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National Geographic Photo of the Day: Best of 2011 + Online Presence

2012-01-31T08:23:00.001-08:00

National Geographic is well known for their AMAZING PHOTOGRAPHY... take a look!

Camel Thorn Trees, Namibia

Photograph by Frans Lanting, National Geographic

Tinted orange by the morning sun, a soaring dune is the backdrop for the hulks of camel thorn trees in Namib-Naukluft Park.

See more pictures from the June 2011 feature story "Africa's Super Park."

Oceanic Whitetip Shark, Bahamas

Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

Oceanic whitetip shark and diver in the Bahamas

(From the National Geographic book Ocean Soul by Brian Skerry)

Yellow Birch, Adirondacks

Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic

On the trail to Goodnow Mountain, a yellow birch appears to be ingesting a boulder left behind by a glacier. With its tenacious trees and rebounding wildlife,Adirondack Park is a miracle of regeneration. Committed advocates and legal protections written into New York’s state constitution offer hope that it will remain forever wild.

See more pictures from the September 2011 feature story "Forever Wild."

Skyscrapers, Dubai

Photograph by Catalin Marin, Your Shot

Every year around the month of October, Dubai experiences heavy fog due to the still-high humidity and the falling temperatures. With all the new high-rise buildings (including the tallest in the world, Burj Khalifa) this provides a great photographic opportunity.

Cottonmouth, North Carolina

Photograph by Jared Skye, My Shot

While working as a field researcher for a biodiversity study on pine plantations in North Carolina, I found this Agkistrodon piscivorus in a drainage ditch. It's seen here displaying the classic defensive posture that gives it the common name "cottonmouth."

Swimmers, Lake Superior, Minnesota

Photograph by Nick Otto, My Shot

I love all the empty space around the swimming platform. It shows how the lake is both huge and peaceful. The figures of the people become very small, and what makes the shot is the person jumping from the platform and appearing especially tiny surrounded by all that water.—Catherine Karnow

Photo Tip: Don’t be afraid to have a lot of open space in your photos. Wide open space is as much an element as the objects and subjects in your photos.

Blacktip Reef Shark, Maldives

Photograph by Paul Wilkinson, Your Shot

Smaller fish keep their distance when a blacktip reef shark swims amongst them in shallow water in the Maldives.

Kung Fu Master, China

Photograph by Fritz Hoffmann, National Geographic

Buddhist monk and kung fu master Shi Dejian (above) and his disciples hauled bags of cement and roof tiles up steep mountain paths to build an isolated retreat (in background) away from the tourist crowds at the Shaolin Temple.

See more photographs from the March 2011 feature story "Battle for the Soul of Kung Fu."

Autumn Woods, Germany

Photograph by Jonathan Manshack

This photo was taken during autumn in Hameln, Germany, which is the birthplace of the infamous Rattenfänger—or Pied Piper as we Americans know it. This shot is actually on top of the last few hills that soon sink into the state of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). This area is essentially lowland plains—hence the name Lower Saxony!

(This photo and caption were submitted to the 2011 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.)

Elephant Festival, India

Photograph by Marjorie Lang, My Shot

The Elephant Festival is one of the most popular festivals in Jaipur and takes place at the famous Chaugan Stadium in March. It begins with a beautiful procession of bedecked elephants, camels, horses, and folk dancers. The mahouts proudly embellish their elephants with vibrant colors, jhools (saddle cloth), and heavy jewelry.

Alberta, Canada

Photograph by Dwayne Holmwood, My Shot

Beautiful frost at sunset in Alberta

source: National Geographic

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2012-01-23T12:48:00.001-08:00

__________________________________________________________________________________

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Vincent Medina
Google Online Search Domination / Visibility Expert Santa Monica Los Angeles
http://ArtfulMind.Biz
310 251 9728

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + Google Search Domination + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks + Google Search Visibility Expertise

2012-01-21T15:24:00.001-08:00

"Making the WORLD More Open & Connected." ~Mark Zuckerberg
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How do your friends shape the information you see and read online? Social networking technologies like Facebook let us connect to hundreds, even thousands of people -- and have fundamentally changed how people get their information.

While much of our time is spent communicating with close friends about events in our personal lives [1], we also use online networks to share breaking news, discuss political issues and learn about new trends. In 2010, my colleagues Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, Lada Adamic and I conducted a study on Facebook to understand the nature of information spread in social networks.

Some claim that social networks act like echo chambers in which people only consume and share information from likeminded close friends, stifling the spread of diverse information. Our study paints a different picture of the world.

Instead, we found that even though people are more likely to consume and share information that comes from close contacts that they interact with frequently (like discussing a photo from last night’s party), the vast majority of information comes from contacts that they interact with infrequently. These distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information, demonstrating that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events.

The research suggests that Facebook isn’t the echo chamber that some might expect – online social networks actually increase the spread of novel information and diverse viewpoints.

Social Networks as Information Pathways

Economic sociologist Mark Granovetter was one of the first to popularize the use of social networks in understanding the spread of information. In his seminal 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties [2], Granovetter found that surprisingly, people are more likely to acquire jobs that they learned about through individuals they interact with infrequently rather than their close personal contacts.

To explain this phenomenon Granovetter used social graphs to illustrate how networks relate to information access (Figure 1). When a person interacts with two individuals frequently, those individuals are also likely to interact with one another. It follows that people tend to form dense clusters of strong ties who are all connected.

Figure 1: We are connected to core groups of strong ties that we interact with frequently and weak ties that we interact with infrequently. Granovetter's hypothesis about the "strength of weak ties" states that weak ties facilitate information flow from disparate clusters of people.

What do these structures have to do with information access? Since people in these clusters all know each other, any information that is available to one individual spreads quickly to others within the cluster. These tight-knit social circles tend to be small relative to people's entire social network, and when it comes to information about future job opportunities, it can be hard to find new leads.

Granovetter used the relationship between interaction frequency and social structure to explain why information about jobs is instead found through weak ties that we interact with infrequently. Weak ties help spread novel information by bridging the gap between clusters of strong tie contacts. The strength of weak ties informs much of the popular understanding of information spread in social networks.

Birds of a Feather Surf Together

But what about information that is more widely available, like news on the Internet? To understand the flow of more general types of information in society, it’s important not only to take into account how people are connected, but also the commonalities that promote the spread of information. One of the most robust findings in social networks is that of homophily [3], the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to associate with one another. Individuals are connected to each other through workplaces, professions, schools, clubs, hobbies, political beliefs and other affiliations. The homophily principle holds true for any kind of social network you can think of: close friends, professional contacts, classmates and even the people you ride the bus with.

Today, these commonalities not only shape how often people interact and what they talk about, but also what kinds of information they as individuals seek on the Web. Homophily suggests that people who interact frequently are similar and may consume more of the same information. Individuals that interact less often tend to be dissimilar and may consume more diverse information. This view of the world is illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Information spread in online social networks. Our study suggests that strong ties are similar and more likely to be tuned into the same web sites. Weak ties, being more dissimilar, tend to visit different websites.

Interest & Novelty

To understand how online social networks affect the spread of information, we used random variation in the News Feed to determine how likely a person is to share Web content if she did or did not see the content shared by her friends. We found that people are more likely to share the information they were exposed to by their strong ties than by their weak ties on Facebook (Figure 3).

Figure 3: People are more likely to share information (links to Web pages) that they were exposed to by strong ties in their News Feed [4]. Tie strength between two individuals is measured by the number of comments a person received from their friend on Facebook. Other measurements of tie strength, like the number of messages, co-appearances in photos, and discussion on posts are discussed in our paper [5].

There are many possible explanations for the increased flow of information across strong ties. One reason is that close contacts are more likely to be similar to one another, and therefore find content shared by their close friends more interesting. An alternative explanation is that strong ties are more "influential", so that people are more likely to be persuaded to share information from their close contacts.

We also investigate how Facebook amplifies information distribution. That is, if a friend shares something on Facebook, how many times more likely are you to share that information as a result of seeing it in the News Feed? The figure below shows how this multiplicative effect depends on the strength of your tie with that friend.

Figure 4: Weak ties spread novel information that people are unlikely to otherwise see. The figure above shows how many times more likely people are to share a page because of exposure via the News Feed from strong and weak ties.

We found that information shared by a person's weak ties is unlikely to be shared at a later point in time independently of those friends. Therefore, seeing content from a weak tie leads to a nearly tenfold increase in the likelihood that a person will share a link. In contrast, seeing information shared by a strong tie in News Feed makes people just six times as likely to share. In short, weak ties have the greatest potential to expose their friends to information that they would not have otherwise discovered.

The Collective Influence of Weak Ties

Ultimately, we are interested in how these network effects shape information spread as a whole. Even though a person is more likely to share a single piece of information from one of their close contacts, it turns out that weak ties are collectively responsible for the majority of information spread.

Let's consider a hypothetical example (illustrated in Figure 5). Let's say a person has 100 contacts that are weak tie friends, and 10 that are strong tie friends. Suppose the chance that you'll share something is very high for strong tie friends, say 50%, but the weak tie friends tend to share less interesting stuff, so the likelihood of sharing is only 15%. Therefore the amount of information spread due to weak and strong ties would be 100*0.15 = 15, and 10*0.50 = 5 respectively, so in total, people would end up sharing more from their weak tie friends.

