A quick post to pass along some useful info I just found on TechCrunch:

Last week YouTube installed a search bar on every embedded YouTube video all over the web.

This means that you run the risk of losing the visitor who would have watched the video on your site to YouTube’s main site, to spend the rest of their day watching cat videos.

To remove the search bar from an embedded video, add:

&showsearch=0

To the end of the video URL.

Voilà! No more ugly search bar, no more lost visitors to YouTube.

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After a long battle with the perfect copy and perfect coding, WebpageFX has finally launched our new site!

It has all the same info as our previous site plus some new goodies.

Next up is redesigning this blog: leave suggestions in the comments.

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It’s been pretty easy for techies to bash John McCain. He’s from a different time and has lived his life without much need for the internet or social networking. You can’t really blame him: I’ll be uneasy about flying cars for the first few years they’re available, even though my (grand)kids will zip around no problem.

But part of running for president is creating a brand, and (like any policy issue) McCain should have recognized his weakness and surrounded himself with people who know better.

He didn’t.

McCain’s online team completely ignores Web 2.0, opening the door for web-savvy early adopters to destroy his brand.

Pranksters have beaten Team McCain to the punch by pre-registering the candidate’s profile on every major social media site. Some squatters leave the profiles alone, while others have done irreparable harm to his brand.

Just like www.yourbrand.com is your territory on the web, the brand’s username on social media sites is your outpost to the users of those services. Users that are typically young, educated, and relatively wealthy.

The McCain brand is not owned by the campaign in any of the following cases, missing the opportunity to connect with over 11 million users:

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Photo thanks to Lorelei Ranveig.

Web.com president Dr. Jeff Stibel is one of the inventors of search engine interfaces and has a paragraph of titles after his name.  In a recent blog post and Harvard Business Review Podcast he claims that the brain is a reasonable model for understanding the internet.

I disagree.

Dr. Stible argues that the internet is a brain, and Google is its memory. In the brain the most powerful thoughts are formed by connections of billions of synapses, and these memories are the most likely ones to come up in daily thought.

Others are accessed by sending “thought queries” to the brain, bringing up memories we though we had forgotten.  Of those, only the top few receive attention.  The rest are ignored.

A similar system exists online. The more pages that link to a website, the more important that website is and the more often it is “remembered” (shows up on search results).  But the more specific the query, the more less-important sites will become more relevant.

This analogy is good for conceptualizing. Links=synapses, websites=neurons, internet=brain, etc. In fact it’s a pretty accurate model for the construction of the internet.

But the model falls apart when you realize that it takes more to be “remembered” on the internet than the intrinsic quality of the memory itself. Stibel’s advice to small business owners (from his blog):

So what should you do? Follow the brain.

Stop trying to game Google and focus on building value. Improve the quality of your site, remove the clutter and focus on attracting relevant sites to link to your site. And if you are looking for a good model, look no further than Google’s website: uncluttered, massive links in to the site, and a nice big button for sending your information on.

A real memory’s worth is the intrinsic value of the memory. But a website, although it may be beneficial and relevant, must be configured in such a way as to allow the memory engine (Google) to remember it.

In practice, “gaming” Google is just as important as providing value. The fundamental difference between the brain and the internet is that online memories (sites) must to be configured correctly to be remembered (ranked well). It’s not enough for a site to simply be valuable.

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