The sale is being brokered by WebsiteBrokerage.com, who also represents brand.com, geo.org, and haircare.com
RSS.com still boasts its plans, which is to “launch a high quality RSS reader, married to a crowd sourced, crowd curated RSS feed directory.”
They says that this “community approach will allow users to drill down to top subject matter content and experts quickly and efficiently.”
That plans never really worked out for Sheridan, and now he’s looking to sell.
With Google Reader on the way out, there’s now a giant void that must be filled (unless you think RSS is dead). Digg has announced plans to build their own Reader replacement. Existing feed readers like Feedly and Newsblur are looking to capitalize on the many Google Reader users looking for an alternative. Will someone step up and bring RSS.com’s plans to life? 200 large is a pretty hefty asking price, but who knows?
Today, Netflix unveiled their new ISP Speed Index website, which lets users browse the average performance of multiple ISPs across many of the countries in which Netflix in available.
As of now, Google Fiber is the clear winner with an average speed of 3.35Mbps. Second to Google Fiber is Sweden’s Ownit, which streams at 2.99Mbps on average.
Finnish Netflix users enjoy to fastest speeds overall, and Mexican users the lowest. In the U.S., Cablevison, SuddenLink, Cox and Verizon – FiOS round out the top 5.
Of course, these are averages and Netflix notes that the peak performances for the ISPs are much higher:
The Netflix ISP Speed Index is based on data from the more than 33 million Netflix members who view over 1 billion hours of TV shows and movies streaming from Netflix per month. The listed speeds reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP’s network and are an indicator of the performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.
Note: the average performance is below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes Netflix uses to deliver the TV shows and movies as well as the variety of devices members use and home network conditions. These factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs.
Netflix first started releasing monthly ISP rankings back in December of last year, but this is the first time that they’ve aggregated all of their data into a slick little site. Google Fiber has taken the top spot on each month’s list since last November’s rankings.
YouTube, the leader in online video, is not without its fair share of serious competition coming from the likes of Vimeo, Hulu, and more. Now, it appears that its latest rival may come from someone who was once very close to the service.
In fact, the challenge may come from one of its co-founders. Speaking over the weekend at a Q&A session with Digg’s Kevin Rose, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley tipped that he was working on a new sort of video site – one more focused on creators and collaboration.
“I wish [SXSW] was a month later because I could unveil the new product,” said Hurley in a recent interview. He said that the new service will be “primarily video-based…and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content.”
Hurley made sure to say that he wasn’t looking to kill YouTube and that “there’s always going to be a place for YouTube.” His new site will simply focus on being a “platform better suited for collaboration.”
Hurley is the co-founder and former CEO of YouTube. IN 2006, he and Steve Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. He stepped down as CEO in 2010.
Well, this guy sure has an interesting resume – or CV or whatever you want to call it. Upon first glance, you probably wouldn’t even notice that this Amazon product page is actually a a giant advertisement for Philippe Dubost, and web product manager.
Yet it is. Dubost has refashioned his website, phildub.com, to closely resemble an page on Amazon.com – product pictures, star ratings, dimensions, descriptions, and even a button to “add to cart.”
According to Dubost, there’s only 1 left in stock and it ships directly from Paris, France. In the product details we find the the product is 186 cm and comes in English, French, and Spanish. The average customer review, of course, is five stars.
Below that, Dubost has inserted a product description and “professional experience” disguised as product reviews.
(image)
The links are functioning as well. If you click on the author name link, it takes you to his LinkedIn profile. If you click “add to cart” a contact form pops up. All of the links to his various places of education and employment go to the respective sites.
The unique web CV is gaining a lot of attention right now, so I guess it worked. Let’s see if it gets him hired at Amazon or somewhere else that could use a clever web product manager.
Viral trendsetters BuzzFeed have just announced a significant cash injection – $19.3 million led by NEA. Previous investors RRE, Hearst, SoftBank, and Lerer Ventures also participated – as did Michael and Kass Lazerow, Buddy Media co-founders.
