Google introduced today Voice Search on Computers. Learn more at:  http://www.google.com/insidesearch/voicesearch.html

It’s easy to search out loud. All you need is Google Chrome and a built-in or attached microphone.

To get started:

1. Download and install Google Chrome
2. Open Chrome and go to google.com
3. Just click the mic in the search bar and start talking

learn more at: http://www.google.com/+1/button/

Facebook is launching a resource center to help non-profits use the social network. The site will include educational materials, tutorials and a downloadable non-profit guide geared toward raising awareness and funds for causes specifically through the social network.

A “Get Started” section offers quick tips on how to create a Facebook Page and explains how to set up events and use discussion boards to connect with an audience. The Guide has more general advice like “Be Personal and Educational” or “Use Tools to Increase Relevance” along with mini-spotlights on Facebook features such as targeted ads and Like boxes.

Learn more about facebook for non profits at http://www.facebook.com/nonprofits

Original post by: http://mashable.com/2011/05/16/facebook-non-profit-page/

Have you also noticed that when you post things like status messages, photos and links, the same circle of people are commenting and everyone else seems to be ignoring you?

Don't worry, everyone still loves you and nobody has intentionally blocked you. The problem is that a large chunk of your friend/fan list can't see anything you post and here's why:

The "New Facebook" has a newsfeed setting that by default is automatically set to show ONLY posts from people who you've recently interacted with or interacted the most with (which would be limited to the couple of weeks just before people started switching to the new profile). So in other words, for both business and personal pages, unless your friends/fans commented on one of your posts within those few weeks or vice versa - you are now invisible to them and they are invisible to you!!

HERE'S THE FIX: On the homepage click the "Most Recent" title on the right of the Newsfeed, then click on the drop down arrow beside it and select "Edit Options", click on "Show Posts From" and change the setting to "All Of Your Friends and Pages" (you can also access the "Edit Options" link at the very bottom of the facebook homepage on the right) Note: Business pages do not have a newsfeed however page owners should adjust the settings on their personal accounts.

The good news is: now you can now view all of your friends and fans again.

The bad news is: YOU ARE STILL INVISIBLE to a large portion of your list. You must get the word out to ALL of your friends and fans by inviting them to this event or creating one of your own so they can read the post and adjust their settings. To invite your friends: Click on "Attending" at the top and then you will see an option to invite your friends at the top left. It’s public so everyone who logs onto facebook can view it and even the friends who can’t see your posts WILL see the event invitation. You can also tweet about it, create a blog post or send out an email to your subscribers in hopes of reaching them all.

Original post by: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=153881578008049

Google Inc. has modified the algorithms that dictate search result rankings in an attempt to push up more “high-quality sites.”

The formula changes will affect 11.8% of search queries –- about one in every eight, Google said in a blog post. For now, the tweaks will stay in the U.S. before eventually rolling out to the rest of the world.

For months, Google has been combating the presence of “content farms” such as eHow that mine for clicks by generating articles based on popular searches, though none were mentioned specifically.

The new algorithm will lower such sites in the search rankings in favor of “sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on,” the company wrote.

The update is not directly related to feedback from the Blocklist Chrome extension Google launched last week to block specific sites that show up in search results. But when crosschecked against the top several dozen domains blocked through the extension, Google found that the formula change also addressed 84% of blocked domains.

Original post: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/google-changes-search-formula-to-push-down-low-quality-sites.html

Google admitted today that search spam has increased in recent months, and the search giant has outlined its plan to combat spam and the rise of “content farms.”

Google search quality and SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed piece on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. He starts off admitting what we’ve been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.

“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,” Cutts said. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”

Cutts makes it clear that webspam refers to the junk that appears in search results when websites try to cheat their way to a higher position. With the launch of the new version of its search engine, Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing more content than before, including spam.

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well,” Cutts explained. “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”

read more at: http://mashable.com/2011/01/21/google-combat-search-spam/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Mashable+(Mashable)

 A few folks at Google have built this website to help keep tech support a family business. Go to www.teachparentstech.org and send your parents the PERFECT HOLIDAY'S GIFT!!!

Here you have 5 free tools to grade your website to help you see how you rank up. These tools measure social media presence, search engine friendliness, compliance, and a few other key metrics.
 

