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It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.

This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.

For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”:

• design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and
• design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).

1. Logo

Typically, a logo is designed for immediate recognition. Users often identify a corporation by its logo. Just look at the above images: the names of the companies should immediately pop into your head.

But a logo is only one aspect of a company’s brand strategy. It helps, of course, to differentiate a company from its competitors, but a great logo doesn’t mean anything until the brand makes it worth something. If you’re given the task of creating a logo for an organization, create an abstract image that is clean, simple and carries very little meaning until the brand of the organization adds that meaning. You can read more about the importance of logo design in Seth Godin’s article. 2. Typography

A well-proportioned, clean font can make all the difference on a website or even a corporate flyer. Good typography creates that “There’s something about that” feeling in people’s consciousness.

One of the most successful fonts that can be seen everywhere (signs, buildings, planes, etc.) is Helvetica. This is the King Kong of typefaces, and it’s more than 50 years old. Helvetica changed the world of typography. It showed typographers and graphic designers that simple is good.

Large corporations tend to adopt clear sans-serif typefaces. A typeface should reflect the company’s image and beliefs. If a company is a little conservative, then it should use serif typefaces, such as Times New Roman: these typefaces reflect classical designs. With the help of large typography, an organization should enhance the motto or message delivered to its users.

All website text, not just for corporate websites, should be readable. A Web designer should take into consideration the different browser rendering engines; text fonts are not displayed the same across browsers.

With large corporate websites, usability plays an increasingly large role in typography design. A company should also care about its users with disabilities who can only read with the help of a screen reader, etc. It isn’t always a good approach to embed text in images and not include <alt> tags, because screen readers can’t read the text. Sadly, the majority of large organizations are still struggling with this issue.

Also consider the following links to resources on corporate typography:

• Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit
• 60 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design
• To Anti Alias or Not to Anti Alias

3. Colors

A graphic designer usually should be careful when designing the visual identity of a large corporation. We should take into consideration different color combinations, color meanings and color theory.

The corporate color scheme that the designer chooses makes a strong statement about the organization and how it does business. As with all of the other seven elements, colors should emphasize the philosophy and strategy of the corporation.

Research conducted by the Institute of Color Research reveals that all human beings make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment or item within 90 seconds and that that assessment is based on color alone. This demonstrates the important role of colors in corporate graphic design.

Enter the world of color harmony and palettes. There are lots of useful online tools for creating beautiful, appealing colors, such as COLOURlovers, which showcases color trends and palettes.

One particular tool is interesting for the technological point of view behind it. Apparently, our brains did not evolve to see or appreciate the concentrated and saturated colors that are considered “basic colors.” Our eyes evolved to see natural and sophisticated colors that rarely clash with each other.

Consider the following links for more detailed color theory:

• Overview of Color Theory
• Wikipedia: Color Theory

4. Brand

Brand is the definition of corporate business. The name of an organization can also serve as its brand. Brand value reflects how a company is perceived in the marketplace. Brand identity communicates an organization’s strategy in a universal way to target audiences.

Branding is not about getting a target market to choose one corporation over its competition, but about getting prospects to see the corporation as the only one that provides a solution to their problems.

A company should lay down brand objectives from the beginning. These are the organization’s characteristics, and they must reflect the organization’s philosophy, processes, image, etc. A strong brand builds credibility and motivates clients.

Further reading:

• Corporate Brand Guidelines
• MPC Corp Guidelines (PDF)

5. Quality

Quality is one of the most important elements. It defines a company through its policies, procedures and responsibilities to its users. A company that offers quality products or services has a great chance of bringing a user back not just once but many times over.

Quality should be reflected in every aspect of a corporation: how it does business, the kind of products or services it produces, how it handles its prospects and clients. The same is true for the corporation’s website design, too.

The following screenshots do indeed reflect quality:

And not quite so memorable designs:

6. Community

Many large corporations tend to neglect this aspect of their business. The first large company that recognized this important element was Apple. It created a dedicated, enthusiastic community around its products, which eventually paid off in the long run.

It’s not an easy task to form enthusiastic communities and to leverage that power. A company should always keep in mind that without quality products or services, it can’t project a positive image to its user base.

One way of forming a community is by recruiting company product evangelists. Evangelism is a form of word-of-mouth marketing in which a company nurtures customers who strongly believe in the company’s products, with the result that these customers actively promote them and try to convince others to buy and use them. These people often become the key influencers in the community, and because they’re not paid or affiliated with the company, they are perceived by others as being credible.

Let’s take Apple’s example and find out the three steps of creating a community:

• As a first step, which is the most important one, it creates quality products that are targeted to a specific audience.
• It encourages customers to meet and share, as is the case with iPods.
• It focuses on specific key aspects of the product and associates them with the company’s philosophy. In Apple’s case, that aspect is a better user experience.

7. Culture

When speaking of culture, one shouldn’t take it to mean community. Culture is the tastes, manners, knowledge and values that are shared and favored by the community. If a corporation has communities formed around its products, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these communities have a healthy culture. In fact, a bad culture can ruin a company’s reputation with future prospects.

Microsoft is, sadly, a good example of bad community culture. This culture is mainly the result of the company’s policies and how it has nurtured its community. On the other hand, Apple created a relatively healthy community by enveloping its products in mystery and rumor. Think of the long lines in front of Apple stores around the US, Europe and even Asia, anxiously waiting for the iPhone. The customers even called it the iLine.

In recent years, not only have cultures formed around Apple products, but subcultures have, too. Subcultures around product rumors have resulted in many websites, such as MacRumors.com and AppleInsider.com.

About the author

György Fekete is a Web developer with 5 years of experience in Web design and development. He is the founder of Primal Skill Ltd., an established Romanian Web design and development studio. (al)

We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.

While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems. And of course they offer a glimpse into the people behind Google.

The first one we made is "Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality." I interview Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Amit Singhal on their insights in how search works at Google.

The next title is "Map Reduce," a discussion of this key technology (first, at Google, and now having a great impact across the field) for harnessing parallelism provided by very large-scale clusters computers, while mitigating the component failures that inevitably occur in such big systems. My discussion is with four of our Map Reduce expert engineers: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean again, plus Software Engineers Jerry Zhao and Matt Austern who discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce. By the way, this type of infrastructure underlies the infrastructure concepts in our recent post on "The Intelligent Cloud."

The third video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.

[Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog.]

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release The Leaf Fall: a social icon set. This set contains 12 social icons, designed in an autumn-style. The set includes icons for Twitter, Technorati, RSS, Reddit, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in the .png-format in various resolutions. This icon set is intended to be used by bloggers. It was designed by Templates.com, especially by Julia Agnes, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download Icons For Free!