“We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale. We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster,” said Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed Founder and CEO.
In a release, BuzzFeed touts their coverage of the 2012 election aided by their “ten content verticals and bureaus in Washington D.C.” They say that this round of funding will help them “build a media company for the social age.” And $19.3 million is a pretty hefty chunk of change for the site, which received 15 million last year.
“We couldn’t be more excited to build the defining media company for the social era with Jonah and the team,” said Patrick Kerins, NEA investor and BuzzFeed Board member. “We think BuzzFeed will be one of the great media companies of the next decade.”
According to BuzzFeed, the site topped 40 million unique visitors last month. The claim that much of that was driven my social referrals – mainly Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. They also claim that mobile accounts for over one third of all BuzzFeed traffic. BuzzFeed currently employs 180 people.
When my anti-Twitter friend finally joined the service, I expected that it would only take a few days for him to see why we love it. But after a week, he’d already deleted his account, saying it simply wasn’t for him. So I inquired further, and asked him if he’d been tweeting.
Nah, not really, he said. Well, what about responding to others’ tweets? Nah, not really, he said.
Well, duh. That’s the problem. You gotta engage, I told him. And now, a year later, his incessant Twitter use is borderline annoying. It’s all about engagement.
And what better way to utilize the Twitter platform than to engage with strangers by helping them answer their questions. I’m sure you’ve seen some Twitter users use the service as if it were a polling forum, or even Google. So many questions floating around on the Twittersphere – why not take some time and answer some of them?
That’s the thought behind Youasked.it, a new single-serving site that allows you to respond to random people’s questions on Twitter, in real time. A random question will be generated for you, and you then have 30 seconds to respond. If you don’t want to answer the given question, you can skip it and get a different one. You can also narrow down the type of questions you’re likely to receive by telling Youasked.it what string of keywords the tweeted questions must contain.
Yes, you do have to be logged in to your Twitter account to participate – you can’t just send totally anonymous responses to people. But if you’re looking for a funny (and possible conflict-inducing) way to engage with people on Twitter that you may have never had the chance to engage otherwise, this is a pretty interesting little concept.
Feel like trolling the Twittersphere? This tool makes it easy.
UPDATE: It appears that a problem with Amazon Web Services EC2 in Northern Virginia. You can check out AWS’ Service Health Dashboard here.
Those of you looking to browse reddit right now may be out of luck. That’s because the site is down, and has been for at least a couple of hours.
According to Reddit Status on Twitter, the site began having problems around noon ET, and those problems expanded to taking down the whole site a little past 1:30 pm. Reddit says a “network-related issue” is to blame.
What’s bad news for reddit and redditors is good news for a couple of other sites. The “reddit is down” page includes a couple of suggestions for people while the site is down. At the bottom right-hand corner there’s a link to imgur and the scrolling message asks users if they happened to see today’s XKCD comic yet.
It also tells you just how impatient you are, by noting how many times you’ve refreshed. Thanks, reddit, but we already know how lost we are without you.
Although Walter White is probably beyond saving at this point, a site set up in his honor is pulling in real donations for real cancer patients.
Remember back to season two of AMC’s hit show (and best show on television) Breaking Bad. Got it? Okay, then you’ll probably recall when Walt Jr. set up a horribly designed website to pull in donations for his dad, the inimitable Walter White. In the show, the site was called “Save Walter White,” and it ended up pulling in some good money for the White clan (although he began to need the charity of others less and less after season two).
When that episode aired, AMC saw an opportunity to do some by using the immense popularity of the show. So they set up savewalterwhite.com for real, and allowed visitors to make donations to a non-profit cancer organization called The National Cancer Coalition. According to the NCC, their goal is to “ensure everyone has access to quality medical care and drugs to fight chronic disease and cancer – no matter where in the world they live.”
