Blog

Not a virtual barge, a real barge, docked in San Francisco Bay. A second one has been towed into Portland Harbor, Maine and reportedly, two more are under construction.

As with all things Google, there’s plenty of mystery because Google isn’t saying much. On November 6th, Google released this statement: “Although it’s still early days and things may change, we’re exploring using the barge as an interactive space where people can learn about new technology.”

The barges are owned by a company called By and Large, LLC, which appears to be a front for Google. It has not gone unnoticed that the name of the fictional company in WALL-E, the animated film about a robot who is designed to clean up a futuristic waste-covered Earth, is Buy N Large. For more insight, read Google’s crazy barge scheme: Your complete guide.

Twitter’s IPO price was set at $26 per share, valuing the company at $18.34 billion. Trading began on November 7th with the price rising to a high of $50, then closing at $44.90. At the end of the first day of trading, Twitter was valued at $25 billion! Keep in mind, this is a company that has never turned a profit and posted a loss of nearly $65 million for its most recent quarter.

Twitter has become part of the global culture with 230 million users tweeting, retweeting, following and lurking. How often do you hear a respected news anchor report on a tweet from a politician, celebrity, or even the Pope? And the hashtags—some people actually write and speak in hashtags! Whether we actively use the service or not, Twitter affects us.

Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets said, “When people use Twitter they are following certain people, they’re searching for specific information. There are powerful marketing signals that are almost Google-esque, something that Facebook doesn’t really have.” Google-esque?? We’ll see if Twitter joins the ranks of Google, in terms of profitability. In an interview with CNBC, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said, “There’s nothing structural about Twitter that prevents us from having the kind of margin profiles of our peer group.” Read the interview for more on Twitter’s plans for the future.

Click here to learn how to use Twitter’s new custom-timeline feature and click here to read about advertising opportunities on Twitter.

Admin user interface up-dates

The updated site builder includes new colors and icons to produce a more constant user experience on desktop as well as tablets. The side navigation menu is now collapsible, creating more space in the main content areas for adjusting settings.

Mobile website responsive/css
The new site builder update will instantly create a smartphone website based off of your alreadying existing main website pages. There is no need to edit the mobile website. The mobile site uses responsive/css design techniques to tweak the display to fit on smaller resolution devices.

When editing your site, you will see "website" and "mobile" links at the top right of the edit area. These links allow you to easily toggle between desktop and mobile views of the page that you are currently editing. The automatic mobile site could be disabled if you want your full web site to display on mobile devices. Custom settings include adjusting the mobile navigation bar, enabling your main menu, and choosing to enable/disable your site logo and banner.

The automatic mobile site can be disabled if you want your full website to display on mobile devices. There is no need to worry about or adjust image sizes (option to manually sizes images is still available if you wish to use it). You simply upload your images and the system scales the images to fit/fill in the content area. The new image styles take advantage of CSS features included in new HTML5 browsers (latest IE, Firefox, Chrome and most mobile browsers). The styles can apply to default images on your site, photo galleries and all of your product images.

Image gallery
Image galleries will be much easier to manage. If you prefer to use it), there is no need to worry about or adjust image sizes (option to manually sizes images is still available. You simply upload your images and the system scales the images to fit/fill in the content area. You just need to set the number of columns to use for the display. The images are adjusted to fit if the page width grows/shrinks.

Image styles
The new image styles make use of CSS features included in new HTML5 browsers (latest IE, Firefox, Chrome and most mobile browsers). This includes images with rounded corners, enhanced borders, shadows and circular shaped images. Choose from up to 4 different styles of images and apply them to your web-site. The styles can apply to default images on your site, photo galleries and all of your product images.

HTML5 audio support
If it is available in your browser, the updated audio player takes advantage of HTML5 support. This allows the audio to work much better across different platforms and devices like phones and tablets.

Payment gateways
Two new payment gateways have been added
- Stripe
- PayMill

HTML5 microformats
Support for HTML5 microformats has been put into product pages. Microformats are extra information added to the HTML of website pages that make things easier for search engines to index your website. It also allows for websites such as Pintrest to display more detailed information about your services and products with the Pintrest Rich Pins feature.

Design
New layouts and background images have been added.

POP3 email accounts can now be upgraded to IMAP email accounts.  IMAP is an email protocol which keeps email stored on the server and allows a better email experience when customers are using multiple email clients/devices to access their email.  It also provides a backup of email in case the device storing messages fails.  

Fortune magazine called Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, the ultimate disrupter when he was chosen as its 2012 Businessperson of the Year. Last week, Bezos bought The Washington Post newspaper, a premier brand in the content world, for $250 million. In a memo to Post employees, Bezos wrote that he’s “excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.”

*According to the most recent internet usage data published in June 2012 by Nielsen Online and reported by internetworldstats.com, internet service is available to about 34% of the world's population. North America has the highest percentage of coverage; Africa, the lowest.

• North America - 79%
• Oceania/Australia - 68%
• Europe - 63%
• Latin America/Caribbean - 43%
• Middle East - 40%
• Asia - 28%
• Africa - 16%

Total number of internet users worldwide, as of June 2012: 2,405,518,376.

Instead of standing by waiting for internet service providers to tap the two-thirds of the population without internet access (see data, below*), Google is working toward servicing those areas with balloon powered internet. Essentially, 'Project Loon' works like this: balloons are moved around in the stratosphere and sent into a layer of wind that's moving in the right direction, creating a large communications network to which people can connect via an antenna attached to their building. Not surprisingly, Project Loon was founded by MIT-trained scientist, Richard DeVaul.

Recently, Google introduced Carousel for local search results. Now, when you search for a local business like a hotel or restaurant, the results appear in an interactive carousel at the top of the page. Click on one of the results in the carousel and you'll see the address, photos, overall review-based score and links to the actual reviews.

Any SEO provider who's trying to do the right thing will tell you that SEO is so much harder than it used to be. Content marketing takes far more time and effort than the link building tactics that worked years ago. Some try to cut corners by writing one article and posting that one article on multiple websites. That's duplicate content. It's certainly efficient for the SEO provider, but not effective for search results. Let's say Google gives you points for content marketing:

• One unique article posted on one site - 1 point.
• One unique article posted on two, three, four or more sites - may look impressive,
  but still - 1 point.
• Four unique articles posted on four sites - 4 points.

You get no credit for duplicate content. Duplicate content does nothing for search rankings but seeing their articles duplicated on numerous websites might impress those who don’t know better. You know better! 

The best way forward is to focus on the future and diversify your online marketing.
Build your online brand with social media, press releases, guest blogs, infographics, videos and all forms of content marketing.
Look into pay-per-click advertising. It may be more affordable than you think. A small business can run a very tight PPC campaign targeted to very specific locations and generate leads for less than the cost of other types of advertising. Set up a lead capture form on your website and track phone calls to get a true measure of your cost per lead.