OMG. These have to be the coolest looking flash drives ever, and even though they may be a little pricey, I think the wow factor more than makes up for the price. Get them all over @ Amazon.com.

[Marvel Iron Man 3 USB Flash Drives]

Apple's Find My Friends, a mostly-unrelated concept.

Perhaps you've heard of Bang With Friends. It's a rather controversial thing. Simply put, it's a Facebook and mobile app that lets you pick which of your friends you'd like to "bang." Oh, but it's more clever than that: the app won't reveal your intentions until that friend picks you back. Then, theoretically, you can clandestinely meet for a night of sex without any fear of rejection, or the need for awkward dates, and none of your other friends will be the wiser. Needless to say, some people aren't so happy about the idea. They're worried that it objectifies people, that it could promote infidelity, and other things of the sort.

It's a shame everyone is so fixated on the...

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Le procédé assure même la protection contre la graisse. Au niveau moléculaire le nanorevêtement arrête les substances liquides. Les molécules sont situées si près les unes des autres que la transsudation s’avère impossible, tandis que l’air passe librement et l’étoffe « respire ». Mais, de l’avis de Roman Novitchkov, directeur de recherche au nanocentre « Doubna », l’essentiel est que les installations spéciales et les equipements sophistiqués ne sont pas nécessaires pour le traitement des tissus :

« C’est simple comme bonjour. Un coup de vaporisateur, quelques minutes pour laisser sécher le tissus, et le voilà imperméable ».

Adobe has just announced that Creative Suite will cease to exist after CS6 (in name at least), and be replaced exclusively by Creative Cloud. On its most basic level, that means there won’t be perpetual licenses for future Adobe products (though, for now, you’ll still be able to buy CS6 in that format) and instead all of their Creative Cloud software will be available by subscription only.

For creatives, this is a huge shift. Adobe has been the leader in graphics and web software for years (especially after their purchase of Macromedia), and designers and agencies are used to the perpetual license model. I’ve already been hearing complaints from some colleagues unhappy with the switch, though many of their complaints don’t really have much merit if you really break them down.

$50 a month?!?!

The price is probably the most common complaint I’ve been hearing. But if we break it down into long-term costs for the subscription compared to the cost of the perpetual licenses, the subscription actually comes out on top.

A new (not upgraded) license for Creative Suite 6 Master Collection is US$2,600. An upgrade license will cost you anywhere from $550 (if you already had the CS5.5 Master Collection) to over $1,000 (if you had any of the other CS5 or 5.5 products). Adobe has historically offered major upgrades every 18 months or so, which means the monthly breakdown is between $30 and $58 per month. And if you have to buy the entire Creative Suite new, then you’re looking at a cost of over $144/month for 18 months.

Adobe is offering CC subscriptions for new users for $50/month, and for “upgrade” users for just $30/month for the first year (and CS6 users will get an even steeper discount for the first year). The other big advantage is that you won’t have to fork over a large payment up front. This makes it much more affordable for new designers or small agencies, and will obviously reduce start-up costs for new freelancers or agencies. This could encourage a lot of great designers to strike out on their own.

I don’t want my work in the cloud!

The good news is that you don’t have to host any of your work in the cloud, and the software itself runs right on your computer, not online.

Granted, the cloud offers a lot of great features you might want to take advantage of, but there’s nothing that says you have to. You can keep using your CC products just like you’ve been using CS products for years.

And if your internet connection is down (either on purpose or because of connectivity problems), you don’t need to worry about your software not working. It only needs to connect to validate your license every 30 days, and with the annual plan it will still work for over 3 months (99 days) without validating. Of course, without internet access you won’t be able to access online CC features, but the software on your computer will still work fine.

But how do I pirate something in the cloud?

Okay, I haven’t heard this one expressed directly, but I’ve heard grumblings where the subtext is basically the same thing.

My answer for this is that you really shouldn’t be pirating the software in the first place.

Without getting into the entire moral and ethical debate surrounding software piracy and when it is or isn’t acceptable, let’s look at one small aspect of it: the biggest reason given for piracy is often that the product isn’t affordable. I can see where that was the case with CS, as it’s a very expensive professional program. Obviously your hobbyist or entry-level designer might not want or be able to spend thousands of dollars on software.

But Creative Cloud removes that expensive start-up cost. Most professional designers using Creative Suite products are making well over $50/month with the software. And there are free and low cost alternatives that will meet the needs of most hobbyists if they don’t want to spend that kind of money on a monthly basis.

I understand the frustration that many people who design as a hobby or just like to “play around” in Photoshop or another Adobe program, but at the same time, it’s certainly not Adobe’s job to make it possible to use their products without properly licensing them.