You can use the icons for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free, without any restrictions whatsoever. However, you are not allowed to sell or redistribute the icons without author’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission.

• preview (jpg)
• PNG files + PSD sources (1.3 Mb)

Thank you, guys!

You want to showcase your work as well?

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).

You may be interested in the following freebies as well:

• On Stage: A Free Icon Set
• RSS/Feed Icon Set
• Grunge Photoshop Brushes Set
• Simplicio: A Free Icon Set
• Smashy The Alien Icon Set
• Smashing Royal Icon Set

Posted by great scott!

SEOmoz's newest product, Linkscape, provides link data that Search Marketers have always wanted but never really had access to.  What we found though is that once you start collecting that data, there's a lot more to it than one might think.  Building Linkscape forced us to create new, actionable metrics to make the data useful to marketers and quantifiable in ways similar to what we've come to learn from the engines. We also had to step back and analyze structural elements of the web and of links themselves to provide as much useful data as possible.

We've built a new vocabulary with this product; terms like mozRank, mozTrust, Pay-Level Domains, Fully-Qualified Domains and more provide unparalleled link intelligence but require a little getting used to.  We've put together these first three videos to help introduce and explain the concepts, terms, and metrics behind Linkscape. Future installments will get into features and tactics, but first we want to give the Search Marketing world a thorough introduction to this awesome new product.

Linkscape Education - Link Attributes

Linkscape is all about Link Intelligence, and it provides more than you've ever had access to before, but which link attributes have an effect on how powerful they are?

In this video, we'll look at the link attributes that Linkscape examines and discuss how and why they're important for Search Marketers to examine. Aspects such as source, target, status, ability to pass rank, and more are examined to help you understand how Linkscape analyzes your links.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - Link Attributes from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.


Linkscape Education - The Structure of the Web

Linkscape provides more detailed link information than anything previously available to Search Marketers. In this video we'll explain how Linkscape views the structure of the web to provide incredibly rich link intelligence.

This includes examination and explanation of the concept of Pay-Level Domains (PLD's) and Fully-Qualified Domains (FQD's); both are important concepts to understand in order to make the most of Linkscape's robust data.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - The Structure of the Web from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.


Linkscape Education - Inside Linkscape Metrics

An in-depth look at the powerful new metrics Linkscape provides: mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Juice, etc.

This video will help you understand what these metrics mean and how they're calculated to give you greater insight into how Linkscape provides Unparalleled Link Intelligence.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - Inside Linkscape Metrics from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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If information is the currency of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson allegedly said, then during last Thursday's vice-presidential debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin a lot of people used Google Search to get a bit wealthier, metaphorically speaking. Using Google Hot Trends, we can see some of the more interesting things that people were researching, and you can do the same to follow along yourself during tomorrow night's second presidential debate (9 PM ET). But first, here's what people were curious about during the VP match.

Many people were simply interested in understanding the meaning of particular terms. Governor Palin called Senator McCain a "maverick" several times, sending many viewers to Google to query definition of maverick, what is a maverick, and define:maverick.

As the debaters spoke, voters queried for more information.

When Biden mentioned that the "theocracy controls the security apparatus" in Iran, users searched for the meaning of theocracy — as they did when he spoke of the windfall profits tax.

Getting these definitions got a bit tougher when the candidates couldn't even agree on pronunciation. Discussion about a certain type of energy caused a flurry of queries: nucular vs nuclear, nuclear pronunciation, palin nucular, and even nukular. And when Senator Biden talked about the "7,000 madrasses built along [the Pakistani-Afghan] border", the queries ranged from madrass, madrases, madrasa, and even madras, a major city in India that's most definitely not on the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Governor Palin's claim that "Israel is in jeopardy of course when we're dealing with Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran" led viewers to try to learn more about this leader even if they could not spell his name. They searched for [Achmadinijad], [Akmadinijad], [Akmadinajad], and the correct Ahmadinejad. Some did not even try, instead looking for [president Iran] and [Iran leader]. The Governor also referred to General McKiernan, the U.S. military leader in Afghanistan, as "McClellan", sending viewers in search of McClellan, general in Afghanistan, General McClellan Afghanistan, and general Afghanistan surge. Some searchers eventually did find the correct general, but not that many.

Historical references abounded. When Senator Biden claimed "This is the most important election you will ever, ever have voted in, any of you, since 1932", some people wanted to know what it was about the 1932 presidential campaign between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt that was so special. And twice as many them wanted to know about that "shining city on a hill", a phrase from Ronald Reagan's farewell address that was originally coined in 1630 by John Winthrop.

When Senator Biden offered a civics lesson ("Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch") many people checked, and learned that Article I of the Constitution describes the legislative branch of the U.S. government. The executive branch is described in Article II. Others just searched directly for the role of vice president and vice president duties.

People searched on clean coal and took a look at Senator Biden's position (as the candidate asked them to) with queries like Biden clean coal.

These are some of the more interesting queries, but which were the most popular ones? Among the candidates, Senator Biden was a big winner. Searches on him soared more than 70-fold, compared to a week earlier. Governor Palin, much more of a search favorite in the weeks leading up to the debate, only saw a 6x jump, but her volume outpaced Senator Biden's.

Searches for the VP candidates peaked near the debate's end.

Beyond names, two search terms which triggered the most searches were [nuclear] (a 130x spike compared to a week earlier) and [maverick] (70x). [Register to vote] was also quite popular; we even have a special site for that.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which hosts the debates, has stated its objective as providing "the best possible information to viewers and listeners". From Google's perspective — the little search box on viewers' and listeners' computers and mobile phones — the vice presidential debate did a pretty darn good job.

We'll give you an update on tomorrow night's debate later this week. In the meantime, keep an eye on the most recent queries yourself on Google Hot Trends; they change frequently and will start to reflect the debate's talking points soon after it finishes.

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer; Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst; and Betsy Masiello, Economics Analyst

Amazee.com

On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

Overview of Amazee features

Amazee provides you with effective tools to promote your project and collaborate with project buddies. You can for example decide upon the degree of openness and publicity of the project, assign different member rights and keep your visitors informed through an easy editable project magazine. The project team can exchange ideas in the discussion section and jointly edit text in the project's writeboard area. Members can upload pictures as well as other files and organize events and to dos in a calendar. Project funding is an important and unique part of Amazee, providing three built-in mechanisms for projects to raise money and ask for further support.

read more

If you’re in London, please join us for a YUI meetup on October 16 at 6:15 p.m. at the Yahoo! UK office on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Sophie Major and Christian Heilmann from the Yahoo Developer Network will be the hosts on the London side, and YUI engineers Matt Sweeney, Adam Moore and Satyen Desai will be participating by videoconference to give you a tour of (and progress report on) YUI’s upcoming 3.0 release.

