Venus Williams, Li Na into quarterfinals – AOL
January 24, 2010
Venus Williams, Li Na into quarterfinals – AOL
MELBOURNE, Australia -Venus Williams advanced to the Australian Open quarterfinals for the seventh time to set up a meeting with China’s Li Na, who has never made it this far at the tournament. The sixth-seeded Williams beat Francesca Schiavone 3-6, 6-2, 6-1 on Monday, recovering after dropping a
Sources: Rep. Berry plans to announce retirement – Omaha World-Herald
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) – Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry plans to announce Monday that he won’t seek re-election this fall, three people have told The Associated Press. Three people who had spoken with Berry on Sunday said the congressman planned to announce his decision Monday. The people
Wal-Mart cuts 11,200 Sam’s Club staff – Cleveland Plain Dealer
New York — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Sunday it is cutting about 11,200 jobs at its Sam’s Club warehouse division as it outsources its product-sampling department to marketing company Shopper Events in an effort to win more customers and boost lagging sales. The terminations represent about 10
Contest – - Rinascimento virtuale
January 10, 2010
Contest – - Rinascimento virtuale
Mario Gerosa, known as Frank Koolhaas on Second Life, will be presenting his new book, “Rinascimento virtuale” on Friday 11 April 2008 at noon SLT (9pm italian time), in the Toscana sim, in Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/toscana/85/215/105. The book, which has been published in Italy, is about the art generated in social network, avatar branding, grassroot culture, virtual tourism and much more.
For the occasion, a contest will be open to all SL residents, called “Second Renaissance.” The competitors must create one or more pics (max 3) inspired by famous Renaissance paintings, with the photos being entirely taken in SL. The avatars should take poses and situations by famous masters like Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaello.
Submissions are due by 3 pm slt, Thursday, April 10 (midnight Italian time) and must be submitted in .jpg format, no larger than 250 kB, to secondlife@intoscana.it. The submissions will be shown during the presentation on April 11. The jury wil be comprised of Mario Gerosa, journalist and writer; Mirko Lalli marketing and communication officer of Fondazione Sistema Toscana; and Sergio Tossi, gallery owner and curator of contemporary art exhibitions in Florence, Italy.
The three top pieces will receive these prizes:
1st prize: Weekend in a Tuscany agriturismo offered by B&B LA VILLANELLA (http://www.villanella.it, lavillanella@katamail.com – 0575.48394). Winner to provide their own transportation.
2nd : 5 books by Meltemi, shipping prepaid
3rd: 3 books by Meltemi, shipping prepaid
Tweet This! A How To Guide On Installing A TweetMeMe Button
October 4, 2009
I’ve received a lot of questions in the last week about how to install a Retweet button on web pages, blogs, and article pages so I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain how easy this is to do. In this post, I’ll show you where to find the proper code for placing the button on your website or blog.
Begin by visiting TweetMeMe.com. There you will find a listing of top retweeted articles and content. What you need to do is page down to the bottom where you will see an option that says, “Retweet Button” under the ‘Have some fun’ section. This will bring you to the code page.
Once you land there, you can choose from four different options. The first option, “web button” is the most common. By accessing this page, you’ll find the code you need to add a button to your web pages (HTML, asp, etc.). The second section is for individuals looking to embed a button in an email. This is a great options if you have an email newsletter or like to send your content out via email.
The third option is to place the button within your RSS feed. This is a good idea if you have a lot of subscribers to your feed. The last option is to embed the retweet button in your blog template (WordPress users). So you can see that there a number of options with the retweet button.To begin, select the option that is appropriate for your application of a retweet button. As mentioned earlier, most people look to add the button to their web pages or blogs. A good place to start then is with the first option. Click on the web button option.
This will take you to a page that shows different blocks of code. At the most basic level, you want to place java script on your pages or in your post that will simply show the button. If the title of your page is short enough, when others retweet, it will include the title of your post.