Adobe maintains that the added difficulty in pirating their products had nothing to do with their decision to transition to an entirely subscription-based product line, but I’m sure they’re finding it to be a nice little added bonus.

I only use Photoshop/Illustrator/etc! I don’t want to pay for everything!

There’s good news here: you don’t have to. There are plenty of people out there who only use Photoshop, or Illustrator, or any of the other Creative Cloud/Creative Suite products. And for those people, you can subscribe to just one program at a discounted rate of US$19.99/month.

This is a great option for those people who only use one product (like photographers who only use Photoshop or visual effects designers who only use After Effects).

More about the new subscription model

Students and teachers will still be able to get Creative Cloud at a deeply discounted rate of US$19.99/month ($29.99/month after June 25). The big bonus here is that they’ll get access to all of Adobe’s programs, rather than just the one or two they might need for their classes.

This opens up a lot of creative possibilities, as students and teachers will be able to more easily branch out into other media. We’re likely to see more designers familiar with motion graphics, more video editors proficient in audio editing, more photographers proficient in design, etc. And of course we’re more likely to see interesting projects coming out that combine disciplines.

In addition to the basic Creative Suite programs we’ve all become accustomed to, Creative Cloud offers some additional tools you might not have used before.

There’s the Digital Publishing Suite, which lets you create content and publish apps. There’s ProSite for managing and building your own professional portfolio site. Business Catalyst offers tools for website hosting and management. And Story CC Plus is available for collaborative screenwriting and production tasks (like scheduling and reporting). These are apps that a lot of designers and other creatives may not have tried before, but without any added cost, there’s no excuse not to now.

One of Adobe’s main reasons for switching to the cloud model is the ability to constantly update products and add features without a major product upgrade. These constant updates are good news for the creative community.

The verdict?

While transitioning to the cloud is going to be an unwelcome change for some designers and other creatives, overall, I think it’s good news for the industry and for creative pros. You’ll have access to more programs and more features for less money. And you’ll get updates on a more consistent basis, without added cost.

While I’m sure we’ll continue to hear complaints from some sectors of the design community, overall I think most creatives will embrace CC once they give it a chance.

Are you already a Creative Cloud subscriber? Are you happy about the change or do you have reservations? Let us know in the comments!

3,000 Items! MEGA Design Bundle – only $49!

Disney's Hollywood Studios is giving you the opportunity to put your face on a 3D-printed Stormtrooper figurine as part of its Star Wars Weekends annual event. For $99.95 and 10 minutes of your time, Disney uses its high quality single-shot technology to capture a three-dimensional representation of your face — creating a 7.5-inch model that will be delivered 7-8 weeks later. The park's Stormtrooper exhibit will be available on weekends between May 17th and June 9th, alongside its Carbon-Freeze Me experience — which launched last year to freeze park goers in carbonite like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Unfortunately, you won't be able to eat this one.

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SEO has always been a tricky business, not only do experts have to spend time on researching keywords and following the best practices, they have to be prepared for the changes which search engines inevitably put into place.

Last year saw search giant Google make two major algorithm updates — Panda and Penguin — that saw many a site plummet down the rankings, as they were penalized by the new rules.

This was because the changes were implemented in order to rank poor quality sites, such as content mills and link farms, down and give more weight to sites that produce quality content.

This is carried out by making changes to how Google’s spiders recognize a site, giving better rankings to sites with quality, well written content and social media engagement. For web professionals, this created something of a panic, as static sites that were not particularly well written and stuffed with keywords began to fail.

Penguin and Panda updates relied on a new set of rules and more complex algorithms designed to rank a site on a number of different factors.

These include:

• Content: Google spiders can now tell if a site is badly written, with spelling and grammatical errors, lots of ads and bad quality links. This change is seen to be a welcome one for many SEO and digital professionals, as it immediately knocked poor quality article syndicates and content mills down the ranks, so that high quality could take their place and be more useful to searchers.
• Freshness: the “freshness” of copy has become more important to Google than inbound links. This means that in order to compete on Google, it’s necessary to add new content often. The freshness ranking looks at 3 key areas: #1: Trending topics such as the Olympics or US election #2: Recurring famous events such as the Superbowl #3: How recently the content has been added.
• Unique content: ever copied and pasted some content into a website to cut corners? Now it will also cut the site’s ranking. Original content is one of the most important aspects of determining position. Content containing unnatural links will also be penalized, so it’s important to ensure that links appear organically and are very relevant to the content. This is only going to become even more important as Google’s Author Rank takes off.
• Social: as many of you will know, social is the new marketing and is a very powerful tool for SEO. Google now uses social in search results to determine just how useful a site is across the board. It’s important now for online marketers and SEO experts to include social, ensuring that all brand colors and logos are uniform across social channels and websites. Additionally, it’s important that the social presence is well managed; badly, bot-managed social will harm a site’s rankings.
• Free from technical errors: this in particular is important for web professionals, and will no doubt knock a lot of blogging sites off the top perch. A site that has a sound architecture will perform better than a site which is built off templates, Flash, or is more than two years old. This means that code should be standards-based with valid CSS tags and tidy meta data.

