Blind Acre Media

As of March 10th, 2010, Blackle.com has saved 1,746,870.447 Watt hours. Blackle is the black “green” Search Engine Powered by Google.

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year, proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly, we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com – Saving energy one search at a time”.

Adobe has, for a very long time, been at the forefront of the design community as the software of choice for web and print design. When Adobe starting buying out Macromedia they took great care in turning their individual pieces of software into a suite; all programs are supposed to work harmoniously with each other for a more efficient and enjoyable work flow. However, they dropped the ball on one of the most simple aspects of this feat; shortcut keys.

One can argue that they didn’t change the shortcut keys on all of the programs because people were already used to and had already established their muscle memory for the pre-established keystrokes. My opinion is that the new programs have been around long enough that it’s time to make the most simple aspect of consistency consistent. Let’s face it, it’s completely absurd that to hide an application you press Command-H in Dreamweaver, Command-Shift-H in Photoshop, and Illustrator totally lacks a default keystroke for hiding altogether.

Now, Adobe doesn’t appear to be changing this any time soon, however they did set the programs up to customize all key commands on your own.

It’s honestly as simple as selecting Edit > Keystrokes

From there you view either shortcuts for tools or shortcuts for each menu item categorized by high level menu option.

Once you find a shortcut you would like to change click on the appropriate column and then simply type the keys you would like to assign to that shortcut and the symbols for those keys will appear. Hit save and you’re all set – and one step closer to better efficiency.

The idea behind online marketing and search engine optimization is to rank well with the search engines for your targeted keyphrases.  There are many tips and techniques out there and today we will share our top 5 on page SEO techniques to rank well with Google, Yahoo and Bing.

#1: Name your pages strategically! The filename of your page tells the search engine a lot about what you are displaying to the user!  Break down pages into “specific” product and/or service pages rather than creating a single page that lists all products and services.  Be sure to name the page based on the keyphrases you are targeting for that page (the product or service offered).

#2:  Title your page strategically!! Use the keyphrase(s) you are targeting in your URL (see #1) in the title element in the <head> section.

#3:  Write good meta description tags! Search engines take into consideration the abstract you create to describe what the page is representing.  The abstract is placed in the <head> section as well inside of a <meta name=”description” content=”<<<your abstract>>>” />  Keep your descriptions specific to the keyphrases you are targeting for each page.

#4:  Create links with keyphrases as the anchor content! Anytime you are creating links within your site or to your site from other websites, be sure to include the keyphrase you are targeting for that page inside the link.  An example is: <a href=”www.yoursite.com/the-seo-friendly-page”>[keyphrase included link]</a>  Search engines are more likely to rank you higher for a particular keyphrase  if they see links with the keyphrase pointing to your seo friendly page for the service or product.

#5:  Write good, relevant, key phrase related content… content is king! Contrary to what you may think or believe, having too much content is rarely ever a bad thing in the SEO world.  Although, balancing design and text on a page becomes a more delicate issue.  We don’t want to confuse or lose visitors because the page feels too congested, but we want to give more than one paragraph describing the product or service.  Don’t take the easy way out with content; make sure you create strong, keyphrase-rich content talking about your products and/or services.  If you can find a way to add dynamic, changing content to each page, it will give the search engines a reason to return to your page(s) frequently, thus giving them a reason to believe your site is more useful/relevant site than those that never change!

At Blind Acre Media, we have been putting a lot of thought and time into our methodology for developing web applications.  Each project lends some form of revelation regarding how we can improve the planning and development processes.  While each of these 5 steps can be talked about in its own blog post, we have found (especially in a client/contractor relationship) that these 5 steps of the development process are the most critical.  If you’re blessed with smart developers then the brunt of the mistakes will fall within the project planning.  That’s why these steps are critical for a successful web development project.

1.) Create a Clear and Convincing Business Case:
Before starting your next development project make sure you do a thorough analysis of what business problem your new technology will be solving.  Get the ideas out to real customers to gauge their feedback prior to starting development.  Proper planning will allow you to set priorities once you start writing code.