Like meetups we had here in California last month, this event will be small and informal — it’s a good opportunity for us to get feedback from you on the 3.0 work, and likewise it’s a good chance for you to hear directly from some of the project’s principal developers. We hope to see you there.

After the YUI 3.x discussion via video conference, Christian and Sophie will be heading off to a local pub for more discussion and socializing.

Posted by randfish

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include:

• An Index of the World Wide Web – 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape

• Linkscape – a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value.

• A Fresh Design – that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience

• New Features for PRO Membership – including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more.

Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion:

SEOmoz's Index of the Web

For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics:

• Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.

• 1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."

• While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.

• About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.

• From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)

Over time, we hope to answer hundreds of questions that the major engines, due to their penchant for secrecy, have kept under wraps. We'll also be offering custom data reports for companies that would like to retrieve more specific information from our index.

Along with all the exciting possibilities for leveraging this resource comes an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. SEOmoz's index is by no means perfect or complete, but I have been shocked, time and again, at the degree to which the data has provided exceptional valuable. Some things to be aware of, however, include:

• Domain Diversity over Domain Breadth
  Our crawl biases towards having pages and data from as many domains as possible, rather than intensely and exhaustively indexing every URL on a single domain. Over time, we hope to do both, but in order to provide site owners with valuable data early on, this was our initial focus.

• Concentration on the “Center” of the Web
  As others who've invested energy into crawling the web in academia have noted, the Internet's pages fit a bow tie-like pattern of a well-connected center (where many links exist between sites and pages) and two external sides where links largely flow one way (either in, towards the center, or out from it). Both as a result of this pattern and because we feel that the most valuable data comes from the most important and well-connected (and connecting) pages, our crawl biases towards this “center” of the well-linked web.

• Index Freshness
  Our process for crawling the web and making our data available requires significant processing resources (as a comparison, back in 2002, when Google's stated index comprised fewer than 5 billion URLs, they appeared to only compute data once each month, resulting in what SEOs termed the “Google Dance”). Thus, SEOmoz's index generally contains crawl information between 10-50 days in age. Moving forward, we'll continue to refine freshness and, hopefully, have enough commercial success with the product to invest in better and faster crawling and processing.

• Index Size
  Over the past few weeks, we've run thousands of tests, and come to the general conclusion that SEOmoz's index contains between 1/3 to 1/5 the URLs of the major search engines. When comparing link numbers or data counts, this should be expected. Fortunately, it appears that nearly universally, the SEOmoz index contains the more important, well-linked-to pages and sites, so the missing portions in a comparison are unlikely to be popular, valuable resources.

• Subtle Differences with the Major Search Engines
  In comparing our crawls against the engines, we have noticed a small number of sites and pages that “cloak” or display content in different ways to different crawlers. While this represents an infinitesimally small percentage of URLs, it's worth noting that Googlebot (and to a lesser extent, Yahoo!'s Slurp and Live's MSNbot) see a slightly different web than other crawlers.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing more information about our crawl and asking for your feedback, too. Until then, we've got some additional, in-depth resources in the Linkscape education center.

Linkscape: Online Access to the Web's Link Graph

Linkscape is the tool I've been lusting for since first getting into the SEO world. It's a truly extensible, usable, fully-featured link research system accompanied by some impressive link-based metrics.

The primary metric Linkscape exposes is mozRank (abbreviated mR), which we've been using internally with great success for the last few months. Like other link popularity metrics (Google's PageRank, Yahoo!'s old WebRank, Live's StaticRank, etc.), mozRank relies on the intuition that links are votes and that links from more important sources should carry more weight. As of today, mozRank isn't perfect, but it does include substantive differences from the algorithms discussed above (and those mentioned in academic papers) that helps mozRank to reward natural linking and discount many of the more flagrant manipulative link behaviors we found.

Linkscape also features lots of other valuable metrics, including mozTrust (abbreviated mT and inspired by the TrustRank paper), a link popularity metric similar to mozRank, differing only in that it has a built-in bias towards trusted links and those that earn them); Domain mozRank (DmR) & Domain mozTrust (DmT), which calculate mozRank and mozTrust on the domain level (rather than just for individual pages) to learn about which domains carry the most link popularity and trust. There's also a host of individual attributes like image links, links with nofollow, links in noscript tags, links from the same IP address or C-block of IPs and many more. A full list of link attributes is available here.

What does this mean? It means that I can perform a search like this one:

This shows me only those links that come from pages with "seo" in the anchor text and then sorts to show only the links which are embedded in images or come from the same IP C-block or ... well, lots of stuff.

This type of advanced link information has, in my opinion, always been critical to the SEO process, both for self-examination and for competitive analysis. It's almost a crime that we've had to perform link-related SEO tasks without it, so as much as I'm excited to offer this tool to other SEOs, I'm equally thrilled to finally have it for our own clients and projects. It even shows the distribution of anchor text, like this list of anchor text links pointing to SEOmoz's SEO Expert Quiz:

I could go on about Linkscape for ages, and I probably will in future blog posts, pointing out all the shady links we've uncovered, which types of badges are most likely to be adopted from viral campaigns, and why the search engines might be ranking particular sites and pages where they do, but for now, I suggest you explore the tool on your own. The only final note I'll add is that Linkscape is still in beta, and this means it's somewhat rough right now - the index size, the values of mozRank and mozTrust, the depth of the crawl, and many more items will all be receiving upgrades over the weeks and months to come.

The SEOmoz Redesign

As you've probably noticed, the SEOmoz website has a new look and feel. We might be ironing out kinks for a few days, but I'm very happy with the new layout. We've moved to a wider width as our site stats indicate an extremely low percentage of users visiting on anything under a 1024x768 resolution. For our YOUmoz contributors, this means images can now be up to 630px in width and still fit into blog posts without breaking the formatting.

The re-design also includes a new toolbar for PRO members that provides quick access to all the PRO features when you're logged in:

Pages like our tools, guides (formerly articles), blog, YOUmoz and home page have all received their own overhauls, and we'd love to get your feedback.

Changes to PRO Membership

As I noted a few weeks ago, the price for PRO membership is rising. Starting today, PRO membership will cost $79/month or $799/year. This increase is primarily to help us support the Linkscape project, which (as you can imagine) has been, and will continue to be, an extremely expensive endeavor. PRO is still "risk-free" to try, and if you're unhappy with the service, you can cancel anytime in the first 30 days at no charge. For our 3,000+ legacy members, PRO membership will remain at the price it was when you signed up for as long as you remain a member.