How to address problems with a site’s ranking

Even some of the biggest sites were affected by the changes to Google algorithms, I read of one which had to be stripped right back in order to change all of the keywords and duplicate pages.

A site that is poorly written should have all of its content refreshed, preferably by someone who can write. This includes blog posts and articles, so if a site has lots of content like this, then it may be a better idea to strip it all from the site and add as you get it, or different content, written.

Meta data also has to be clean and tidy and Google tends to ignore keywords and concentrate on descriptions here. Keywords of course still have their place and it’s important to ensure that these are still well researched and analyzed, but articles and blogs with a high keyword density are likely to be penalized. This is because keywords, when overused, tend to compromise the quality of the writing.

Panda concentrated on getting rid of those sites which attempted to “trick” its algorithms with the overuse of keywords and link spamming. In order to determine if a site has spam links pointing at it, use Google’s Disavow Tool, which will remove them for you. However, it’s important at this point to note that a site audit should be carried out to identify bad links and it should be with caution that the tool is used.

For Panda, it’s also worth checking that a site’s content is unique; it has to be 60% unique site-wide, as well as accessible, in order to pass Panda’s rules.

Penguin concentrated more on the actual content and both algorithms are still updated regularly in order to refine them. For the most part, Penguin concentrates mostly on keyword stuffing within articles and spam links. 

Essentially, they are both concerned with accessibility, content, spamming techniques and new rules that are designed to prevent black hat SEO.

What is black hat SEO?

Basically, this is a way of attempting to manipulate the search engines so that it essentially ‘tricks’ them into thinking a site is valuable. Black hat uses aggressive tactics and is geared towards the search engine, rather than a human audience.

Over coming articles, I will take a look at black, white and grey hat techniques in order to give a clear overview of which can be used safely and which are a no-no. The problem that many have found is that some, less than reputable, SEO ‘experts’ have employed black hat techniques in order to win more customers and make a quick buck. This is why some business sites have dropped like a stone down the rankings, often unaware that they have done anything wrong.

Black hat techniques include:

• packing code with ‘hidden’ text;
• link farms where a group of sites all link to each other to spam the index of a search engine;
• blog spam, using the comments field on blogs and forums to place links to other sites;
• scraping, a practice where one site takes content from another in order to appear more valuable to search engines;
• doorway pages used with the intention of enticing searchers with phrases not related to site content;
• parasitic hosting , where a site is hosted on someone else’s server without permission;
• cloaking, a technique in which the search engine spider sees different content to the end user who views through a browser.

Black hat methods are seen by many web professionals to be unethical, as they use tactics that promise swift returns but run the chance of damaging a company’s reputation, website and in turn, profits.

Utilizing black hat methods often means that a site doesn’t have to wait months for link backs, as you would with traditional white hat methods. However, it also fills the internet with useless information and spam, and over the years has seriously affected search.

It’s also cheaper for the SEO strategist to carry out as often, a blog network will already be set up to link to and it doesn’t depend heavily on analytics and content, as white hat practice do.

Not only does employing black hat methods often lead to the threat of legal action, if they are used alongside a PPC campaign, heavy penalties can be incurred from the advertising host.

It’s not recommended that a site use black hat techniques due to the penalties involved, in terms of legal action, reputation and the threat of not ranking. However, no doubt that won’t stop everyone, despite the Google updates.

Saying that, we’re already seeing content mills dropping rapidly down the rankings, so the updates are obviously working as this is one of the key areas that Google wanted to address.

Google and all of the major search engines have a vision, one that intends to clean up the web and do away with bad practices, leading to more useful content appearing at the top of search for us all. Whether you use black hat techniques or not is between you and your conscience, but certainly I for one am glad of the ability to search and not come up with a page full of junk before I get to what I want.

What problems have you run into as a result of Panda and Penguin? How have you solved black-hat techniques employed by predecessors? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, search image via Shutterstock.

3,000 Items! MEGA Design Bundle – only $49!

In any given day I can find myself reading up on a new W3C proposal, fixing an issue with our tax return, coding an add-on for our product, writing a conference presentation, building a server, creating a video tutorial, and doing front end development for one of our sites. Without clients dictating my workload I’m in the enviable position of being able to choose where to focus my efforts. However, I can’t physically do everything.

I’m one half of a two-person web development business—the team behind the little CMS, Perch. I’m also an author and speaker on subjects that range from CSS to technical support, and I enjoy all of it.