2.) Create an Approval Process For Deliverables:
By establishing a consistent approval process for all proposed work (wireframes, user stories, and other functional requirements), you will save a vast amount of time and frustration.  You wont find yourself rolling huge iterations back because something was not considered in the planning process.

3.) Properly Define Scope Objectives:
You will also benefit from clear definition of scope and objectives, even though details are allowed to emerge throughout the development process.

4.) Create Realistic and Aggressive Expectations:
If the relationship between the web project owner and the web developer is a client/contractor relationship, both sides have to come to an agreement on budget and time constraints.  While it’s hard to avoid long nights at the end of any enterprise development project, it is possible to improve your ability to hedge against large setbacks.  Encourage short and regular iterations, developing the software and delivering a working product in small chunks.

5.) Establish an Accountability Plan and Product Owners:
Each project will most likely have several key product owners that need to be in place as key stake holders in the project from the client’s side.  This accountability team will act as Subject Matter Experts, lending their opinions and knowledge in the planning and building phases to ensure that all of the business dependencies have been thought through.  In most cases these key stake holders will also be in charge of signing off and approving on the deliverable scope items.  Their active participation in the project is vital.

Even with these 5 steps in place, it’s still possible to have mistakes along the way.  A common way of how things can still get off track is that there is not enough collaboration between project owner and the development team.  Even when you have an accountability plan in place, key stakeholders may be a reason for confusion and mistakes within a project.  One of the reasons product owners are unclear in traditional projects is because they are asked, often times too early into the project, for far more details than they can handle which results in them not being able to visualize an adequate solution.  You can help alleviate this by encouraging ideas from key stake holders.  Discussing each deliverable in depth will feel redundant but can uncover critical oversights sooner rather than later.

As you implement these 5 steps you will be able to continually refine your processes, and the efficiency within each project will continue to increase.

Social media is here to stay and Web 2.0 is the future of the internet experts say.  That being said, we as marketers are still struggling to grasp the best strategy to expose our client’s brands and engage their customers through this young and developing communication median.

Facebook in particular has drawn a lot of attention recently from the marketing community with the burning question of how to market your business/product/cause to the Facebook community.  While there is no perfect strategy yet, some people have created “Fan Pages” for their particular business/product/cause that have been much more successful than others.

One good example is the Facebook fan page titled “No Microsoft Word, I didn’t spell my last name wrong”, which at the time of this writing has more than 1.5 million fans.  This is compared to the official “Microsoft Student” fan page which has only garnered a mere 100,000 fans.  But, my favorite example has to be a fan page titled “Can this pickle get more fans than Nickleback?” (note that the creator intentionally spelled Nickelback incorrectly to avoid copyright violations).  Admittedly, this is one of the more humorous/ridiculous Facebook fan pages out there.  But, this goofy idea that pokes fun at a popular rock band achieved its goal and gained more fans than Nickelback (1.5+ million!!) in just over two weeks time.

The moderator of the pickle fan page now has the eyes of over 1.5 million people to which she can advertise to, and she achieved this in just a little over two weeks.  Just think of the advertising reach your business could potentially have if your business’s fan page was even remotely as successful as the stupid pickle page.  The moderator of the pickle fan page now has transformed this goofy idea into a revenue stream by selling T-shirts with the infamous pickle on them.

So, it doesn’t necessarily hold true that if you produce good content on your social media pages (even if it’s original) that you will automatically gain more fans.  Successful social media pages do have one thing in common that should be observed by all web marketers.  The common theme among successful (in terms of number of fans) Facebook fan pages is that they have content that is provocative and that people can get passionate about.  Although bigger corporations need to be careful not to take a particular stance on such things as political issues, provocative content is still what gets people (Facebook fans) actively engaged with your fan page which translates directly into more brand exposure for your business.

Although you may think it impossible to create provocative content for your business; just remember, if a pickle can do it, you can too!

