Google Patents Real-World Image Recognition Algorithm For Video, Photography S

http://hothardware.com/News/Google-Patents-RealWorld-Image-Recognition-Algorithm-For-Video-Photography/ Google Patents Real-World Image Recognition Algorithm For Video, Photography Saturday, September 01, 2012 - by Joel Hruska Google has been granted a patent on a system for real-world object identification scanning that will allow the company to survey and tag images and videos. The abstract for patent 8,254,699 (hereafter referred to as the '699 patent) covers An object recognition system performs a number of rounds of dimensionality reduction and consistency learning on visual content items such as videos and still images, resulting in a set of feature vectors that accurately predict the presence of a visual object represented by a given object name within an visual content item. The feature vectors are stored in association with the object name which they represent and with an indication of the number of rounds of dimensionality reduction and consistency learning that produced them. The feature vectors and the indication can be used for various purposes, such as quickly determining a visual content item containing a visual representation of a given object name. Translation: Famous objects, landmarks, and commonly photographed views all have common characteristics that can be recognized by automatic programs rather than needing puny humans to perform the same task. Or, as Google notes: Currently, automated recognition within a digital video of images of real-world objects of interest to a user, such as people, animals, automobiles, consumer products, buildings, and the like, is a difficult problem. Conventional systems, to the extent that they allow for such recognition at all, typically use supervised learning which requires training sets of images that have been manually labeled as representing particular objects... However, such human input is expensive, time-consuming, and cannot scale up to handle very large data sets comprising hundreds of thousands of objects and millions of images. This is particularly a problem in the context of video hosting systems, such as Google Video or YouTube, in which users submit millions of videos, each containing numerous distinct visual objects over the length of the video. The use of unsupervised learning techniques, in which the explicit input of human operators is not required to learn to recognize objects, has not yet been achieved for large-scale image recognition systems." The privacy implications of such an automated system or enormous. Facebook's own automatic facial recognition software was highly controversial when it debuted, and what Google has now patented puts Facebook to shame. The larger question, unaddressed in this patent, is whether we want our individual personal data to be tagged, filed, and logged without permission or choice. To a potential advertiser, this sort of information is gold. The implications reach far beyond what Google states here. This type of data could be used for logo identification (for better advertising) and as a form of citizen tracking. If that last seems like a reach, remember that Google's own vision for the future of computing is a Chromebook/Chromebox that's completely dependent on their own services for everything. Content is tied to Google servers at every step, which would give them an extremely convenient way to gain access to such details. Users have the right to decide whether or not they want to use cloud services or turn data over to Google, but we're deeply uneasy about the idea of data mining user videos for this sort of content. It could be an important step forward towards the creation of semantic search databases -- but questions of user privacy and data ownership must be answered first.

It's Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebook's IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerberg's Letter To Shareholders