Today, AMC is announcing that the site has been a success. Here’s what has happened in just a little over three years:
“Since the launch of SaveWalterWhite.com in July of 2009, more than one million Breaking Bad fans have clicked on the “Click Here to Donate” button and visited the National Cancer Coalition’s website, and to date, those fans have donated more than $125,000 to the NCC,” says AMC in a blog post.
If you want to make a donation, the site is still up and running. Beware, it’s pretty ugly as AMC let it mimic Walt Jr.’s design from the show.
If you need any more proof that reddit is not to be disregarded (and really, why would you), they’re happy to provide you cold, hard stats. The coldest and hardest of stats – pageview stats.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Reddit is freaking enormous. According to a tweet from the reddit alien, the site topped 3.4 billion pageviews in August. Yes, billion.
Those came from 42.9 million unique visitors who spent an average of 17 minutes and 29 seconds on the site per visit. And despite how you may feel, that’s not a typo. It’s not really 17 hours and 29 minutes per visit.
Of course, August wasn’t just another month on the reddit calendar. Something big happened – something really big. As you may recall, the reddit community convinced a sitting U.S. President to participate in an Ask Me Anything session.
Barack Obama’s AMA helped pad the August stats, but it would be remiss to attribute reddit’s massive month to one single post. Sure, the AMA was huge – 3 million pageviews on the first day, and over 5 million in the first three days. But that’s only a few million drops in a giant pool.
Just how much has reddit grown in, oh let’s say 8 months? A lot. Back in December of 2011, reddit had one hell of a month – 2 billion pageviews and 35 million uniques.
There are some Twitter accounts that you follow because you genuinely value the tweets that come from them. Great Twitter accounts can provide up-to-the-second news and insider information, or they can give you a window inside the life of celebs and other high-profile newsmakers. Some Twitter accounts you follow because the person tweets tidbits that are relevant to your everyday life or line of work.
And some Twitter accounts you follow because it would simply be a disservice to yourself not to follow them, even if you can’t put your finger on why. Former MLB star Jose Canseco’s Twitter account falls into this category.
Canseco’s Twitter account (472,000 followers) has been on the radar for a little while now. Not only is he very active on the site, but his tweets oftentimes range from WTF to seriously, WTF. It’s both entertaining and bizarre, unfiltered and occasionally offensive. Last month it was briefly deactivated, but the perplexing string of tweets resumed very shortly thereafter.
Now, Canseco’s latest Twitter activity is holding up to the high standards of odd set by previous activity. He has just used his account to notify his followers of a new membership website that will involve live streamed chats, inside baseball footage and, well, weekly injections.
You will all join my website cause it will be so easy and cost almost nothing.you can talk to me direct using a video feed and get to see live baseball footage of playing so you haters can make fun of me ,also you will see me inject my weekly dosage of testosterone and lots more
So, there you go. Now word on when this members only experience will open up. Also, no word on how he plans to mix the interactive testosterone experience with his other recent aspirations:
Over the weekend, the Stop Online Piracy Act was dealt a major blow as the legislation was delayed until “outstanding concerns” have been addressed. SOPA will not move forward in the House as the official vote was been cancelled and the bill has been yanked from the floor. Representative and SOPA opponent Darrell Issa cheered this as a win for the internet community – but he warned that SOPA’s Senate cousin PIPA is still a major concern.
He’s right, and SOPA is still a concern as well. While it has been delayed, SOPA is not dead (just ask SOPA author Lamar Smith). It is entirely possible that SOPA could resurrect once a “consensus is reached.” SOPA must be destroyed while vulnerable.
And presumably, that’s why many sites will still participate in a scheduled blackout on Wednesday, January 18th to protest the legislation.
Smaller sites can get in on the protest as well. A site, sopastrike.com, has been set up by the Fight for the Future non-profit. It allows anyone with a website to join the strike. The site’s list of all registered blackout participants contains hundreds of small websites.
This site has been blocked in protest of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) two bills which will allow the government to censor the internet. Find out more at americancensorship.org or the video below. This website will return at 8pm.