Figure 5: People are more likely to share information from their strong ties, but because of their abundance, weak ties are primarily responsible for the majority of information spread on Facebook. The figure above illustrates how a majority of influence (orange) can be generated by weak ties, even if strong ties are individually more influential.

It turns out that the mathematics of information spread on Facebook is quite similar to our hypothetical example: the majority of people’s contacts are weak tie friends, and if we carry out this same computation using the empirical distribution of tie strengths and their corresponding probabilities, we find that weak ties generate the majority of information spread.

Conclusion

The information we consume and share on Facebook is actually much more diverse in nature than conventional wisdom might suggest. We are exposed to and spread more information from our distant contacts than our close friends. Since these distant contacts tend to be different from us, the bulk of information we consume and share comes from people with different perspectives. This may provide some comfort to those who worry that social networks are simply an echo chamber where people are only exposed to those who share the same opinions. Our work is among the first to rigorously quantify influence at a mass scale, and shows that online social networks can serve as an important medium for sharing new perspectives, products and world events.

Footnotes

[1] Common experience would suggest that we spend most of our time communicating with only a few individuals on Facebook. To a large extent, this is true, and documented in Backstrom, et al. Center of Attention: How Facebook Users allocate Attention. ICWSM, 2011.

[2] M. Granovetter. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 1973.

[3] An extensive and accessible introduction to homophily can be found in McPherson et al. Birds of a Feather Flock Together. Annual Review of Sociology, 2001.

[4] It is important to note that very often, information does not "cascade" very far along the network. This phenomenon has been observed in earlier research on Twitter in Everyone's an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter by Bakshy et al. and has been studied across other networks more extensively in upcoming work by Sharad Goel and Duncan Watts at Yahoo! Research, NY.

[5] The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion. Bakshy et al. 2012

source: Eytan Bakshy via Mark Zuckerberg

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Google's Success May Mark The End Of Everything Else | Google Online Search Domination / Visibility Expert

2012-01-11T07:42:00.001-08:00

To use a phrase from Highlander, "There can be only one."

That is the direction that Google is heading, intentionally or not. As the dominate player in search, adding social media through Google+ and local business controls through a revamped Google Places, we're heading down a road where nobody else will be able to compete.

Over the past decade, Google's success has hinged around one major product--search. They have had some success with other products such as Gmail and many of their acquisitions, such as YouTube, have flourished. For every success, there are several other failures both in products they have designed and in acquisitions.

When you're on pace for $30 billion in revenue from one product (Adwords), you have room to make mistakes. Now, it seems, Google's 3 latest major endeavors--Google+, Google Places, and Android--are well on their way to being shining examples of further success. The difference this time is that the combination of the three mixed with the unfathomable amount of data they have collected on the Internet over the years could mean "game over" for most others trying to make moves in search, social, mobile, and local verticals.

Unless Google slips up somewhere, the races will eventually be for second place. First place will be locked down by the big G.

Social Media

Many would argue that Facebook has too big of a lead and to embedded of a userbase to fear annihilation. Sure, Google+ is a major competitor, but MySpace was a major competitor and they couldn't stay together. Twitter has been a pseudo-competitor for years but are still no threat to Facebook's existence.

Is Google+ simply something that Facebook will have to compete against or is there a real possibility that they could be dumped as quickly as MySpace got dumped once Facebook grew to a tipping point?

Looking at the interfaces, the platforms upon which both are built, and the general mobility of each company, it's possible that Facebook could be caught in a MySpace-esque failure within 18 months.

With Facebook trapped in MySQL, they face scalability issues that make many database experts wonder how they've made it this far. There are too many conversations going on at any given moment for the platform to remain stable indefinitely. It's not a matter of if Facebook will crash. Like "the big one" that will eventually hit Southern California, it's only a question of when Facebook will crash unless they are able to make major changes before it happens.

A month ago, the risk of a Facebook crash was not a huge concern. Facebook is approaching 800 million users and there were no viable alternatives. People would suffer through the crash and come back when it was over because it was the only place that had all of their friends, family, images, and videos stored in one location.

Google+ changes things. Now, there is a force that offers most of what Facebook has and several things that it doesn't have. It's a name that is recognized by everyone and trusted by many. A crash of the system in whole or in part could spook people enough to have them leaving in droves.

Even if the technology issues can be secured, Google has another major advantage. Android devices are being activated at the astounding rate of 550,000 per day. Each activation requires a Google account. When Google+ goes public (as soon as next week) each of these accounts will be encouraged to join. Google+ apps will eventually be pre-loaded into Android devices. Forced adoption does not mean that people will use it, but many will. If Google plays its cards right, they will adopt it and they will love it.

Android isn't just about social. The domination continues with mobile...

Mobile

It goes beyond the amazing activation numbers as we discuss Google mobile progress. The mobile war is much more than just about device sales and operating system preferences. Mobile as an industry is becoming the central point for everything else. Social, search, and local are all falling into orbit around mobile devices and our addiction to them.

In this market, the race will be for #3. Android and iOS will own mobile for the foreseeable future. Debates can rage over which is better and who will eventually win, but the Blackberry days are fading and the Windows Phone 7 days never really got started.

Android will continue to chug along tossing out more phones while the iPhone will continue to set records for individual handhelds. iPad is showing signs of weakness, but not nearly enough to scare Apple. In the end, Android will win in bulk and iOS will win in profits. Everyone else will lose.

How does all of this equate to Google domination? If Apple is in the picture, there can't truly be an "end to everything else," right? Actually, it can, and it does.

Apple's place in the mobile market will always be as a provider. Despite attention towards a relationship with Twitter and having ties with Microsoft, Apple will not fight Google in an open war the way they have fought individual phone providers and software companies such as Adobe. Like it or not, Apple will have to be in a constant state of truce with Google as a company because people like the services. If Apple were to completely remove Google apps from the iPhone, it would hurt them more than it would hurt Google.

They are the only "Google-proof" company. They can co-exist with Google and feed off of their developments. It wouldn't make sense to go head to head just as it never made sense for the USSR and the USA to fight a war back in the high-tension Reagan years. If Apple and Google truly fought openly, everyone would lose.

Google needs Apple nearly as much. While Google may play a little in the hardware realm, Apple owns it. Google products must be present on Apple devices for the success of both companies. In mobile, there can be 2 winners.

In local, however, there truly can be only one...

Local

Everyone should have seen it coming. When Google launched Places last year, it started showing reviews from 3rd party sites. It would pull from Yelp and TripAdvisor (which neither appreciated) and other sites to entice people to check out the reviews and learn about the places they were considering. Once they added an option to add reviews directly through Google, the end was officially announced.

Those who wanted to stop having their reviews published in Google Places go their wish. Others, such as DealerRater, were crushed by the change last week when Google pulled 3rd party reviews.

It had become part of the business model for many. Being listed as an influencer over Google Places reviews and star rankings was big. Now, it's all gone. The reasons are many, including quality and consistency, but it really boils down to Google needing content to make the Places pages useful until they had enough of their own content to use their own instead.

Most Places pages have links to other review sites, but it's often low on the page and it doesn't affect star-ratings anymore. As Google Places picks up steam over the next couple of years, smaller companies will fall off. The bigger ones like Yelp will still have a niche to fill, but they will be fighting for second place.

Check-in services are also at risk. Foursquare should consider falling into the Google empire, while Facebook places needs to get stronger adoption from businesses to keep the check-ins coming in consistently. Without check-ins, the service becomes useless.

The Data

This is where it all comes together. Google search domination is increasing and while it's highly unlikely that Microsoft will ever put Bing on the chopping block, it's still barely a competitor simply because it's a distant #2.

The data that Google has about the Internet is unmatched. The information that they have scraped and indexed about the companies, governments, places, and people on the Internet is exponentially greater than anyone else. The knowledge they can produce as a result of all of this information is mind-blowing.

With successful domination in social, mobile, and local, the combined integration will make all other entities and companies vying for our attention online unnecessary. In essence, Google will have a presence in everything.

We will do business through research or recommendation on Google.

We will communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world through products powered-by or integrated with Google.

We will make decisions based upon what a Google-powered device tells us.

This is where people will say, "No, it will never get like that. The government will stop it. The people will stop it. Someone will compete. Someone will challenge them."

No. No they won't. Unless Google truly messes up in the next two years, they will become an unstoppable force. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Actually, the more I think about it, it truly is a bad thing. It's only a matter of time, now.

source: FC Expert Blogger JD Rucker

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Vincent Medina
Google Online Search Domination / Visibility Expert Santa Monica Los Angeles
http://ArtfulMind.Biz
310 251 9728

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + Google Search Domination + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

Start the New Year with Progress | Harvard Business

2012-01-03T09:39:00.001-08:00

by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer

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To get yourself and your team off to a good start for the new year, focus on progress. Our research discovered that fostering progress in meaningful work is the most important way to keep people highly engaged at work — even if that progress is a "small win."

