You stare at the clock. It hasn’t moved in minutes. You’re starting to get a headache, and you remember that your dog chewed up your favorite pair of shoes last night. It’s only Tuesday and you’re ready for the week to be over.
I know your day is a bummer. I know you need a beer. But here’s something to make you feel better
[via AmazingLife247, YouTube]
The situation is still fluid outside the Oklahoma City area, after a massive tornado ripped through the town of Moore leaving a path of destruction that rivals any storm in recent memory. As of Tuesday morning, reports indicate that dozens of people are dead, including some children. Crews are just beginning the daunting task of searching through the rubble.
It’s hard to find many uplifting stories in a tragedy like this – at least this early on. Later we’ll hear reports of heroism and self-sacrifice. Today comes this story of a woman and her dog.
While conducting an interview with CBS, an elderly woman found her lost dog buried under the rubble.
“I never lost consciousness,” says Barbara Garcia, “and I hollered for my little dog…and he didn’t answer, and he didn’t come. So I know he’s in here somewhere.”
About a minute later, the reporter notices the dog just a few feet from where they are conducting the interview. Truly incredible.
There has been a lot of terrifying imagery of the tornado that terrorized the Oklahoma City area on Monday, but this incredible video shows the formation of the storm in Newcastle, OK.
“The birth of the May 20, 2013 tornado at Newcastle, OK. It Moved from there to Moore where it turned into an F4. God be with its victims,” says Charles Cook in the YouTube video description.
The video is currently the top entry in reddit’s r/video subreddit, under the heading: “Incredible video my Dad took of the May 20th tornado FORMING and destroying everything in its path near Newcastle, OK (0-F4 in seconds)”
User solvitNOW, who submitted it, says, “He was out that way for work today and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was worried it was going to come back at him and was searching for a way to scoot out it’s way once he was able to gauge how insanely close it was to him. He hung in there, though. Unbelievable.”
See some photos of the aftermath here.
Ever wondered what it might look like from a first-person perspective to be eaten by a grizzly bear? This video might give you an idea.
Don’t worry, it’s not a gross mauling video, but Brad Josephs’ “A Grizzly Ate My GoPro!!!” video is generating some viral buzz today, and with good reason.
Two months ago, NASA observed the largest explosion on the Moon that they’ve ever seen. And today, they’re talking about it and have released a cool video that shows the event as it took place.
The explosion was caused by a meteorite, 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide, weighing in at about 40 kilograms. When it hit the moon, it was travelling at 56,000 miles per hour. According to NASA, it exploded with the force of 5 tons of TNT.
“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
The impact was so bright, in fact, that anyone looking would have seen it without the help of a telescope.
“It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” says Marshall Space Flight Center analyst Ron Suggs, who was the first to see the impact.
This type of lunar strike is common, but NASA has yet to see one this large in the nearly 8 years its been monitoring the moon for such impacts. Here’s why:
Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed. “Lunar meteors” crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event. Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are sporadic meteors–random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.
Oh, by the way, the “explosion” is special thanks to the lack of oxygen in the Moon’s atmosphere.
“The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” says NASA.
If you’re looking to sell more from mobile devices, you might want to check out a couple of sessions from Google I/O that the company has now made available online. Google, during its keynote, noted that 97 percent of mobile shopping carts are abandoned. Clearly, there’s work to be done.
Google did announce a new Google Wallet API designed to help fight that shopping cart abandonment problem. More on that here.
If you’ve spent some time on YouTube recently, you may have noticed that not every channel you land on looks the same. Some channels sport a new look that features a large header photo, social links, and a new design that reorganizes videos by category.
This new design is called the YouTube One Channel, and YouTube has had it in beta for some time now. In that time, over 100 million channels have opted-in to the new look. But for all of you holdouts, your days with the old channel format are numbered. YouTube has just announced that all channels with be automatically and permanently moved to the new One Channel design by June 5th.
“Channels that have already made the switch are experiencing several benefits. Their branding shines through in more places because Channel Art is visible on iOS apps, Android apps and TV. For the channels that have opted in, we’ve seen 20% more page views on their channels because clicks from the YouTube guide go directly to their channel pages instead of to their activity feeds,” says YouTube
Here’s what the new channels look like:
Compare that to the old channels, which will no longer exist come June 5th:
Of course, if you’re a channel owner and you’re just now hearing about this – you can choose to opt-in early here.