It's Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebook's IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerberg's Letter To Shareholders As Facebook's stock continues to collapse, the volume of whining is increasing. Four months ago, you will recall, Facebook was viewed as "the next Google." Now, with no major change in the fundamentals, it's viewed as an over-hyped disaster. Meanwhile, there is ever-louder grumbling that 26-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in over his head and should be relieved of command. As I listen to all this whining, I have a simple question: Didn't anyone even read Facebook's IPO prospectus? The answer, I can only assume, is "no." Because if anyone had read the Facebook IPO prospectus, they would have learned, among other things, the following: Facebook's growth rate was decelerating rapidly. Facebook's user-base was rapidly transitioning to mobile devices, which produce much less revenue. Facebook's operating profit margin was already an astounding 50%, which suggested it had nowhere to go but down. Facebook's CEO had a nearly unprecedented amount of control over the company. Facebook's CEO had set up this astounding level of control intentionally. Mark Zuckerberg knew all about how impatient public-market shareholders are. And he set up the whole company so he would never have to pay attention to their whining. In the 9 months following the IPO, insiders would be free to sell more than 2 billion shares of Facebook that they had been holding for years. Facebook was going public at an astoundingly high price for a company with these characteristics—about 60-times the following year's projected earnings, in a market in which other hot tech companies like Apple and Google were trading at less than 15-times. Even more importantly, if anyone had read the IPO prospectus, they also would have learned the following, all of which was expressed in a letter written directly to prospective shareholders by CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook's social mission is more important to Mark Zuckerberg than Facebook's business. Facebook's business exists to support Facebook's product development, not the other way around. Facebook's CEO is an extremely patient man who does not flinch under criticism. Facebook will never care as much about clients and shareholders as it does about its service and users. Facebook cares about the long term, not the short term (read: decades, not months). Facebook shareholders may be annoyed by those facts, especially now that the value of their stakes are getting demolished. But they can't say that they weren't warned. And they also can't say that the stock has been unduly punished: At $18, using the correct share count (2.7 billion), Facebook is still valued at almost $50 billion. And it's still trading at ~28-times next year's projected earnings of $0.65, an estimate that looks just as likely to be too high as it is to be too low. Meanwhile, Apple is still trading at less than 15-times projected earnings. So you can't argue that Facebook is now "too cheap." Lastly, if Facebook shareholders really think Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to cave to their whining and step down now, all of four months after he told them that he only cared about the long term (which, again, is measured in decades, not months), they don't know Mark Zuckerberg. Again, Mark Zuckerberg set up the entire structure of the company so he wouldn't be forced to make dumb short-term decisions by whining public-market shareholders. And he TOLD them that he wasn't going to make those decisions. They just didn't listen. In the interests of "better late than never," I've attached an annotated version of Mark Zuckerberg's letter below. If you've already read it, here's what else you should know about Facebook's stock—especially Facebook employees. Mark Zuckerberg's letter is in black below. The translation and annotations are in blue. LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. Before I begin, let me remind you that I own 57% of the voting stock of Facebook, which means I have complete control over it. I organized the company this way many years ago, with the very deliberate intention of maintaining complete control over it. I did this so I wouldn't get overruled and canned by venture capitalists, a fate that unfortunately befalls many entrepreneurs. I also did it so in the event that we ever had to go public—which we unfortunately have to do now—I would never have to pay attention to whiny short-term public shareholders. Those whiny short-term public shareholders have destroyed many great companies by making management obsess about absurd near-term financial targets. I have made sure that that's never going to happen to Facebook. If there ever comes a day when you and I disagree about the future direction of the company, rest assured: Your choice will be my way or the highway. At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people. Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness. At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships. People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate. We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives. One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction. Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design. In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well. We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions. We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time. By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few. Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them. Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress. TRANSLATION: What I care about most is Facebook's product and service and "social mission." The business is secondary. Our Mission and Our Business As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works. TRANSLATION: For those of you who missed it the first two times I said it, I'm going to say it again. Facebook's social mission is what I care about most. The business is secondary. If you don't like that, there's always the highway. I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team. Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something. [ANNOTATION: This is the most important sentence in the whole letter. Unlike most companies, Facebook views its "business" as a way to fund its product. This is profound and important, especially for investors who believe that products are just tools with which to build businesses and generate cash for shareholders. I, personally—Henry Blodget—completely agree with Mark Zuckerberg here. I think most companies should be run the way Facebook is run, with the product being center stage and then equal consideration given to customers, shareholders, and employees. I think America and Americans would be much better off if companies were run this way, and I think we'd have companies with stronger, more defensible competitive positions. A lot of public-market shareholders do NOT think that way, however. They think management should always "maximize profits." Those investors obviously shouldn't buy Facebook.] These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits. [ANNOTATION: Agreed. And if not, simply "maximizing profits" leads to modestly lower share prices, so be it. The tradeoff will be worth it.] By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. [ANNOTATION: Also critically important. And, most likely, true. "Maximizing near-term profits" often means under-investing in future innovation, customers, and employees. And although it sometimes temporarily boosts stock prices, it often guts companies and clobbers their value over the long haul. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has never paid the slightest attention to appeasing Wall Street's demand for near-term financial performance. Instead, he has always focused on Amazon's products and customers. And it's no accident that Amazon has built the single most successful and valuable long-term franchise of all the 1990s Internet companies.] We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company. This is how we think about our IPO as well. [ANNOTATION: There it is again, just in case you missed it the first five times.] We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it. TRANSLATION: We don't want to go public. We're only going public because we have to. I understand that, by taking your money, I do owe you something. But I want to be very clear with you about what I think my obligation is. The Hacker Way As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler. To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp. The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook: Focus on Impact If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on. Move Fast Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough. Be Bold Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time. Be Open We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact. Build Social Value Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do. TRANSLATION: We're going to stay aggressive. Sometimes we'll screw up. Then we'll iterate, learn, and move on. If you can't stand that heat, stay out of the kitchen. Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

wordpress + django on same account - advisable or not?