We call this phenomenon the progress principle; it works because people want to feel that they are contributing to something that matters. The new year presents a great opportunity for managers to put the progress principle into action.

First, note the progress made by your team or organization over the past year — the major accomplishments and the small wins, too. And communicate the list broadly. All too often, progress gets ignored as people move from one task or project to another. Simply noting what was accomplished and how it contributed to the goals of the organization can have a big impact on how people feel about themselves, the organization, and the work they do. Wesley, a researcher at a chemicals firm that participated in our study, made clear how much it meant to him when his VP did this at a holiday celebration: "We had a wonderful Christmas celebration, during which time our VP and Director of R&D reflected on our terrific achievements over the year."

Don't stop with enumerating the year's accomplishments. Celebrate that progress and recognize all those who contributed to it. People who work hard deserve the opportunity to celebrate and rejoice in what they have accomplished. It nourishes them psychologically and motivates them to accomplish even more in the coming year. And don't recognize only the people directly responsible for a particular achievement. Recognize everyone who contributed across the organization, including support staff. For people to give their best in the future, they must feel that their hard work really matters. They benefit, through satisfying engagement in their work. And the organization benefits, too. When employees are more engaged in their work, their performance improves — contributing to the bottom line.

Map out goals for progress in the upcoming year and say why that progress matters. Be sure to include both broad, aspirational goals and smaller, interim milestones. For people to be fully engaged, they must feel that they are making steady progress, not just slogging away in hopes of a major breakthrough. And be sure to articulate why those goals matter — why they are meaningful to the organization, customers, and/or society. Making progress on meaningless work doesn't boost engagement; people must feel that they are contributing to something they value. Great leaders at every level of an organization are able to communicate not only what needs to be done, but why it is important. This means communicating the mission and values of the organization, and ensuring that all employees understand how their own work contributes to the mission.

Finally, resolve to support people's progress each day in the coming year. For the progress principle to work, people should experience progress more often than setbacks. Give them the goals, resources, and time they need to succeed, and remove or reduce any obstacles to progress. And insist that people across the organization support each other as much as possible. Create a climate of attention to progress, where everyone is looking for opportunities, every day, to help colleagues move forward on meaningful work.

These actions are not difficult or costly, but they can have a real impact on employee engagement and performance. Make it your pre-New Year's resolution to give your people meaningful work to do and to support, recognize, and celebrate their contributions now and throughout the coming year.

What tips do you have for jump-starting progress for the year ahead?

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Vincent Medina
Google Search Expert Santa Monica | Los Angeles
http://ArtfulMind.Biz
Simply call to inquire today: 310 251 9728

Innovating for a Better City + Staying Ahead of the Curve of Innovative Thought.

2011-12-06T18:24:00.001-08:00

Michael Bloomberg

3 December 2011

The Takeaway

New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg says
cities need to innovate just
as much as corporations—
and offers prescriptions for
how to do it.

Fifteen years after founding my company, I wrote an autobiography that forced me to look back on my experiences – not something I had had much time for. In doing that, I realized that my chief function at the company had morphed from managing day-to-day operations into soliciting new ideas and driving the best of them forward. “I make sure we allocate resources to new, innovative, and risky development projects,” I wrote in Bloomberg by Bloomberg (Wiley, 8/01). “My job is to ensure that new products come alive at Bloomberg and to integrate them with the rest of our system.”

When I first ran for mayor of New York, many people were skeptical that an outsider could run the biggest city in the country. There are, of course, major differences between the public and private sectors, but the primary challenge for a chief executive of any organization is the same: to encourage & enable the workforce to consistently find new and improved ways to serve our clients.

In general, government tends to be risk averse, because taking risks means taking on special interests. It means getting attacked in the press. And, for elected officials, it means potential consequences for your reelection.

That’s why many officials tend to play it safe. Even when they want to be bold, there are often bureaucratic barriers standing in the way. For example, different agencies are often isolated into silos instead of integrated across functions. Some of this is attributable to restrictive legislation and regulation, antiquated work rules, separate funding streams, competitive jockeying, and differing cultures. But sometimes the reason agencies do not work well together is less complicated: they’ve never been expected to.

There is another challenge to innovating in government: public dollars are scarce, and especially in these times, it is hard enough to fund existing basic needs let alone new experiments. Even in better times, it is challenging to use taxpayer dollars when the possibility of failure is real. The public rightly expects its money to be used in productive ways. You simply cannot ask taxpayers to take the same risks as shareholders or partners.

In New York City government—much like at Bloomberg LP—three key approaches have helped us get around these and other challenges to drive innovation forward.

Empower your team

I expect my staff to value creativity and new ways of thinking. Citizens deserve more than tweaks to the status quo—so I reinforce to commissioners and other policy makers that bold, new ideas should be the rule rather than the exception. This mandate empowers leaders to push themselves and their teams beyond their comfort zones, to look with fresh eyes at challenges and potential solutions. Simply giving permission to innovate is insufficient; you have to expect it and hold people accountable for delivering it.

Remove the barriers

Being clear-eyed about (removing) barriers to innovation... is also important. For example, we’ve raised private philanthropic dollars to subsidize innovative new programs, such as our new comprehensive effort to help black and Hispanic young men achieve at the same rates as their peers in other ethnic groups. When we’ve tackled issues like sustainability and poverty that span numerous agencies, we’ve created cross-agency teams to improve coordination and results. As a result, our sustainability program has produced a 13 percent reduction in New York City’s carbon footprint over the past five years.

Support those who fail

When it comes to innovation, the one thing you know for sure is that it will not always succeed. In New York, the intense media focus can be a disincentive for innovation, which is why I’ve always believed it is critical to give a public pat on the back to those who took reasonable risks but failed. That’s how you keep the new ideas coming in—and it’s how you keep attracting the top talent.

These three approaches have helped us drive innovation in areas ranging from poverty to sustainability to education to creating new open spaces. And mayors from cities all over the nation are launching their own bold solutions to many of the same challenges.

That’s why government innovation is one of the five focus areas of Bloomberg Philanthropies. The centerpiece of our government innovation work—called the Mayors Project—aims to spread these proven or promising ideas among cities. By replicating innovative programs, policies, and leadership strategies, we know we can help fuel cities’ efforts to solve pressing challenges and achieve even greater impact.

One of the most recent Mayors Project investments is in Innovation Delivery Teams. These are stand-alone teams of top performers who bring a rigorous focus to developing and delivering powerful solutions to major urban challenges. The three-year initiative will fund teams of 6-to-12 members each in five cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans. And in each city, the team will focus on top-priority issues identified by City Hall, ranging from job growth to customer service to public safety.

It’s exciting that the teams will help these five mayors produce new, tangible results for their residents—reducing street homelessness in Atlanta, the time Chicagoans wait in line to receive city services, and the homicide rate in New Orleans. But Bloomberg Philanthropies has a broader purpose, too. Through this initiative, we hope to refine a set of leadership and management strategies that ultimately can be used by mayors in cities worldwide to advance bold innovation.

The need for local government innovation is now greater than ever. When I talk with my colleagues in cities across the nation, they say they are being asked to do far more, often with much less. Citizens expect more. Many residents, hard hit by the recession, need more. And there are fewer public dollars to respond. That’s certainly the case here in New York City—and that’s why we’ll continue empowering leaders to drive innovation, reducing the barriers they face, and supporting all those who keep challenging the status quo with innovative new ideas. And that is why, through my philanthropic work, I will continue to support others who aspire to do the same.

source: McKinsey Quarterly

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RSA Animate - The Divided Brain

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson

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7 Reasons to Start Blogging More...NOW! | Facebook Marketing

2011-11-02T12:37:00.001-07:00

7 Reasons to Start BLOGGING More...NOW!

Hubspot’s 100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts, & Graphs
highlights statistics on why every business should be blogging early and often.

Here are my favorites...

#1. More Traffic [period].

#2. More Leads.

#3 – Frequency Matters.

#4. Volume Matters.

#5. Get Found in Google Search Results.

#6. More Indexed Pages = More Leads.

#7. Save Money.

This guide was packed full of AWESOME statistics on Blogging, Social Media, and SEO. I highly recommend downloading it.

Filed Under: Facebook Marketing
source: Jimmy Mackin

DOMINATE 1st Page thru x Page Google Search Results!

CLICK here for PROVEN & GUARANTEED GOOGLE RESULTS.

Where we ALL want to be with business through our Social Media Efforts.
The importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB.
This leading to undisputed DOMINANT VISIBILITY RESULTS.