It will also show this video about SOPA and PIPA. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s a nice video that explains the dangers of the legislation:
Googler Pierre Far made a timely Google+ post Monday evening, coyly referencing the fact that sometimes webmasters feel the need to take their site offline for a day because of “server maintenance or as political protest.” He mentions this action as the most important one to take if you plan on having your site go dark for a day:
1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:
a. It tells us it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.
b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.
2. Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.
If you don’t own a site and want to spread the word of the blackout via social media, you can use the hashtag #sopastrike or #stopsopa all day. BlackoutSopa.org also allows for you to change your Twitter pic to one of three images – either a smaller “Stop SOPA” banner under your pic, a total “STOP SOPA” image or a simple blackout.
There is still a day until the SOPA blackout, which means the window is closing for other big-name sites to join in. Having Reddit and Wikipedia down is going to be a huge deal, and it would only get bigger if other social sites joined the blackout party.
But it appears that not everybody is joining the party. In response to Radar correspondent Alex Howard asking him if he had the “cojones” to join Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia in the blackout, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had this to say:
@dickc dick costolo@digiphile Not shutting down a service doesn’t equal not taking the proper stance on an issue. We’ve been very clear about our stance17 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales agrees that Twitter should not go dark in protest –
@jimmy_wales Jimmy Wales@dickc Can you confirm your support for Wikipedia’s protest? I agree with you that twitter should not go dark.14 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
He makes a distinction – that Twitter needs to be used to organize the protests. It’s a no-brainer that shutting down giant social media sites like Twitter and Facebook would severely hamper the ability to communicate about the protest. But if the purpose of the blackout is awareness, to send out a warning message, then nothing would be as jolting as seeing a site like Twitter go dark for an entire day.
Not all SOPA opponents feel that a blackout it a good way to tackle the unpopular legislation. As PandoDaily’s Paul Carr writes,
Arguing that a one-day closure reminds everyone of the importance of net freedom is like burning down one church to underscore the importance of the First Amendment for all of the others. Even if the shut-down did send an effective message, it’s still not Wikipedia’s call to make. If you ask the entire world for money to stay live, then you owe the entire world the courtesy of staying live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
He also stresses that Wikipedia should stay neutral on policy issues, as they are dedicated to staying impartial in every other facet of the site. Jimmy Wales has responded to this concern as well:
So the English version of Wikipedia will be inaccessible for the purposes of article retrieval from 5am GMT to 5pm GMT on Wednesday. All visitors will see an open letter asking that they contact their representatives about SOPA/PIPA. Wales told the Telegraph:
“The general sentiment seemed to be that US law, as it impacts the internet, can affect everyone.”
Do you think that Wikipedia has a duty to stay neutral on the SOPA/PIPA issue? Or do they have a duty to take a stance because the legislation threatens the internet as a whole?Let us know in the comments.
Although SOPA was dealt a crushing blow this weekend, do you think that the demonstration is necessary to show people the real cost of internet censorship, so maybe legislation like SOPA won’t get this far in the future? Or do you think that blacking out a popular site for an entire day is too much, or even counterproductive? Do you think that it will work in swaying any SOPA supporters? Let us know in the comments.
As major sites like Wikipedia and reddit prepare for a Wednesday blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate cousin the Protect IP Act, many smaller sites are also debating whether or not they want to participate in what is being called “SOPA Blackout Day.”
White there is still a great deal of debate surrounding the possible efficacy vs. consequences of going dark for an entire day to protest domestic legislation, plenty of sites will turn off on January 18th.
Googler Pierre Far made a timely Google+ post in which he outlined some tips for webmasters who want to go dark in protest, but have SEO considerations.
Check it out below, and remember, the internet must remain free.
Website outages and blackouts the right way
tl;dr: Use a 503 HTTP status code but read on for important details.