I know this guy who asked the question. We've been members of a small pinax-based users group -- discussing spawning an e-commerce project. He is a serious guy and I know his situation. So, when he asks a question and gets an answer, I look very closely and learn from THE QUESTION.

bobhaugen Member Registered: 2008-02-25 Posts: 34
wordpress + django on same account - advisable or not? I have a client that wants to host a wordpress blog and a django app on the same account.

I understand from a bunch of forum posts that this is doable, for example: http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?id=4656

But I have a few questions about the best way to do it, and if it is a good idea.

1. The examples say to put them on the same domain with django at the root, and wordpress on e.g. /blog. The client would prefer to have wordpress at a root, and django maybe at a subdomain. Is this possible? (The two apps will only be connected by hyperlinks.)

2. The two apps do not need to be on the same website, and the django app could remain at something.webfactional.com while the wordpress site is at a registered domain, e.g. somethingelse.com. So would it be cleaner to create two websites under the same WebFaction account?

3. Is this a good idea (running wordpress and django apps on the same account), or would be better to get 2 different accounts? The django app will be more mission-critical than the wordpress app, and go through more software changes. I assume they will both be running on the same apache server. Will the 2 apps interfere with each other? Is there a clean way to restart django without stopping wordpress?

4. Another complication might be that the people administering the wordpress and django apps will be different. By that I mean, the people logging onto webfactional via ssh and tinkering with the software and configuration. What should we watch out for there?

5. Assuming it is at least an ok idea, what size plan would be advisable? Neither app will have large number of users or hits, but the django app will be fairly complex and process a large amount of data. Moreover, the django app will use postgresql while wordpress will use mysql.

#2 2010-09-20 12:05:13 David L Administrator Registered: 2009-04-13 Posts: 578 Re: wordpress + django on same account - advisable or not?

1. The examples say to put them on the same domain with django at the root, and wordpress on e.g. /blog. The client would prefer to have wordpress at a root, and django maybe at a subdomain. Is this possible? (The two apps will only be connected by hyperlinks.)

This *is* possible, but Django really doesn't enjoy being anywhere but the root of a site. With some finagling, you can usually make it run with minimal issues. It's possible that this has been fixed in one of the more recent releases, though.

2. The two apps do not need to be on the same website, and the django app could remain at something.webfactional.com while the wordpress site is at a registered domain, e.g. somethingelse.com. So would it be cleaner to create two websites under the same WebFaction account?

That solves the above problem quite nicely

This is really up to you. We don't count PHP-based applications against your memory limit so if your Django application happens to chew through some memory your WordPress site won't be affected.

3. Is this a good idea (running wordpress and django apps on the same account), or would be better to get 2 different accounts? The django app will be more mission-critical than the wordpress app, and go through more software changes. I assume they will both be running on the same apache server. Will the 2 apps interfere with each other?

As I said above, they shouldn't interfere with each other.

Is there a clean way to restart django without stopping wordpress?

These run as entirely separate processes, so restarting Django has absolutely no impact on Wordpress.

4. Another complication might be that the people administering the wordpress and django apps will be different. By that I mean, the people logging onto webfactional via ssh and tinkering with the software and configuration. What should we watch out for there?

Naturally, if you're giving someone SSH access to your account it's possible that they can do damage. Other than malicious users, there really shouldn't be anything else to worry about.

5. Assuming it is at least an ok idea, what size plan would be advisable? Neither app will have large number of users or hits, but the django app will be fairly complex and process a large amount of data. Moreover, the django app will use postgresql while wordpress will use mysql.

We always recommend starting with our lowest plan and upgrading if/when necessary.

From what you've described, it's like you won't need much more than a Shared 1.

[Editorial: this post came from the webfaction forum so they are answering how much resources would be necessary.]

Speed up WordPress, and clean it up too!

by Joost de Valk on 21 January, 2008 at 15:17 110 comments

Every once in a while people will ask me to fix their blog, because it's either slow, or broken. When it's not something to do with their WordPress hosting, (some hosts are just plain bad and slow), most of the time this is caused by either broken plugins, or broken themes. There are a few things I tend to do when I get to clean up stuff, and I though I'd list them for you.