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
http://ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

DOMINATE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS! 310 251 9728

2011-10-28T10:10:00.001-07:00




UNDISPUTED DOMINATION of 1st Page GOOGLE Search Results. Get the same WINNING RESULTS for your BIZ. CONTACT ME TODAY! ~ Vincent Medina \| 310 251 9728 \| Vincent@ArtfulMind.Biz The importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB. This leading to HIGH LEVEL VISIBILITY. Where we are all striving to get: MULTIPLE 1st page links/ranking in Google organic searches using your keywords. Test by clicking link below: I Produce Printing \| Social Media \| Branding \| Creative Design \| Business Process Improvement \| Marketing \| SEO/Link-Building \| Advertising for Business \| Realtors in Santa Monica \| Los Angeles \| S CA. Amgen, Avery Dennison, & Chevron provided the opportunity to develop and implement a robust project/people/inventory-tracking method, delivering clear visibility throughout the creative/production process of 150 to 180 concurrent projects with multi-level accountabilities and oversight accessibility by cross-divisional stakeholder/project managers/c-level constituents; manage the implementation of an intranet solution for stationery procurement through PeopleSoft and Ariba Spend Management System; create an efficiency model for "global market trends" data with hyperlinks, providing a 3-year perspective via quarterly updates in historical, current, and forecast data and a price-tracking data model, providing formulaic pricing trends, historical, and current insight over all suppliers within the CC&IG category. The ArtfulMind.Biz business model focuses on: ~ innovative and creative solutions ~ print and online project management ~ clean and efficient design ~ effective and measurable results ~ strategic sourcing and procurement ~ qualitative production ~ quantitative spend reduction The result: ~ your branding/corporate identity looks better ~ your SEO/Link-Building is effective & works beyond belief ~ your HTML works better ~ our social media networks look and functions better ~ your post cards look better ~ your business cards look better ~ your fliers look better Better is good & Effective is the end result. I Guarantee that! Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought, we the people, remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap. I resolve to provide great resource for printing \| branding \| social media \| creative design \| business process improvement \| marketing \| SEO/link-building \| advertising for business \| realtors in Santa Monica \| Los Angeles \| S CA. Thank you. Vincent Medina Managing Director http://ArtfulMind.Biz 310 251 9728


		Vincent Medina of ArtfulMindBiz

Payment		Cash, Checks

Hours		Mon-Fri: 8:00am-5:00pm

Travel		Customers may travel to my place of business OR I will travel to the customer up to 60 miles.

Location		Marina Del Rey, CA 90292

Verification		DOJ Smart Search verified Address verified Phone verified Email verified Facebook verified Twitter verified LinkedIn verified Website verified Thumbtack reviewed

Hundreds of UCLA Students Are Homeless, Struggling | (Let's reach out!)

2011-10-26T08:52:00.001-07:00

Vincent Medina (Facebook)

I am donating my time (talent) and creating a project to help students at UCLA who are struggling with lack of finances and housing.

So...

I need COOL digital photos (shots) in and around UCLA.
I will subsidize the printed/digitally produced media for this project.

Who can help?
Send shots or call me direct.

Thank you.

Vincent Medina
vincent@artfulmind.biz
310 251 9728

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + Google Search Domination + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

V I N C E N T M E D I N A | 310 251 9728 | Vincent@ArtfulMind.BIZ

Facebook Search vs Google Search - Battle for Internet Domination

2011-10-15T06:16:00.001-07:00

Facebook Search vs Google Search -
Battle for INTERNET DOMINATION

Before the recent All Facebook report, titled “Facebook Testing Web Search Box At Top Of Site” was changed to “Facebook Not Testing Web Search Box At Top Of Site (update)” I can imagine the reaction from Google's top brass. There has been a lot of speculation about Facebook potentially adding social media search to its core product, presenting the Big G with its first major threat in over a decade. Is that day close at hand?

The report even showed a user-submitted screen-shot that included a second search box adjacent to the regular search at the top of Facebook’s user interface that looked like such…

Facebook Search Box?
A Facebook spokesperson was quick to shoot down the supposition, indicating that it was not a test and most likely was the result of malware from a third-party.

However, there’s no reason to doubt that Facebook is entering the search space. For users, it provides greater choice, particularly from a social networking ecosystem where many of us spend the majority of our Internet time (with traffic that has even exceeded Google at times).

Matt McGee from Search Engine Land feels the same. "Despite Facebook’s statement tonight, it’s not far-fetched to think that some increased use of search, perhaps via Bing, may be in the cards at some point in the future." TechCrunch's Michael Arrington feels the incentives are too lucrative for Facebook not to consider a move into the search arena. "There is so much advertising revenue in that business, that they can’t ignore it forever."

In the graphic novel satire, "Facebucks & Dumb F*cks," much of the plot revolves around Z-Man (aka Mark Zuckerberg) and his social network Facebucks (aka Facebook) battling Google (aka Gobble) for not only control of the Internet…

Page from Facebucks & Dumb F*cks graphic novel
but also to eliminate them from the playing field all together - so they can focus on what they perceive as their greater threat - the Republic of China.

Page from Facebucks & Dumb F*cks graphic novel
However, world domination of the Web is an arduous task,
even with Google out of the picture.

Page from Facebucks & Dumb F*cks graphic novel
So, is search in the cards for Facebook? I don't think the question is "will it happen"-
I think the real question is "when will it happen?"

Page from Facebucks & Dumb F*cks graphic novel
Your thoughts, readers?

Source: Ron Callari, Social Media, Semantic Technology, Digitial Media & Trends Writer, InventorSpot.com

Farewell To A Genius...

2011-10-14T08:45:00.001-07:00

A look back on the LIFE and times of
STEVE JOBS, THE MAN WHO STRIVED TO MAKE A DENT IN THE UNIVERSE.

source: InfoGraphicWorld

The Four Bs... including "SEARCH... is still the killer app!"

2011-10-14T07:43:00.001-07:00

DOMINATING 1ST PAGE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS: CLICK IMAGE BELOW...

Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought... we the people remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap.

My methodolgy guarantees DOMINATING 1ST PAGE LINKS in Google search using your KEYWORDS for far less cost than GOOGLE ADWORDS / PPC / SEO.

Thank you.

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
WEBSITE
PORTFOLIO

_________________________________________________________________________________

Route to 2015

Real-time will rule:
DOMINATING social search rank, pricing, optimization

The demand for real-time information and capabilities will continue and increase,
as will the desire for improved advertising efficiency. Old, non-optimizable formats will go by the wayside. Display will boom, as real-time bidding becomes possible, making every campaign mutable-by-the-moment, enabling ad buyers to tailor bids and ads, impression by impression, across a wide range of ad space. Half the ads targeted to particular audiences will use real-time bidding.

“We will move from just recording data to modifying the system in real time: continuous improvement.”
________________________________________________________________________

Digital Tipsheet: The Four Bs

BE FOUND: SEARCH... is still the killer app!
It’s more location-based (knows where you are), personalized (offers to you), visual (Google Goggles) and real-time (price, availability, news) than ever. Roy’s Restaurants introduced hyperlocal ads, delivering clickable, down-to-the-block level information about a business at the right place and at the right moment – and got an 800 percent ROI on their advertising investment.
BE ENGAGING: You could be dull in another era, NOT this one.
For creativity, look at American Express mastering the art of the live stream – a newly potent medium. Their live-streamed concerts, ‘Unstaged: An Original Series from American Express,’ created an absorbing environment on the web and in the arena, engaging users with the music of Arcade Fire and John Legend – and with their brand.
BE RELEVANT: Real-world, real-time relevance matters more than ever.
A Google client in the auto insurance business uses click-to-call so that when a potential customer searches their mobile phone for car insurance, the company shows them an ad that can immediately connect the customer to its call center and begin the application process on the spot. The consumer, right there on the lot, could get their insurance before they drive away.
BE ACCOUNTABLE: Ford's identified five key buying actions based on closely measured online behavior.
If someone configures a car online, Ford now knows they are more likely to buy one. The car company uses this information to target digital advertising, generating high-value leads and test-drive registrations for its dealers. Unlike traditional local media, Ford can measure the exact return on this investment. Accountability pays.

source: ThinkWithGoogle

The EIGHT PILLARS of INNOVATION + INNOVATE! Balloon Buddies

2011-10-05T09:17:00.001-07:00

The EIGHT PILLARS of INNOVATION

As Google's employee #16, Susan Wojcicki has learned a thing or two about innovation. Here's what she's learned, and what she continues to work on.

WORDS BY Susan Wojcicki

ILLUSTRATION BY Robert Samuel Hanson

The greatest innovations are the ones we take for granted, like light bulbs, refrigeration and penicillin. But in a world where the miraculous very quickly becomes common-place, how can a company, especially one as big as Google, maintain a spirit of innovation year after year?

Nurturing a culture that allows for innovation is the key. As we’ve grown to over 26,000 employees in more than 60 offices, we’ve worked hard to maintain the unique spirit that characterized Google way back when I joined as employee #16.

At that time I was Head of Marketing (a group of one), and over the past decade I’ve been lucky enough to work on a wide range of products. Some were big wins, others weren’t. Although much has changed through the years, I believe our commitment to innovation and risk has remained constant.

What’s different is that, even as we dream up what’s next, we face the classic innovator’s dilemma: should we invest in brand new products, or should we improve existing ones? We believe in doing both, and learning while we do it. Here are eight principles of innovation we’ve picked up along the way to guide us as we go.

Have a MISSION... that matters

Work can be more than a job when it stands for something you care about. Google’s mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ We use this simple statement to guide all of our decisions. When we start work in a new area, it’s often because we see an important issue that hasn’t been solved and we’re confident that technology can make a difference. For example, Gmail was created to address the need for more web email functionality, great search and more storage.

