SocialVibe Turns Pageviews into Charitable Donations

12 Feb 2009

SocialVibe is an interesting new web app that allows anyone with a web page – either on MySpace, Facebook, blog or otherwise – to embed an advertisement (illustrated below). You choose the company they would like to be the sponsor (Jones Soda in my case) and the charity and every time the ad is viewed, you earn points for your charity, which turn into donation money from the sponsors.

Bloggers, and other web site owners, often struggle with monitizing their site.  The easiest way is through advertising programs, provided by third party ad resellers, such as Google and Yahoo, or affiliate programs created by sites such as Amazon or Ebay.  However the pennies in earnings that most site owners see do nothing to offset site running costs, much less generate income.  For recreational web developers and bloggers, an option to turn visits to their site into money for a favorite charity might be a welcome alternative.  Instead of becoming frustrated over the inconsequential earnings provided by a huge ad reseller, sites can generate substansial donations for a charity by working as part of a larger, charitable network.

Take a look at SocialVibe to see the charities and sponsors available – and consider adding a SocialVibe application to your Facebook, MySpace, Blog or webpage.


Coraline and the 3D Media Revolution

8 Feb 2009

This past weekend I had a chance to see the new Tim Burton film Coraline in theatres. The ticket for the movie, made in the increasingly popular 3D, came along with my very own set of 3D glasses and I must say they were definitely a step from the paper eyewear we had picked up for the Superbowl.

The movie was really fantastic, although what else might you expect from the amazing Tim Burton working in collaboration with one of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman who wrote the original novella Coraline. It definitely contained the right amount of creepy to be thoroughly enjoyable but much more fun than your typical run-of-the-mill horror story. Of course it also helped a wimp like me that it was made for kids.
What I find interesting is the new excitement surrounding 3D movies and television programs. The recent NBC Superbowl ad and 3D episode of the TV show Chuck may have introduced a lot more people to 3D entertainment, but the popularity of the medium has been growing for a while. I remember seeing my first 3D film at Disney World almost a decade ago.

And now it’s the ‘it thing.’ After the Superbowl ad and Chuck, there’s Coraline as well as the upcoming Aliens Vs. Monsters by Dreamworks and a new addition to the Ice Age series that will also be released in 3D later this year.

As with all new technology, but especially in entertainment, there will most likely be a ramp up time when the novelty is exciting enough to encourage others to mimic the style but not common enough to know whether or not it will be successful throughout the market. The one major drawback of 3D entertainment is the required glasses – which may be uncomfortable, a poor fit or difficult to use over other eyewear but without which the screen is blurry and the experience is ruined. HD television may have experienced a similar phase, during which television networks attempted to add their own HD programming but only a small portion of the population had HDTV sets. With the new television broadcast laws, HDTV is now the norm rather than the exception but there won’t be any similar breaks for 3D entertainment.

Will the new 3D movies and shows be interesting enough to engage the whole market? Will the novelty hold the public despite the silly glasses? Will we someday carry 3D glasses in our cars and bags for movies out, lose them as easily as the remote in our living rooms and expect to have them provided during teen slumber parties? It seems unlikely but perhaps the beginning of the 3D revolution will bring additional entertainment technology that we can’t even imagine.

How to Get High PR Backlinks

5 Feb 2009

I wrote a post earlier about SEO and the English Langauge that described the ways text can influance search engine placement and I want to talk briefly about one of the other factors that can affect search engine optimization and that is backlinking. A backlink is a link from any other website to your own.  If I were, for example, to link to Spoonfed that would be considered a backlink to the Spoonfed site, an external link from my own.  The more backlinks a website receives, from more reputible sources, the higher Google ranks them in the search results, and the higher page rank (PR) they are awarded.  PR is an artificial indicator, created by the search engines, that indicates how important a page is perceived on the web.  PR can go from unranked, which is lower than 0, to 10 which is the highest.