Clean up your theme

header.php
First of all, what I do is make the header.php file do a lot less queries. Because themes have to be easy to spread, they have to get almost all the blog specific info from the database. That results in a lot of queries for stuff that you could just hardcode into the theme. Some examples, taken from the default kubrick theme:

1	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>

2	<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

3	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="

4	<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>;

5	charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

Could just as well be:

1	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">

2	<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

3	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

You can also:

• •.make your stylesheet URL's static 

• •.make your pingback URL static 

• •.make your feed URL's static 

• •.you can remove the blog's WordPress version 

• •.make your blog's name and tagline / description static 

Doing all that, you can remove 11 queries to the database, and this can highly speed up your theme.

footer.php
The default theme also has some of these calls to the database in the footer which you can make static, or remove altogether:

• •.your blog's name 

• •.RSS feed URL 

• •.Comment RSS feed URL 

You can also remove all comments that aren't necessary, like "If you'd like to support WordPress, having the "powered by" link somewhere on your blog is the best way; it's our only promotion or advertising." I can tell you that that line is in a LOT of footers, and it's a waist of bandwidth once you have decided to leave the link for WordPress in or not.

Check your coding habits

You will have added code to your themes for your plugins. Let's say you have a line of code like the one below, for a plugin that thanks people coming from search engines:

1	<?php refer_thanks(); ?>

This creates a problem, as soon as you, by accident or another cause, disable the plugin that holds therefer_thanks function. When the function doesn't exist, the code errors out, and your page doesn't continue to load, thereby breaking your blog. To fix this, PHP offers a special function calledfunction_exists, and using it, the code would look like this:

1	<?php if (function_exists('refer_thanks')) { refer_thanks(); } ?>

Now, if the function doesn't exist, your theme, and thus your blog, won't break. It's probably a good idea to do this for every line of code you added for a plugin.

Install a caching plugin

Lastly, you should really consider installing either WP-Cache, or WP-Super-Cache. They make your blog so much faster, that you won't know what happened to you once you've got them running.

All of this makes sure your blog remains maintainable, and fast.

The heading structure for your blog

by Joost de Valk on 2 September, 2010 at 16:00 45 comments

The heading structure of your pages is one of the very important aspects of on-page SEO. It defines which parts of your content are important, and how they're interconnected. Because they have different goals, a single post needs another heading structure than your blog's homepage or your category archives. This post intends to give you the basic pointers to get your heading structure right for those three different cases.

blog's heading structure

If you've ever heard of this new kid on the block called HTML5, or maybe even consider yourself an expert on it, please note that this post still treats headings in the HTML4 / XHTML1 way of using headings. I'll briefly talk about headings in HTML5 in the end, it's a whole 'nother ball game!

This post will cover:

1. 1.5 basic principles about HTML headings 

2. 2.The headings for your homepage 

   1. 1.The issue of full posts on archive pages 

3. 3.Heading structure for your single posts / single pages 

4. 4.Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages 

5. 5.Headings and HTML5 

6. 6.Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers 

5 basic principles about HTML headings

Let's get these things straight before we do anything about our heading structure:

1. 1.The most important heading on the page should be the H1. 

2. 2.There is usually only one H1 on any page. 

3. 3.Sub-headings should be H2's, sub-sub-headings should be H3's, etc. 

4. 4.Each heading should contain valuable keywords, if not, it's a wasted heading. 

5. 5.In longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that they find interesting. 

Based on headings, there are tools out there that can, and will, make an outline for your content. If you were to make an outline for this article, it would look like this:

• •.[h1] The heading structure for your blog 

  • •.[h2] 5 basic principles about headings 

  • •.[h2] The headings for your homepage 

    • •.[h3] The issue of full posts on archive pages 

  • •.[h2] Heading structure for your single posts / single pages 

  • •.[h2] Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages 

  • •.[h2] Headings and HTML5 

  • •.[h2] Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers 

The most widely known, and probably also the easiest, tool capable of doing this is the W3 Validator.

The headings for your homepage

So while we can (and will) discuss some specifics in the comments, your homepage should probably have a structure that looks like this:

• •.H1: Blog's name 

• •.H2: Your blog's tagline, if it's "keyword-rich"; if not, all your recent posts should have an H2. 

• •.H3: Your recent posts, or, if those have an H2, this could be used for somewhat older posts. 

• •.H4: related content in the sidebar, like the heading of an "about" widget. 

• •.H5: Unrelated headings in your sidebar, footer, etc. 

As you can see, I differentiate between "related" widgets and unrelated widgets. It's no use at all to have an H3 heading saying "Our Sponsors". An H4 HTML heading saying "About this SEO blog" could be useful though, if "SEO blog" is what you want to rank for.

