The Star Wars saga continues to grow in popularity with the increasing May the Fourth be with You/Star Wars Appreciation Day. This unofficial day of recognition for anything Star Wars has grown from a meager recognition but has been given a ‘faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs’ boost in popularity mainly due to SEO’s.

Search Engine Land has put together a great <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2069098/May-the-Fourth-Be-With-You-SEWs-Favorite-Star-Wars-Parodies
” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>blog article about the role that SEOs have had in the rise in popularity of Star Wars Day. The growth in popularity of the internet meme that propagated the Star Wars Day phenomenon, speaks to the multitudes of youngling Padawans that grew up with the Star Wars movies (the original episodes 4,5,6…not episodes 1,2,3).

I take great personal pride that the first movie I watched in a theatre was Star Wars. I was immediately hooked. From the fly through opening text, to Chewbacca’s growl at the end of the award ceremony! Needless to say I dressed up as Luke Skywalker that year for Halloween. Buy why should we stop there? I think an internet community, we can encourage the spread of Star Wars Day phenomena and have people dress up for the May the Fourth date next year in appropriate star wars garb! Who’s with me? (pics to follow next year . Maybe a flash mob of stormtroopers and/or Jedi?

In very much the same way, Beanstalk SEO is akin to the Rebel Alliance. We are a last bastion of white-hat SEOs trying to work within the confines of the Google Empire while staving off a constant barrage from the black-hat forces of scum and villany seeking to bring ruin to our peaceful Alderaan of search results. (ok, the metaphor was a stretch, but just go with it…)

Remember: Don’t give into hate. Do not turn to the Dark Side as Vader did. Complete your training and become an effective SEO Jedi worthy of a seat on the White-Hat SEO Jedi Council. Many Bothans died to bring you this message….

Have fun with this soundboard from starwars.com

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May the Fourth Be With You / Star Wars Appreciation Day and the SEO Connection

If you took a very heavily spam-influenced search engine like Bing for example and removed the first 1 million results for a query, how good would the result be?

How about doing the same thing to the best filtered search engines available?

Well someone got curious and made the million short search engine.

What this new service does is remove a specific # of search results and show you the remainder.

I became immediately curious about a few things:

• Where are they getting their crawl data from?
• What are they doing to searches where there’s only a few hundred results?
• Where is the revenue stream? I see no ads?

Given the lack of advertising I was expecting them to be pulling search data from another site?

There’s no way they are pulling from Bing/Yahoo, there are 14+ sites paying for better spots than we’ve earned on Bing for our terms..

And while the top 10 list looks a bit like DuckDuckGo, we’re seemingly banned from their rankings, and not at #6 at all. It’s funny when you look at their anti-spam approach and then look at the #1 site for ‘seo services’ on DDG. It’s like a time machine back to the days of keyword link spam. Even more ironic is that we conform to DDGs definition of a good SEO:

We know the data isn’t from Google either, we have the #1 seat for ‘seo services’ on Google and maintain that position regularly.

So what’s going on?! This is the same company that gave us the ‘Find People on Plus‘ tool and clearly they know how to monetize a property?

My guess is that they are blending results from multiple search engines, and likely caching a lot of the data so it’d be very hard to tell who’s done the heavy lifting for them?

All that aside, it’s rare to see a search engine that blatantly gives you numbered SERPs and for now MillionShort is, on the left side-bar, showing numbered positions for keywords. That’s sort of handy I guess.

You can also change how many results to remove, so if your search is landing you in the spam bucket, then try removing less results. If your search always sucks, and the sites you want to see in the results are on the right, you’ve apparently found a search phrase that isn’t spammed! Congrats!

Weak one: Google Drive

Well my enthusiasm for Google Drive just flew out the window on my second week using it.

<em title="I wanted to transfer a large 4gb file to two machines in the US, and I knew both have high speed coax/fibre connections so rather than piddle around uploading from my capped connection to both machines, I uploaded it to Google Drive and then tried to download it to the remote machines.

What a joke! If you are a Chrome user, the inability to resume a broken download WILL make you weep tears of Shakespearean grade irony.