Of course, the trick becomes finding ways to get sites with high PR to give a backlink to your site.  Of course, you can create content that other sites find interesting, causing them to link to your interesting information; you can contact them directly and ask them to place a link on your site, especially if you think they might find your content valuable – this is what I am currently working on for Spoonfed; you can purchase high quality backlinks OR you can find places where you can actually post your own link on someone else’s website.  That might sound counterintitive – why would someone allow you to change their page to add a link? – but it’s actually more common that you might imagine.  Blogs have comment fields where you can enter your own comments, forums as well allow visitors to take part in a conversation.  By placing your link in comments or forum posts, you can manually increase the number of backlinks to your site.

Things become a bit more complicated, however, with something called the Follow tag.  When you typically create a link in HTML code, it looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.name-of-website.com”>Name of Website</a>

However in that code, you can add special tags that cause the link to open in a new window, to open in a new tab, or even a tag that tells Google robots (discussed in the previous post) not to visit that page at all.  Most blogs (including mine) include “no-follow” tags as a default setting in comments, so spammers can’t take advantage of the exact manual backlinking strategy I described above.  However many forums and blogs have “do-follow” tags that allow Google robots to explore your site after you manually create the link, thus passing the high PR from their blog or forum to your page.

There are many directory listings of forums and blogs that are do-follow, so I won’t go into those lists here.  What I want to discuss is how to find high PR pages within the forum or blog where you can post your link.  Because each page on a domain has an individual rank (for example, this blog post alone is unranked while the homepage at www.thetopfloorflat.com has a PR of 3), sometimes it can be tricky to find high PR places to link even within do-follow domains.

The first step is to download the Firefox addon, SEO for Firefox, a fantastic tool that will show you, directly in your search results list, valuable SEO information about the pages your search has returned.  This information includes PR, the number of backlinks that page itself has, and age of the site.  Once the addon has been installed, you’re ready to find some high PR target pages to add your backlinks.

Pick one of your favorite do-follow forums or blogs – if you don’t know of any you can start with my favorite web developer’s forum, Digital Point.  Go to the Google search engine and make sure your SEO for Firefox addon is turned on.  Then, do a search for the phrase “site:forums.digitalpoint.com” of course replacing the URL forums.digitalpoint.com with whatever forum or blog you plan on using.  As your search loads, the SEO for Firefox addon will show you the PR of each page indexed on the site, while the Google results will show you how many forums posts are on the page.  A quick scan through the results can indicate some valuable results, such as this one here:

This image shows a result with a PR of 3, a fairly high PR, and only six other posts on the page.  This is an excellent target – I can go to the page, add a post to the forum thread, and instantly have a PR3 backlink to my site.  Then, I can return to the search results to find more easy targets and high PR backlinks. Once you’ve exhausted one site, there are thousands of other do-follow blogs and forums to explore.

One note – Google does not allow you to run limitless searches on their cached site pages, so it may be useful to do a few searches under one domain, then another, switching between them as you look for high PR backlink options.

This is a departure from my usual, less technical posts, and I do hope to start including more of my tech experiences in the blog here.  If you have any questions about this information, feel free to leave a comment below.  Didn’t understand a word? Don’t worry, the usual fluff will return to a blog near you soon :).

Dust Bunny of Doom

4 Feb 2009

My computer, as much as I love it, has been acting up for a while now.  It’s less than two years old so I thought maybe it was the equivalent of computer teenage rebellion – “You’re always telling me what to do! I don’t care what you think, I’m going to run my fan all day if I want.”  Next thing I knew, I’d be waking up to a computer covered in neon decals.

But while I was busy over-personifying my computer, I didn’t really consider the possibility that something was actually wrong with it.  Such miscalculations in the past have often resulted in the loss of important data and hair I tear out of my head but for once I’ve kept up with my backups, avoided any potential viruses and, as far as I know, kept from dropping the computer from any great heights.  None of that was much help when the screen decided to stop turning on.