Social Media can sometimes seem like a chore when trying to balance your daily tasks, work and family time!  An average of five and a half hours a month is spent on social networking sites, with Facebook leading the way. That’s 82% more time on social networking sites than just a year ago, according to Read Write Web. So, how are you expected to stay connected to the world whether it is for business purposes, with friends, or family and still have time for everything else?

The first rule of social media is that there are no rules. But, in order to keep a healthy media diet, maybe it’s time to put some rules into place. I have created a list of rules of my own to help efficiently manage social networking for BlindAcre. My rules and tips are as follows;

TIMING: Find a time of the day that works best for you to network. Try to set aside at least an hour or two at the same time everyday. This will become a nice daily habit and can help eliminate wondering onto posts, tweets and sites that may be off topic.

ORGANIZATION: If you are into a few social media sites, it may be time for you to use a platform that helps you organize your different networks and allows you to work from a single interface. My preference is HootSuite, see Top 10 Favorite Features of HootSuite. This platform will help you swiftly update posts, tweets and even blogs by allowing you to switch between your different accounts. This is a great way to save time!

RATIO: If you help your business on networking sites, make sure you have a nice ratio of personal to business posts/tweets/topics. I like to follow a 4:1 ratio on twitter and a 3:1 ratio on Facebook. This allows you to stay up to date on industry news while also keeping your postings personal and allowing customers, followers and friends to stay connected. This also helps to weed out information that may not need to be posted and can help you decide which posts are the most important for your readers.

MEASURE: See what posts and topics are most popular by the feedback and comments. Check the stats and click rate through HootSuite’s Summary Statistics. Noticing a trend on your posts? Maybe it’s time to post more about a certain topic or area.

BLOG: Because Blog postings can sometimes take a lot of time, I have a designated folder on my desktop where I like to keep a list of topics I feel may be relevant to write about. From here, I can begin to grow a database of information and articles as I stumble upon them. This makes the writing process smoother with resources readily available for my next post.

The BlindAcre team has also created a blog schedule to follow. This allows for a variety of information to be posted to our blog per division and takes the stress of blog writing off of one person. Having a schedule to abide by allows each division to communicate to our readers and followers, allowing for very dynamic content and information.

Next time you find yourself beginning to feel the stress of balancing work, life and your family, assess your situation and make a schedule that works for you. If you are looking for a more in-depth plan, don’t be scared to make your own rules to follow. Wired provides a great pyramid on Balancing Your Media Diet by breaking up the time you should spend on different media outlets.

Many businesses are still wondering whether an investment in social media really offers a worthwhile return. Is all of the blogging, tweeting and Facebooking really working? Brian Morissey’s article in Adweek suggests that social media can play a huge part in indirect marketing by building a firm’s reputation, instead of generating direct sales.

For all the excitement about social media, there is still a hesitation over its use by companies.  Budget-strapped CMO’S who, while eager to find new ways to reach consumers, are under more pressure to push their business efforts forward.  Trying to measure social-media still remains a challenge to companies.

While online interactions offer a plethora of data points, they don’t contain a set playbook for assigning value. Marketers have grown comfortable with formulas for building brands in traditional media. With social media, what’s a Facebook friend worth?

“The value of social media is that it’s the richest data set that has ever existed,” says Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights, a Wisconsin-based analytics company that uses social media to help clients make marketing decisions. “You can use this data for many things.”

The two sides of the social-media measurement debate are a top concern for marketers, as many plan to ramp up their social-media budgets in 2010. According to an ExactTarget survey of 1,000 marketers, 70 percent said they plan to increase spending in social media, but less than 20 percent said they could effectively measure ROI. The chaos is because marketers using social media tend to blend “art and science” in their measurements, according to Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of strategy and research.

“ROI isn’t the thing that’s pushing people to social media,” says Stewart. “Companies using reputation as a measure of success are more likely to be shifting budget there.  This says that companies are shifting their mind-set about how to measure success”.

For the first time in a decade, Pepsi did not advertise during the Super Bowl.  Where did they go?  They put their money in a social-media campaign that benefits charities.  They have undertaken one of the largest commitments to social-media that has ever been seen.  To combat this, Coke started a Facebook campaign that donates to a Boys and Girls club every time a virtual gift is sent.  Large corporations are using their marketing money towards social-media which shows where the market is shifting.