If you install Google Drive as a service, the download is attempted once, and then it fails, with no further action. You can re-try to sync failed files, but it just fails again.

I’m going to try the download in FireFox now, and hopefully it’s boasting about resuming downloads isn’t all crockery. “>UPDATE: Turns out the disk was full and Google Drive has no feedback at all. Thanks FireFox for telling me WHY the download failed. Oh man.

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Search Engine Experiment in Spam Surfing

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When I was a teenager the coolest speakers on the planet were made by AVI Sound International in Vancouver BC and they stood out from other manufacturers because of how they used rare earth neodymium magnet structures.

Using these rare materials in speakers intended for bass was a first in the world of audio products, and AVI has helped many enthusiasts win at international competitions with their exotic products and no-compromise ideas. Even at the time the cost of using these rare minerals was really crazy, and AVI only produced limited quantities before totally stopping production.

Fast forward to 2012 and US federal authorities tasked with resource forecasts are already predicting a world-wide shortage of neodymium, and other rare minerals, that will be outpaced by our needs as early as 2015! The transition away from these magnets for things like traditional physical HDDs will help, but our needs in just the electric-vehicle industry alone is causing concerns.

Enter: Planetary Resources

It is speculation at the moment, but when you take someone with the resources and imagination of James Cameron, pick Peter Diamandis (the X Prize founder) to lead the operation, stir in some wealthy Google executives, and call it ‘Planetary Resources’ you are begging for speculation.

When Earth runs low on rare resources, the value of reaching into space for those resources starts to match up with the cost of doing so.

The trick is to find a way to mine without having it cost more than the minerals are worth.

It’s for this reason that we’re not likely to send Bruce Willis, or any humans, off to space with a pickaxe any-time soon.

The first industrial space mining is almost certainly going to be done by robotics, and guess who’s behind a new robot fighting show on TV called “Robogeddon”? Yes indeed, James Cameron is lending his experience in robotic battle cinema to the new show which will be hosted by Mark Burnett from Survivor and Shark Tank.

Is it really financially feasible to mine asteroids?
Back in 2005 Peter Diamandis did a TED video discussing how a single asteroid full of nickel-iron alloy could be worth “$20 Trillion” on the precious metals market:

(Oh Canada .. @ 8:35m)

When you look at the resources we need to continue advancing clean energy technologies like photovoltaic panels, electric motors, batteries, etc.., these items are all based on rare minerals we are rapidly running out of on this planet. By as early as 2020 we will start hitting a crisis of supply that nobody doubts will impact our current clean energy initiatives drastically.

So at this point we already know we can’t afford to not take this next step into space exploration and mining. The gains in science and development of the entire human race alone make the case for this work.

Another factor is the privatization of space exploration with NASA stepping out of the publicly funded access to space. This lack of a publicly financed effort makes room for all the private companies who now can see the value of the investment and competing for the business in this new sector.

I don’t need to tell the reader how excited and eager I am to hear the full ‘official’ announcement of Planetary Resources’ plans which should be coming as early as next week!

Speaking of Competitions..

April 15th was the final day of our Beanstalk map making contest in Minecraft.

While we were really impressed with all the effort going into the maps we know that most map makers are still trying to finish the maps they started.

At this point we have confirmation that all entries past the date of our prize change are interested in extending the competition.

To make things as fair as possible Dave has agreed that we will give out the original $50 prize to the best map we have now, and then give everyone until May 31st to finish their maps for the main prize.

This should be plenty of time to finish all those ‘runaway trains’ of details and tweaks that map makers find as they start to complete a major build. I know that on the demo map I could probably spend a week just detailing the cloud structures and leaves on the Beanstalk leading up to the giant’s castle.

Congrats to Faragilus for his floating castle and beanstalk map submission! We’ve sent out an email to confirm your win and will be shipping out your prize once we’ve confirmed your address info.

Faragilus’ map will also be featured along with the top finalists, and he is welcome to re-submit an updated map at any time if he wishes to also compete for the grand prize. Because the competition is still on-going we won’t be featuring any winning map content until the May 31st closing date.