A phone call with Dell technical support (joy of joys) and several nerve-wracking restarts later, we established the whole thing was shot and needed a new motherboard.  Thankfully my warentee was still in tact and they’d send someone over to fix it the next day.

This afternoon, my friendly neighborhood computer-repairman arrived, ready to discet my computer and replace its innards.  About halfway through the procedure on my computer which he, to my great amusement insisted on calling “the patient” the whole time, he asked me to come over and see something.

From inside my computer, he had withdrawn a plastic sticker that should have been removed by the orginal manufacturer and a dust bunny, I kid you not, the size of my thumb.  The combination of the two had been seriously overheating the guts of my poor computer which had, in the last few days, given up completely while I continued to unknowingly fry its chips.

All’s well now and the computer is running better than before – certainly more quietly at any rate, without the fan running all the time.  After surviving the proceedure I’m feeling a lot more cheerful towards my computer.  I might even get it a neon decal as a reward.

Reposado Restaurant – Palo Alto

29 Jan 2009

This evening I went with my mom to the new Reposado restaurant in Palo Alto for what promised to be a unique Mexican dining experience. It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to review a restaurant but the Bay Area has flavors and eateries to rival the best of London’s so there’s no reason not to take advantage of the diversity around me now.

The large dining room was certainly spacious – a welcome change after London’s typically cramped dining experiences – but this meant that, despite the fairly sizable dining crowd, Reposado looked half empty at 7pm. We were seated by a friendly hostess and began our menu debate. The first snag of the night occurred when we were asked for our drink orders and I realized I had forgotten my ID, something that wouldn’t normally be required in London but unfortunately a necessity for a 22 year-old in the US. Margarita-less, I returned to the menu. My mom and I decided to begin with the Ceviche de Camaron, a prawn ceviche with lime and cucumber juice, Serrano chili, avocado, and grilled pineapple, for $10.50.

An enthusiastic but somewhat misdirected waitress returned with the Cayo de Hacha y Camaron (a prawn and scallop dish) but quickly rectified the mistake, delivering the attractive dish we had actually ordered (shown above). The lime was somewhat overpowering but the appetizer grew on us, the fried plantain chips providing a welcome sweetness to off-set the tart bite. While I don’t think we would order it again, it was a tasty departure from a typical cerviche.

For our main course we settled on the three taco plate after a seemingly endless debate. A recent review had warned against the tacos, citing too much iceberg lettuce and dry meat, but the opportunity to sample three different flavors proved too tempting and we each ordered a chicken, pork and steak taco.

Quite contrary to the negative review, the meat was tender, the lettuce in proportion and the tacos overall satisfying.  Unfortunately we felt that the steak taco was the weakest in the group, featuring a toasted ancho salsa, avocado crema, and Cotija cheese which seemed to ruin an otherwise tasty meat, and a letdown after the pork and chicken. However the plate was priced incredibly reasonably at $9.75 and was a perfect portion size, especially with the earlier appetizer and the promise of desert.

We finished our Reposado meal with the Azteca Chocolate Cake ($6.75), a dark chocolate cake with a hint of chili peppers, a combination that worked beautifully. It was served with a strawberry compote and key lime cream topping. Our only comment was that the texture of the cake could be improved as the individual portion size cake may not have been as moist as we could have hoped – overall a minor critique for an otherwise delicious desert.

The food was quite tasty although no where near the best Mexican in the Bay. This character restaurant offers more in ambiance than it does in gourmet cuisine but the restaurant is new and the menu is still improving (the waiter mentioned an upcoming chorizo dish which sounded tempting). It’s location is convenient, the prices reasonable and the food flavorful. The meal was certainly a treat however the service we received was what turned the night out into an enjoyable experience. From the hostess to the wait-staff to the owner, who stopped by to ensure we were enjoying our meal, the friendly atmosphere that filled Reposado earned the top marks.

Next time I’ll remember to bring my ID and I’m certain I’ll have wonderful things to say about the bar as well!

Photos courtesy of Reposado Restaurant website