We're also offering two new levels of membership - PRO Plus and PRO Elite, which feature greater access to Linkscape, the Q+A service and SEO Analytics (and planned access to new tools and features in the future). You can learn more about all the different levels on the Go PRO page.

As I mentioned in my previous post, folks who've signed up at the old rates are locked in - no need to worry, your subscription pricing won't rise. However, the current pricing is "introductory" and we are planning to raise the rate for PRO to $99/month, $999/year in December, when we launch... (see below)

The Future

There's so many exciting things we're planning to do, but maybe none of them are more valuable to SEOs than this:

We're still in the planning stages, but expect to have a beta version of a toolbar that plugs into Linkscape's API (and leverages many other SEO data sources and tools) available before 2009. There's much more to come, including a sister project to Linkscape (probably launching in Q1 of 2009) and lots more data in Linkscape itself, as well as refining the metrics and growing the index. We expect our first major update around Halloween (Oct. 31), and according to my sources, it should make the currently awesome data 10X awesomer (and yes, awesomer is a word - and a good one at that).

Special Thanks

A debt of gratitude is owed, first and foremost, to the incredible team at SEOmoz. There are 16 fantastic men and women putting up with me (up from only 7 a year ago!) and they have all invested not only a tremendous amount of effort, but a dedication and passion that shines through in the new site and tool. Deserving of specific thanks are Nick Gerner and Ben Hendrickson, ex-Microsofties and founders of their own startups who were excited enough by this project to set aside their pursuits and join our team. Together, they architected the remarkable web indexing and Linkscape projects and have produced something that is, in my opinion, revolutionary – truly disruptive technology for an arena sorely in demand.

Jeff Pollard, our CTO, also deserves a special shout out. Over the past year he has really evolved into a great leader and invaluable asset to this company. He has put in long hours, not just towards Linkscape, but towards rebuilding the site, managing the dev team, answering site support questions, fixing tools, and providing solid input on various projects.

Also, huge thanks to all of our beta testers. We had tons of people volunteer their time to either physically come in and test the tool at our office or sign up as remote beta testers. You all provided us with fantastic feedback to make Linkscape better, stronger, faster. We couldn't have released our groundbreaking new tool in its current state without your help!

I'd also like to extend a big thank you to the families, friends, husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the team here at SEOmoz. I know you haven't seen much of them over the past few months, and I hope that you're as proud of their accomplishments as I am. I can't promise things will slow down immediately, but we'll try to be a little less demanding of their time in the months to come.

Lastly, a debt of gratitude to Mystery Guest (whom I married just 3 weeks ago). Her constant support (she even edited this post at 1am) and unequivocal forgiveness of my every late night, nearly complete absence from the wedding planning process and substantial unavailability have been inspiring. I'm a very lucky guy. 

BTW - For those hoping to give specific feedback about Linkscape, we've now got an official feedback thread on YOUmoz. You can also always email us - sitesupport@seomoz.org. Scott will also be posting three videos on the blog later today that help to explain more about Linkscape (and to help make up for last week's lack of a Whiteboard Friday).

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by Tim Mercer and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team

Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.

In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.

35 × Elegant Smoke Photographs

Magicnikon
Dry ice was put in the bottle to get this great image.

Hughes Léglise-Bataille

Selva Morales

Ibai Acevedo Larrañaga

Alberich Mathews
Wonderful fantasy image.

italian.meatball

Frances Dre

icewomanfirst

moczkos

Corica
No HDR in use.

Wolfgang Schlegl

olvwu

Greg Cope

brents pix

Howya

cubanito

ubierno

lapebo

Mohammad Moniruzzaman

Stephan Bollinger

Lumendipity

StarGazer
Smoke from a small piece of dry ice looks like a mini-hurricane.

Alfredo M. Montesdeoca

Terry McCormick

Kalamakia

G. Chorus

Alicia en Sheffield

Stuck in Customs

e20ci

Tony Hopkinson

The smoke that’s produced in explosive interaction with electricity: [via]

Mehmet Ozgur

Josh Beeman

puma100

Lamont Hardy
Experiment with a lightbulb’s filament.

Dubi Feiner

25 × Smoke Art

Eddie Mayda
Roll-Up by Eddie Mayda. “Fluid and aerodynamics are technical interests of mine. It is so entertaining to be able to combine my technical side with a little bit of art. The forms that result from a simple stick of burning incense defy the imagination… and catching them is a sport!”

Jay PH

Will Cook

Steve Wampler

dxsibo

Mehmet Ozgur
Stunning image of smoke shaped in Photoshop to resemble a woman. This technique is often referred to as “smoke sculpture.”

J.Auchinleck
Great image made by layering pictures of smoke and mirroring them to make it symmetrical.

Ceekybikerboy
Blue waves of smoke.

Paul C Anderson

Larry Grace
Beautifully symmetrical smoke photograph.

Sdx76

Per Zangenberg
This natural smoke wisp looks like a torso.

CowGummy

Greypaw

Mehmet Ozgur

Lumendipity

Resources

• Abstract smoke photography how-to
  Great guide to smoke photography.
• Smoke photography interview
  Interview with a smoke photographer.
• Smoke art
  Flickr group.
• Smoke photography video
  Video tutorial on smoke photography.
• Smoke Trail Art
• Artsmoke Flickr Pool
• Sensitive Light: Coloured Smoke
  Pictures of ordinary smoke that have been coloured on the computer. The smoke comes from burning incense sticks and was photographed in a studio using an off camera flash.

About the author

Tim Mercer is a photography enthusiast, graphic designer, artist and blogger. His blog, digital artist toolbox, offers free resources for the digital artist and graphic designer, as well as tutorials, artist interviews, inspiration and more. (al)

For most of us, today is another Saturday. For a chief of the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, it's a unique day, because San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has issued a proclamation declaring October 4th as "Chief Almir Surui Day."


Chief Almir and the Amazon Conservation Team will be in the Bay Area to attend the world premiere of a documentary film by Denise Zmekhol called Children of the Amazon. They'll also participate in a unique panel tomorrow, October 5th.

In June, a team of Googlers went to the Amazon to train indigenous people including Chief Almir's Surui tribe on how to use Google Earth, You Tube and other Internet tools to show the world what's at stake with deforestation in the Amazon. The tribes are using this knowledge to preserve their history, culture, and develop a long-term sustainability plan to protect their rainforest and create economic opportunity.