The issue of full posts on archive pages

Maybe you've seen it, maybe you didn't yet, but this sort of heading structure creates a problem. If you're displaying full posts on your front page, your sub headings would be H2's, just like your post titles. That's wrong, of course, and a good example of why we should be separating our content and markup a bit more then we're doing now, but that's not an easy fix. Basically, if you're displaying a post on an archive, category, tag or home page, each H2 should become an H3, H3 should become H4, etc.

No code samples yet, but my mind is working on this now, so it might come soon.

Heading structure for your single posts / single pages

This one is simple:

• •.H1: post / page title 

• •.H2's and H3's: subheadings and sub-subheadings 

• •.H4: your blog's name, and possibly related widgets 

• •.H5: same as above: sidebars etc. 

Makes sense right? The most important line on the page is the post or page title, second come the subheadings. Your blog title still has some value because, if the post is good, people will search later on for "Yoast WordPress SEO", for instance.

Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages

If you actually want your category and tag pages to rank, meaning you've given them some unique content and are making them interesting for people, the heading structure should basically be the same as the homepage, with this difference:

• •.H1: category / tag title 

• •.H2's: post titles 

• •.H3: blog's name 

• •.Rest: repeat from homepage. 

Headings and HTML5

In HTML5 the entire method of dealing with HTML headings changes, and while it's a bit harder to grasp for people at first, the new system makes a lot more sense for content management systems. In short: headings and heading structures are section specific there, where section could be any part of a page. It would take too long to explain here, but if you're interested, read the header section of Mark Pilgrims excellent Dive into html5.

Truth be told, Mark doesn't talk about how search engines deal with HTML5 headers yet. In all honesty: I couldn't tell you yet. Simply a case of "not enough data to tell".

Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers

Now it's time for you to take some action. Go and use the W3 Validator now to check your blog's outline. If you've read an understood all the above, you should now be able to determine whether your theme is doing a good job. If you're using a premium theme or a theme that you downloaded from WordPress.org, I'd love for you to share your results in the comments!

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Linkbaiting or Link Baiting Strategies?

BY AARON WALL

Rand mentioned that there are multiple types of linkbait, those that are known as controversial and those which are informational or comprehensive. I view them both as being in the same category though...evoking emotions and thus links. :)

I just updated my ebook again. I added quite a bit of information about designing / creating / formatting / packaging / launching / and marketing link bait. While it will surely change in future versions, here is some tips from the current version, similar to my recent WMW Pubcon talk on viral marketing.

Link Baiting
The idea of link baiting is to create a piece of content which is centered on a set demand from a specific audience. Who do you want to relate to? Why would they care? What would make them likely to spread your idea?

For example, Salary.com sponsored research stating that work at home moms did $134,121 worth of work each year. Because it was packaged as research and a story people would want to spread it spread far and wide.

Some common link baiting techniques

• •.Talk about a specific community. 

• •.Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important. 

• •.Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community. 

• •.Be provocative or controversial. 

• •.Be a contrarian. 

• •.Be thorough. 

Controlling Your Message

• •.Launch your story on a main channel such that you can change your messaging or update your offering based on feedback. If they wrong group runs with your story you may not want to stop them. ï 

• •.If you do not have a main channel which you can launch your idea on try to launch your idea by giving a popular channel such as TechCrunch the exclusive on your story. 

• •.If possible, build trust and attention in the marketplace well ahead of when you need to leverage it. 

• •.Consider potential blowback ahead of time. Depending on the importance of your message and brand strategy you may want to make your message easy to misinterpret OR you may want to make your message clear. 

• •.Create common link points. Do not throw away your link equity. For example, here are a couple ways people throw away link equity they earned: 

  • •.Some book authors do not create an official page about their book on their site, and thus just give away the link equity and top ranking to an online bookstore. 

  • •.Many people use Surveymonkey or some other 3rd party voting service when they create contests and polls. If you can include the voting script on your site you keep that link authority associated with your site even after the poll closes and people no longer talk about it. 

Magnetic Headlines

• •.Be specific with your headlines. Salary.com stating that work at home moms are worth $134,121 a year is probably going to spread further than if they said $200,000. 

• •.Write your headlines with the intent of spreading them. Focus more on writing something that evokes emotional responses and spread rather than writing for keywords and SEO. 

• •.Given that many social news sites have a voting mechanism that does not even require people to read the article to vote, the title may be far more important than the actual content of your link bait. 

• •.Copy Blogger offers great free headline writing tips. 