On the other hand, if you have a very long title to your web page or post, the retweet only shows an abbreviated title or website name. When focusing on retweets keep titles short and to the point. The code for retweeting is (replace “[ and ]” with ):
[script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"][/script]
Simply copy and paste this code into your HTML page or the code associated with your post. When you publish your pages, they will now contain the retweet button. If you want to style your button – placing it in a specific location, use div tags. For example, if you want your button to flow with the text and be right aligned, you may wrap the java script above with the following (Note: you must replace the [ and ] symbols with symbols for the code to actually work.)
[div style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 5px; float: right; display: block; width: 50px; height: 61px;"]
You can also find more advanced tutorials and information at the TweetMeMe website. There are a variety of retweet tools out there if you want others to post your information to Twitter (styles, layouts, etc) but Tweetmeme is the easiest to use. I have found Tweetmeme to have the best information, resources and support.
Best of luck with your retweet button.. and be sure to retweet this post!
Source: http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2009/10/tweet-this-how-to-guide-on-installing.html
Organic Foods – TheTruth on Health
October 2, 2009
Organic Foods – TheTruth on Health
Soil Association response to the Food Standards Agency’s Organic Review
I’m still at a loss at how the FSA reached their decision when you read their report carefully, despite the biased nature of the report, it still manages to identify major benefits of organic foods.
Obviously a major concern amongst consumers buying organic is to avoid xenoestrogens, toxins and other potential residue contaminants in conventional crops
The FoodStandard’s Agency study on Organic Foods admits
1. This review does not address contaminant content (such as herbicide, pesticide and fungicide residues) of organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs.
It is well proven that (most probably due to modern conventional farming and harvesting methods) average nutrient levels in food have reduced in recent years. It’s suspected that the McCance and Widdowson data that nutritionists use could be hopelessly out of date for use as a therapeutic tool. Despite this studies as early as 1958 have been used by the FSA in the meta study.
The FSA study on Organic Food admits
2. Based on 162 relevant articles published, in peer-reviewed journals since 1st January 1958
The FSA meta study did find differences in important nutrient values The FSA study on Organic Food admits
3. Significant differences in content between organically and conventionally produced crops were found in some minerals (nitrogen higher in conventional crops; magnesium and zinc higher in organic crops),phytochemicals (phenolic compounds and flavonoids higher in organic crops)
London Nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston says “We have many clients in clinic displaying symptoms of magnesium deficiency and Zinc is very important for helping with infertility problems which are on the increase. It’s been shown anti oxidants such as flavonoids have an important role to play in protecting the body. It’s misleading for the FSA to suggest food with higher amounts of these nutrients is of ‘no importance’ for optimal health.”
In adition to disqualifying a major new EU study on organic foods the FSA also admits
4. Studies were also disqualified from inclusion if they were primarily concerned with non-nutrient contaminant content (cadmium, lead and mercury)
Contest – - Rinascimento virtuale
Mario Gerosa, known as Frank Koolhaas on Second Life, will be presenting his new book, “Rinascimento virtuale” on Friday 11 April 2008 at noon SLT (9pm italian time), in the Toscana sim, in Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/toscana/85/215/105. The book, which has been published in Italy, is about the art generated in social network, avatar branding, grassroot culture, virtual tourism and much more.
For the occasion, a contest will be open to all SL residents, called “Second Renaissance.” The competitors must create one or more pics (max 3) inspired by famous Renaissance paintings, with the photos being entirely taken in SL. The avatars should take poses and situations by famous masters like Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaello.
Submissions are due by 3 pm slt, Thursday, April 10 (midnight Italian time) and must be submitted in .jpg format, no larger than 250 kB, to secondlife@intoscana.it. The submissions will be shown during the presentation on April 11. The jury wil be comprised of Mario Gerosa, journalist and writer; Mirko Lalli marketing and communication officer of Fondazione Sistema Toscana; and Sergio Tossi, gallery owner and curator of contemporary art exhibitions in Florence, Italy.
The three top pieces will receive these prizes:
1st prize: Weekend in a Tuscany agriturismo offered by B&B LA VILLANELLA (http://www.villanella.it, lavillanella@katamail.com – 0575.48394). Winner to provide their own transportation.
2nd : 5 books by Meltemi, shipping prepaid
3rd: 3 books by Meltemi, shipping prepaid
Internet Marketing Resources You Can’t Live Without
September 28, 2009
In today’s post I wanted to provide some insight into the information sources I use on a regular basis to stay on top of what’s happening in Internet marketing.
