, it was the very thing that actually sent my photo straight to amateur food pornland.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Maps vs. Do-It-Yourself: Which Is Better for Business?
Jan 27th
As mobile becomes normal for the Web, location becomes key. The next phase of location apps are live, right there with the user as she goes about her business. When it comes to mapping the outside world, the space is pretty crowded. It’s hard to argue with Google Maps, whose free consumer service powers the maps on both dominant smartphone platforms. For businesses, it’s crucial to be on the map, and Google Places can’t be overlooked.
But there’s another frontier of mobile mapping that matters, and the exploration has just begun. Indoor mapping of big buildings – like airports, convention centers, museums and stores – is the El Dorado of mobile location. Google has begun its expedition inside buildings, and businesses can sign up and offer their floor plans. But there’s another option: Use a platform like Meridian and build your own inside map. Which is better for business?
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Google Maps: Just Hand ‘Em The Plans
Google launched interior maps in November. It’s currently only available on Google Maps for Android. When it launched, it came with a bunch of partners, and it offered any business owner the ability to submit a floor plan for inclusion. After that, the business owner doesn’t have to do a thing except submit updated plans if things change. Google handles the rest.
Business owners have enough to think about, so letting a service provider handle all this mapping stuff could be a convenient choice. Google has a vested interest in presenting the most attractive local business listings it can. But are they always the most accurate? In October, Google decided to take responsibility for updating business listings into its own hands, asking owners about changes only after the fact.
If you need fine-grained control over how your business appears online, you might want a more custom solution.
Meridian: Roll Your Own Map
When a location releases an app built with Meridian, it’s a grand affair. It announces partners one at a time, such as the launch of the Oregon Convention Center app yesterday. Unlike Google, Meridian is in start-up mode, but it raised $1 million last year on the premise that the best location-based business apps are built by the businesses themselves.
Meridian has offered consumers interior mapping longer than Google has, but only for a few participating locations. That’s not a shortcoming, though; Meridian is a platform. For consumers, it’s an app that lets them navigate inside favorite museums, stadiums and stores (currently mostly in Meridian’s hometown of Portland, Ore.). But for businesses, it’s a way to build and control a 3D interior map of their own location and offer a custom-branded app for it.
It has its own Web-based editing tools, so owners can move around contents of the map like store displays or museum exhibits. You can include audio tours or featured products that display prominently for the user. It will even push pertinent information to the customer’s device.
How Should Businesses Handle Maps?
If you own or work for a business with a building you want mapped for smartphones, think about priorities. Is it better for you to ship off location data to a service provider who will handle it for you, or would you rather have constant control over the experience? Do you just need to be on the map, or would you like to build the app?
Whichever option makes the most sense for you, it’s exciting to have such choices. The power of the mobile Web to enhance the world for users and raise the profile of local businesses is only just starting to kick in.
Which location-based services do you use, whether for work or for fun?
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SEO NEWS: When 2 Isn’t Better Than 1 – SubmitEdge SEO News
Jan 24th
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SEO NEWS: When 2 Isn't Better Than 1
SubmitEdge SEO News A debate has been raging on between SEOs, SMMs and almost everyone else in the online world as to whether or not two SMM teams are better than one, returning actual benefits to clients. Since it works in some areas, why not this one? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Pinterest Works Better Than Google+
Jan 20th
Let’s be grown up about this. Pinterest is an app for sharing lists of scrumptious-looking stuff. It’s not for girls or guys, it’s for people who like looking at things. The story I’ve heard is that it was designed for architects and designers and “then brides found it.” This is why, my sources explain, it tends toward the jewelry-and-table-settings end of the spectrum.
But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you’re following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google’s efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it’s better for users.
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Pinterest has been around for a while, but lately it has caught on intensely. The statistics suggest that lots of women use it, but lots of non-women and businesses also use it. It’s inspiring blatant imitators, and Alexia Tsotsis even thinks that Google wants to buy it. Why all this interest all of a sudden? Pinterest is visually driven, which makes it easy and pleasurable to use, but I think its mechanics as a social network are more interesting than that.