Me Me Me: the Selfish Web

• •.People like to view themselves as being important. 

  • •.Many bloggers search for links to their blogs on Technorati or Google Blog Search multiple times each day (I typically do). 

  • •.Calling out specific people, especially with humor, is an easy way to build linkage data. 

  • •.Digg frequently has homepage stories about Digg or Digg users. 

  • •.People are more likely to believe and spread messages which reinforce their world view. 

• •.Community involvement is important to help others identify with and feel ownership in your link bait. 

• •.When Rand Fishken launched his Search Engine Ranking Factors he collected feedback from about a dozen prominent members in the SEO community. Many of those people are active community members who helped spread the news at launch time. 

  • •.Asking people for feedback can help others feel ownership in your idea, and is a way to pitch them on your idea without looking sleazy pitching it. 

Seeding Your Idea

• •.Ask for feedback from people who may be interested in helping you improve your idea or helping you market it. 

• •.Leverage friends and contacts via instant message and email. 

• •.Pitch relevant bloggers and media sources. It is preferable to build rapport prior to pitching. 

• •.Build accounts on social news sites. 

• •.Some social news sites allow you to place voting buttons on your site. Do so on your most important ideas. 

• •.Consider the best times and locations to launch your idea. 

• •.Have a friend or yourself submit your best ideas to the most authoritative and relevant social news sites. 

  • •.Ensures your story has a title that is easy to vote for. 

  • •.Ensures your story is submitted at an appropriate time. 

  • •.If you do not do it soon after mentioning a story on your own site someone else may submit for you, using a dumb title or dumb post content. 

Launching a Static Site
Even if your site is fairly static in nature you can still create a buzz when you launch it.

• •.Call in favors from people you helped in the past. 

• •.ncorporate community ideas into your idea. 

• •.Spread out your ideas. For example, if you are forming a new partnership you can triple dip on publicity: 

  • •.Interview partners on another channel. 

  • •.Announce the launch. 

  • •.Add linkbait to the site at a later point in time. 

Formatting Link Bait

• •.Make it easy to identify and connect with. Think about human emotions and tap the sense of empathy. 

• •.You may want to make your idea look polarized such that it especially appeals to one group and/or especially offends another. If other people are fighting over guessing your intentions you will get quality links. 

• •.Make your link bait look comprehensive. 

  • •.Perception is more important than reality. 

  • •.Most writing is quite wasteful in nature, because you have to trim off much of what you create. 

  • •.By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you make a list of 101 ways to do x people may give a few ideas and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383 ways to do x. 

• •.Cite research, further reading, and link out to related resources from within your content. It makes your story look well researched and associates your work with other trusted names or brands in your field. You may even want to cite a few people that you want links from. 

• •.Dress up your link bait using quality design and / or relevant images from sites like Istockphoto. 

Monetizing Link Bait

• •.Make your link bait EASY to link at. 

• •.Don't over-monetize it right out of the gate. Make it look like research which is easy to cite rather than a piece of commercial information. 

• •.In Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content Clay Shirky stressed the importance of gaining authority to gain scale and distribution if you want to make money online. 

• •.Link bait rarely makes much money or directly pays for itself from the direct traffic. However, it has amazing indirect value. 

  • •.People who pay attention to the active portions of the web are far more likely to be web publishers than those who do not. 

  • •.Even if people do not link to your link bait idea right away you still gain mindshare and brand recognition amongst a group of people who have significant authority. 

  • •.Many search engines, such as Google, use authority centric relevancy algorithms. Editorial links are seen as votes or signs of trust. 

  • •.In Google, getting a link to any part of your site will help make all pages on your site more authoritative. 

• •.Two weeks after launching a linkbait my Google traffic and site earnings more than doubled on a site that was getting thousands of visitors and making over $100 a day from AdSense before the viral marketing campaign. 

Bubbling Up

• •.Social news sites and social bookmarking sites have recently popular lists that many people read. 

• •.Meme trackers track what stories are quickly spreading through the blogosphere. 

• •.Exposure on either of these can cause additional exposure and more linkage data. Many bloggers and some mainstream media outlets (like the MSNBC Clicked Blog) use these social news sites to find stories or sources. 

Don't Compete With Yourself
Be careful what you name your link bait ideas. If your link bait is well executed and targets keywords important to other pages on your site the link bait will likely outrank your other pages in the search results.

Our SEO for Firefox page nearly outranks our homepage in Google for SEO.