I often get questions from my associates and like minded individuals in search of reliable information. There are a few resources that I like to use on a regular basis and describe each of them in this post.
If you want to stay on top of all aspects of online marketing, a good way to do so is via targeted media. The online marketing industry, specifically Internet marketing and Search Engine optimization have a variety of resources that can give you timely information. Some of my favorite are:
Media
Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station that has really good programming that covers Pay Per Click maketing, to affiliate programs, to search engine optimization. Shows are hosted by experts in each niche like Danny Sullivan who covers search news to other ‘big names’ across the industry. A great feature is that you can listen throughout your day or simply download the podcasts for later listening on your ipod or listening device.
Wow… they have a lot of information and some great column writers that you are going to want to learn more about. WebProNews provides timely information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I’m looking for news and current feedback.
Search Engine Watch
When it comes to search, Search Engine Watch has been around since the beginning. SEW provides everything from search related articles to updated news stories related to what’s going on in search. Be sure to visit and bookmark this site.
Blogs
As with many industries – blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I’ve read many blogs and to be honest – I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.
If you’re reading this post than obviously you’ve found The Marketing Blog. Although I have experience with everything from Advertising to Trade Shows, my passion is Internet marketing. Here you’ll find all you need to know about Internet marketing, SEO, PPC, and much more.
If you haven’t heard of Matt, you will. He’s one of the most outspoken Google associates – attending SEO conferences and speaking about the Google Algorithm. Officially, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team. His blog covers Google, technology, and some personal posts. Even though he doesn’t give away the farm, Matt does reveal some great insights into Google search.
SEO expert Rand Fishkin provide research, news and SEO tips on a regular basis. From op-eds to SEO whitepapers the SEOmoz Blog provides useful information and even has a great feature called Whiteboard Friday’s where you can get some great SEO advice.
Forums
Forums are a great place to tap into industry experts and get questions answered quickly and easily. I was a little fearful of using forums in the past but have found them to be one of my most valuable assets for Internet marketing and SEO. The other great thing about forums is that once you build up expertise in a certain area, you can share what you know with those just starting out.
The Internet Marketing Forum
This forum is my latest project and is set to be released from Beta in the next 30 days. The beauty of this forum is that it was created by my marketing team in search of answers to their most difficult questions and from readers like you with questions and the need for expert advice. Registration costs nothing and gives you access to some of the best Marketing, Internet marketing, SEO, and PPC experts around. If you’re not already an inaugural member, sign up today.
The SEO chat forums are really the most popular of SEO forums out there. Each covers a broad set of topics from Google to Social Media.
DigitalPoint has been around for a while and again covers many of the same topics as found in the Internet marketing forum and SEO Chat Forums. Some users well known but overall the forum serves as a good place to ask questions and get them answered.
Newsletters & Other Resources
In addition to the above mentioned resources, other resources that are helpful in the area of SEO include:
Google Webmaster Tools And Guidelines
If you’re not already familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Guidelines, than I suggest you check it out. Not only are the webmaster tools essential for uploading your sitemap to Google and getting noticed, but the guidelines are helpful for knowing best practices.
Not being a fan of newsletter in general, I rarely read them. However, I have found this newsletter to be helpful when trying to stay on top of changes in SEO and more importantly, accessing real case studies associated with Internet marketing. In short, it provides great advice and helps you stay on top of search marketing.
Conclusion
There are literally thousands of resources online for marketing, Internet marketing, and SEO. The resources I mention above are just a few that I use to stay on top of my game. The key is to always be on the lookout for new and valuable resources that you can learn from. Internet marketing is continually evolving – so should you.
Source: http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2009/09/in-todays-post-i-wanted-to-provide-some.html
How To Use eZineArticles To Promote Your Articles And Build Backlinks
September 20, 2009
After last week’s video on article marketing, I received a lot of comments and questions about article marketing. One of the most popular questions is where you should be submitting your articles and how to write them. If you are looking for a really good article creator, I suggest you go to an article software review website like Culzee.com and read their reviews. Once you’ve created an article and are ready to begin submitting to directories, you can use a piece of software or start with the most popular directories like eZineArticles.com. Ezines, GoArticles.com, and other top directories work like a mall.