Filmmaker Zmekhol joined us on the trip and filmed dozens of hours of footage. Out of this footage has come a story about cloud computing from under a lush canopy of Amazon rainforest, where a group of emerging technologists are eager to share their story about their culture and their plan to preserve their forest and their way of life. (Learn more about our trip here.)



Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach

At the Javits Convention Center in New York next week, the Yahoo! Search team will speak on five SMX East panels to address a number of industry topics, including spam, URLs and domains, design techniques, and enhanced listings. Also, the team will offer answers to your questions and give you a behind-the-scenes look at search engines in the "Ask the Search Engines" SEO Track on Wednesday.

Check out our line-up and stop by if you're in the neighborhood. You can find the team at the Meet & Eat tables during lunch on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday too.

Tuesday, October 7th

Time: 10:45 a.m. - noon
Session: What is Spam?
Description: Search representatives share their views on what search spam is.
Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering

Time: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
Session: Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains
Description: This session looks at a variety of URL and domain name issues you should consider to increase your success with SEO.
Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering

Time: 3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Session: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and SEO
Description: CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0 dynamic design techniques can cause search engine indexing and ranking issues. This session examines solutions to consider.
Yahoo!: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search

Time: 3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Session: Enhanced Listings
Description: Search engines are moving towards enhanced listings. How can search marketers tap into them?
Yahoo!: Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products

Wednesday, October 8th

Time: 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
Session: Ask the Search Engines (SEO Track)
Description: This Q&A panel gives a behind-the-scenes look at how things work in the world of indexing and ranking pages.
Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering

The Yahoo! Search Marketing team is speaking on a number of other panels as well, so be sure to check out the conference site for more details on their whereabouts. Hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

With just over a month until the 2008 United States Presidential Election, there is quite a bit of activity ahead and certainly a lot to keep up with. To help you get quick updates on the candidates, election news, polling numbers, and more on a state and national level, Yahoo! Search is launching a series of new election shortcuts. Pulling information directly from the Yahoo! News elections hub as well as the political dashboard, the shortcuts provide fresh, up-to-date information.

If you're interested in what's going on with a particular candidate, simply search [Obama] or [McCain] and get up-to-date information on poll results, recent headlines and relevant discussions. We're also including a short bio, photos and videos to thumb through when you search for candidates.

If you're just looking for a quick snapshot of the race, search [presidential election] and Yahoo! Search will give you a shortcut with fresh results on Obama and McCain news and national poll averages. You can also learn how to register to vote by following the link in the shortcut.

If you're curious about a specific state and want to hone in on its election news and polls, just add it to the search box (e.g. California presidential election).

And in honor of the upcoming 56th presidential election, we've made some changes to the search results page when you search for election related queries. Click the "VOTE" badge in the top right hand corner to be taken directly to the Yahoo! News election page.

Try it out before the big day on November 4th and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

LEADEL.NET is a video portal and social network, funded by the European Jewish Congress, which revolves around the elements that make social, technological, political and financial leaders tick and thereby encouraging Leadel's viewers to explore what makes them do what they do.

The site focuses on jewish identity and tries to explore the differences which make us as identity bearing human beings unique.
The path LEADEL have taken in inspiring the perseverance of that identity, is to create a website which will appeal to young people and will adhere to their standards of quality, user experience and ease of use.
This was a great chance to take the services module further then we (at linnovate) have ever done before.
We ended up writing 16 custom services and using drupal to organize the site's information and flash as a front end, this comination seems to be the best of both worlds.

The Talk Carousel

The talk carousel is the main visual component in the home page and is used to promote the videos inside.

read more

Posted by gillian

Last week, as the US financial powerhouses began to pay the price for their lack of fiscal responsibility, I was on the road in Seoul, Nanjing (for SMX China 2008), and Tokyo.

I had a great time! I haven’t felt such excitement, vigor, and potential in a long time. SEOmoz sponsored the water bottles. Chris Sherman took a shot of me showing it off before the keynote speech.

I was going to post a standard review of the conference with stats, etc. but Shor wrote an admirably thorough review of the state of search in China and Chris posted a solid review and his thoughts of SMX Nanjing. So today, I’ll focus on things I came away with from the conference and on the financial market activity, what it means to the Search industry, and how I see it being perceived and responded to by our colleagues in China and Japan.

The Business Climate in Nanjing, Sept 2008

I met about 300 people involved in search, software, and technology at the Nanjing Conference and Exhibition Center (Chris got a great shot of the complex the day before the crowds arrived). Attendees were privileged businesspeople involved in a growth industry with sufficient expendable capital to attend a 2-day conference. The mayor came to open the event and Microsoft sent Zhaohui Tang, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft AdCenter, to demonstrate their suite of marketing and ROI-improvement tools. We’re not talking about reactions from the ‘man on the street’, but I think there is value in what I heard and saw.

On the surface, China seems impervious to the maelstrom in the US. The Asia Financial Times, however, begs to differ. Articles indicate that China’s growth has slowed from more than 12% to an expected 9% this year. Nine percent! Washington would donate a few right arms for that kind of growth. And there is no doubt that China is already a major force in the global economy in many sectors. China’s drop in production is affecting the global price of commodities. Carlos Slim suggests, “China is now the most important country to help responsibly in this crisis. China has great liquidity, large resources, surpluses in its current accounts and a lot of capital flow." That should give every American cause to think.

Some Observations from SMX China Nanjing 2008

Baidu is still the most popular search engine in China by a very large margin. Trying to use Google was, to put it lightly, frustrating, so I don’t see that equation changing anytime soon. However, this isn’t stopping Google or Microsoft from continuing their paid search promotion in the region.

Pay per click campaign management is still the major focus of concern for attendees. Making the financial case for SEO over SEM seems to be the biggest problem facing both in-house and independent SEOs. Pay per click provides a clear cost and ROI for business owners. SEO is more difficult to track. Not much different than the concerns of their counterparts around the world, is it?

Many indicated that they are involved exclusively or primarily with companies seeking to export their products to the US and other English-speaking countries. At the moment, pay per click campaigns on Google are the primary tool to promote products outside China. Alibaba, who swallowed Yahoo in 2005 in the China market, plays an important role in promoting export-active clients as well.

I was asked if SEOmoz would translate our tools' interface to make them easier to use. Although some expressed interest in getting data and support for reaching other markets, they primarily requested US-centric data. With the meltdown in the US, I expected these people to be considering other markets than the US. But newspapers in China, Korea, and Japan are still describing the US market as the largest and strongest, despite the current woes. I didn’t speak to a single person who was worried about the medium or long term health of the US market.