Our mission is one that has the potential to touch many lives, and we make sure that all our employees feel connected to it and empowered to help achieve it. In times of crisis, they have helped by organizing life-saving information and making it readily available. The dedicated Googlers who launched our Person Finder tool (to learn more see Missions that Matter) within two hours of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this March are a wonderful recent example of that commitment.

Think BIG... but start small

No matter how ambitious the plan, you have to roll up your sleeves and start somewhere. Google Books, which has brought the content of millions of books online, was an idea that our founder, Larry Page, had for a long time. People thought it was too crazy even to try, but he went ahead and bought a scanner and hooked it up in his office. He began scanning pages, timed how long it took with a metronome, ran the numbers and realized it would be possible to bring the world’s books online. Today, our Book Search index contains over 10 million books.

Similarly, AdSense, which delivers contextual ads to websites, started when one engineer put ads in Gmail. We realized that with more sophisticated technology we could do an even better job by devoting additional resources to this tiny project. Today, AdSense ads reach 80 percent of global internet users – it is the world’s largest ad network – and we have hundreds of thousands of publishers worldwide.

Strive for CONTINUAL INNOVATION... not instant perfection

The best part of working on the web? We get do-overs. Lots of them. The first version of AdWords, released in 1999, wasn’t very successful – almost no one clicked on the ads. Not many people remember that because we kept iterating and eventually reached the model we have today. And we’re still improving it; every year we run tens of thousands of search and ads quality experiments, and over the past year we’ve launched over a dozen new formats. Some products we update every day.

Our iterative process often teaches us invaluable lessons. Watching users ‘in the wild’ as they use our products is the best way to find out what works, then we can act on that feedback. It’s much better to learn these things early and be able to respond than to go too far down the wrong path.

Iterating has served us well. We weren’t first to Search, but we were able to make progress in the market by working quickly, learning faster and taking our next steps based on data.

Look for IDEAS... everywhere

As the leader of our Ads products, I want to hear ideas from everyone – and that includes our partners, advertisers and all of the people on my team. I also want to be a part of the conversations Googlers are having in the hallways.

Several years ago, we took this quite literally and posted an ideas board on a wall at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. On a Friday night, an engineer went to the board and wrote down the details of a convoluted problem we had with our ads system. A group of Googlers lacking exciting plans for the evening began re-writing the algorithm within hours and had solved the problem by Tuesday.

Some of the best ideas at Google are sparked just like that – when small groups of Googlers take a break on a random afternoon and start talking about things that excite them. The Google Art Project, which brought thousands of museum works online, and successful AdWords features like Automated Rules, are great examples of projects that started out in our ‘microkitchens.’ This is why we make sure Google is stocked with plenty of snacks at all times.

Share EVERYTHING...

Our employees know pretty much everything that’s going on and why decisions are made. Every quarter, we share the entire Board Letter with all 26,000 employees, and we present the same slides presented to the Board of Directors in a company-wide meeting.

By sharing everything, you encourage the discussion, exchange and re-interpretation of ideas, which can lead to unexpected and innovative outcomes. We try to facilitate this by working in small, crowded teams in open cube arrangements, rather than individual offices.

When someone has an idea or needs input on a decision, they can just look up and say, ‘Hey…’ to the person sitting next to them. Maybe that cube-mate will have something to contribute as well. The idea for language translation in Google Talk (our Gmail chat client) came out of conversations between the Google Talk and Google Translate teams when they happened to be working near one another.

Spark with IMAGINATION... fuel with DATA

In our fast-evolving market, it’s hard for people to know, or even imagine, what they want. That’s why we recruit people who believe the impossible can become a reality. One example is Sebastian Thrun who, along with his team, is building technology for driverless cars to reduce the number of lives lost to roadside accidents each year. These cars, still in development, have logged 140,000 hands-free miles driving down San Francisco’s famously twisty Lombard Street, across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the Pacific Coast Highway without a single accident.

We try to encourage this type of blue-sky thinking through ‘20 percent time’ – a full day a week during which engineers can work on whatever they want. Looking back at our launch calendar over a recent six-month period, we found that many products started life in employees’ 20 percent time.

What begins with intuition is fueled by insights. If you’re lucky, these reinforce one another. For a while the number of Google search results displayed on a page was 10 simply because our founders thought that was the best number. We eventually did a test, asking users, ‘Would you like 10, 20 or 30 search results on one page?’ They unanimously said they wanted 30. But 10 results did far better in actual user tests, because the page loaded faster. It turns out that providing 30 results was 20 percent slower than providing 10, and what users really wanted was speed. That’s the beautiful thing about data – it can either back up your instincts or prove them totally wrong.

Be a PLATFORM

There is so much awe-inspiring innovation being driven by people all over the globe. That’s why we believe so strongly in the power of open technologies. They enable anyone, anywhere, to apply their unique skills, perspectives and passions to the creation of new products and features on top of our platforms.

This openness helps to move the needle forward for everyone involved. Google Earth, for example, allows developers to build ‘layers’ on top of our maps and share them with the world. One user created a layer that uses animations of real-time sensor data to illustrate what might happen if sea levels rose from one to 100 meters. Another famous example of open technology is our mobile platform, Android. There are currently over 310 devices on the market built on the Android OS, and close to half a million Android developers outside the company who enjoy the support of Google’s extensive resources. These independent developers are responsible for most of the 200,000 apps in the Android marketplace.

NEVER FAIL to fail

Google is known for YouTube, not Google Video Player. The thing is, people remember your hits more than your misses. It’s okay to fail as long as you learn from your mistakes and correct them fast. Trust me, we’ve failed plenty of times. Knowing that it’s okay to fail can free you up to take risks. And the tech industry is so dynamic that the moment you stop taking risks is the moment you get left behind.

Two of the first projects I worked on at Google, AdSense and Google Answers, were both uncharted territory for the company. While AdSense grew to be a multi-billion-dollar business, Google Answers (which let users post questions and pay an expert for the answer) was retired after four years. We learned a lot in that time, and we were able to apply the knowledge we had gathered to the development of future products. If we’d been afraid to fail, we never would have tried Google Answers or AdSense, and missed an opportunity with each one.

Our growing Google workforce comes to us from all over the world, bringing with them vastly different experiences and backgrounds. A set of strong common principles for a company makes it possible for all its employees to work as one and move forward together. We just need to continue to say ‘yes’ and resist a culture of ‘no’, accept the inevitability of failures, and continue iterating until we get things right.

As it says on our homepage, ‘I’m feeling lucky.’ That’s certainly how I feel coming to work every day, and something I never want to take for granted.

Source: ThinkWithGoogle

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

INNOVATE! Balloon Buddies
___________________________________________________
The ORIGINAL Party Box Greeting

ORIGINAL PATENTED PRODUCT DESIGN - Balloon Buddies | 310 251 9728

DEI Social Media ANALYZER TOOL + RESULTS!

2011-10-03T09:06:00.001-07:00

Use DROP DOWN MENUS to make your selection | REAL TIME RESULTS!

DOMINATE Organic 1st Page Google Search Results!

CLICK for GOOGLE RESULTS

After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB. This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY.

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

Why do search engines get all the credit for driving online behavior when publishers are the kings of content? + GOOGLE SEARCH EXPERTISE

2011-10-03T07:50:00.001-07:00

AS CONSUMERS we... consume information in the form of news, opinions, entertainment, etc. The latter isn’t typically considered as part of the purchase funnel butit’s important to expand the definition of information consumption – what we’re reading, watching and/or listening to - when thinking about what drives intention.

The consumer is more empowered with information than ever before. Think about the last time you made any major purchase decision – a new camera, where to go on vacation, or what accountant to hire. Should I take that new job? Should I buy that car? Most likely you began your quest for an answer with a search engine. Once there, you start a discovery process, then process the information you found, weigh the opinion, and then eventually move towards a decision. Once the decision is made, you likely go back to the search engine to look for a brand, a product, or a service to purchase.

Today’s “Meta Curator”

We, as consumers of information, have all become what I refer to as “meta-curators.” We can literally access unlimited amounts of content and more often than not from anywhere and at any time (unless of course you’re on a United flight that still hasn’t gotten around to installing wi-fi). Our ability to access and process content drives the need for curating. There is simply too much content coming at us too quickly to keep up with it all. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed with information, and having access to more information doesn’t necessarily make us smarter or help us make better decisions.

With all of this information at our fingertips, most of us began curating for our own, private use. Collecting information in buckets (folders), making lists of sites, web pages and posts to stash away for midnight reading (or on a plane without wi-fi). From bookmarking sites to building folders, everyone developed their own approach to organizing valuable content to reference at a later date. The difference between how we organize content today compared to a few years ago is how we share the content we collect. The process of sharing has made us meta-curators. Whatever your poison – Delicious, Google+ , Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook – we, as consumers of information, have become obsessed with sharing online.