After years of avoiding social media, Dell Computers made a huge splash.  Their push into social-media left them with a conundrum: how could they monitor social-media efforts that were taking place all throughout the company while determining if they were worth those investments?  Dell’s social-media team mapped out a well defined framework to guide those efforts. It identified a set of value drivers for the customer and for the business, looking for programs that overlapped the two sets. For consumers, Dell identified drivers like connections, recognition and advice. For its business, its drivers are things such as revenue, brand health, share of voice and customer sentiment.

This year, H&R Block changed course, abandoning one-on-one Twitter contact in favor of building a Q&A community site, which replaced a more standard blog that the company did last year. The site required H&R Block’s social-media team to recruit and train 1,000 tax pros to answer questions. It looked to local managers to nominate tax preparers to participate. Early results are promising: get it right has signed up 65,000 members and answered 50,000 questions, with the big tax push still to come.

The challenge will be tracking these queries back to sales. H&R Block, after all, makes most of its money by getting people into its offices. With few internal resources, the company has needed to pare back its social programs, with less emphasis on Twitter and Facebook, for instance. H&R Block can’t promise to answer tax questions posed on Facebook. Instead, they are using Twitter and Facebook mostly as broadcast vehicles, hoping customers who have come back then tell their networks they were helped.

Online social outlets are creating positive brand awareness, which translates into more word of mouth recommendations from customers.  Creating online communities like H&R Block has enhanced their one-to-one relationships with consumers.  More companies are using these methods instead of the “traditional” social media methods because, on Twitter for instance, you cannot have continuous dialogue.  Many companies realize that if people contact them online instead of by phone, they do not need to expend nearly the same amount of internal resources.

Animoto is a wonderful way to auto-generate your pictures, videos and music together to create a sleek slideshow for free! Videos can be up to 200MB in size, including portions that are in high definition. All you have to do is add your pictures from your hard drive or sites like Flickr and Facebook, as well as your videos, then choose your music. Animoto has a built-in clip editor so editing any video footage is simple. Animoto also has hundreds of sample music tracks to select from, or you can upload your own tunes. The best part about this site is that it takes the work out of creating awesome dynamic displays by completing all of the rendering processes automatically. No more hours spent adding transitions in iMovie… let Animoto do the work for you! Animoto is free to create as many 30 second projects as you would like. They also offer unlimited access to create full-length projects for $30 a year. In addition, they even have a corporate subscription that will allow you to create “white label” products free of Animoto branding! View my video project I made in fewer than ten minutes;

Throughout the evolution of computers, software and technology, the web browser is one of the many applications that has seen tremendous change.  During the days of dial-up, web browsers were relatively weak, discouraging web programmers from implementing too many advanced features that may slow down or crash the browser, and possibly the entire system.

Today, companies such as Google and Mozilla are creating new browsers that explicitly target many of the advanced techniques and languages; they can render pages and scripts quicker and more efficiently.  Google Chrome is leap-frogging the other browsers by almost becoming its own operating system, capable of very quickly running full applications, games and videos without the need of extra plugins.  This near-OS goal is quite evident when you open the embedded task manager.

All of this new power and capabilities is allowing web sites to become more then just plain text/informative sites; full applications are springing up all over the web.  This trend to create more dynamic and event-oriented site has been coined as the term ‘web 2.0′.

As a web developer, I often get requests from clients to convert their old informative sites to new web 2.0 -enabled sites.  One powerful tool in this conversion is what’s known as a javascript toolkit; the name is quite fitting.  A javascript toolkit is basically a toolkit with a set amount of tools provided to the programmer.  Just like with real toolkits, the contents and usefulness is quite diverse.  Some toolkits contain only simple scripts, allowing easy handling of currency or time, while others will provide an entire desktop experience, (literally).