Everyone expects a short term bumpy ride, but no one was considering holding back on their efforts to sell products to the US. As in the US, some people I spoke with were licking their chops at the low-cost buying opportunities. “Money is just moving around. Smart people just eat [buy] as much as they can while the others are being sick to their stomachs. It’s just time for the money to move around,” one attendee (whose name I sadly didn’t get) assured a group of us at lunch.

What the Market Activity Means to SEO

We are in for a recession. Not a depression, but definitely a recession. Smarter people than I argue about the length of time it will take, so I won’t ruminate about it. As companies tighten their belts, traditional media (print, radio, TV, even tele-sales) are already seeing a decline. Matt McDougal twittered about noticing that the economic slowdown is already pushing more advertising online. I’ll stick my neck out here – I predict that not only will this trend continue, but when things pick up, online advertising gains will continue to hold their ground and continue to increase. Furthermore, as SEM becomes more costly with more competitors for keywords, SEO will see a boon as well. I'll revisit this prediction in the future to see whether I should get that Fortune Telling parlor set up.

Some basic business advice: when times are good, increase your market size as well as your market share. When times are tough, do it even faster. Stephen Noton has been consulting in China for some time; Stephan Spencer is opening an office in Beijing this month. And of course, SinoTech Group is growing. There are others. I’m encouraging you all to consider which markets outside your own cities, states, and countries will help you increase the size of your pie rather than continue to focus solely on getting a larger slice of your current market. In particular, I suggest you consider looking for companies outside your area that need experts to help them sell in your area. Be that expert and leverage it.

And now, Just for Fun… Seen and Heard at SMX China Nanjing 2008

On the first morning, crowds of attendees were delayed as our cars, buses, and taxis drove to the convention hall and again as we all passed through security screenings, had our bags x-rayed, and presented our badges for inspection. The mayor of Nanjing was on hand to welcome us to the conference, so security was high. That evening Inway Ni, co-producer of the conference, said, “The government wants to add more security tomorrow because we are expecting more people. They don’t know no one in China is going to do anything bad now. No one is interested in terrorism! We have found something with better ROI!”

• Inway Ni, on the same subject later: “We don’t have time even to argue with each other. We are too busy doing business!”
• Irene Wang, Alldao China: “Can you say something for the camera about the importance of our business?”
  
  "I don’t know your company.“
  
  "But we provide services for export companies to get their products to the US. It’s not about our company, just say something about the importance of the work we are doing!”
• TR Harrington: “Tell the man in the yellow shoes that the man in the yellow glasses said hi.”
• Unknown: “Look, SEOmoz and Google are on the same line and same size.” Well, there’s a moment to capture!

• Taxi Driver en route from the airport: “Nanjing is ancient! Nanjing is new! Look! [at the new 7-story shopping mall rising behind the city wall, circa 1038]"

Pictures of SMX China Nanjing 2008

Booth babes and giant spotted dogs were popular:

An amazing array of items are sold using cartoons. This cartoon is selling parental control software:

And finally, I’ve never been photographed so often by so many people in such a short time. Here I whipped out my camera and had a game of dueling cameras to the amusement of people nearby.

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Posted by willcritchlow

We fall on the very search-engine-friendly side of SEO (I hesitate to use the phrase "white hat" because I think all the lines often blur). Despite this, I have a lot of respect for well-executed darker tactics and find it fascinating to watch and deconstruct them.

What I don't want, however, is to take the blame on a client project for shady tactics employed before we even worked on the project. Some time ago, at Distilled, we had an issue with this when a client had a website banned. We weren't to blame, but it was very bad timing - the course of events looked like this:

• Client (a pan-European brand) hires us as "outsourced SEO department" reporting to their chief marketing people
• We make recommendations regarding their main site
• Recommendations are implemented and traffic begins to rise
• Client buys a company with a well-known brand in one European country (SEO obviously falls under our remit since we are their SEO department)
• Shortly afterwards (and before our first recommendations), the website for the new brand gets banned...

What had actually happened was that their past had just caught up with them. The smaller brand had previously engaged a local SEO firm with tactics that were a bit past their sell-by date (mainly consisting of a huge link network of sub-domains off the SEO company's own site and some other properties). There was not only a question of tactics here, but also of plain common sense - not only was part of the link network on the SEO company's site, but so were proud links to "our clients" (all of whom got slapped, we believe).

Now, anyone who has worked with us will know that we typically look to improve the things directly under the client's control first - most decent size websites have link equity they aren't spending well and so technical and structural stuff is normally our first target. Many clients, unfortunately, still think we have magic buttons under our desks (or perhaps they're hoping we'll submit them to a few thousand search engines), and so it was perfectly plausible to them that even though we hadn't yet made any recommendations for their new site, we might have pushed the button under our desk a little hard and got them banned.

It might be how some SEO companies work - get a new client and plug them into your shady link network - but it's not our style. These kind of tactics might have their place, but in my opinion, that place is not when you're playing with brand websites.

So, once we had diagnosed the issue, calmed the client down, bullied the old firm to remove the network, submitted grovelling reinclusion requests etc., we started to think....

The nature of our business is such that many clients have implemented 'SEO' suggestions before (whether in-house or agency) and many of them have pasts that contain the odd closet with perhaps a skeleton or two. How could we avoid this kind of scenario in the future - where we might get the blame for the sins of our predecessors?

The Pre-Sales SEO Due Diligence

Out of this conversation came a concept that we have gone some way towards but not 100% cracked yet. This is the idea that before signing a new contract, we should undertake due diligence regarding previous tactics independently of quizzing our prospective client (not only are clients not always up-front about previous tactics, but personnel could have changed, external agencies could have been responsible without being straight with the in-house team, etc.).

So, we are now starting to look out for a variety of things that signal warnings to investigate more closely before signing with a given client. We are looking for things like:

• Manipulative patterns in their backlinks
• Cloaking
• Doorway pages

Effectively, we are thinking like search engineers and giving them a little bit of a manual review. Now, we don't have the tools that search engineers have at their disposal, but we can cobble together a bit of a toolkit to get some way towards this kind of process (and as I mention below, I'd love to hear how you guys go about this).

Pre-sales is not the only time that you might need to do this - sometimes you are going to be paid to do it. This happens when you are hired to work out what has gone wrong with a site when the owner can't help. They might not be able to help because either the board doesn't know details of what was done in the past and the team has moved on, the company purchased the site as a whole, or they outsourced SEO to a less-than-reputable source. As part of our global associate role with SEOmoz, we answer a lot of Q&A and this kind of diagnosis forms a fair bit of that work.