Sometimes webmasters want to take their site offline for a day or so, perhaps for server maintenance or as political protest. We’re currently seeing some recommendations being made about how to do this that have a high chance of hurting how Google sees these websites and so we wanted to give you a quick how-to guide based on our current recommendations.
The most common scenario we’re seeing webmasters talk about implementing is to replace the contents on all or some of their pages with an error message (“site offline”) or a protest message. The following applies to this scenario (replacing the contents of your pages) and so please ask (details below) if you’re thinking of doing something else.
1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:
a. It tells us it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.
b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.
2. Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.
3. Two important notes about robots.txt:
a. As Googlebot is currently configured, it will halt all crawling of the site if the site’s robots.txt file returns a 503 status code for robots.txt. This crawling block will continue until Googlebot sees an acceptable status code for robots.txt fetches (currently 200 or 404). This is a built-in safety mechanism so that Googlebot doesn’t end up crawling content it’s usually blocked from reaching. So if you’re blacking out only a portion of the site, be sure the robots.txt file’s status code is not changed to a 503.
b. Some webmasters may be tempted to change the robots.txt file to have a “Disallow: /” in an attempt to block crawling during the blackout. Don’t block Googlebot’s crawling like this as this has a high chance of causing crawling issues for much longer than the few days expected for the crawl rate recovery.
4. Webmasters will see these errors in Webmaster Tools: it will report that we saw the blackout. Be sure to monitor the Crawl Errors section particularly closely for a couple of weeks after the blackout to ensure there aren’t any unexpected lingering issues.
5. General advice: Keep it simple and don’t change too many things, especially changes that take different times to take effect. Don’t change the DNS settings. As mentioned above, don’t change the robots.txt file contents. Also, don’t alter the crawl rate setting in WMT. Keeping as many settings constant as possible before, during, and after the blackout will minimize the chances of something odd happening.
As more and more people use their smartphones for computery purposes, it’s become increasingly important for webmasters to make sure that their webpages don’t turn into to complete mess. Small fonts, poor organization, frames that don’t stay aligned – what looks good on your computer monitor may turn into to complete rubbish on your smartphone.
However, if you built your website using Zeeblio, or are even planning on building a website and shopping around for tools, they’ve announced an incredibly helpful feature: a one-click function that turns your published website into a mobile-friendly version when viewed on smartphones and tablets. Beyond simply shrinking your website (since your browser pretty much does that already by default), the feature allows users to customize content you want displayed when viewed from mobile devices. And seriously, all you have to do is click on feature that says “Turn On Mobile Layout.” That’s it (unless you wanna tweak the lay-out, but that’s your bag to sort through).
Created by the folks at Tripod.com, Zeeblio’s mission is to help professionals and small business create sharp looking websites with relative ease and puts a heavy emphasis on customization. For anyone unfamiliar with their product, the video below should give you a proper introduction.
Kelly O’Hara, Product Manager of Web Publishing, explained, “The number of consumers that access the web via mobile phones continues to grow, and our customers need great-looking, mobile-friendly sites to be successful. We’re excited about this new feature because now Zeeblio is not just the easiest way to make an awesome website, it’s also the easiest way to create a fantastic mobile site, too.”
There’s really no excuse anymore for businesses to not have made their websites compatible to the already-difficult navigation of mobile browsers.
The virtual pissing contest between Arabs and Israelis raged on today. A hacker network called “group-xp” claimed responsibility for DDoS attacks on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and on El Al Israel Airlines.
But, let’s be clear. They did not disrupt trading at the exchange nor flights on the airline. In other words, they simply crashed the cosmetic homepages of those entities.
This is somewhat akin to claiming credit for attacking a person’s home, only for it to be discovered later that you ripped the numbers off the mailbox.
Earlier this month, the group claimed they had gotten almost half a million Israeli credit card numbers. Israeli authorities said that it was more like 21,000 numbers. There is some debate as to whether those numbers were genuine.
Last week an Israeli retaliated by posting information about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, etc. This hacker claimed to be a “soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit”.
