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What Does This Mean For Creators/Advertisers On YouTube?
Viewers will stay with you if you provide good content, even if it’s longer than normal. For creators this means they don’t have to worry about length as long as the content is sound, and for advertisers, it means they need to get on the ball with unique content that someone on YouTube will want to watch. I’ve always preached go the Red Bull/Go Pro route and create stories, not ads. Sell your product in more of a product-placement way rather than splashing the logo everywhere and going with...
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ReelSEO.com put out a very interesting article as they analyzed some findings from an AdAge article on YouTube’s views and engagement levels thus far during the year in 2012.

Someone (not sure if it is ReelSEO or AdAge as the level of curation sometimes obfuscates the source of the analysis) points out that even though total video views on YouTube decreased, Engagement on those...

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He later sent the footage and pictures to surfing expert Sean Collins, who guessed the wave was 85-90ft tall. Collins died in December.

Last week, McNamara was awarded $15,000 (11,600 euros) for the ride at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards in California.

Judges for the awards examined the footage and pictures from different angles.

They also compared McNamara's height in a crouch and the length of his shin bone with the wave's top and bottom before reaching a verdict, event director Bill Sharp told the Associated Press.
Commentary:

It’s a huge wave no matter how you measure it, but the geek in you will probably ask, ‘Just How Do they measure it?’

With viral videos popping up around the globe with lots of faked footage, we have all grown more and more skeptical, but it was cool to see the different techniques they quickly deployed to calculate the wave height.  It wasn’t really rocket science after all…

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If you have a WordPress blog and you still scraping your head trying to find out why you’ve been attacked by the Penguin although you did nothing wrong, it just might relate to your blog’s theme or plugins.

I recently revealed that there are much more than a few WordPress plugins, widgets and themes that injects hidden links into the page! Google clearly stating on its content guidelines for webmasters that hidden links are a violation of its guidelines which may even result a complete removal from Google index!

Some plugins’ developers insert the hidden links so they...
Commentary:

Omri Shabat has put together a great article identifying one of the sources of pain stemming from the recent Google Penguin updates.  He lists a number of plugins and themes that you should definitely review to insure that your website isn’t being targeted by Google.  He also mentions a great plugin the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin on WordPress that helps...

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We may be at the dawn of a new, private era in space.

Wired: How do you think this will this impact NASA?

Horkachuck: It provides a benefit and fills a gap that retiring the Space Shuttle left. It’s a good cooperative effort between us and industry, and both sides are learning new ways.

Plus, it frees up some of our budget to be able to develop deeper space missions. Hopefully changing the cost to low-Earth orbit will allow NASA to go further and deeper into space than we’ve gone before. So it’s a win-win for everybody....
Commentary:

It’s difficult not to root for SpaceX right now.  There are simply to few other games in town, but this space venture fueled by the funds of internet startup success in an age where 50 years of government backed space travel is dying out is in deed an interesting time, a changing of the guard.  Hopefully the new guard will be able to take us to a whole new level, literally!

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Beastie Boys rapper, musician and video director Adam Yauch, known as MCA in the groundbreaking hip hop trio, has died after a lengthy illness, Billboard has confirmed. He was 47.

It was announced in 2009 that Yauch had a cancerous parotic gland and underwent surgery and radiation therapy.

In January of 2011, Mike D told the BBC that the group was "really happy" about Yauch's improved health, a statement that led to reports that Yauch was cancer-free. A spokesperson for the group told Billboard at the time that "Mike did not say that" and Yauch released a statement...
Commentary:

Rest in Peace Adam Yauch and best wishes to your family and friends.  It is a sad day for the Beastie Boys and for fans, but your music continues to put smiles on faces around the world.

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Starting today with English language users who are signed in to the site, and expanding soon to all English-language queries, Google will serve up a concise summary box on the right side of the results page with key information on many queries.The company says there are already 500 million people, places and things that will trigger a Knowledge Graph-based summary box; Google expects the boxes to show up in roughly the same number of queries that now trigger Google Maps in search results.
Commentary:

While reading this article by Forbes, I couldn’t help but envision who on the web would suffer the consequences.

Content Farms, all those websites that hoped to provide the answer a click past a google search, the About.com’s, the Wikipedias, the Yahoo! Answers and many millions of blogs.

How are content owners at risk?

Well Google’s Knowledge Graph is simply...

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Blubrry PowerPress 4.0 brings the latest essential features for media creation to WordPress, including the hottest updates to the new iTunes specifications.

iTunes upgrades include:
An updated iTunes image requirement -- RGB 1400x1400 -- throughout the plugin for better cover image quality throughout.

“Feature Episode” that allow podcasters to designate a primary episode, which can be used to introduce the podcast or lead in to a new series.

An iTunes Order feature that allows a podcaster doing a series of episodes to have each listed in the desired order.
Other PowerPress 4.0 offerings include:
Commentary:

My good friends at RawVoice and Blubrry have just kicked out version 4.0 of PowerPress, the podcasting plugin system for WordPress.  For any podcaster this plugin is essential and the new features in 4.0 are going to be huge as they allow people to Feature a podcast and identify the order of multiple episodes among other things.

Hat’s off to Todd and the development team at Blubrry and Raw Voice!

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James Farmer at WPMU.org wrote a very interesting Penguin-related article, which doesn’t make the update look too great, despite its apparently honorable intentions.

The update hit WPMU.org, sending it from 8,580 visits from Google on one day pre-Penguin to 1,527 a week later.

According to Farmer, the Sydney Morning Herald spoke with Matt Cutts about the issue (which may or may not appear in an article), and he provided them with three problem links pointing to WPMU.org: a site pirating their software, and two links from one spam blog (splog) using an old version of one of...
Commentary:

As webmasters continue to investigate how Panda works (or doesn’t) some new evidence indicates two things:

  1. Before Panda, Google must have given extra spammy sites more link juice than seems practical to anyone
  2. Theme Creators (such as WPMU.org) who have links in the footers of the themes they sell or give away may have...

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NASA's Spitzer space telescope has detected a light source coming from a large earth-like planet.

This artist's concept shows the super-Earth planet 55 Cancri e. It's a toasty world 41 light-years from Earth that rushes around its star every 18 hours.
Commentary:

This alien planet at twice the size, 8 times the density with an 18 hour year (uninhabitable by us) was spotted via infrared light.  We are quickly, very quickly zeroing in on the ability to find planets close to the size of our own and actually view them!

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A loophole in US tax law will allow Facebook to claim a bumper tax credit when its staff - including 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg - and early investors cash in hundreds of millions of share options following its listing on the Nasdaq.

The revelation comes as the social networking giant this week kicks off a series of meetings to woo potential investors for a listing that could value the business at around $96bn.
Commentary:

Why would Facebook want to pay taxes?  It’s not like they do business in the US or have a large number of users/customers in the US.  They obviously don’t have a lot of US advertisers or US partners or even US employees.

Oh wait, do they?

I’m sure people will be more offended over the latest privacy scandal to erupt out of the terms of service as opposed to shortchanging America.

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