1. Websitegrader.com

Website Grader covers several aspects of your website in their report: Metadata Information Age of Site Google PageRank Indexed Pages Last Google Crawl Traffic Rank Website Grader will also tell you if any of your images lack ALT tags (always important), it will give you traffic rank, blog rank, number of inbound links and the number of pages Google has indexed for your site. (But wait, there’s more!) You can also add website addresses of your competitors to sneak a peek at their website grade as well.

2. WooRank.com  (blog ranking)

WooRank provide all the information about your blog, traffic, inside and out side SEO, contents, etc. We can use all the information to improve our blog performance.

WooRank provide tips how to improve our blog through the information above the factors that WooRank analysis. There are three colors for every analysis factors. Green, Yellow and Red. Green means OK, Yellow means you need to make a little improvement. Red, you need to fix the error. Some is easy to fix and some is hard and we need help from the expert.

3. Builtwith.com

Is a great tool that tells you information about the development platform, server information, and will even tell you what CMS drives a site.

• Who is hosting the site.
• Server Information.
• Analytics and Tracking.
• Widgets used.
•  Frameworks used.
• Advertising Used.
• Aggregation (Feed) Functionality.
• Document Information.

    * Encoding.

4.  Pearanalytics.com

This tool gives you a rating out of 100 and a nice emailed breakdown of the analysis on many metrics. It has a nice layout and also gives you hints of how to better enhance your SEO. Check it out to see what I am talking about.

5. Reactionengine.com

This little British tool does some great analysis on all kinds of metrics important to page rank. It does a grate analyze of the strength of your keyword also it has another useful futures like :

• analyzing your content
• Link popularity.
• Network information.
• Troubleshooting 

Source: http://www.bitdoze.com/blogging/top-5-free-tools-to-grade-your-website/

Once again Google's results are showing up differently.  The google local listings are now displaying throughout the traditional search result page with reviews, images, videos. The google map that used to be in the center area at the top is now on the right hand side. When you scroll down looking at results, the map follows you down the page and overlays over top of sponsored listings.  Review sites have been receiving tremendous weight in the engines and have also helped local listings rank in the map area.  The results are changed once again.

If you haven't claimed your local listing yet or become a Google place, its time to do so.  Results are favoring local small businesses. (click here to learn how to add your business on Google Local Maps)


We have noticed a change in how Google is displaying the search results for certain cityname+keyword searches. For those of you who often search for something that includes a location (or a city name) along with a keyword, you might be interested in how Google is changing the search results.

Here is a screen shot of the search results change:

From time to time, Google does experiment with the search results pages at their search engine. The fact that the search results are now featuring the Google Map image on the right side, where we would normally see Google AdWords ads, is a major change for Google. Furthermore, we typically have not seen Google actually “hide” the Google paid ads like they are doing here. The Google Map image actually stays in view and hides the Google AdWords ads when you scroll down the page.


Here is a screen shot of the Ads hidden by the map:

Google now displays your current location on the left side of the search results and you can actually change it, so this is getting more and more interesting.

Results are favoring local small businesses and organic searches instead of the Ads so this is a great change. Get your local listing and promote your business thru Search Engine Optimization to increase your Organic visibility, Google Adwords keeps loosing importance.

Augmented Reality is very cool and in 10 years you may use it everywhere, on your car windshield, on your glasses, on retail stores, but what useful applications we could find today for it? There are some great iphone applications that apply this cool concept and could also help your business grow…
 

The acrossair app for example uses 3D navigation which you can see as you spin around. There is local data from property companies and big name brands which is represented in an augmented reality view. This app is a great example why you should get into social media marketing and services like foursquare, and have your business local map entry on google, or if you have a restaurant promote yelp and tell people rate you there and make comments and reviews. Social media and other online services are starting to pop up all around us and now with the use of Augmenter reality people will take advantage of them even more.

Think about it, more and more people is using these tools on their mobile devices. That means you need to be part of it or you will be loosing opportunities every day.

Here's a Video about what Augmented Reality is in plain english…. and also a video about the acrossair application so you see how it works…   
Other applications like New York Nearest Places, Layar Reality Browser, Augmented Car Finder and Wikitude use this new technology too.