Webmasters in search of content visit these article directories in order to find fresh content for their websites and blogs. When they publish the content, it appears on site with your author information. Your author box should always include links back to your website or blog – this is article marketing at its best.
In this video, I spend a few minutes showing you how to sign up at one of the leading article directories on the Internet. Once you’ve opened an account, you can quickly and easily go through the article submission process. Follow me as I show you how to submit an article on EzineArticles.com step-by-step. As you submit articles you’ll be developing valuable backlinks from the article directory itself and every time your article is used by a webmaster on a different website or blog.
If you’re not article marketing, get started now. Watch this video and start the article marketing process!
Source: http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-use-ezinearticles-to-promote.html
Article-Level Metrics At PLoS > Addition Of Usage Data
September 16, 2009
As part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we’re delighted to announce that all seven PLoS journals will now provide online usage data for published articles. With this addition, the suite of metrics on PLoS articles now includes measures of: online usage; citations from the scholarly literature; social bookmarks; blog coverage; and the Comments, Notes and ‘Star’ ratings that have been made on the article.
As discussed recently, we at PLoS feel that there is much to be gained from assessing research articles on their own merits rather than on the basis of the journal (and its impact factor) where the work happens to be published. [snip]
PLoS has therefore embarked on a program to aggregate a range of available data about an article and place that data on the article itself. The data are found on the new tab called ‘Metrics’, available on all articles. A reader can now scan the various metrics to determine the extent to which the article has been viewed, cited, covered in the media and so forth. With the addition of usage data to the article-level metrics we have taken another step towards providing the community with valuable data that can be used and analyzed.
In order to make article-level metrics as open and useful as possible, we are providing our entire dataset as a downloadable spreadsheet and we encourage interested researchers to download the data and perform their own analyses.
Related
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/06/article-level-metrics-at-plos-and.html]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Scholarship20/~3/VCXZSkDThIA/article-level-metrics-at-plos-addition.html
Shutterstock: A Case Study Of How One Company Is Using Twitter To Grow Their Business
September 14, 2009
On my never-ending quest to find individuals and companies succeeding with Social Media I hit a goldmine. In a single word, Shutterstock. In today’s post I share how one company, in a VERY crowded space, is dominating the niche with Twitter!
Shutterstock is a microstock company, which means that photographers upload their photos to the site, which in turns sells them to graphic designers, news agencies, marketers, pretty much anyone who needs stock imagery. The photographers receive a commission every time one of their images is sold. Basically it’s crowdsourcing, as Shutterstock outsources the task of taking stock photos to the general public.
There are several of these microstock companies aside from Shutterstock; other ones include iStockphoto, Dreamstime, Fotolia, Big Stock Xchang, etc. When Twitter started blowing up, around six months ago, all these companies tried to stake a presence on this glitzy new social media platform. So far, Shutterstock appears to have been the most successful. Why?
1. Right from the start, Shutterstock identified their audience and offered them exactly what they wanted: free, useful stuff. In this case, Shutterstock’s audience was comprised mainly of graphic designers and photographers, so Shutterstock began to post free vectors and images every week on its Twitter account, as well as links to Shutterstock generated articles containing photography tips, Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials, etc.
2. Shutterstock began to actively engage people who mentioned their service in their Tweets; every week Shutterstock responded to @shutterstock comments, to either offer technical advice, voice appreciation or ameliorate concerns. Doing this, and doing this in a specific, casual tone, made Shutterstock’s followers feel like they had a direct pipeline into the company.
3. Many bloggers use Shutterstock as an image source for their blogs, so Shutterstock began to Tweet each blog post by an influential blogger that featured a Shutterstock image. Since bloggers are really the rockstars of Twitter, with a devoted readership base, this helped channel new people to Shutterstock, and also demonstrated that respectable bloggers used the service. Basically, Shutterstock used Twitter to network with popular bloggers.