Sharing enabled us to tap into other curators – initiating the phenomenon of social consuming. Today people read an interesting article or stumble upon a cool infographic and immediately share it – on Twitter, Google+, RSS feeds, Facebook, and more. Content that’s curated in this manner – through social public sharing sites – is consumed by people that don’t necessarily know each other but have similar interests.They’re connected by their “interest graph” vs. their social graph. As interests evolve so does the interest graph and the intent to consume follows. More often than not, consumption of content doesn’t start and end on the same trajectory. It’s vectored based on the act of discovering and learning. The content consumed helps us uncover new information that ultimately influences the outcome of purchasing behavior.

How Content Drives Intent

In the online media world where I spend the vast majority of my time, intent is oftentimes synonymous with search. “I search, therefore I intend.” A foursquare version of this would be “I check-in, therefore I intend.” Both are a red herring that fundamentally underestimate the value of true intent built during the content phase.

We form the decision-making process during and around the act of consuming content. We seek, or stumble, into information that interests us. We dig deeper because we’re engaged by the content. Its authenticity, opinion, or perhaps even its entertainment value is what grabs us. We discover and then we begin moving towards a decision.

The true intent path is a bell curve:

The x-axis represents elapsed time, and the y-axis represents a relative degree of influence. People spend way more time in the content phases of the intent path (discovery, opinion, decision) than the bookends (navigation, transaction) that drive intention.

So, if content is the chief intent influencer, why then does the search engine get all the credit for the conversion? Shouldn’t the publisher of the content that’s driving purchase behavior get the lion’s share of credit? After all, they did the research, assembled the background materials, wrote the drafts, took the photos and videos, and edited the final copy that ultimately influenced the consumer purchase behavior. Publishing regular, valuable content that helps consumers make purchase decisions is no easy task. Let’s give the publishers the credit they deserve when it comes to the role they play in consumer intent.

source: Walter Knapp, COO Lijit Networks

A: While CONTENT definitely drives readers/clicks,
pattern keyword FREQUENCY across STRATEGIC CHANNELS drives SEO RESULTS.

Vincent Medina
Managing Director

Tags: Best Practices Google Search Expert Domination Santa Monica Los Angeles SEO

____________________________________________________________________________________

PAY ATTENTION to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks.

Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots onGoogle get 58% of clicks.

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic.
Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together.
For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers.
In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good summary of how search engines are tapping into social.
As (MIcrosoft) Bing’s Paul Yiu says in the piece, “search up until recently has been a lonely experience.
We want to introduce people as an important part of search.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

DOMINATE 1st Page Google Search Results!

CLICK for GOOGLE RESULTS

After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB.
This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY.

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Expert: Advertising + Business Process Improvement + Design + Direct Mail + Marketing + Printing + SEO/Link-Building + Social Media

Super rich swayed by social media, study shows + MetroRings.com Downtown Los Angeles Engagement Ring Jeweler

2011-09-19T16:23:00.001-07:00

Stevens, Pa.--A new survey from Unity Marketing shows that it was the wealthiest consumers who were most influenced by social media when making luxury purchases over the past year.

According to the survey, more than half of high net-worth individuals (those with $1 million or more in investible assets) said comments or information gathered from social media influenced what websites they visited (59 percent), what retail stores they shopped in (56 percent) and what designer brand they bought (57 percent).

The survey showed similar results for those classified as ultra affluent (annual income of $250,000 a year or more), with 54 percent stating that social media influenced their website visits, 49 percent stating it influenced where they shopped and 47 percent stating it influenced their brand choice.

“Fashion marketers need to make strategic use of social media to build powerful relationships between their brand and these high-value customers,” Unity Marketing President Pam Danziger said. “That will translate to a shopper’s ‘like’ of a brand or becoming the ‘mayor’ of a retail location into added revenues and profits.”

Unity Marketing conducted the study, titled “The Fashionable Affluent,” between July 6 and 13, surveying affluent consumers (annual income of $100,000 a year or more) who bought luxury goods in the second quarter. For the study, Unity asked the consumers about what influenced their buying decisions, including the role of social media in swaying their purchasing decisions between July 2010 and July 2011.

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently | Google Expertise

2011-08-28T10:06:00.001-07:00

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others?
If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion.

It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail.
The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle.

In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people
reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.
If you want change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently,
you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along.
Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you,
and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to
become a different person to become a more successful one.
It's never what you are, but WHAT YOU DO!

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson.

UNDISPUTED EXPERT & DOMINATION of 1st Page GOOGLE Search Results.
Clients who are ahead of the curve get the same WINNING RESULTS.

CONTACT ME TODAY! ~ Vincent Medina | 310 251 9728 | Vincent@ArtfulMind.Biz

The importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in
it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB.
This leading to HIGH LEVEL VISIBILITY.

Where we are all striving to get:
MULTIPLE 1st page links/ranking in
Google organic searches using your keywords.

Test by clicking CLICK HERE link:

Amgen, Avery Dennison, & Chevron provided the opportunity to develop and implement a robust project/people/inventory-tracking method, delivering clear visibility throughout the creative/production process of 150 to 180 concurrent projects with multi-level accountabilities and oversight accessibility by cross-divisional stakeholder/project managers/c-level constituents; manage the implementation of an intranet solution for stationery procurement through PeopleSoft and Ariba Spend Management System; create an efficiency model for "global market trends" data with hyperlinks, providing a 3-year perspective via quarterly updates in historical, current, and forecast data and a price-tracking data model, providing formulaic pricing trends, historical, and current insight over all suppliers within the CC&IG category.

The ArtfulMind.Biz business model focuses on:

~ innovative and creative solutions
~ print and online project management
~ clean and efficient design
~ effective and measurable results
~ strategic sourcing and procurement
~ qualitative production
~ quantitative spend reduction

The result:

~ your branding/corporate identity looks better
~ your SEO/Link-Building is effective & works beyond belief
~ your HTML works better
~ our social media networks look and functions better
~ your post cards look better
~ your business cards look better
~ your fliers look better

Better is good & Effective is the end result. I Guarantee that!

Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought, we the people, remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap.

Thank you.

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
http://ArtfulMind.Biz
310 251 9728

2011-08-28T10:00:00.001-07:00

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others?
If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion.

In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people
reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

The importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in
it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB.
This leading to HIGH LEVEL VISIBILITY.

Where we are all striving to get:
MULTIPLE 1st page links/ranking in
Google organic searches using your keywords.

Test by clicking CLICK HERE link:

The ArtfulMind.Biz business model focuses on:

The result:

Better is good & Effective is the end result. I Guarantee that!

Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought, we the people, remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap.

Thank you.

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
http://ArtfulMind.Biz
310 251 9728

Illuminating Paintings by Leonid Afremov

2011-07-06T06:34:00.001-07:00

Leonid Afremov is a Belarusian painter who was born in Vitebsk, in 1955.
Coincidentally or not, he was born in the same town as Marc Chagall,
the famous artist who also founded the Vitebsk Art School along with Malevich & Kandinsky.
Leonid Afremov graduated from Vitebsk Art School in 1978 and is one of its elite members.
His painting are often colorful landscapes, cityscapes and figures,
and are typically painted using a palette knife and oil paint.

"I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and palette knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. Each of my paintings brings different mood, colors and emotions. I love to express the beauty, harmony and spirit of this world in my paintings. My heart is completely open to art. Each of my artworks reflects my feelings, sensitivity, passion, and the music from my soul. True art is alive and inspired by humanity. I believe that art helps us to be free from aggression and depression." ~ Leonid Afremov

Source: gismullr | deviantART profile (which is managed by his son David Afremov).

The Alhambra Palace | Sensational Architecture of Granada, Spain + Search Magic

2011-06-26T14:18:00.001-07:00

The Alhambra Palace, Granada Spain...
One of the greatest architectural wonders of the world,

created in the 13th & 14th centuries and remains so today.

more... CLICK HERE

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

HDR (high dynamic range) images of LA ALHAMBRA PALACE,
17 gorgeous examples that help us take a virtual tour of Spain and admire the architectural beauty that can be found there.

Plaza Zorrilla, Valladolid

Church of San Manuel and San Benito in Madrid

Hanging Houses – Casas Colgadas, Cuenca

Plaza Mayor, Salamanca

St. Vincent’s Basilica

Monument to King Alfonso XII – Madrid

Pond of the Fisher’s Cabin

Cathedral – Catedral, Cuenca

Cathedral – La Seo Cathedral – Catedral, Zaragoza

Covent of Saint Esteban

Basilica-Cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar

La Almudena Cathedral – Madrid

City Hall of Cadiz

photo source: TRIGGERPIT

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Tags: Best Practices Google Search SEO

Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic.
Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together.
For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers.
In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good summary of how search engines are tapping into social.
As (MIcrosoft) Bing’s Paul Yiu says in the piece, “search up until recently has been a lonely experience.
We want to introduce people as an important part of search.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

click image for p o r t f o l i o

DOMINATE 1st Page Search Results!

CLICK for GOOGLE RESULTS

After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB.
This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY followed by INCREASED REVENUE (period).

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

MODERN + DREAM ARCHITECTURE | Tangga House — Guz Architects

2011-06-16T06:53:00.001-07:00

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Tangga House is a Singapore dream home designed by Guz Architects.