Good luck and have a great time making your maps!

The rest is here:
Robotic Asteroid Mining for Rare Elements

In the process of building your company’s online brand, you’re going to have to deal with a veritable ton of information. We have discussed how the practice of Web Analytics can quantify all manner of data such as number of users, the location of visitors, and changes over time, all intended to allow you to analyze your brand’s performance. However all the information in the world isn’t going to do your online marketing efforts a bit of good if you aren’t able to measure it against carefully chosen benchmarks of performance. In short, you need to identify your metrics.

What is a Metric?

Boiled down, a metric is some unit of measurement intended for you to compare current information to previous information, and to evaluate the difference in light of your goals. An example of a metric is the Conversion Rate, which is typically defined as the number of visitors who took a desired action divided by the total number of visitors in a given time period.

Metrics vs. Goals

It is important to understand the metric is not the goal itself, but rather the way to measure that goal. For example, visitor traffic numbers in a given month (quantity + time) is a metric. It is a unit of data that can be compared to other units. Trying to increase user traffic is a goal that can be evaluated for success by the use of metrics (i.e., if user traffic decreases from one month to the next, the goal has failed).

Setting Your Metrics

The keys to every metric are universal: quantity and time. Visitor rates per month, unique visitors per quarter, bandwidth use before and after an advertising campaign, each of these is based on a quantifiable measurement within a predetermined timeframe. The key is to have a piece of hard information that can be compared between two points.

In the online branding arena, there are numerous metrics you can choose to help evaluate your brand’s performance.

Usage statistics – Hard numbers that can be compared by date, user statistics are essential and vital. This category includes numbers of unique visitors, time spent viewing each page, how frequently certain videos are downloaded, and the like.

User Commentary – While this may seem a more qualitative category, there are actually several ways that user comments can be judged in mathematical terms as metrics. Evaluators can measure comment proportionality (percentage of positive, neutral, and negative commentary per product, for example). Including a rating system enhances this effort, as it allows comments to be summarized, reducing the time spent on reading and interpreting the text itself, if necessary.

Social Media Influence – Social Media venues are the newest and most efficient source of word of mouth press. Being linked through a popular blog or Facebook page can spike a brand’s visitor statistics overnight. In this case metrics can include the number of link-backs spread around various Social Media sites, or the popularity of a site’s own SM pages in various communities.

Timing is Everything

The Web is a place where time becomes downright bizarre. Companies start overnight and fold just as quickly, so the perception is that any changes have to be immediate and drastic. The problem is that this can be utterly counterproductive to good metric analysis. Metrics take time to properly analyze, and indeed are useless without the consideration of timing.

Consider a webpage that gets a total of twenty-one unique visitors. This doesn’t actually say anything in and of itself. Now, compare a page that gets twenty-one unique visitors per week, and one that gets twenty-one unique visitors per minute. Suddenly a comparison can be made. This is it the essence of metrics, comparison over time.

You must establish realistic time goals for your brand, so you can logically evaluate the impact of various decisions and procedures. To do otherwise is simply robbing yourself of any way to use the vital data you’re gathering properly.

Some sample time benchmarks include the obvious daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and quarterly periods. These should be examined in a before-versus-after context. For example there is Burger King’s quirky Ugoff campaign, which ran for a single summer in 2004. The metric in question would be the number of Burger King salads purchased before, during, and after the campaign.

A Parting Thought

It is important to remind yourself that a metric is not the goal. Just as importantly, remember that the metric is not the brand itself. Metrics are measurements. The brand is something that can be evaluated in the light of the metrics you choose, but the brand is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a thing distinct unto itself, the image of your organization that is presented as a combination of the actual quality of a product and peoples’ perceptions thereof.

Consider very carefully what exactly your brand is, and what you want the brand to be. Compare the two honestly and carefully, and you will find that the metrics you need to evaluate the success of your brand are actually quite easy to discern.

Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat. We are social media consultants. Make your site more findable and your brand more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

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Online Brand Building By the Numbers

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Online Brand Building By the Numbers