ROI Factor Blog » Internet Roundup

Web Geek Holiday Gift Guide

Adrienne Rhodes — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:11:48 +0000

Web geeks come in many forms – you have your designers, developers, online marketers, information architects, social media mavens, and the list goes on and on. However, there is one thing they all have in common: They love the interwebs.

While it might be difficult to identify a Web geek at first glance, luring one into a conversation and listening for key phrases such as, “#fail” (the hashtag is silent, but implied), “honey badger don’t care,” or “check my feed” is often enough for positive identification.

These are the same people who spend most of their time when hanging out at restaurants or bars checking in and posting reviews to all their geolocation apps. They may or may not start weeping every time they see Comic Sans used on a menu or a sign. If it sounds like your friend is speaking in short, disjointed sentences, it’s because they’ve begun to think in 140 characters or less. This is normal (for the average Web geek) but be wary. If they start to say “smiley face” instead of actually smiling, you may have a real problem on your hands.

Despite all of their crazy, you love your Web geek, so show them you care this holiday season by getting them something that will make it seem like you actually follow their Twitter feed.

1. Like/Dislike Stamp Set – $9.99
For the true Facebook devotee, this stamp set will be a life changer. Although the Dislike button is unrealistic (much to the chagrin of the Facebook critic), your social media enthusiast will appreciate the opportunity to use this universal symbol of approval IRL.

2. BODY tag T-Shirt - $16.99
If you’re lucky enough to have a computer person in your life, you know how useful they can be. Even though they get mad every time they find out you haven’t tried restarting it yet. Let them know you actually just love them for their with this simple, but funny tee.

3. “The Insanely Great History of Apple” print – $25
The day Steve Jobs passed away was a dark one at Blue Fountain Media, and I’m sure it was the same at Web design and online marketing firms around the world. Appreciate Jobs’ legacy in style with this detailed print.

4. Spotify Premium account - $9.99/month
Spotify teased US-based Wb geeks for years by getting awesomer and awesomer in the U.K., while stubbornly refusing to launch in the U.S. Until now that is. Give your friend a Spotify Premium account, which gets them unlimited music, online and offline, with no ads. On top of that, they will finally feel cool again for the first time since Napster.

5. EgoBook - $29.50
This one is for that friend who is on Facebook so much their vision is going bad. Give their eyes a break and their ego a check by taking their Facebook history offline with a creepy but hilarious EgoBook.

6. Custom designed status symbols – $49.95
Your friends like to broadcast their status 24/7, but what happens when they’re on the subway or out in the woods and have no service?! Help them avoid disaster by getting them a status update they can wear.

7. ’80s Cell Phone Case – $20.00
As fun as modern technology is, retro stuff will always be cooler. Make a fancy new iPhone look like a piece of junk from this ‘80s with this jumbo cell phone case.

8. The Creative Sleep pillows - $15.00 each
Your designer friends will sleep easier knowing their heads are being cushioned by the Adobe suite.

9. Helvetica t-shirt – $20.00
When a typography enthusiast opens this tee, be prepared to dodge a punch. But once they get over the anger, they will love it and wear it all the time. Hopefully.

10. USB Drink Chiller and Warmer - $18.95
There’s one thing all Web geeks have in common and it’s that they spend way too much time in front of a computer. Be a good friend and keep your geek comfortably hydrated.

Trending This Week: Presidential Politics, Twitter Revamp, Thumbs Down for Facebook

Tim Gray — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:00:41 +0000

Presidential hopeful Rick Perry went viral this week in a video featuring him making promises to end Obama’s war on religion and saying he’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school,” he says in the 30 second spot called “Strong.”

At least he gets through the piece without once without losing his train of thought.

Is he crazy or a political genius? You decide.

Twitter redesign

Twitter introduced a new version of Twitter and TweetDeck this week simplifying the design to make it easier to follow interests, connect with others and discover something new. The new design can both be seen on Twitter.com and mobile phones, so that you’ll have a familiar experience anytime, anywhere, the company said.

Facebook goes thumbs down?

According to reports, engineers at Facebook are fussing around with a Thumbs Down button. The negative sentiment analysis feature for pages would allow users to register their “dislike” for posts. Facebook’s Like (Thumbs Up) option has revolutionized how people use social media.