Completed in 2009, the 7,663 square foot residence is located in Holland Village, an elite district of Singapore that is famous amongst the expatriate community.

The luxury single-family home gives the owners the opportunity to live in harmony and comfort with nature, in Singapore’s hot tropical climate.

“The house is a contemporary interpretation of a traditional courtyard house, laid out around a central green courtyard with a double height stair and entry area forming the focal point of the project.

The L-shaped plan creates open spaces which encourage natural ventilation and offer resident’s views over the courtyard to the veranda, roof gardens and beyond.

Lushly planted roof gardens surround the house and add to the effect that nature is evident in every part of the house.

The large roof above the courtyard creates an indoor and outdoor space leading to the gardens and swimming pool which wraps around two sides of the house.

Maryland Drive is a modest and luxurious residential design which gives residents opportunities to live in harmony and comfortably with nature.”

source: HomeDsgn.com

Top 6 + 1 Sites That Inspire & Educate

2011-05-27T10:40:00.001-07:00

If you're a professional who likes to be intellectually stimulated and you enjoy keeping up with the latest news
and breaking trends, the internet provides you with an endless choice of carefully curated sites to visit. Today, we bring you six of them that we believe are leaps and bounds above the rest. These sites will not only educate you on topics ranging from business and technology to art and design, they'll motivate you to find your own, original ideas and see them through. They're culturally relevant, they're idea driven and most of all, they're deeply inspirational.

1. TED

TED is short for three incredibly important subjects in our modern world; technology, entertainment and design. Started in 1984, TED brings together the most brilliant minds to teach us about issues that matter. Their mission is simple: to spread ideas. Their passion to change the world comes through in their inspirational talks. Next time you want to hear real stories from amazing people who do mind-blowing work, watch a TED talk.

Tip: Download TED's free iPad app to browse through 800 videos by date, popularity or keyword. Make sure to check out their Inspire Me feature which lets you find videos that not only fit your mood (inspiring, funny, etc) but your schedule (how much time you have). The talks range from 3 minutes to 30 minutes long.

2. Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings started from very humble beginnings. Its founder, Maria Popova, a UPenn student at the time, explains it best. "I started publishing, one curated item per day Monday through Friday, without much of a strategy," she says, "just pursuing my own curiosity and digging for nuggets of stuff that inspires, that gives you pause, that makes you connect dots you didn't realize were connectable. Over time, it just found its audience." Ultimately, Popova wants to make ideas not only accessible but relevant. More than anything, her site challenges you to see patterns, to discover how pieces of life's puzzle sometimes fit surprisingly together.

Tip: With over 63K Twitter followers, Brainpicker has a strong audience...and for good reason. Make sure to follow them if you want to see some well-curated culture links from not just Brainpicker's website, but from all around the web.

3. PSFK

Though focused on design, advertising, and technology, PSFK is a must-read for anyone who wants to be on the cusp of new trends and emerging ideas. With an editorial staff that spans the globe, PSFK brings you interesting stories from broad viewpoints. Visit PSFK daily to see what creative professionals are currently talking about. You'll find everything from great advice, like Tips For Getting A Project Funded On Kickstarter, to inspirational talks from founders of companies likeThrillist.

Tip: Attend a PSFK conference, workshop or event to hear about the latest trends and ideas first-hand. Each year, PSFK brings together the world's leading creative thinkers and business leaders to a conference in a major metropolitan city. To get a feel for the type of talks you can expect to hear, check out their video round up from years' past.

4. Kottke

Kottke is an influential blog that was started by Manhattan, New York-based Jason Kottke back in 1998. It's a site that not only brings together interesting ideas in science, technology and art, among other subjects, it also summarizes that information in a personal way that makes it applicable to the reader. Smart and insightful, Kottke was recently recognized as one of Time's Best Blogs of 2010and was described this way by the American news magazine, "Touting only smart, stimulating items worth adding to the public sphere, Kottke.org is part odd-news aggregator and part archival treasure dig -- consistently one of the most surprising domains on the Web." We couldn't agree more.

Tip: Kottke is working on a new web app/site called Stellar which helps you discover and track your favorite things online. You can follow Stellar's Twitter account for updates or request an invite onStellar's webpage.

5. Information is Beautiful

Information is Beautiful was started by London-based writer and designer David McCandless. It's a blog that takes information - facts, data, ideas - and turns it into well-designed charts, graphs and data visualizations. Relevant to not just designers but anyone who appreciates statistics and facts, this site will not only keep you entertained, it will educate you on the world we live in.

Tip: Pick up the 256 page Information is Beautiful book for a comprehensive, visual guide to the way the world works. Great for inspiration on how to present your information in new and interesting ways.

6. The 99 Percent

The 99 Percent recently won the 15 Annual Webby Awards for best Cultural blog. Behance's think tank, The 99 Percent focuses on what happens after inspiration. The website is filled with inspiring interviews, action-oriented tips, and tried and true best practices. They also have an annual conference that's designed to help you turn your ideas into a reality. Held each spring, the conference is a two day event that brings over 400 creative people together to hear accomplished professionals talk about lessons they've learned on their journey to success.

Tip: Founder of 99% Scott Belsky recently wrote a book, called Making Ideas Happen, where he's collected personal stories from the leaders of top companies like Google, Disney and Zappos, finding out what methods they used to helped propel their companies forward. With practical tips, this book will help anyone in a company, big or small, see what it takes to bring their ideas to fruition.

Which websites do you visit to be both educated and inspired?

By Alice Yoo (from My Modern Met) on May 16, 2011

RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

Another inspiring RSA Animate taken from a speech given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education expert and recipient of the RSA Benjamin Franklin award.

DOMINATE ORGANIC GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS!

2011-05-22T11:18:00.001-07:00

Creative Advertising, Design, Printing, Branding, SEO, Link-Building & Marketing Services




I Produce Printing \| Social Media \| Branding \| Creative Design \| Business Process Improvement \| Marketing \| SEO/Link-Building \| Advertising for Business \| Realtors in Santa Monica \| Los Angeles \| S CA. UNDISPUTED DOMINATION of 1st Page Google ORGANIC Search Results! Call me if you are looking for the same type of winning success for your business. After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB. This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY followed by INCREASED REVENUE. Where we are all striving to get: DOMINANT 1st page links/ranking in Google organic searches using your keywords. Test it yourself by clicking my link below: Amgen, Avery Dennison, and Chevron provided the opportunity to develop and implement a robust project/people/inventory-tracking method, delivering clear visibility throughout the creative/production process of 150 to 180 concurrent projects with multi-level accountabilities and oversight accessibility by cross-divisional stakeholder/project managers/c-level constituents; manage the implementation of an intranet solution for stationery procurement through PeopleSoft and Ariba Spend Management System; create an efficiency model for "global market trends" data with hyperlinks, providing a 3-year perspective via quarterly updates in historical, current, and forecast data and a price-tracking data model, providing formulaic pricing trends, historical, and current insight over all suppliers within the CC&IG category. The ArtfulMind.Biz business model focuses on: ~ innovative and creative solutions ~ print and online project management ~ clean and efficient design ~ effective and measurable results ~ strategic sourcing and procurement ~ qualitative production ~ quantitative spend reduction The result: ~ your branding/corporate identity looks better ~ your SEO/Link-Building is effective & works beyond belief ~ your HTML works better ~ our social media networks look and functions better ~ your post cards look better ~ your business cards look better ~ your fliers look better Better is good and Effective is the end result. I Guarantee That! Technology is changing at the speed of novel thought, we the people, remain flexible to change and open to the continuum of the proverbial building of a better mouse trap. I resolve to provide great resource for printing \| branding \| social media \| creative design \| business process improvement \| marketing \| SEO/link-building \| advertising for business \| realtors in Santa Monica \| Los Angeles \| S CA. Thank you. Vincent Medina Managing Director http://ArtfulMind.Biz


		Vincent Medina of ArtfulMindBiz

Payment		Cash, Checks

Hours		Mon-Fri: 8:00am-5:00pm

Travel		Customers may travel to my place of business OR I will travel to the customer up to 60 miles for an additional cost of $0.60.

Location		Marina Del Rey, CA 90292

Verification		DOJ Smart Search verified Address verified Phone verified Email verified Facebook verified Twitter verified LinkedIn verified Website verified Thumbtack reviewed

Albert Einstein | Illustrated Perspectives | Google Search Enlightenment

2011-05-08T08:09:00.001-07:00

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space.
He experience himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest...
A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

~ Albert Einstein

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength.
They are radical. henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

~ Hermann Minkowski, 1908 (Einstein's Former Mathematics College Teacher)

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."

"Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe.
But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes...
goodwill among men (humanity) and peace on earth."
~ Albert Einstein

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

click image for p o r t f o l i o

UNDISPUTED DOMINATION of 1st Page Google ORGANIC Search Results!
Call me if you are looking for the same type of winning success for your business.

CLICK for GOOGLE RESULTS

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Tags: Best Practices Google Search SEO

Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

Google SEO Advice + Dancing with Google's Spiders | The Economist + Dominating 1st Page Google Search

2011-05-02T07:18:00.001-07:00

These guys at GOOGLE are great... but, a little off base for creating 'less cost' models and cost avoidance regarding Google Adwords/Pay-per-click.