If most of this sounds all too adolescent, it could well be. The release of some credit card information may have caused inconvenience, but no cardholder would be held responsible for that kind of theft. These stunts sound a lot like teens or college students trolling around for low-security sites to scrape credit card info from, if they don’t make the numbers up entirely. Then, they make forum postings filled with racist and warmongering invective.
The former head of Internet security for the Israeli government said, “Right now, we’re not seeing anything that’s especially interesting or especially dangerous.”
Beginning January 12, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will be accepting applications for newly available top-level domain names beyond the typical .com and .net variety. Some of the new domain offerings you might see are .book and .aero and (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) .xxx.
Still, as fun as it might be to register face.book or lexa.pro, those site pranks will cost you a cool $185,000 a pop.
That price tag might seem like a strong enough preventive measure to keep everyday buffoons from taking advantage of the names of corporations but the U.S. government is still wary of ICANN’s new offerings. Lawerence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information for the Department of Commerce, met with representatives from several businesses to discuss ICANN’s decision. As Bloomberg puts it, “General Electric Co. (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Coca-Cola Co. (KO) are among more than 40 companies that have joined with the Association of National Advertisers to oppose the expansion, saying it will increase costs for companies, confuse customers and create new risks of Internet fraud.”
In a letter to ICANN citing concerns of potential cybersquatting of websites including brand names and increased confusion among consumers, ANA President Robert D. Liodice wrote:
The ANA and its membership regard the Program as not merely unsupportable, but potentially disastrous — exacting outrageous fees and costs, requiring massive diversion of resources, and instituting an application, evaluation and dispute resolution process that is certain to lead to increased contention and costly federal and international legal action with no demonstrable benefit to businesses or consumers. These concerns are especially heightened in an economy that day by day continues to pose ever-increasing challenges and unprecedented uncertainties for businesses and consumers worldwide. Another layer of unnecessary and unjustifiable costs is the last thing the selling and buying public needs in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Corporations already patrol the Internet for websites that they believe violate trademarks. Additionally, they don’t want you getting your rocks off at the expense of their namesake. Just try visiting microsoft.xxx, facebook.xxx, apple.xxx, amazon.xxx, or even twitter.xxx. All of these URLs present visitors with the same message:
And yeah, you barely even need to take one guess as to who the owners of those respective domains might be. Corporations have a steady practice of snatching up websites that they have zero intention of using solely to prevent the URLs from being used by cybersquatters and shady businesses.
ICANN acknowledged all of the above concerns and stated that they’re “going to go slow” in divvying out the new URLs to applicants. Regardless, Reuters reports that “ICANN has no plans to delay rollout of the top level domain expansion, a goal that is to allow more innovation in website addresses and to open the space to the non-Latin alphabets. It has pledged a quick take-down for trademark violators under the new system.”
All said, it seems a little presumptuous of businesses to assume that the average Internet user would be duped by a site like facebook.xxx. Besides, who’s to say that apple.xx wouldn’t be a legitimate site? Maybe there’s an untapped market out there for people with antediluvian fetishes that such a URL would perfectly satisfy? Besides, it’s not just anybody that’s going to fork over nearly $200K in order to create such a website. As Mr. Liodice mentioned above, the U.S. economy is still in crisis and people might wanna hold onto that money for more meaningful purposes.
What do you think? Is this brand protection overkill or do these corporations have a fair complaint for protecting their brand? Add your comments to the discussion below.
An interesting infographic has come out looking at what websites are made up of. More specifically, the most popular markup languages, servers and hosting on the web.
A 30-year-old Quebec native is already in the record books, but his goals are even more ambitious. Pat Vaillancourt wants to cover his body with URLs – 100,000 to be exact. He’s donating his entire body to be the canvas of the internet, and you can be a part of it all for a small fee.
For just $35, you can have your site permanently inked into Mr. Vaillancourt’s skin, as well as linked to from his fast-growing list of sponsors on his personal site, back2thelight.com. Major sponsors (the ones that get the large tattoos in the prime real estate seen above) have to shell out $500.