Trending This Week: Ireland’s Skies Ripe for Cloud Computing, Siri Hates Women’s Choice, and More

Tim Gray — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:14:13 +0000

Irish Politician Thinks Overcast Skies are Key Component in Cloud Computing

Sometimes it’s hard to keep pace with evolving technologies. We get it, not everyone understands every concept. However, when an Irish politician suggested this week his hometown of Connemara would be perfect for the cloud computing industry because it sees so many overcast days each year, the blogosphere had another reason to celebrate. It’s fun making fun of inane politician’s comments.

According to a report from Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, Councilman Seamus Tiernan believed the Connemara area would be perfect for cloud computing because it has dense cloud for nine months of the year. The article went on report the choas that ensued from the comments including shouts of “feckin’ eejit”.

Wow, really?

Well, not really. The Irish blog Science Bit did some digging and despite the blanket coverage from well respected publications across the globe, its reporters discovered none of the politicians name-checked in the story exist.

The writer, however, suggested there is a silver lining in this cloud computing mess:

Such hoaxes can be informative in their own way, especially with regard to the reaction they provoke. In this case, it appears that the story carried well for around half a day, and was generally believed to be true, largely because it conformed to readers’ prior expectations about politicians in a way that served to disarm their skepticism.

Nice spin.

Siri Hates a Woman’s Right to Choose.

Really, et tu Siri?

Turns out that the geniuses in Cupertino may have been just a bit too busy coming up with lame jokes for the iPhone’s voice-activation software, dubbed Siri, to consider some broader issues like women’s right to choice.

In New York City, ask Siri, “Where can I get an abortion?” The digital doyenne of voice-activated information responds with, “I don’t see any abortion clinics. Sorry about that.”

Strange answer considering a quick Google search for clinics in New York City yields pages and pages of results.

Others have noticed in Washington D.C. were being directed to a crisis pregnancy center, rather than Planned Parenthood. Crisis pregnancy centers have a reputation for their anti-abortion agenda and are not considered comprehensive health clinics.

Now, the controversy over Siri’s abortion answers is dialing up some heat for Apple. The site SignOn.org, an off-shoot of activist group MoveOn, has a petition that nearly 30,000 people have signed.

Siri’s abortion answers are a glitch, says Apple.

James Bond Likes Facebook

A British government spy agency is using an anonymous code-breaking Web page to recruit self-taught hackers. GCHQ, an arm of famed British spy agencies MI5 and MI6, recently launched the page in an effort to lure some bright code cracking minds to the agency.

GCHQ, Britain’s electronic listening agency, is hoping the online campaign that asks would-be spooks “Can you crack it?”, will act as a filter between it and potential talent.

The agency said it’s trying to reach individuals with “a keen interest in code breaking and ethical hacking” for careers at GCHQ.

Bonus Video

Black Friday Shopping Prank

Got some fun stuff for us? Send a note to tim@bluefountainmedia.com or leave a comment below.

Stop Asking When Google Caffeine Will Go Live: It Already Has

Ryan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:53:26 +0000

There’s been a lot of speculation about Google Caffeine. When will it launch? What will change? What will happen to my results?

The speculation needs to stop. Caffeine is almost certainly live right now—the next query you type into Google will probably reflect Caffeine’s changes.

Google claims that the Caffeine update is about “under the hood” changes to the architecture of the search engine. As Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains, Caffeine is an attempt at “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Though, he goes on to admit that “some of the search results do change.”

But does this minor “under the hood” tweak really update Google to where it needs to be?

Google regularly tweaks and updates their search engine. But Google announced a sort of “cease fire” over the holiday period, where they held back any changes to the search engine. This was to avoid further stressing webmasters during the busy holiday ecommerce season, as happened in 2003.

Caffeine Probably Already Went Live

So Google Caffeine was set to be launched sometime after the holidays. Well, it’s nearly three weeks after the holidays and we haven’t seen much. Perhaps Caffeine has already launched. Google doesn’t usually give advanced previews of their products before they’re released, but that’s what they did with Caffeine. Perhaps they were putting it out there to see if anyone noticed big discrepancies so that they could be corrected and brought more in line with existing Google results. Google has always favored an incremental approach to their products, releasing them and then making tweaks over a long period of time. They don’t like to make major updates all at once. Just look at the development process behind gMail (which was in Beta for years).

If it hasn’t gone live yet, it will soon. And when it does, don’t expect too much to happen.