And speaking of YouTube and channels, the company just expanded live streaming to any and all channels with 1000+ subscribers.
A video of a bus crash with a deer is gaining some viral steam. According to the video’s description, the white-tailed deer crashed through the CamTran bus on Tuesday evening. It shows the deer crash through the windshield, then flail and run around like a maniac.
Eventually, though we don’t see it in the video, the driver reportedly let the deer out of the bus through the door, and it went back out into the wild. The incident reportedly happened in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
This may be the most intense police pursuit you’ve ever seen. Traffic Officer Mark James of the Portland Police Bureau caught a car doing 52 in a 35, endangering the lives of every motorist on the road.
Hot on the trail and catching up to the speeder, James hit a roadblock. Inncent lives were at stake. Of course, officers are sworn to protect and serve – even if those that need protection are on the featherier side of things.
The violator got away. Damnit, foiled by ducks again.
[via reddit]
One of the funniest minutes on late night is back for its 9th installment, and we couldn’t be happier. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreations reading tweets from young female celebrities.
In this episode, TV’s Ron Swanson reads tweets from such starlets as Katy Perry, Miranda Cosgrove, and Jennette McCurdy.
If you’re interested, there’s a lot more where that came from.
[TeamCoco]
Google gave an incredibly lengthy keynote to open up Google I/O on Wednesday. This included a number of announcements pertaining to Android, Google Play, Chrome, Google+, Search and Google Maps, yet still didn’t come close to covering all of the company’s announcements for the day.
At the end, CEO Larry Page made a surprise appearance, and engaged in a Q&A session with audience members.
WLIIA fans, rejoice! The CW has just unveiled the first promo clip for the new season of the classic improv show, which is slated to kick off this summer.
The CW revival of the series, which started in the late 90’s and ran for 8 seasons on ABC, brings back Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady, and Colin Mochrie – but has replaced the host. In the new version comedian Aisha Tyler is filling in for Drew Carey. The new series will feature a “special guest” for each episode, and will consist of ten 30-minute shows.
Impressions? Well, Colin and Ryan look a bit older, but other than that the performers don’t seem to have lost a step – even when they’re being forced to use 90210 as source material. And Laura Hall is back!
Check it out:
Google has a lot of stuff in the works that will have a direct impact on webmasters and the search engine optimization community. In a seven-minute “Webmaster Help” video, Google’s Matt Cutts (sporting a Mozilla Firefox shirt), ran down much of what Google’s webspam team has planned for the coming months, and what it all means for webmasters. It involves the Penguin update, the Panda update, advertorials, hacked sites, link spam, and a lot more.
Are you paying close attention to Google’s algorithm updates these days? Are you looking forward to the updates, or are you afraid of what they will bring? Let us know in the comments.
Cutts is careful to note that any of this information is subject to change, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but this pretty much the kind of stuff they have planned at the moment.
We already knew the Penguin update was on the way, and he touches on that.
“We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin,” says Cutts. “Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper in have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”
Before the video came out, Cutts was already talking about this update on Twitter, saying that it would be “larger” and roll out in the “next few weeks”.
Google recently changed its updating strategy for Panda. Webmasters use to anxiously await coming Panda updates, but Google has turned it into a rolling update, meaning that it will continue to update often and regularly, to the point where anticipating any one big update is not really possible any longer. On top of that, Google stopped announcing them, as it just doesn’t make sense for them to do so anymore.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t Panda news, as Cutts has proven. It turns out that the Panda that has haunted so many webmasters over the last couple years may start easing up a little bit, and become (dare I say?) a bit friendlier.
Cutts says, “We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”
If you’re an authority on any topic, and you write about it a lot, this should be good news (in a perfect world, at least).
“We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters,” says Cutts. “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space. You know, it could be medical. It could be travel. Whatever. And try to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site, according to the algorithms, we think might be a little more appropriate for users.”
Also on the Google menu is a bigger crackdown on advertorials.
“We’ve also been looking at advertorials,” says Cutts .”That is sort of native advertising – and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines. So, again, if someone pays for coverage, or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank. We’ve seen a few sites in the U.S. and around the world that take money and do link to websites, and pass PageRank, so we’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines.”