According to his site, more than half the money he raises for the project will go towards charitable organizations to help in places like Haiti and Somalia.
Those who know me will agree that I’m a spontaneous guy, a man of real conviction and passion who’s not afraid of getting involved in unconventional projects. I want to break a world record and become the man with “the most Websites tattooed on his body.” But more importantly, I want to help others. That’s why I’m going to donate more than half the money raised through the project for Haïti.
Vaillancourt already has over 15,000 URLs tattooed all over his body, and he claims that over 16,000 more have already reserved a spot. Apparently, the first 50,000 URLs will be inked traditionally, as black text. The second half will be tattooed in fluorescent ink so that he can be “very noticeable in nightclubs.”
Each 100 URLs take about an hour to tattoo, so the entire 100,000 will end up costing Vaillancourt between 10,000 and 12,000 hours of his life. The entire project will hopefully generate a total of around $3.5 million.
While “over half” the money will go to charity, the rest will go to paying old debts and helping him raise his son, he says. With almost 150,000 likes on his Facebook page, it looks like Vaillancourt is generating enough publicity to make his goal a reality.
If you offer a web service for which you charge, will it harm sales to prominently promote a “free trial” option for possible users? According to a case study of email marketing platform GetResponse, the answer is no.
Before the test, GetResponse offered a free trial for their service – but it wasn’t prominently displayed on their homepage. Instead it was buried deeper on the site, on other pages. Bottom line: is wasn’t a well promoted option for browsing customers. On the other hand, the “buy now” button, allowing people to directly purchase their services, did have prime real estate on the homepage.
They wanted to know what would happen if they displayed their free trial option directly beside the “buy now” option. Would it significantly decrease the number of paid accounts?
There was a perception that providing a “Free Trial” button will decrease the number of signups so it was quite a critical test. They used Visual Website Optimizer to quickly setup an A/B test in which variation had an extra “Free Trial” button next to the “Buy Now” button.
Here’s what A looked like:
And here’s what the B variation homepage looked like:
What they found was that not only did the prominent free trial button increase free account signups by 158%, it led to no significant decrease in the number of paid accounts that people were signing up for via the homepage button.
Agnieszka Dabrowska of GetResponse had this to say about the results:
It’s worth testing different variations of Call to Action (CTA) on the homepage. We expected that by adding a free trial button on the homepage the number of paid accounts would decrease. We were positively surprised by the results. Not only did we manage to keep the sale at the same level, but we also noticed a huge increase in the number of free trial accounts, which will also result in a bigger number of upgrades in the future.
Of course a case study is just that – a study of one case. There’s no guarantee that adding a “free trial” button to your homepage would produce similar results. But it does show that it’s probably worth a try.
Can you attest to the advantages and disadvantages of this? Let us know in the comments.
From the outpouring on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, it’s clear that the life of Steve Jobs impacted a lot of people. Condolences and tributes from the tech industry, celebrities, athletes, politicians and everyday Apple users have been rolling in at a furious pace since the news broke last night that the visionary icon had passed away.
Various popular websites found ways to show their appreciation for Jobs – from Boing Boing to Google. Here are some of the tributes from around the internets –
First up, my favorite Jobs tribute comes from Boing Boing. They have transformed the entire layout of their site to resemble a mac desktop from way-back-when:
Google’s homepage kept it classy with a simple “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011.” It linked to apple.com:
Speaking of the apple.com homepage, they kept it super classy with this image that still graces your landing:
Reddit replaced their alien with a small Jobs sketch on their logo:
YouTube featured Steve Jobs videos on the homepage:
Search Engine Land gave us a black background with the Apple logo in the top left corner:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog honored Jobs with a large header of an inspiring quote:
Finally, Wired dedicated their entire landing page to this image of Jobs, complete with various quotes about Jobs from people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin:
What was your favorite way that a site honored Steve Jobs today? Let us know in the comments.