Augmented Reality - Explained by Common Craft

Iphone acrossair augmented Reality Browser app 

Here you have some great tips on how to embed videos from youtube on your website or blog and make them look and act the way you want it.

To embed a video, just copy the code from the "Embed" box—you can find it in the "About This Video" box when you're watching the video. Once you've copied the code, just paste it into your website or blog to embed it.
1. Embed Higher Quality Videos
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed high quality videos you need to append “&ap=&fmt=18? and “&ap=&fmt=22? to the embed url.
2. Link to the interesting part
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 2 minutes 45 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 02:45? All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.
3. Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0? to the embed url.
4. Embed only a part of Video
Just append ‘&start=30? to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.
5. Autoplay an embedded video
You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1? to the url part of the embed code.
6. Loop an embedded video
Append ‘&loop=1? to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.
7. Disable Related Videos
Just add ‘&rel=0? to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video option.

Here you have 5 tips on how to help your website convert more visitors into customers.

1 - What is your website about?

You have only 3 seconds to keep a visitor on your page. If the visitor is not convinced in that time that your site is worth reading, he'll go away. Tell your visitors what you can do for them, which problem you would solve and how... We recommend using pictures on a slideshow, since you only have 3 seconds and people wont read a paragraph in that time.

2 - Do you have a professional looking website?

A great way to create trust is to use a professional website design. Use a clean design that makes it easy to read. Avoid clutter and extreme colors. Simple and common structures will help the users read and find things easily.

3 - Would your visitors Trust you from looking at your website?

Show testimonials, tell your visitors who you are and put all your company information including, phone, email and address. Show that you are a real company and that you can be trusted. Also show your credentials, associations, etc.. (BBB membership, awards, etc)

4 - Make it as easy as possible

Tell your visitors what you want them to do, have a clear call to action: "Click here to contact Us", "Download our Brochure", "Click here for a FREE evaluation", "Subscribe to the newsletter", etc. Focus on a single task. Don't ask the customer several things at the same time. The less your website visitors have to think about how to complete the task, the better.

5 - Avoid asking too much from your customers:

Avoid registration forms or make the forms as short as possible. The more fields a form has, the less people will fill it out.
 

• Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and there were many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.
• Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
• If everyone uses Google Instant globally, Google estimates this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.
• 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.            

Thanks www.joomlablogger.net for the information.

[ August 20, 2010 — Sarasota, Fla. ] New World Collaborative, a group of digital marketing professionals, has opened a new office at 1266 First St., Suite 5, in downtown Sarasota. This office will serve as an umbrella location for both the New World Collaborative and the three founders’ individual companies. The New World Collaborative formed in 2009 to provide comprehensive web development and internet strategies including SEO and social media marketing alongside digital public relations for clients, leveraging combined skills and educating the community on how to build their businesses without wasting money. Meet the founders:
Elizabeth Blair is president of Webjunkees, Inc., a company combining marketing strategy with award-winning creative to provide clients with not only a website, but a tool to save valuable company time while growing their business. Gabriel Marguglio is CEO of Destiny Technologies, which was founded in 2002 and focuses on website design, content management solutions and internet marketing. Finally, Gayle Williams is president of Vision PR & Marketing, a firm specializing in bridging the gap between traditional and digital PR/marketing for a diverse array of clients.
These three web and marketing professionals joined forces to combine their strong individual talents and achieve greater results for their clients as a result of truly working collaboratively on integrated digital and physical marketing and branding campaigns. Some of New World’s success stories include Sunshine from Darkness, Sarasota Ballet and Bach Elder Law. They will also continue to offer open-to-the-public seminars on best practices for SEO, digital PR and social media marketing.
New World Collaborative made their first splash in April of 2010 with the launch of their One-for-One Website Initiative. Inspired by eco-friendly TOMS Shoes, who donate a pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair they sell, New World made a commitment to build a free website for a not-for-profit organization for every website developed for a corporate client. The most recent website was built for grassroots organization Second Chance Last Opportunity and went live in June. As New World Collaborative continues to grow, new One-for-One websites are in the works.
The New World Collaborative invites you to stop into their new home and meet the team. Stay tuned for news about a fall open house in the courtyard of the new office as the weather begins to cool. The New World Collaborative will look forward to officially welcoming you to their space!
New World Collaborative Sarasota, 1266 First St., Suite 5, or newWworld.com
About New World Collaborative
Founded by three marketing/PR/web development experts, each heading their own company, New World Collaborative came into being from the belief that collaboration among professionals on behalf of clients and the community at large is the highest order of business.  Using the most current, most effective and most efficient strategies in this new digital world, New World Collaborative offer clients cost efficiency in a team of senior experts in marketing, PR, web development, SEO and social media. Collectively, New World determines the most effective strategies based on each client’s budget and goals, not big overhead. Our community service is to empower our clients with the knowledge and tools to flourish and most importantly track the results of their programs in a meaningful way. Learn more at http://www.neWWWorld.com
New World Collaborative co-founders:
Elizabeth Blair, Webjunkees
Gabriel Marguglio, Destiny Technologies
Gayle Williams, Vision PR & Marketing