When we were a service business, what I was actually working on was largely dictated by the requirements of our clients. Whether they wanted to pay me to build servers, manage projects, or write code didn’t really matter. I was exchanging my time for money, doing a range of things I enjoyed. Now that we’re a product company, my greatest challenge is working out where I am best spending my time, while avoiding falling down a rabbit hole of interesting things I have discovered while performing some other task.

The quote that I opened this column with reflects the dilemma I seem to face daily. I can choose to place my attention anywhere. But if I dart around between tasks, none of them get my full attention. At the very least, progress on everything becomes painfuly slow as I spend an hour on one thing and two on another, inching them all forward. I can’t claim to have the perfect solution to managing this problem, but I have started to develop a process for deciding what needs to be done, and whether I am the best person to be doing it.

First and foremost you need to identify what needs doing. I am a great fan of Getting Things Done and regularly review our business and my personal goals, and the tasks that will go into meeting them. Once I have a list of tasks, I can assess them against the following criteria:

• Am I the only person who can do this?
• Does the business or product benefit from me in particular doing this?
• Is this a task I really enjoy doing?
• Will I learn anything new by doing this?
• What am I not doing if I choose to do this?

Am I the only person who can do this?

Things that fall into group one, the things that only I can do, need investigating. It isn’t ideal for any business to have things that only one person can do. It might be that I need to deal with that task today, but how can I make it so that in the future someone else could? Until the middle of last year, our accounts were a case in point. Although we had an accountant do our end of year tax returns, I was the only person who fully understood the complex processes developed to deal with the many incoming small payments for Perch licenses. Taking on a bookkeeper meant I had to formalize and document all of those processes. As a result I don’t have to do the day-to-day books, but perhaps more importantly the business isn’t reliant on knowledge that is only in my head.

Does the business or product benefit from me in particular doing this?

It can make sense to keep some tasks internal. I wouldn’t completely outsource our technical support, or our social media activity, or even our marketing. The public face of our product is very much about us being a small, friendly business. Our customers get to talk to us, the product developers; we share their frustrations and they help us decide on where to put time into new features. There may well be real reasons to keep certain tasks as a role of the core person or team, even if they would seem straightforward to outsource.

Is this a task I really enjoy doing?

Running a business can involve hard work and long hours. If you feel you have to outsource bits of your job that you love doing because it makes most sense as a business, you may end up pretty miserable. For those of us running small software companies, it’s likely we have ended up here because we like to code. So it’s important to me that I spend some of my time actually writing code—even if it might be more sensible from a business perspective for me to just manage other people who are writing code.

I believe that our products and businesses are better when we love being involved with them. To have a successful business, it’s likely that you will always have important things to do that you find less enjoyable than designing or writing code, however I don’t think we should be beating ourselves over the head. Doing what we love is really what has been behind the success of our product. It is completely ok to hang onto some tasks because you simply enjoy doing them.

Will I learn anything new by doing this?

I might really enjoy a particular project, but I find a helpful way to decide if I should do something or contract it out is to see whether I will learn anything new by doing it myself. For example, I have just sent out a sizeable chunk of front-end development. It is a rebuild of an existing site, and I think there are lots of practical and performance gains to be had by rebuilding it. It would have been nice to have done that work myself, but I wouldn’t have learned anything by doing it. Therefore I made the decision that this would be a good piece of work to outsource to a contractor. I can manage that project and make sure that I’m happy with the end result, but I don’t need to actually write the code.

Our business benefits by us having knowledge and understanding. I’m currently spending quite a lot of time learning about automation (using Puppet) and modern ways of managing systems while rebuilding our infrastructure. I could have brought someone in to do this work for me, and may well do so in future. Yet by updating my systems administration skills, I’m ensuring that within the business we maintain a good level of knowledge about our infrastructure.

What am I not doing if I choose to do this?

As part of a tiny team of two, I’ll always have a number of tasks on the go. Ultimately, choosing to take on one task means not doing something else. It might be another task in the business that gets pushed back. It might be personal things like exercise, or spending time with family and friends. To be able to understand the implications of selecting one thing to work on over another, you need to have a really good overview of all the things that are trying to get your attention.

Having clear business goals and objectives in the first place can make this decision-making so much easier. When you find yourself in the position of being able to do anything, it is so easy to run around picking up tasks and trying to do everything. The trick is to take that step back; to see where you can be more strategic with which tasks you tackle and which you delegate. This approach can help you be far more productive and give you space to enjoy the work you are doing while meeting your business goals.

On dirait que Facebook pourrait lâcher 1 milliard de dollars dans un nouveau rachat, du moins, c’est ce que disent les rumeurs, car il y a des rapports selon lesquels Facebook et Waze seraient en pourparlers avancés sur une possible [...]

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