My Costume is a Real Digg Story

DIGG COSTUME WEB CAM So, for Halloween, I decided to be a Digg Story. Literally. My costume syncs up with my Digg Story at http://www.digg.com/mods/My_Costume_Is_This_Digg_Story and displays the correct number of diggs. It refreshes every 15 seconds! You can see by the picture below and instructions on how I did it as well… Note: Because I had to take the picture of the costume before I ran it on digg, this one was actually hooked up to yesterday’s story on Al Gore: http://www.digg.com/politics/UK_signs_Al_Gore_to_sell_climate_case_in_US Supplies: 1. Poster board 2. Duct Tape (of course) 3. Magic Markers (no substitutions) 4. Laptop which bends flat (Acer 4010) & WIFI 5. XAMPP 6. Basic PHP Skills 7. More Duct Tape After creating the digg button...

Privacy and Accessibility: Responses to the #privacy initiative

There has been quite a bit of response to the #privacy (http://www.poundprivacy.org) initiative and I am thankful for all who have supported it and taken time to blog about it, link to it, or mention it among your friends and colleagues. The response has been very supportive. (SEOMoz, Google Inside, WebDevForums (15000+ Members), Syndk8 (6500+ Members) and many more.) If this is to be successful, it will require as much support as possible. There are a handful of responses which I believe should be discussed out in the open. I will try to cover the questions which have been raised about the standard as well as I can. (1) Doesn’t adding #privacy to a search flag it as “This is a really interesting search! Hot Stuff Here!”...

The New Standard for Search Privacy

There are really only two legal/ethical issues that are regularly lodged against search engines: copyrights and privacy. The copyright debate has taken its way to courts across the world and has resulted in several technologies which empower webmasters to protect their copyrighted information. No fewer than 4 separate standards: robots.txt, nocache, noindex, and nofollow, allow webmasters to opt-out of indexing, caching, and other search engine activites which may violate or endanger their copyright. How many standards exist to protect privacy? Until today, none. I am proud to introduce #privacy (http://www.poundprivacy.org), the new search standard for privacy. The concept is fairly simple: searchers should be able to opt out of tracking mechanisms when they...

LinkFromDomain, MSN, and New Tool…

So, finally one of the search engines decided to add a linkfromdomain: command. This is incredibly useful as it allows sites to tell who they are linking to, which in turn can be used for all kinds of useful things such as… Bad Neighborhood Tools: http://www.virante.com/resources/free-tools/banned-sites.php Percentage Reciprocating: http://www.virante.com/resources/free-tools/percentage-reciprocal.php This will check the first 100 links in MSN for your site and tell if they are not indexed by google (an indication of banning). Thank you MSN. No tags for this...

Virante in Wall Street Journal

While we are proud to call ourselves the the SEO firm of entrepreneurs, it is not every day that such an assertion is validated by the Wall Street Journal. Kelly Spors, a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal tapped Virante, Inc. CEO Ryan Allis to discuss some of the issues regarding SEO for fledgling businesses in the WSJ Startup Journal (the “center for entrepreneurs”. The story is available online, but was also published in the September 26th edition of the Wall Street Journal. http://www.startupjournal.com/columnists/smalltalk/20060927-smalltalk.html It was also nice to hear from one of our former clients and a fantastic success story, Jim Kitchen with Spring Break Travel. They do great work over there. No tags for this...