So, finally, I'm going to get to the point and present my methodology for diagnosing manipulative issues with websites:

Forensic SEO Process

I look for three main things:

1. Generally deceptive on-site practices (keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, doorway pages)
2. Cloaking or other unusual serving of information
3. Offsite manipulation - strange linking patterns, etc.

1. For the on-site stuff, I typically:

• do a site: query and just see how many pages they have indexed versus the apparent size of the website
• search for some of their keywords across their site
• view the source of a few key pages
• check their internal linking structure

It's pretty much a short, basic site review.

2. To check for cloaking, I typically change my Firefox user-agent to Googlebot, disable javascript and cookies and browse around a bit watching for different site behaviour. This isn't enough to pick up sophisticated cloaking but it gives a good overall impression. The ultimate check is to compare the Google cache of their pages to the originals. This is a bit more time-consuming, but is the only way I know of to pick up all kinds of cloaking.

3. The one that caught us out with our client was deceptive linking practices. In an attempt to spot that, I delve into their backlinks a little. What I'm looking for here is things like:

• Repeated optimised anchor text
• Sitewide links
• Links from many low quality sites (long, hyphenated URLS, blogspot domains, etc.)
• Footer / sponsored links
• Hidden / cloaked links

Essentially, I look for anything that "smells wrong." Rand has written before about experienced SEOs' sixth sense, and this is definitely the place for those skills.

I'm interested to know whether this is part of your process and what tools, tips or tricks you use. Share all in the comments!

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Posted by randfish

If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you're perceived and how you're remembered across the web.

Strategies for Choosing a Name

The name you choose should be based on branding considerations, SEO and reputation management intent. Choose the name of your profile based on your carefully thought out goal for social media participation (and if you don't have one, get to work!): 

• Company Branding
  • Use the exact brand name of the company, not a modified version, a play on words or a name you picked for fun. If you're going to be representing your brand officially in these spheres, you need to craft a profile that does just that. It doesn't mean you can't show personality or be fun with your profile, it just means you need to make it extremely clear that this profile IS your brand.
  • Consider adding a geographic or specific modifier only if this is part of your branding goal (for example, Utah SEO PRO). Because anyone can make a modified version of your name, you should also invest in owning the exact match brand name to be sure there's no confusion (and, if possible, mention the profile you use in the exact match name).
• Personal Branding
  • First and last name must be included. Speaking from personal experience, if I could go back in time, I would alter all my profiles to be "Rand Fishkin" rather than "randfish." It seemed fun at the time (2001), but in retrospect, my full name would bring far more recognizable branding and credibility through those profiles, back to a personal brand. I can't enumerate the number of folks who, offline, made the sudden connection that "randfish" and "Rand Fishkin" were one in the same - a clear sign of missed branding opportunity.
  • If your name is exceptionally long or difficult, you can consider shortening or modifying, but make sure it's something you're comfortable using in the real world as well. Remember that this advice is targeted towards professional use of social media campaigns, so if you're just in there for fun, you don't need to worry about this nearly as much.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • Choose relevant, non-cannibalizing keywords and phrases to put in the name. You don't want to directly compete with your own site on the keywords you're pursuing - you just want the profile pages to have some keyword relevance (and oftentimes, the profile name is the only keyword opportunity you get in the title tag on social sites).
  • Make sure it makes sense, sounds reasonable and doesn't come across as spam. No matter how much effort you put in, if the name is "student-credit-card-dude," no one will trust you or want you around.
  • A diversity of profiles may seem wise, but in reality, you may be able to draw far more link juice and value by contributing more significantly with fewer accounts.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • Use the brand name and possible combination keywords to build phrases that make sense and can fill up important or risky search results.
  • Make sure to be extremely careful and non-provoking as you participate - aggressive or antagonistic behavior can turn a pro-active reputation management campaign into a defensive one very quickly.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Consider using names synonmous with but not exactly your brand name. The reason is to avoid having responses to negative comments repeat the keyword of your brand name more times in the copy or having complaints about your profile come up in brand searches.
  • If you are representing yourself, be clear about it - if web users smell a rat, they'll pounce, and you could end up exacerbating the reputation management problem.

Strategies for Choosing a Profile Image / Avatar

• Company Branding
  • Use the logo. If the logo won't fit, use the most recognizable aspect of the logo that fits into square dimensions
  • If all else fails, go with the first letter or an Acronym for the brand name
• Personal Branding
  • Use a picture of yourself - a head shot, with your face as close up, visible and friendly as possible.
  • Make the photo fit your personality. Even if you're going for a very professional profile, having a smile and a polo vs. a somber face and tie is OK. As with many things on the web, there's a certain respect for the more casual and approachable profiles, but don't miss the opportunity to brand visually.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • It's probably best to use a photo that's cute, funny or enticing without being directly associated with your brand or you personally. After all, if you go overboard initially or learn the ropes by testing the boundaries of what you can accomplish from a pure rankings perspective, you don't want that possibly negative branding reflecting back on you.
  • As others aruond the web (and in presentations) have noted on this topic, using an image of an attractive, younger woman on social sites can produce more interaction, more "friending" requests and a greater level of acceptance. I personally think it's a sad example of sexism on the web, but my responsibility on the blog is to note valuable strategies, and this one certainly can deliver.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • As with company branding, using the official logo is a generally wise move here.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Using a photo that helps humanize you as an individual and your company can help - a group photo, a picture with your kids, significant other, on vacation, etc. One of the big problems in reputation defense is getting the opposing party to empathize, and this strategy can help start down that path. Now is not the time to be the faceless corporation.

I'll let others tackle advice about how and where to link and how to optimize the descriptive elements of a social media profile page for maximum value (or maybe Jane can do it next week) :-)

Also looking forward to your feedback about how you've had the most success with social profiles.

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Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks.

With batch image processing, you can specify a size or file type, and then a script runs to convert the images. You can process hundreds or thousands of images with just a few clicks. And nearly every image processor comes with a unique feature set.

Many of the articles here on Smashing Magazine have screenshots that have to be resized and configured to fit within the website’s layout. We use batch image processors to quickly resize all of the screenshots and larger images that we feature in the articles.

Types of Batch Processors

Batch image processors usually come with some very standard functions:

• Resizing images,
• Scaling images,
• Converting to different image formats.

Some image processors also perform some advanced functionality, such as graphic editing (rotating, blurring, borders, adding watermarks), and some can even create slideshows, display other types of multimedia and perform other advanced functions.

Image processors are worth their weight in gold if you’re a designer or developer spending a good chunk of time converting images by hand in Photoshop. Let’s take a look at 15 useful batch image processors for both Mac and PC.