I did great work as a GLOBAL ANALYST with CHEVRON... work that lead my thinking & techniques for GOOGLE SEARCH DOMINATION.
More to do with creating vast visibility rather than seo for your singular site.
Vast visibility that leads your prospective clients... wherever you want to lead them... including your website.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Search engines:
Google is engaged in an elaborate dance with firms determined to keep their websites high up in its rankings.

THE industrious spider “bots” that crawl around the web on behalf of Google, the world's biggest search engine, evoke both fear and reverence. Late last year the bots swept through the world's web servers to scrutinise some 8 billion web pages and determine their new rankings in Google's search results. As Google tweaks its mighty ranking algorithms, and applies them to the constantly changing pages of the web, different sites shuffle up and down wildly in its search rankings, repeatedly gaining and losing ground. This operation, which takes place two or three times a year, is known as a “Google Dance”.

Like hurricanes, Google Dances are given names, such as Bourbon, Gilligan and Florida, often by commentators at a website called webmasterworld.com. Jagger, the two-week dance that began late last October, moved through servers in three waves, eliciting chatter in internet forums. “Been kicked off the face of the index by jagger1,” reads a typical entry. “Will try not to panic til after jagger3.”

All search engines test and implement new algorithms constantly, though not in such a dramatic fashion. Because achieving a high search ranking is crucial to success for many online businesses, a huge industry has sprung up devoted to the pursuit of website visibility. In 2005 worldwide spending on such “search-engine optimisation” (SEO), grew 125%, to $1.25 billion, according to SEMPO, a Boston-based trade association. It predicts spending will grow by 150% this year.

In this Technology Quarterly

The Google Dance can rattle companies, since precipitous—but often temporary—falls down the pecking order are common. But Paul Aelen of Checkit, a large SEO firm based in the Netherlands, admits that algorithm updates are “very exciting” for SEO experts, who can then test an array of tricks to figure out what works, and what doesn't.

SEO firms boost their clients' online rankings by tinkering with their websites to enhance the characteristics that search engines consider positive. This involves techniques such as simplifying complicated page addresses, rewriting copy to produce single-theme pages with accurate titles, adding extra keywords to the invisible page descriptions (or “metatags”) read by indexing software, and putting product information stored in databases directly on to fixed pages, so that search engines' bots can read it.

The quest to understand how search engines rank websites has become an obsession for some. Web forums devoted to the topic hum with debate, and many SEO experts comb through patent applications to find out what new algorithms are in the pipeline. That ruse, however, is becoming less effective. Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google who is assailed with algorithm questions at industry conferences, says his firm, like its competitors, carefully controls access to its secrets. “A lot of our best ideas don't get filed as patents because patents eventually become public,” he says.

The best SEO firms can do wonders for a site's ranking. Lee Odden, the president of TopRank Online Marketing, a firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, says one of his clients stopped paying out $50,000 a month on pay-per-click advertising; instead, Pacific Security Capital, an investment bank based in Beaverton, Oregon, now spends a tenth of that figure on SEO and claims the top spot for some 50 keywords on several search engines.

The most powerful determinant of a web page's importance is the number of incoming referral links, which is regarded as a gauge of the site's popularity. Site optimisers solicit links from directory sites, swap links with prominent sites, and fish for links from bloggers by sending them press releases. But the influence of links begets abuse. Unethical methods, known as “black-hat SEO”, include renting links from popular or long-established sites (their links carry more weight). Some unscrupulous SEO outfits even exploit loopholes in website-management tools to place hidden links on prestigious sites, such as those maintained by universities.

The “link farm” technique involves spamming the web with automatically generated bogus blogs, known as splogs, that link to a website to give it a boost. David Sifry, founder of Technorati, a blog search-engine based in San Francisco, estimates that 10,000 link-bearing splogs sporting content copied (or “scraped”) from legitimate sites are put online every day to fool the spider bots. “Cloaking” involves presenting content to indexing bots that is different from that which web surfers who visit the site will actually see. “Keyword stuffing” involves hiding popular search terms on a page—using, say, white text on a white background—to attract visitors.

Mahesh Murthy, the founder of Pinstorm, a company based in Mumbai that is one of India's biggest SEO firms, says that the Google Dance and other similar algorithm updates are constantly getting better at detecting and “shutting out” cheaters. This can mean relegation to the bottom of the rankings, or even removal altogether. Last month Google accused BMW, a carmaker, of using cloaking, and briefly removed its website from its index. But the financial stakes are so high that SEO firms will continue to look for new ways to boost their client's rankings. This is one dance, it seems, that will not be going out of fashion any time soon.

from the print edition | Technology Quarterly

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

click image for p o r t f o l i o

UNDISPUTED DOMINATION of 1st Page Google ORGANIC Search Results!
CLICK for GOOGLE RESULTS

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Tags: Best Practices Google Search SEO

Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic. Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together. For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers. In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

Google Online Search Domination / Visibility Expert | Printing | Design | Santa Monica | Los Angeles

National Geographic Photo of the Day: Best of 2011 + Online Presence

Oceanic Whitetip Shark, Bahamas

Yellow Birch, Adirondacks

Skyscrapers, Dubai

Cottonmouth, North Carolina

Elephant Festival, India

Alberta, Canada

Online Presence & Visibility....Defined!

Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks + Google Search Visibility Expertise

"Making the WORLD More Open & Connected." ~Mark Zuckerberg_______________________________________________________________________________________________

source: Eytan Bakshy via Mark Zuckerberg

Google's Success May Mark The End Of Everything Else | Google Online Search Domination / Visibility Expert

Social Media

Mobile

Local

The Data

Start the New Year with Progress | Harvard Business

Innovating for a Better City + Staying Ahead of the Curve of Innovative Thought.

The Takeaway

Empower your team

Remove the barriers

Support those who fail

7 Reasons to Start Blogging More...NOW! | Facebook Marketing

7 Reasons to Start BLOGGING More...NOW!

#1. More Traffic [period].

#2. More Leads.

#3 – Frequency Matters.

#4. Volume Matters.

#5. Get Found in Google Search Results.

#6. More Indexed Pages = More Leads.

#7. Save Money.

DOMINATE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS! 310 251 9728

Hundreds of UCLA Students Are Homeless, Struggling | (Let's reach out!)

Facebook Search vs Google Search - Battle for Internet Domination

Facebook Search vs Google Search - Battle for INTERNET DOMINATION

Farewell To A Genius...

The Four Bs... including "SEARCH... is still the killer app!"

Route to 2015

Real-time will rule:DOMINATING social search rank, pricing, optimization

Digital Tipsheet: The Four Bs

The EIGHT PILLARS of INNOVATION + INNOVATE! Balloon Buddies

The EIGHT PILLARS of INNOVATION

Have a MISSION... that matters

Think BIG... but start small

Strive for CONTINUAL INNOVATION... not instant perfection

Look for IDEAS... everywhere

Share EVERYTHING...

Spark with IMAGINATION... fuel with DATA

Be a PLATFORM

NEVER FAIL to fail

DEI Social Media ANALYZER TOOL + RESULTS!

DOMINATE Organic 1st Page Google Search Results!

After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB. This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY. Thank you, Vincent MedinaManaging DirectorArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

Why do search engines get all the credit for driving online behavior when publishers are the kings of content? + GOOGLE SEARCH EXPERTISE

PAY ATTENTION to Search Engine Rankings:Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks.

Super rich swayed by social media, study shows + MetroRings.com Downtown Los Angeles Engagement Ring Jeweler

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently | Google Expertise

Illuminating Paintings by Leonid Afremov

The Alhambra Palace | Sensational Architecture of Granada, Spain + Search Magic

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

MODERN + DREAM ARCHITECTURE | Tangga House — Guz Architects

Top 6 + 1 Sites That Inspire & Educate

By Alice Yoo (from My Modern Met) on May 16, 2011

RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

DOMINATE ORGANIC GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS!

Albert Einstein | Illustrated Perspectives | Google Search Enlightenment

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings: Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Google SEO Advice + Dancing with Google's Spiders | The Economist + Dominating 1st Page Google Search

Search engines: Google is engaged in an elaborate dance with firms determined to keep their websites high up in its rankings.

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings: Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

"Making the WORLD More Open & Connected." ~Mark Zuckerberg
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Facebook Search vs Google Search -
Battle for INTERNET DOMINATION

Real-time will rule:
DOMINATING social search rank, pricing, optimization

After all, the importance of innovative SOCIAL MEDIA (SM) and worthwhile content, is in it's opportunity for creating VAST PRESENCE throughout the WEB. This leading to DOMINANT VISIBILITY.

Thank you,

Vincent Medina
Managing Director
ArtfulMind.Biz | 310 251 9728

PAY ATTENTION to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks

Search engines:
Google is engaged in an elaborate dance with firms determined to keep their websites high up in its rankings.

Pay Attention to Search Engine Rankings:
Top 3 Spots on Google Get 58% of Clicks