The experts at New World Collaborative will share the latest and most effective techniques used by businesses to build brand awareness, overall visibility and action using tactics that are guided by well thought out strategy. “We are no longer in a world of ‘build it and they will come’,” explains New World founder and principal of Vision PR & Marketing Gayle Williams. “Small and large businesses alike must engage their audiences and build relationships by leveraging fully optimized website and strategic social media activity.”

Williams and New World co-founders Gabriel Marguglio of Destiny Technologies and Elizabeth Blair of Webjunkees will discuss SEO/SEM, digital PR, websites, social media marketing and more on Fri., July 23. This seminar is free for DSA members and $10 for non-members. Attendees are encouraged to RSVP to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 366-7040.

Digital PR Seminar, 8-9:30 a.m., Fri., July 23, Whole Foods Market Lifestyle Center, 1451 1st Street, 366-7040 or newwworld.com, free for DSA members, $10 donation non-members.

Are you still operating your business the "old school" way?
Are you unsure of how to use social media to your advantage and profit? Does your website need a facelift but you're afraid it'll cost an arm and a leg?
Well, its a NEW WORLD BABY!!
NEW WORLD COLLABORATIVE, that is!

Saturday, June 19th on WTMY 1280 AM radio, from 9-11 AM, the "Talking with Gloria" radio show will host the entire NEW WOLRD COLLABORATIVE team!
Not only will they address ways in which to improve your business but we'll be taking calls to answer YOUR specific questions, pertinent to your business needs.
AND........THEY ARE GIVING AWAY FREEBEES to the first 100 people.......who.........well.......... you'll just have to tune in Saturday to "Talking with Gloria" and find out what you can get for FREE!!

LIVE Online Streaming with Video at www.WTMY.com or tune to 1280 on your AM dial.

CALL 941-954-1280 to find out what you can get for FREE!

Click here to learn more.

Joomla
If you need: A blog, home-page, videos, photos, e-commerce, ad server and community features.
Good for: Businesses that need more customization than what WordPress offers. The learning curve is less than Drupal's, but just a little less.
Famous user: IHOP, at ihop.com
Price: Free--but. Like Drupal, Joomla is probably too complex to develop, design and maintain yourself.

Drupal
If you need: A blog, home-page, videos, photos, e-commerce, ad server and community features.
Good for: Someone who needs customized content and isn't afraid to learn how to use it. Drupal can do just about anything. And if it can't, a huge user community is ready to swap tips to help your geek along.
Famous user:The New York Observer, observer.com Price: Free--but. It's open source
, meaning that an army of developers works on plug-ins for this thing gratis. So unless you're a coding ninja, you won't know how to install them.

To read more about this go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2010/june/206660.html

Tech Stars
Bright new lights in the region.
Author: Molly McCartney
Photographer: William S. Speer

Sarasota-Manatee is no Silicon Valley. But we aren’t all real estate and tourism, either. The fact is that we have a growing number of bright, energetic tech entrepreneurs who are providing new products and services, from futuristic identity theft protection to nanotechnology inventions that stop the spread of disease.

To read more go to: http://biz941.com/ARTICLES/Past-Issues/2010/June-2010/Tech-Stars.aspx?utm_source=Sarasota+Magazine+and+Biz941+eNewsletters&utm_campaign=c940b64431-Biz941_Daily_04_20_2010&utm_medium=email