People everywhere are calling it “Target Tuesday” – the internet equivalent to the post-Thanksgiving madhouse of a shopping day known as Black Friday.
Yesterday, Italian designer Missoni launched a 400-piece collection at Target. And yesterday, Target felt the full force of fashion-hungry online shoppers as their website crashed multiple times and was pretty much non-functional for most of the day.
The site didn’t become functional again until early this morning, as a Tweet from Target claims that online sales resumed sometimes around 6 am EST.
Apparently, Target knows how to create buzz for a product launch, and this time it worked a little too well. Missoni is a fashion house known for colorful, abstract patterns and the use of a variety of fabrics and materials. I’m not really in tune with the current trends in fashion at the moment, but apparently they are kind of a big deal. And Target’s Missoni collection offers the products for a fraction of the cost one would pay normally. Popularity + bargain = your online infrastructure taking quite the hit.
Both the official Target Twitter account and the Target Style account spent most of the day yesterday and part of the day today fielding tweets about the down site. All in all, the two accounts must have responded to dozens, possibly over a hundred specific complaints.
Of course, it wasn’t just the website that saw a spike in traffic. Retail stores were swamped as well, as you can see from this picture posted to a Target blog All the way up here.
One little thing about that blog. It’s billed as the blog of Marina, the spokesmodel for Missoni for Target. The thing is, Marina is a giant doll. She even has a Twitter account that says “I’m little Marina and I’m a real doll -joints hinges and all. Target and Missoni have hired me to cover their new collection.” Here’s a video clip of her in action at an undisclosed event. Trust me, it’s not creepy at all…
Last night, President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner both delivered speeches outlining the state of negotiations surrounding the debt ceiling and the budget.
And it appears that those speeches provoked people to flock to the websites of congresspeople is massive numbers.
During his speech, Obama asked the American people to contact their members of congress and let them know what approach is necessary to tackle the problem –
The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government. So I’m asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your Member of Congress know. If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message.
It looks like people may have listened. Reports began flying in via Twitter that various congressional websites were down, and some that were still running were doing so slowly. Did a flood a web traffic, possibly citizens looking for how to contact their representatives, shut down these sites?
The Huffington Post has a list of which member’s sites were affected by this traffic increase. Shortly after Obama and Boehner’s speeches, the following sites were down –
John Boehner (R-OH)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY)
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA)
Later in the evening, other sites were running slowly. Freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R), Nan Hayworth (R-NY) and a several other’s sites also shut down shortly before midnight. According to HuffPo, Boehner’s site was one of the last to get up and running again,
The “debt crisis” has been presented as a battle between the parties, with each side wanting a different approach to tackling our large national deficit. Last night, President Obama championed a “balanced approach” that includes both cuts in spending and the elimination of tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans –
Let’s live within our means by making serious, historic cuts in government spending. Let’s cut domestic spending to the lowest level it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower was President. Let’s cut defense spending at the Pentagon by hundreds of billions of dollars. Let’s cut out the waste and fraud in health care programs like Medicare – and at the same time, let’s make modest adjustments so that Medicare is still there for future generations. Finally, let’s ask the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their tax breaks and special deductions.
The only reason this balanced approach isn’t on its way to becoming law right now is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a cuts-only approach – an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all. And because nothing is asked of those at the top of the income scales, such an approach would close the deficit only with more severe cuts to programs we all care about – cuts that place a greater burden on working families.
Rep. Boehner said that Obama wants a “blank check.” He went on to say –
You know, I’ve always believed, the bigger government, the smaller the people. And right now, we have a government so big and so expensive it’s sapping the drive of our people and keeping our economy from running at full capacity.
The solution to this crisis is not complicated: if you’re spending more money than you’re taking in, you need to spend less of it,
There is no symptom of big government more menacing than our debt. Break its grip, and we begin to liberate our economy and our future.