4. This one’s important! Shutterstock went back through its site and embedded link buttons to Twitter and Facebook throughout all of the site’s pages. This way, whenever anyone new signed up to the site, or uploaded an image or collected a payment, their was a little button that they could click on that automatically made them a Facebook fan/Twitter follower of Shutterstock.
5. On top of all this, Shutterstock designed a simple and imaginative application for their photo submitters could called Shuttertweet. This application sends out a Tweet from a Shutterstock photographer’s Twitter account once a day announcing their sales and accepted images. Since many Shutterstock photographers are looking to promote their portfolios, this was an attractive service that many photographers signed up for. Now, with @shutterstock appearing in so many people’s news feeds, Shutterstock is channeling more interest than ever.
At this stage of the Twitter craze, the number of followers of each of the major stock image services seem to tell the tale:
Shutterstock:11,194
Istock:2,198
Getty Images: 1,218
Dreamstime:754
Fotolia: 223
Big Stock Photo: 168
stockxchng: 137
Shutterstock has created a vibrant Twitter community that continues to experience an accelerated rate of growth. The only question now is to see how this will translate for the company’s bottom line which will no doubt benefit from the added traffic, exposure, and social media success they are experiencing!
Source: http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2009/09/shutterstock-case-study-of-how-one.html
Berkman Center Lecture / Webcast > Transforming Scholarly Communication | September 18 2009 |
September 13, 2009
Lee Dirks / Director, Education & Scholarly Communication / Microsoft External Research
Friday/ September 18, 1:15pm / Pound Hall Room 100 (Map) / Free and Open to the Public /
In Person > RSVP Requested / Webcast > Live at 1:15 pm ET.
This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Business School Knowledge and Library Services, Harvard Law School Library, and the Office for Scholarly Communication.
In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives.
There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research – from bio-informatics and earth systems science to social science and archeology. There will also be an explosion in the amount of research data collected in the next decade – petabytes will be common in many fields. These future research requirements constitute the ‘eResearch‘ agenda.
Powerful software services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to form the necessary ‘Cyberinfrastructure‘ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community.
The difficulties in combining data and information from distributed sources, the multi-disciplinary nature of research and collaboration, and the need to move to present researchers with tooling that enable them to express what they want to do rather than how to do it highlight the need for an ecosystem of Semantic Computing technologies.
Such technologies will further facilitate information sharing and discovery, will enable reasoning over information, and will allow us to start thinking about knowledge and how it can be handled by computers.This talk will review the elements of this vision and explain the need for semantic-oriented computing by exploring eResearch projects that have successfully applied relevant technologies — and anticipated impact on scholarly communication as we know it today.
It will also suggest that a software + service model with scientific services delivered from the cloud will become an increasingly accepted model for research.
About Lee
Lee Dirks is the Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s External Research division, where he manages a variety of research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, preservation of digital information as well as the application of new technologies to facilitate teaching and learning in higher education.An 20-year veteran across multiple information management fields,
Lee holds an M.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as well as a post-masters degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to past positions at Columbia and with OCLC (Preservation Resources),
Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996 – namely as the corporate archivist, then corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization.In addition to participation on several (US) National Science Foundation task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries as well as the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Science program.
During his career, his team’s work on the library intranet site at Microsoft was recognized as a “Center of Excellence Award for Technology” in 2003 by the Special Library Association‘s (SLA) Business & Finance Division. Additionally, Lee was presented with the 2006 Microsoft Marketing Excellence Award by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer – for a marketing & engineering partnership around a breakthrough market opportunity analysis process which is now a standard operating procedure across Microsoft.
Source
[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/09/dirks]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Scholarship20/~3/_JhrCpvkrVg/transforming-scholarly-communication.html
Article Marketing Made Simple
September 7, 2009
Article marketing. Can it really do what everyone says it can? Are you using article marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy? I’ve been a big fan of article marketing since 2004 when I launched my first marketing web sites.
In this brief video, I show you the effect of article marketing on my overall search engine rankings and traffic for my main web site as well as share my review of top article marketing software packages. If you want to save time and get significant results, than be sure to check out Culzee.com for free article marketing information.
Source: http://marketing-expert.blogspot.com/2009/09/article-marketing-made-simple.html