One of the most simple toolkits is prototype.  This framework provides convenient access to the elements on a page for manipulation, such as hiding something, or changing some text.  This toolkit is rather limited in what it can do, but it is small and loads quickly into nearly any web application for immediate use; it can be considered a small but convenient toolbelt, something you can carry with you nearly anywhere.

ExtJS is another toolkit, but is on the opposite spectrum from prototype.  It has the capabilities to do almost anything, from simple number formatting to creating an entire desktop in your browser, literally!  RSS feeds, desktops, forums, moveable resizable windows, image galleries, there’s almost nothing this library can’t do; it can be considered an entire tool shed.  The drawback to all this functionality is its size.  The full compressed size is nearly 1MB, (excluding all the CSS and images required also), while the “debug” version is 2.5MB!  A staggering size given that most websites rarely exceed 300kB, images included.

A happy medium between a toolbelt and the entire tool shed would be the basic toolbox, big enough for most tasks, enough room to add more specialized tools if needed, and small enough to not be a burden.  A library that fits this bill is jQuery, (which is my personal favorite).

This library is actually split in two, the core and the UI part.  This allows you to choose if you want just easy manipulation of elements, or the additional goodies the UI provides.  In addition, the UI component is further customizable; you can build your own custom version of the toolkit, adding in only features and effects you want.  This helps keeps the size to a minimum, saving bandwidth and allowing your customers to see your content quicker.  The minified core weighs in at under 60kB, and the core UI ranges between 40kB up to about 200kB, depending on how many extras you add in.

One part of any good toolbox is the ability to add more specialty tools if they’re needed.  JQuery has a plethora of plugins and widgets that can be easily installed and used.  These allow you to quickly add rich and interactive content to virtually any website.

BlindAcre’s homepage provides a glimpse at some of the effects you can do with this library, including the scrolling content and rounded corners.  Calendars, dragable and sortable content, image zooming, fade in/out, and painless ajax calls are a few of the many things you can add to make your static site into a fully featured web 2.0 site. Most of this is done in as little as one line of code!

So if you have a website to build or maintain and haven’t experimented with the various  javascript toolboxes available, go ahead and check out a few.  If downloading and including them is too much work, Google has a solution for even that with their Ajax libraries API.  With 2 lines of code, you can tap into the speed and reliability of Google’s cloud by having the libraries loaded directly from it.  This saves you the bandwidth of serving the libraries yourself, and the trouble of downloading/uploading them to your server.

When was the last time that you had an argument with a friend, family member, or colleague over something that had an objective answer?   Did the argument intensify to the point where you wanted to punch your adversary in the face?  If you answered yes to the previous questions, I have good news for you.  Google is doing everything in their power to prevent those types of arguments from happening in the future.

The creation of the internet is arguably the most important advancement for humanity that we have seen or will see in our lifetime.  While the previous statement is debatable, there is no argument that the internet is hands down man’s crowning achievement in regards to mass information dispersion.  The only thing that even comes close is Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440.  While the printing press did allow for mass information dispersion, it doesn’t hold a candle to the internet in terms of timely information dispersion.

While the internet itself is a great median for storing information, it couldn’t have staked claim to the title “man’s crowning achievement in regard to mass information dispersion” without the help of Google.  Google was not the first company to jump into the web indexing and search industry by any means.  But, since its inception in 1998, Google has been exponentially improving its search platform and has become, overwhelmingly, the search industry leader.  So much so, that the term “Google” has transformed into being not only a proper noun, but a verb as well!

Google’s search engine algorithm has become so efficient that it now takes less than a second to search the entire internet for a search query:

Not only is it fast but, more importantly, its search results are extremely relevant to the term being searched for.  This is in part because Google is often a main influencer on how websites are designed.  Web masters try to create sites that adhere to the strict rules of Google’s search algorithm (more on this in another post).  What this results in, thankfully in my opinion, is that the (very, very, very) smart people at Google force the general masses to create websites that are technically efficient with relevant content.

So, next time you’re in a heated argument – instead of trying to physically beat your point of view into your ignorant antagonist, find the closest computer and “Google” the answer.  Thank you, Google, for providing the world with timely information and for helping to prevent violence at the same time!