BIMP Lite (Win, free)

BIMP Lite is a compact, small and simple Windows-application which performs batch processing at its best. The tool allows you to create thumbnail images, add a prefix/postfix (with meta variables such as image width, image height, sequential number etc.), rename using a sequential number, change the case of filenames, replace/remove spaces & underscores, flip or rotate images and also apply anti-aliasing, inverse, greyscale and bevel effects. An FTP-Manager is integrated as well.

The thumbnail resizing allows you to force a specified width or height and keep the proportions, or define fixed image dimensions. In addition, the program can also convert the file format to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, MIFF, TIFF, PCX or TGA. All of the actions can be performed individually, or combined. BIMP Lite is freeware and contains no spyware.

Phatch (Mac, Windows, Linux, free)

Phatch (which is a combination of the words photo and batch) is an open-source batch photo editor that can be used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Phatch features an excellent user interface that’s easy to use and understand. What makes the tool different from other batch image processors is its extensbility. If you know Python, you can create Phatch scripts to perform some common Phatch actions on the fly.

Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. It can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners and perform 35 further actions automatically. The Phatch website has extensive documentation and also allows you to install specific extensions. Because of Phatch’s excellent documentation, any user from beginner to advanced will find the software easy to use and extend.

ResizeMe

ResizeMe is a batch image processor for Mac users. ResizeMe is simple and sleek, a no-frills application. It was created using the Cocoa framework, so it really feels like a Mac application.

With scaling you can create thumbnails for your website, decrease the file size of your photos, or resize your images to fit a certain size. If your images are all in portrait-mode, but you need landscape or you want to add a new angle to your photos, ResizeMe offers rotation effects as well. You can also batch flip your images horizontally and vertically.

The software gets the job done and does it well. You can download a free 10-day trial or purchase the software for $19.95.

photo Drop (Mac)

photo Drop is a powerful application for bulk resizing images on a Mac. Essentially, you create “droplets,” which are specific configurations for photo resizing. This is perfect for saving presets that you’ll need over and over again, such as for resizing screenshots down to a 500-pixel width to fit blog layouts.

photo Drop is a free application and comes with almost every feature you’d ever need to quickly process a large amount of images.

Use Photoshop CS3 to Batch Convert Images

Adobe Photoshop is far and away the most popular image processor for designers, so some might prefer the option of using the native tools provided by Photoshop. Photoshop comes with many advanced features, and one of them is the ability to batch convert image files. According to the Photoshop documentation, it’s as simple as choosing either:

• File > Scripts > Image Processor (Photoshop) or
• Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor (Bridge),

and then selecting the images or file that you want to convert. Once you’ve selected them, select a location where you would like to save the files, select the file types you’d like to convert to along with any other configuration options and click “Run.”

You can read more about batch image processing at the Adobe website.

Advanced Batch Converter (Win)

Advanced Batch Converter is a Windows-only program that can convert images to over 120 different file formats on the fly and can convert over 25 different types of images. Aside from the ability to convert images, the software can also do basic photo editing, such as cropping and resizing images. There is a 30-day free trial, and after that the software costs $49.95.

Irfran View (Win)

Irfran View is a freeware application for Windows users. Aside from converting images, Irfran View has many unique features, like a multimedia player, hotkeys, and many more. Infran View also allows you to extend the software by using plug-ins.

DBP - David’s Batch Processor (Linux, Mac OS X, Win)

David’s Batch Processor is a Gimp plug-in that performs batch editing functions on images. Instead of having to download a separate program, Gimp users can simply call the plug-in from within Gimp. The user simply selects the images that he or she wants to resize and creates a quick ruleset that will process the images.

However, the plug-in is only intended to resize RGB images, not indexed images. The plug-in is licensed under the open-source GPL license.

FotoBatch (Win)

FotoBatch is a quick Windows batch photo processor that offers all of the basic photo editing capabilities and additionally some nifty features. You can create scripts so that all of your images have the same enhancements and adjustments made to them. The tool offers over 30 imaging functions such as resize, rotate, blur, add border, text watermark, image feather, etc. The tool offers batch conversion, can be integrated in context menus and can generate slideshows and PDF-files.

A user license costs $39.95, but you can try the software first with a 15-day trial.

Image Converter.EXE (Win)

Image converter.exe is a free image converter that is set up slightly differently than other batch processors in that it offers a Conversion Wizard. The Conversion Wizard allows users who don’t have much experience with batch image processing to quickly and easily convert and rename images.

EasyBatchPhoto (Mac)

EasyBatchPhoto is a fast and responsive batch image processor for the Mac. EasyBatchPhoto can easily watermark images as well, which is a function that many image processors don’t have.
The tool takes care of many repetitive tasks by processing images with a single drag-and-drop. A single license costs $24.

Using Automator on a Mac

If you’re a Mac user, you can batch edit images using a program that comes bundled with OS X: Automator. Automator essentially allows you to create tiny applications for specific purposes, and you can create one of these applications just for resizing images. eHow has an excellent tutorial on how to create an Automator action that resizes, names and saves your images to a folder, without having to open Photoshop.

Sizerox (Mac)

With Sizerox you can drag and drop images or folders into a simple graphical interface, and it will convert the images quickly and rename them if you’d like. You can use Sizerox to resize, rename, crop, rotate and watermark hundreds or thousands of images with a single Drag-and-Drop.

Sizerox uses Apple Quicktime to save the resized images, so the quality of the resized images is high. You can also use the Renamer engine to rename the images while resizing them. Because the software costs only $10, it won’t break the bank either. It’s simple, yet effective.

QuickScale (Mac)

QuickScale is another Mac-only application that is simple and easy to use. Like photo Drop, QuickScale has the ability to create “droplets” (saved resize presets). It may not have as many features as some other batch image processors, but it has all of the basics and has a short learning curve. It’s perfect for the user who only needs basic batch image processing functionality. A license for QuickScale costs $15.

FastStone Photo Resizer (Win, free)

FastStone Photo Resizer is a fairly robust image processor. The software is free for home users and runs on the Windows platform. It offers a nicer graphical interface than some of the other image processors and also supports droplets.

The tool can convert and rename images in batch mode, resize, crop, change color depth, apply color effects, add text, watermark and border effects and rename images with a sequential number.

Pixillion Image Converter (Win, free)

The Pixillion Image Converter can convert just about any image file type, including PDF. It has a few nice features that other batch image processors don’t have, like allowing you to right-click an image and resize it from anywhere. Pixillion is a free application for Windows users. (al)