Facebook’s Smart Lists and Google+ Circles have popularized the idea that we need the ability to share different things with different audiences. That lets us have fun with some people and be boring with others without having to maintain two profiles. But neither of those networks offer much control for the person on the receiving end.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is a bit of a magic soup. You can tell it you want more or fewer updates from certain things in certain situations, but for the most part, if they’re sharing it with you, you’re going to get it. Google+ lets you turn down the volume on your circles, so you can adjust the noisiness of groups you’re following, but the people in those circles are just sharing wherever they share. The recipient has to do her or his best to keep all the senders organized.
Pinterest Is the Reverse of Circles
But Pinterest nails the mechanics of this. On Pinterest, users create “boards” for different things they want to share. When you follow a person on Pinterest, you follow all their boards. You can also follow individual boards. If someone you like has a board for “desserts,” which you like, and a board for “spaceships,” which you love, but they also post to their “cute puppies” board all day long (and you hate puppies), the solution is simple: You unfollow “cute puppies,” and everything else remains.
Both the pinner and the follower only have to think about their own tastes. They don’t have to guess what other people are like. People are more likely to enjoy themselves that way. Because hey, if Pinterest teaches us anything, it’s that we have impeccable taste.
Do you use Pinterest? Do you need an invite? Let’s get some invite gifting going in the comments.
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Smart Hoteliers Embrace Google+ For Better SEO – Hospitality Net
Jan 18th
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Smart Hoteliers Embrace Google+ For Better SEO
Hospitality Net Starting now smart hoteliers need to begin embracing Google+ as a major component of their Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Those who move quickly will have a significant competitive advantage over the laggards. Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz provides a short … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Virsto Has Better Storage Virtualization for VMware, HyperV
Jan 16th
Back last summer, Virsto announced the beta support of vSphere for what it is now calling its storage hypervisor. That has now been released, along with a second version of its HyperV product. Both Virsto products automatically thin provision your storage repositories, and also make your storage vastly scalable and easier to replicate, backup and clone.
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This is no small accomplishment, and can have big implications. One of their customers has saved a million dollars per year using their software. That is because virtual storage pools often waste a lot of the room in the process. What is impressive about both products is how carefully the Virsto engineers have adopted the native management frameworks: The vSphere version integrates into the vCenter management console and comes with rapid provisioning wizards to make setup easier. And the HyperV version integrates into the Microsoft Management Console interface. V2 for HyperV has an updated user interface, supports storage tiers, and has a utility that makes it easier to recover a snapshot of the entire Virsto environment for disaster recovery purposes. It also includes better integration with Veeam’s VDI product line.
Both make it easier to clone VMs, taking minutes rather than hour with competing products. Above is a screencapture showing the VDI deployment utility. In tests using IOmeter, Virsto’s storage delivered nearly a 10x performance improvement in terms of I/O response time. Pricing starts at $2800 per host.
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People Using Pseudonyms Leave Better Blog Comments [STUDY]
Jan 16th
Posted by admin in Uncategorized
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In addition to leaving more comments, people using pseudonyms are more likely to leave comments that get “likes” from other readers, according to Disqus, which operates blog commenting platforms for about one million Web sites, including ReadWriteWeb.
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Not only does the data throw the conventional web wisdom that people who use their real names leave better comment into question, it also gives Disqus and other comment platforms leverage to compete with Facebook, which has made inroads into the commenting space by allowing sites to let people leaving comments use their Facebook identities.
Disqus is one of the more than 400,000 Web sites that lets people use their Facebook profiles to leave comments. But Disqus said just 4% of its users preferred to use Facebook to leave comments with their real name, compared to 61% who used pseudonyms and 35% who logged in anonymously.
Of course Disqus has a vested interest in convincing publishers to allow anonymous comments and remarks left under a pseudonym.
But the company is maintaining that, based on its review of 500,000 comments left using its system, 61% of the comments left by those types of users gained positive reviews from other readers, as opposed to 51% for comments left by people using their identity and 34% for people who remained anonymous.
Discuss
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