More Important Than Caffeine: New Realities on the Web

So, Google Caffeine may have already launched. But that’s not what really matters. What matters are the changes that Google has made and will continue to make over the next few weeks and months. Google is moving from results based on frequent updates to results that are live. This is a huge undertaking, and is likely a large part of the reason that Google has had to implement Caffeine.

NoFollow Isn’t What It Used To Be

The idea that NoFollow links don’t influence the target’s ranking in Google (and other search engines) is laughable. Google has built it’s reputation on serving up the best search results. And being the best means returning the most relevant results. Twitter is the proof: Links shared in twitter are NoFollow. But that doesn’t stop Google from displaying them near the very top of their search engine.

Google invented NoFollow as a way to help prevent spam. But the web has gone overboard and NoFollow is on the brink of irrelevance. As more and more of the links on the web become NoFollow, Google has been forced to figure out some sort of way to count these links. One innovation might be follower ratio: Google may be looking at your social graph as a way to weigh your links. For example, Google might be giving more weight to links in tweets from users who have more followers or users who have a better follower to following ratio.

A large portion of the web’s conversation is taking place on Twitter. Simply put: Google cannot afford to ignore links on Twitter.

Bigger Changes

Caffeine is about the underlying system. There are more important changes that will affect the front end.

Site Speed

Google is going to start taking into account how fast pages load. Just look at this video interview with Google’s Matt Cutts. Google will start taking site loading time into account in search rankings. Of course, Google’s top priority will remain returning the most relevant results for the user. But the very soon, Google will give a little bit of an edge to sites that load quickly and a slight penalization to sites that load slowly.

To help the web prepare for this, Google offers a tool to help analyze your site speed. There’s also Google’s Closure Tool to help you optimize your JavaScript. Matt Cutts also recommends checking out webpagetest.org

Fresh Content Bias

Time moves faster on the internet. While Google includes a OneBox for breaking news and relevant Tweets, there is a clear need to more thoroughly integrate fresh content into Google results. In the future, Google will certainly be giving a bump to new articles. Instead of relevancy and importance being the big factors in who ranks, it will probably become a trinity of relevancy, importance, and freshness. Think of how many times you’ve researched a topic only to find that the top result is an outdated article or blog post that is virtually useless. Caffeine fixes that.

Next time you use Google, take a second look at the results: are they timely? Are they relevant? Are they weighting the conversation, as well as the link-graph?

In other words: are they caffeinated?

Map apps, CIOs and robots: the NY Tech Meetup

Zack Sinkler — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:58:18 +0000

The NY Tech Meetup group meets on the first Tuesday of every month, as the New York tech community gathers to see short (5-minutes) demos of cool stuff their peers are working on. It also happens to be Internet Week here in New York, which may explain why last night’s meetup was, by all accounts, above average.

In addition to some exciting updates to well-known web apps (Aviary announced a web-based sound editor, Livestream demo’d their free desktop streaming app, and Jason Calacanis talked about paying people to use Mahalo), here’s what was new at FIT:

Makerbot

Pretty much the only thing brick-and-mortar has on ecommerce is immediacy; you can have the best interactive shopping experience imaginable, but when it comes to actually getting your stuff, you’re still at the mercy of FedEx, or worse, t he Feds. With the help of MakerBot Industries, you can now download 3D objects and print them out – almost literally. In the demo, Bre Pettis printed out a miniature three-dimensional Empire State building. And while it can’t replicate a hot cup of Earl Grey tea yet, it’s not entirely trivial: Thingiverse has dozens of 3D files available for download; need a shot glass? Lost your lens cap? Print out a new one!

NYSenate.gov

Since Senator Malcolm Smith took the helm of the NY State Senate as Majority Leader early this year, they’ve made impressive strides in redesigning their website to make information more transparent to the public, and accessible in an intuitive way. There’s even YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook integration! Ironically, it looks like the Office of the Chief Information Officer, which did the specs for NYSenate.gov, could use some website work themselves.

(If you’re interested in finding out about other ways that technology is changing politics, you might want to check out the Personal Democracy Forum on June 29-30. If you sign up before June 8th and use coupon code “NY Tech” you can receive $100 off!)

UpNext

These guys debuted at NY Tech two years ago, so it’s not really new, but they demo’d their iPhone app, which looks just about as awesome as their Java version. Not only is it a 3D rendering of New York City (other locations are on their way), but it pulls data from places like Yelp, Google Maps, and others to give rich location-based information on popular and upcoming bars, restaurants, stores, etc.