Stories about ‘Web’

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By Brett Bumeter curated from cnet.com
Apple today quietly released a standalone app for podcasts (iTunes), specialty software designed for listening and subscribing to audio and video podcasts.

Podcasts are pre-recorded audio shows of varying genres that users can subscribe to, and download for offling listening. Apple jumped on the podcast bandwagon in mid-2005, promising to take the medium "mainstream by building everything users need to discover, subscribe, manage and listen" into what was then version 4.9 of iTunes.
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Apple finally created a Podcast app.  While they were early in enabling podcasters and planned on doing more sooner, they never really followed through until this year.  Of course, there was already an ‘app for that’ when it came to finding Podcasts and managing them.  It’s called Stitcher!

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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 videos increased.  This means people are watching videos longer and getting more engaged, but not increasing the total number of videos they watch.

ReelSEO does hypothesize on the potential for those very long anti-Kony videos that picked up...

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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...
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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 insure that whomever you received your theme from didn’t load it up with hidden/invisible text and links, which is a big foul in Google’s book.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tac/

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More than a year ago, some bad guys on the Internet wrote a piece of malware inartfully dubbed DNSChanger. About a year ago, law enforcement tracked down the bad guys behind the malware, arrested them, and took over the servers they were using to cause Internet mayhem.

... the servers are scheduled to be shut down on July 9, 2012. When that happens, nearly half a million Internet users who are still infected could lose access to the web, email, and anything else that depends on DNS.

The DNSChanger Working Group has been working to get the word...
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About a year and a half ago, I had a client whose website would get hacked every few months.  We took security step after step to protect the site built on WordPress but it kept getting hacked.  Simple passwords was one of the original problems, but it seemed that once the hackers realized the site was there, it became a huge target even after the password security was boosted.  We needed something to make the site a hard target.

Hackers often deploy scripts or software code to search out sites that are easier to hack than others.  This script in the...

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Interactive Writing Plugins InboundWriter and ScribeSEO WordCamp Atlanta 2012 Brett Bumeter Interactive Writing Plugin presentation

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This video is part 1 of a multi part series covering SEO Copywriting plugins and tools for writers using the WordPress content management system.

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By Brett Bumeter curated from cnet.com - Image courtesy of cnet.com
Google announced today a new iOS app called YouTube Capture that lets users film and upload a video in as few as three clicks. Users can post their videos simultaneously to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, or upload them privately. Advanced features let users perform color correction and stabilization, edit the video length, and even add music.
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Perspective on the split between Apple and Google and the resulting break down in work flow within iOS

Google is building more apps directly for the iPhone now that Apple is starting to remove integration with various Google products, one social network step at a time.  Having switched from a Palm Pre a while back to an iPhone, I find this ironic.  Yes there is an app for everything, but apps are by their nature on IOS a very silo like affair.

The Palm Pre had a lot of flaws, mostly on the electronic side.  However, it...

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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.
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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 going to provide the answer in the search window before anyone every visits a primary source.

Google has just farmed content from sites all around the world and claimed ownership as the primary source!

Sure it took them over a...

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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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More than 1,000 WordPress blogs have been modified to redirect visitors to sites serving malware, affiliate and pay-per-click redirectors, and low quality PPC search result aggregators, through the WordPress' automatic update feature.

The individuals behind the attack have discovered how to add the malicious code to the update.php file, which prompts WordPress to update. This code then injects other code in the wp-settings.PHP file, and effects the redirects.

The update.php file contains the "wp_update_core" function, which is used by the WordPress Automatic Update feature, says Sinegubko.
Commentary:

For years web developers and WordPress developers will told the world and their clients if you want to keep your site secure, you need to keep it updated.  The best (easiest) way to do that  is simply to run auto updates (within reason) when they come available.

The most common WordPress updates, WordPress theme updates and WordPress plugin updates are security updates.  Someone finds a weakness, reports it and the developer or community jumps in and fixes it.

Ergo if you auto updated a plugin you were putting in a security patch typically.

Hackers however figured that out too and also discovered that...

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Organized by Phoenix based WordPress Hosting company Page.ly, the PressNomics conference sessions are focused exclusively on the commercial economy fueled by startups and SMB's leveraging WordPress. Discussion topics will include: bootstrapping to profitability, software licensing guidelines, SaaS, interface and application design, and finance.

The open source web publishing platform WordPress supports a very successful commercial economy estimated near $1B/yr. Commercial entities of all kinds serve the market of ~72 million WordPress powered sites and blogs with custom designed themes, plugins, web hosting, and service based consulting. PressNomics is a once a year gathering of international WordPress professionals to learn,...
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PressNomics 2012 is offering early bird registrations for this WordPress Conference in Arizona organized by Page.ly.

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