“There’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank, and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure, so that users realize that something is paid – not organic or editorial,” he adds.
Google will also be working harder on certain types of queries that tend to draw a lot of spam.
Cutts says, “We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk. So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”
Google will continue to be vigilant when it comes to all types of link spam, and has some new tricks up its sleeve, apparently.
Cutts says, “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers – some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on ways that that becomes less effective, and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”
“In fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis,” he adds. “We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munching, and see how good it looks. We’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.”
Hopefully this won’t lead to a whole lot of new “fear of linking” from webmasters, as we’ve seen since Penguin first rolled out, but that’s probably wishful thinking.
Google intends to get better on the hacked sites front.
“We also continue to work on hacked sites in a couple different ways,” says Cutts. “Number one: trying to detect them better. We hope in the next few months to roll out a next-generation site detection that is even more comprehensive, and also trying to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they see confusion between hacked sites and sites that serve up malware, and ideally, you’d have a one-stop shop where once someone realizes that they’ve been hacked, they can go to Webmaster Tools, and have some single spot where they could go and have a lot more info to sort of point them in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites.”
There have been complaints about domain clustering in Google’s results, and Google showing too many results from the same domain on some queries.
Cutts says, “We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from people about – if I go down three pages deep, I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain, and we’ve actually made things better in terms of – you would be less likely to see that on the first page, but more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking a change, which might deploy, which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site, then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.”
“We’re going to keep trying to figure out how we can give more information to webmasters…we’re also going to be looking for ways that we can provide more concrete details, [and] more example URLs that webmasters can use to figure out where to go to diagnose their site.”
So Google has a lot of stuff in the works that SEOs and webmasters are going to want to keep a close eye on. It’s going to be interesting to see the impact it all has. Given that Google makes algorithm changes every day, this has to be far from everything they have in the works, but I guess the video makes up for the lack of “Search Quality HIghlights” from Google in recent months. Still wondering if those are ever coming back. They were, after all, released to keep Google more transparent.
What do you think of the changes Matt Cutts talked about. Looking forward to any of them? Dreading any? Let us know in the comments.
The question of which hurts more (childbirth or a kick in the balls) continues to plague the curious, as it has for generations. Well, here a couple guys you might be able to ask.
Labor Pain Simulation from Kensington on Vimeo.
They say it was worse than they expected, with reactions like, “That was not good,” and, “It sucked.”
But the real evidence is in the clear agony that they are feeling as it is happening. Having witnessed two childbirths firsthand, and now this video, I have to lean toward childbirth as the more painful scenario.
You don’t see people catching flying birds in midair everyday. FB-Rambo uploaded this video of a hunter that does just that to LiveLeak on Monday, and it has quickly become one of the top videos currently on reddit.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield has been doing awesome things in space, aboard the International Space Station, for some time now – now he’s on his way back to Earth after a stint as the ISS’ Commander.
Well, here’s his goodbye. It’s a slightly tweaked version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Yep, “Space Oddity” performed in space. It just feels right, doesn’t it?
[via reddit]
This video of a baby duck falling asleep, or struggling to stay awake, rather, has been around for about a year. In fact, in a couple days, it will be the video’s one-year anniversary on YouTube.
According to search data from Yahoo, searches for “baby duck falling asleep” are up 590% this week. Clearly interest is holding strong.
Melting hearts across the web… searches for [baby duck falling asleep] are up 590% this week. Have you seen it? ht.ly/kRCnB
— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) May 9, 2013
Unfortunately, the video Yahoo links to does not work. Allow me to direct you to YouTube:
The video actually only has over 800,000 views on YouTube so far, but with interest on the rise, I’d expect that to go up significantly very soon. Watch the video and help the number.
As an added bonus, here’s a lesser known video of baby ducks falling asleep (via AirDrone):
Funny videos of news anchors and weathermen losing their cool on television are nothing new on the Internet. Some might even say that they’re what makes the Internet worth using. No? Either way, they’re usually pretty funny.
Reddit has unearthed a new one where the weather segment begins after a Depends commercial featuring former NFL defensive tackle Tony Siragusa talking about “guarding your manhood”. Needless to say, the weather guy found the commercial amusing: