Google+ is a social layer that turns all of Google search engine into one giant social network. The service allows users to share photos, links and videos with friends, family and acquaintances. The unique part so far is that you can share with specific people your stuff rather than everyone.

But unfortunately, this has also been the root cause of scams that has been generated specifically for this new forum. Many fake sites have been uploaded that invite the users to fill out survey forms in order to get a free invite. When the users dismiss these surveys, another page opens up providing the users with two options. Either to download the free invite after answering a survey or to obtain the invite in exchange of certain fee.

If the user chooses to go for the surveys, then they are asked to fill in real information about themselves, before they are allowed to proceed to the surveys. And unsuspecting users fill out these forms, not knowing they are giving their information in the hands of cyber attackers. This exercise leads to nothing as no account is created- the attackers are after the user personal information, and the would be user is left frustrated.

According to Myla Pilao, director of core technology marketing from Trend Labs, perceived scarcity of accounts have led these scammers to cash in. According to recent reports, some fake Google+ invites contained links to malware, specifically banking Trojans, which are a family of malware aimed at stealing log-in information related to banks. When clicked, the links redirect a user to a commonly used .cmd file hosted at Dropbox. Accompanying this message is a link to another document hosted at Google Docs, but is essentially a fake form created to collect names and e-mail addresses of new victims.

Google+ an attempt to be in between Twitter and Facebook, though maybe catching on, but this ease of aggregating information in one place is a warning for users. This has opened up avenues for more malware and spam attacks.

Stay updated with the latest happenings, but does so behind a secured environment like the VPS network, that not only provides you  a reliable connection, you also get a secured environment with an anonymity feature. Log in and connect with millions but remember to stay web safe!

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.

And then some.

“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bells Labs.

On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.

“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. “Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible,” says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.”

From B to C

Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a “higher level” language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn’t quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.

Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson’s wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.

B was an interpreted language — meaning it was executed by an intermediate piece of software running atop a CPU — but C was a compiled language. It was translated into machine code, and then directly executed on the CPU. In those days, C was considered a high-level language. It would give Ritchie and Thompson the flexibility they needed, but at the same time, it would be fast.

That first version of the language wasn’t all that different from C as we know it today — though it was a tad simpler. It offered full data structures and “types” for defining variables, and this is what Richie and Thompson used to build their new UNIX kernel. “They built C to write a program,” says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later. “And the program they wanted to write was the UNIX kernel.”

Ritchie’s running joke was that C had “the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language.” In other words, he acknowledged that C was a less-than-gorgeous creation that still ran very close to the hardware. Today, it’s considered a low-level language, not high. But Ritchie’s joke didn’t quite do justice to the new language. In offering true data structures, it operated at a level that was just high enough.

“When you’re writing a large program — and that’s what UNIX was — you have to manage the interactions between all sorts of different components: all the users, the file system, the disks, the program execution, and in order to manage that effectively, you need to have a good representation of the information you’re working with. That’s what we call data structures,” Pike says.

“To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consist and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. They needed a way to group all that data together, and they didn’t have that with Fortran.”

At the time, it was an unusual way to write an operating system, and this is what allowed Ritchie and Thompson to eventually imagine porting the OS to other platforms, which they did in the late 70s. “That opened the floodgates for UNIX running everywhere,” Pike says. “It was all made possible by C.”

Apple, Microsoft, and Beyond

At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world’s universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s. “The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground … C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened,” says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. “[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.”

As Pike points out, the data structures that Richie built into C eventually gave rise to the object-oriented paradigm used by modern languages such as C++ and Java.

The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published his research paper on the language, and five years later, he and colleague Brian Kernighan released the definitive C book: The C Programming Language. Kernighan had written the early tutorials for the language, and at some point, he “twisted Dennis’ arm” into writing a book with him.

Pike read the book while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, picking it up one afternoon while heading home for a sick day. “That reference manual is a model of clarity and readability compared to latter manuals. It is justifiably a classic,” he says. “I read it while sick in bed, and it made me forget that I was sick.”

Like many university students, Pike had already started using the language. It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code. Among so many other things, the operating system gave rise to the modern open source movement. Pike isn’t overstating it when says the influence of Ritchie’s work can’t be overstated, and though Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998, he still hasn’t gotten his due.

As Kernighan and Pike describe him, Ritchie was an unusually private person. “I worked across the hall from him for more than 20 years, and yet I feel like a don’t knew him all that well,” Pike says. But this doesn’t quite explain his low profile. Steve Jobs was a private person, but his insistence on privacy only fueled the cult of personality that surrounded him.

Ritchie lived in a very different time and worked in a very different environment than someone like Jobs. It only makes sense that he wouldn’t get his due. But those who matter understand the mark he left. “There’s that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants,” says Kernighan. “We’re all standing on Dennis’ shoulders.”

Google disclosed that mobile revenue–both search and display advertising–is now a $2.5 billion run-rate business, up from $1 billion a year ago. That matches Google’s display ad revenue from a year ago; Google didn’t provide an update to display advertising this quarter.

Total revenue came in at $9.72 billion, up from $7.29 billion a year ago; net income was reported at $2.73 billion, up from $2.51 billion in the second quarter of 2011 and 26% from a year ago. “When I look back over the last quarter, the word that springs to mind is, ‘gangbusters,’” said CEO Larry Page.

Some analysts and investors had projected that performance would be negatively impacted by big acquisitions like the $12.5 billion August purchase of Motorola Mobility, which signified a major foray into hardware. But profits from advertising — comprising almost the entirety of Google’s revenue — appeared to have remained strong, though the company gives very limited information on how search, display, mobile and video ads perform as separate categories.

But it’s clear that Google is becoming successful as a product company in its own right beyond search. Mr. Page led off his remarks touting the progress of Google+, noting that the social network, which launched on June 28, now has 40 million users and 3.4 billion photos uploaded.

However, the company stated that it had 20 million users on Google+ after the first month, so clearly growth is slowing down. Mr. Page emphasized that Google+ was still in “very, very early stages” and had been open to the public for less than a month.

Mr. Page said he was encouraged by the growth of Android, observing there are now 190 million devices activated globally. Similarly, Google’s Chrome browser, the focus of its “Better Web” marketing campaign, is up to 200 million global users. “Turns out people really care about getting to the web quickly and securely, and having a whole ecosystem of apps at their fingertips,” Mr. Page said.

The company is hiring almost as fast as it is growing. Google made 2,500 new hires in the quarter, bringing its total workforce to 31,353, up from 20,000 a year ago. Mr. Page said Google is also shutting down projects with less potential — such as SideWiki and FastFlip — to pour resources into others.

Display ad revenue — from DoubleClick, YouTube, and Google’s ad network and exchange — is Google’s next big source of revenue beyond search, but Google provided few specifics on how its progressing. Google’s chief business officer Nikesh Arora did say that the top 20 display buyers on YouTube and Google Display Network are now spending about $15 million each — up from $2 million in 2009 — and the company has big display deals with companies like Dreamworks and Disney. He also noted that six-month display deals totaling $600 million are now in place with some agency partners.

When the executives were asked to evaluate individual markets, Mr. Arora said that there was “softness, but not weakness” in Western Europe but declined to elaborate further.

The lion’s share of Google’s revenue and profits are still in search, and its share of search queries has remained fairly static since dropping from its December 2010 peak of 66.6%, but showed growth in September with a half percentage point gain, bringing it to 65.3%, according to comScore. In an interview, Group M Search CEO Chris Copeland said growth of Google+ and integration of the +1 button could be having a positive impact on query volume.

“The big benefactor of Google+ is going to be Google search,” he said.

However, there’s more of a consensus around Google’s long-term gains in share of paid search spend. According to data from IgnitionOne, an analytics unit of Dentsu’s Innovation Interactive, Google’s share of paid search has risen from 70% in the first quarter of 2008 to 82% this past quarter. Bing/Yahoo’s share was 18.4% and has trended downward for the past three quarters.

Google’s strongest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, actually offers a higher rate of return than Google, according to Sid Shah, senior director of business analytics for the search firm Efficient Frontier, but it can’t deliver the same high-quality traffic at scale and thus has limited inventory, which has the effect of propping up Google.

“[Bing/Yahoo] has done a good job of being able to raise traffic quality and raise trust with advertisers, but now they have to increase volume, and for the last three quarters they haven’t been able to,” he said.

1. Tweet about stuff you know and love. Your passion and expertise will show and people will recognize it.

2. Make sure your Twitter account name reflects who you are and what you do. For those whose name isn’t a brand in its own right (like, um, @mitrastudios), pick one that’s short and to the point. When third generation NYC journalist Jonathan Mandell decided to tweet about theater, he picked @newyorktheater.

3. Related to No. 2, make sure you fill out the bio that shows up under your account name. In case your name is your account name, put your city and description.

4. Follow people. Yes, some of them will follow you back and many won’t, but to participate in the Twitter economy, follow. This goes for individuals and companies.

5. Read other people’s tweets and ask questions, clarifications and followups. If you’re a company, take the complaints offline — but take them for sure.

6. Unless you’re @nytimes or @cnn, don’t just hose us with links to your stuff. Throw in observations, funny things you see during the day. Go ahead and break the unofficial rule and tweet what you’re having for lunch once in a while. Because someone’s going to say they also had a $5 footlong. And that someone could be your next big client.

7. Don’t link and run. Even when you post links to your work and intersperse them with links to things you find interesting, stick around for the discussion. Attend to everyone who messages you and especially those who @ you. People remember if they didn’t get a response.

8. Tweet consistently. Nothing is more depressing than looking up an account with one tweet from 2010 and two from 2009. Total. (Hi, @mitrastudios.) Hire someone!

9. If you hire someone to tweet for you or your brand, make sure you trust them. Because if you trust them, they’ll be able to have a personality.

10. Remember the Murphy’s Law of Twitter is (thanks to @mitran) that being retweeted gets you more followers, but tweeting loses them. So be sure to say things that get retweeted!

HTML5 is currently being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. In common usage, HTML5 may also refer to the additional use of CSS3, as both technologies are under development in parallel.

Another definition of HTML5 from html5.org is as follows:

HTML5 is a new version of HTML and XHTML. The HTML5 draft specification defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML. It attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML.

As the world wide web gears up for the full unleashing of HTML5, some web browsers are already supporting some elements of HTML5. The support varies widely. A relatively new web tool attempts to reveal the HTML5-compatibility of your web browser. All you need to do is visit http://html5test.com and within some seconds, the full report would be revealed.

I have tried it from four different browsers, with interesting results. The following list is based on the performance of the web browsers:

Safari 4 (Win)

Safari (on Windows) has by far the best  feature set in the current market, outdoing competitors like Firefox 3.5 and even Google Chrome.

Particularly interesting is the excellent support for CSS3 animation properties such as CSS Transforms & CSS Animations, which enable the developer to define javascript-like rotation, movement and easing via CSS (advanced demos).

HTML5 features are well supported with Canvas, Video and Audio all implemented. Only the Geolocation API is currently not available, although apparently this is in the pipeline.

Firefox 3.5 (Win)

Firefox 3.5 has good support for features that you might be looking to use in your client work on a day-to-day basis. @font-face, box-shadow, rgba() and border-radius all work nicely.

Although, it doesn’t quite match up to Safari when it comes to CSS animation, it makes up for this with solid implementation of HTML5 media (video and audio).

A major plus is that Firefox 3.5+ implements the first public draft of the Geolocation specification from the W3C which I anticipate will be very useful in future web applications.

Google Chrome (Win)

As you’d expect for a WebKit browser, Chrome has really excellent support for almost all of the Modernizr tests generated by findmebyip.com.

The big let down is the lack of support for @font-face. This has been widely documented and there are known work arounds for it.  Google has promised that the next version of Chrome will add native support for web fonts.

I was very surprised to see 3D Transforms return positive.  I believe this is currently only supported by the iPhone and iPod Touch so I’m not sure about the accuracy of this result.

Opera 10 (Win)

We got quite a few comments about Opera’s perceived lack of support for advanced features. It’s true that support for CSS3 features is poor, especially when border-radius still hasn’t been implemented.

Nevertheless Opera does have good support for other important web standards which are currently not being tested by findmebyip.com.  He highlights  “Web Forms 2″ and SVG support as two primary examples of Opera’s excellence in these areas.

Nonetheless, I still feel that Opera needs to catch up with the CSS3 spec if it wants to be adopted by the mainstream web dev community.

Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8

And now the one you’ve all been waiting for.  Lets all have a good laugh! Well not quite, because unlike some other contenders, Internet Explorer does actually support @font-face (all be it only in .eot format). In fact it’s supported it for a while, with even IE6 providing complete support!

Nonetheless, with the exception of font-face, Internet Explorer does display a marked lack of support for almost every kind of advanced/progressive feature.  Hopefully the IE team will be able to look at this in a future release, but I’m not holding out any hope.

Summary

There is now a consistent level of support for many of the CSS3 and HTML5 features that the average developer might use for progressive enhancement.  From my survey the most widely supported features were:

• rgba()
• hsla()
• opacity()
• border-radius (except Opera)
• canvas

Outside of these however, support is patchy and is largely dependant on the whim of the browser manufacturer.  Some browsers are way ahead of the game (Safari), whilst others have a intermediate (Firefox) or even poor(?) support (Opera).

HTML 5 is to be the new standard of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) HTML 5 has been on the drawing boards to quite some time now all tho it seemed like it was to far into the future to start worrying about now, that said we are getting ever closer to HTML 5 being a common practice amongst webmasters.

Some people believe that HTML 5 coding is only being introduced to make browsers manufacturers (browser/ software companies) while other webmasters see this as a great step forward to being able to develop more powerful multimedia. HTML 5 will change the way we work with general HTML as the soon to be standard code is not just a markup from HTML 4 but more that of a new language, HTML will make life easier for everyone including not just browser manufactures but also developers, there are already some example JavaScript applications and APIs using the upcoming HTML5 code.

Most HTML based websites are using HTML 4 as we speak but this will start to change over the coming months and years, up until now the HTML code has hardly evolved from HTML 2.0 only some issues were addressed with the release of HTML 4 along with a small amount of new code references, HTML 5 is based from HTML 4 but in it’s own right it will be completely different and will change the way your browsers render websites on your PC screen, HTML 5 will rely heavily on JavaScript, should you have JavaScript turned off the website / pages are unlikely to render correctly.

Please check back soon as we will have a more detailed look into the new code.

In June, we were given a taste of what Microsoft had in store for users and developers in Windows 8. And finally, after three long months, we have the developer release bits in our hands. Being the geek and developer I am, I wanted to get into the new OS, play with it, develop for it, and get a feel for what is to come.

Disclaimer: These are my own opinions of the OS as it is today. Keep in mind the Windows 8 Developer Preview is pre-beta software. It is buggy. It is not feature complete.

Setup

I imagine installation would take anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes from optical media.

I installed Windows 8 on two machines, both with similar system specs. First is my laptop, a Dell Vostro 1500 with a Core2 Duo CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 500GB HDD, and nVidia 8400 mobile graphics. The second machine is a little Dell Optiplex. It has the same specs, except a 2TB HDD and an ATi 2400 HD. The build I downloaded contained the development tools; it was too big to fit on a 4GB DVD, so I put the files on a USB thumb drive. Setup was a breeze, and very much akin to the Windows 7 installation process. The install process was about ten minutes; naturally, being installed from a USB drive had something to do with the speedy installation. I imagine installation would take anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes from optical media.

The UI

After the installation completes, and if you’re dual-booting, you’ll find this new, Metrofied boot manager. Once you boot into Windows 8 for the first time, you’ll be prompted to enter either a Windows Live account or a regular Windows account name.

You’ll then be taken to the new Metro Start screen.

Metro is Touchtastic

The Start screen is your new Start menu, so you will launch your apps from this new screen (the old Start menu is hidden away but can be resurfaced with registry tweaks).

Windows 8 is partitioned into two separate UIs: Metro and Desktop.

Metro apps cannot run in the classic Desktop UI, and Desktop apps cannot run in the Metro UI. You can, however, start Desktop apps from the new Start screen; Windows 8 transitions into the Desktop UI when you do so.

I doubt we’ll see Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Quickbooks, or any other huge application on Metro anytime soon.

The obvious question is, “Why two UIs?” Metro is the touch UI. Apps written for the Metro UI are primarily going to be used in a touch environment for content consumption. The Desktop UI is there for backward compatibility, as well as for users who need the full power of Windows. I doubt we’ll see Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Quickbooks, or any other huge application on Metro anytime soon. Metro is more for consumption whereas Desktop is more for creation.

This is a developer preview; there is not a lot of fluff in this release. The purpose of this release is to get developers testing and learning the new platform. There are no Metro apps for mail and media in the preview, and the majority of apps installed on the OS are primarily for demonstration. Look to future betas and release candidates for more feature-complete previews of the OS.

I’ll come out and say this: I love Metro. I’ve loved it since playing with my mom’s Zune HD and using the Zune desktop app to sync my Zune. I have a Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7, and I chose that platform primarily because of Metro. I use MetroTwit for my Twitter client, and look around for other Metrofied apps to look at and play with. So needless to say, I was excited to know that Microsoft is betting big on Metro. I’ve said, and still say, that WP7′s Metro UI is the best touch-based mobile UI currently available. While I do not have a touch device that I can install Windows 8 on, I have almost a year’s experience using the UI Windows 8′s Metro UI is based on (plus watching demo videos). The UI is responsive, and the gestures are intuitive. It is a fantastic touch experience, and touch users will feel right at home in the new Metro portion of the UI.

Metro is Craptastic for Mouse

Unfortunately, the Metro experience as currently implemented by Microsoft is horrible with a mouse.

Unfortunately, the Metro experience as currently implemented by Microsoft is horrible with a mouse. It’s not just the Start screen, but just about all aspects of the Metro experience. What do I mean by horrible? First, the UI is stretched horizontally, and Microsoft thought the best way to navigate these huge horizontal UIs was with scrollbars… really. It’s 2011, and Microsoft implements a touch-based UI for a mouse using scrollbars. You would think Microsoft would implement clicking and dragging to simulate touch (which I’ve witnessed several people try first), or make the UI move with the mouse’s movement (view the live demo of this Code Canyon item in a small window). But no… scrollbars. You can navigate the Start screen using the mouse’s scroll wheel (a plus), but none of the other Metro apps seemed to respond to the mouse wheel.

Second, the Charms (a unified set of functions for settings, sharing, search, etc that are provided by Windows for Metro apps) are activated by moving your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen. Here’s how they look:

That in itself isn’t bad, but choosing one of the charms opens its panel on the right-hand part of the screen (as shown in the screenshot below). So you have to move your mouse to the other side of the screen to do whatever it is you wanted to do. I have not installed the Developer Preview on my main machine yet; so, I do not know how that behaves in a dual-monitor environment. But I assume users have to move their mouse across both monitors to do whatever it is they wanted to do with the chosen charm.

Third, zoom seems to be non-existent for mouse users. Touch-based zooming was demonstrated in Tuesday’s keynote, as well as the other sessions, but replicating zoom with a mouse ends in failure. I couldn’t zoom on the Start screen, and the only app I successfully zoomed in is the //Build/ app (with ctrl+mouse wheel).

That’s not to say Metro can’t be great with a mouse. There are many Metrofied applications available today for XP, Vista, and 7 (I mentioned a few above). When done right, Metro is awesome with a mouse. But unfortunately, the mouse experience currently in Windows 8’s Metro is not intuitive. It’s not natural. It’s horrible. I know it’s a Developer Preview, but I expected a lot more for mouse/keyboard users. I hope the mouse experience changes in the beta, especially since all Windows 8 users will have to use Metro.

Desktop Stays the Same (for the most part)

Not much has changed in the Desktop UI, although it did receive a small refresh. Gone are the rounded windows and buttons of XP, Vista, and 7; Windows 8′s windows and buttons return to the squared corners of Win9x and 2000.

There is also the ribbon in the Windows Explorer UI. I personally like the ribbon when used in the proper place. Windows Explorer always had a lot of options buried in menus and dialog boxes. The ribbon brings those options to the forefront, and I’m happy about that.

Final Thoughts on the UI

I am disappointed in the lack of customization of Metro.

I am disappointed in the lack of customization of Metro. While the lock screen can be customized, it seems the background of the Start screen cannot be changed. I hope that is just a feature missing from the Developer Preview.

I’ve always thought Apple had the right idea in separating the mobile OS from the desktop OS, but now I think Microsoft has the right idea in combining the two into one. I do, however, think they took the incorrect approach. While the Start screen is nice, fluid, and beautiful, it’s awkward switching between the two UIs when on a device other than a tablet. I would like to see an option to keep the classic Start menu while still being able to invoke the Metro Start screen at any time. As currently implemented, it is too much work to launch an app from the Desktop UI, but enhancing the mouse experience in the Metro UI would go a long way to making it easier and less cumbersome.

Development

Getting a peek at what’s to come is always something geeks like myself enjoy, but it was the Windows 8 developer story that kept me glued to the keynote. I am heavily invested in the C# language and .NET—be it either a desktop or web app, I write them in C# using the .NET stack. When Windows 8 was first previewed in June, .NET developers, myself included, were in a knee-jerk panic mode regarding our place in Windows 8 development. Metro apps written in HTML and JavaScript were showcased, yet nothing was mentioned regarding .NET. Microsoft’s lack of communication with their development community did nothing to sooth our fears.

Only a fool would think .NET would be suddenly killed in Windows 8, but the implication was that C#, Microsoft’s baby and highly touted language for the last ten years, was being pushed aside in favor of JavaScript/HTML and C++. Thankfully, that is not the case.

Quite naturally, the existing development model still exists for Desktop UI applications. Nothing has really changed there—except perhaps the decline of Silverlight. Metro is a different story; it’s where the new sexiness is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a C++ developer, a .NET developer, or a Web developer, Microsoft is providing the tools and (unified) APIs to write Metro apps. Microsoft is replacing the Win32 API for a new API called WinRT, and it is just as accessible in JavaScript as it is in C++.

But one of the most important concepts in Metro app development, and the one I’m most excited about, is the contract. Contracts are agreements between Windows and Metro apps to support a unified experience for the user. For example, apps that support the search contract open themselves up Windows 8’s search, enabling users to search those apps even when they are not running (or when the user is in another app). Other contracts are:

• Sharing: shares content across apps or services
• Play To: plays media on connected DLNA devices
• Settings: provide context-specific access to settings that affect an app
• App to App Picking: allows users to pick files from one app directly from within another app

The goal is to provide an experience that looks like one app, but in reality, its many different apps, glued together by Windows 8, working together to give the user the content they want. While it definitely means more work for me as a developer, it pays off with the rich experience users get when my app is installed.

Many aspiring webmasters create new sites without even knowing HTML, let alone search engine techniques. They get AdSense account and paste on AdSense code, waiting with high hope for the quick money to pour in. But day by day, the earning is really just enough to cover the hosting fee, or even less than that. So, they start to get frustated.

Most quit after some time. Some worse, they “fall into the dark side”, employing black hat techniques or hiring less-than-honorable search engine optimizer firms.

The rest stay on, determined to learn, and improve. Soon, they found out something about called search engine optimisation.

Here I will try to describe some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

Optimizing a website for search engine means you design a website so that search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN) can easily find the pages and include them in the search result. Thus, it will increase the number of visitors coming to your site. Objective of search engine optimization is to have your pages displayed highest possible in the search engine result for your choice of search phrases.

These are 10 basic search engine optimization methods I think every webmaster ought to know. See if the tools you use to create your webpages (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc…) allow you to do these. If not, it is time to learn some basic HTML.

1) Page title

Title is important. Place important keywords on your page title, and try to have different one for each page. I’ve seen sites with same title for every pages. While it gives stronger branding for the site name, that’s something I can do without rather than sacrificing my sub-pages traffic.

Limit your page title to 80 characters the most. Shorter page title means higher importance on each word.

Tag:

<html>
<head>
<title>CheatAd ! – Click-frauds on Google AdSense and such</title>
</head>
<body>
…
</body>
</html>

2) Keyword and description meta-tags

These two popular meta-tags used to be most useful search engine optimization techniques, until they are abused by the search engine spammers. Even then, they are still holding some importance today, specially the description meta-tags.

Meta description tag is used by some search engine in displaying the result page, and by other search engines to determine the relevance of your page.

Limit your page description to 200 characters the most. Put a descriptive, gramatically correct, meaningful sentence for best result.

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the page title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”This site shows problem of click-frauds with Google AdSense and other PPC network like Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika.”>
</head>
<body>
…
</body>
</html>

Some proclaim that keyword tag is dead. Apparently not so. Yahoo webmaster guidelines lists using keyword tag as a way to help improving search engine ranking.

Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Even then, if you have to make a choice between creating good keyword tag and developing useful content – our next point – , go with the latter. Limit the keyword to 300 characters.

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the page title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”This site shows problem of click-frauds with Google AdSense and other PPC network like Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika.”>
<meta name=”keyword” content=”click-fraud, pay-per-click, clickbot, cheat, click network, click-ring, Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, make money online”>
</head>
<body>
…
</body>
</html>

3) Body text

Next to a good title, this is the next most important on-page optimization you can do to bring more visitors to your website.

Most important thing you must remember here is this: you should write for your users first, search engine second. Write in natural, easy to understand language. The reason here is that if you write just for search engine, even if you can rank high up, the visitors will close your page as soon as they find out that your site contain just junks.

Besides, search engines now increasingly use some kind of artificial intelligence to analyze websites before indexing. You don’t want to caught off-handed using some useless texts.

First write some useful contents just as you would write offline magazine articles. Then, only after that, you can do some small tweaking to empasize certain parts, and make some changes to the word choices.

Generally, it is thought that keyword density plays some importance to seach engines. Keyword density refers to number of appearance of your keywords relative to overall page. No agreement on the optimum number though. Some believes the keywords should be around 3% compared to the overall page. Some believes the number should be higher, aroung 8-10%. Whatever it is, just try to include some of these keywords on your page, and make sure the page is still read well naturally. If it is not, take them out.

Then there are HTML tags you can use to emphasize importance of certain words. The most commons are bold, italics, and headers.

<h1>header 1</h1>

<h2>header 2</h2>

<h3>header 3</h3>

<b>bold</b> or <strong>strong</strong>
<i>italics</i> or <em>emphasis</em>

And, of course, you should use text instead of graphics or flash. Search engines can’t read what is written on your beautifully crafted picture. If you want them be indexed and found by search engines, use text.

If you must use some images, use your keywords on the file name, and always use the ALT tag.

<img src=”cheat-adsense.jpg” alt=”Cheat AdSense”>

Major search engines have developed some ability to read text in flash files, but to play it safe, avoid flash banners, buttons or page contents. Flash is great for embedded movies, not for any other use.

4) Regular content

SEO or not, this is important. Regularly updated content will draw visitors and search engine alike. But don’t put content just for the sake of it. Contents copied from other site, for instance, not only doesn’t help in search engine ranking, but can even get you penalized.

Write original, useful contents that make your visitors want to come back and recommend to their friends. You will get repeat visitors that way, regardless of search engine traffic. Good contents will also get link from other webmasters, and this will greatly help in your search engine ranking (read next point).

Blogs are very easy to set-up and is a good avenue to create new contents to your site. Major blogging software, like WordPress, supports RSS by default. By using RSS reader software, your visitors can then choose to be to be notified about new contents on your site.

Creating contents regularly rather than pump in many articles at one go has many benefits. Firstly, your visitors know that everytime they go to your site, they will see new content instead of the same old ones. This will make them want to visit more often. Same thing to search engine crawlers. If everytime the crawler couldn’t find new content, it provides little incentive for them to come back regularly. Thus, your new pages will not get indexed as fast as you want it to be.

Additionally, if you pump in a lot of contents at once, the search engines may think that you are trying to spam. This can result in being penalized.

5) Link and get linked

Link popularity is a way most search engines determine the importance of your site. When a website link to your site, search engines takes it as a vote for your website. In the past few years, this has greatly helped search engines getting the most relevant result for users.

Recently, with a lot of sites using links to cheat into search engines ranking, major search engines, specially Google have increasingly use and develop new technologies to determine the importance of the links.

So, not all links are treated as equal. Links from big reputable sites, for example Microsoft or Reuters are definitely worth more than link from CheatAd.com.

Relevancy of the sites also plays a part. Relevant website will give more value to the linked site. Then there is age in play. Older sites are deemed to be more trustworthy than new sites. Consequently, links from older sites are treated as more valuable too.

Directory submission is the oldest way to build your link reputation. There are free Dmoz, free or paid Yahoo Directory, and thousands other directories. Just search for “directory submission” and you have enough work to do for a whole year. Just do directory submission moderately, probably around 20 directories per week, and you can watch your search engine traffic climbing up slowly.

If you have a blog, you can submit it to blog directories as well. Just search for “blog submission”.

Exchanging link with another webmaster is another way. Termed as “link-exchange”, basically you link to the partner site. In exchange, the partner will put hyperlink in his/her site pointing to yours. As many abuse this technique, Google has degraded the value of link-exchange to virtually non-existant. You might even get penalized if your link partner is considered a “bad website” for Google.

While Google has diminished the value of reciprocal link, Yahoo and MSN are still holding on, though with less value. Even then, it still valuable enough to work on. Just be careful to have only reputable link partners.

To check whether the link partner is bad, just search for “site:www.domainname.com” in Google (replace domainname.com with the partner’s website) and see if the pages are indexed.

The most “in” link-building technique now is via article submission. You can write or buy an original article, and include a link to your website on the resource box (a small section after the article, where you introduce yourself and your website).

This is what I mean:

Article here
…
..
.
About the author
Fernando Hal is a contributing writer for CheatAd.com, a blog about click-fraud on pay-per-click advertisements.

You can then submit this article to a myriad of article submission sites, e.g. GoArticles.com for other webmasters to put it on their website.

The wonder of article submission is that not only it helps search engine ranking, but also brings in interested visitors who like your articles. This is very targeted traffic, compared with directory submission or link-exchange.

Other link building methods are visiting relevant blogs and leave comments there, as well as joining forums/discussion boards and leaving hyperlink to your site on the signature.

If you intend to purchase link from other sites, consider getting links from many smaller sites rather than few major sites. The paid link might be considered as spam by Google.

On the other hand, don’t be stingy in linking to others. Be choosy on who you want to link, but don’t hold back if you find a good site that can be useful for your visitors.

6) Usability

Always remember, your most important audience is the visitors. Give them a good experience, and they will come back. Framed pages, for example, is irritating. It breaks navigation’s “Back” button, and is confusing. Pop-up windows, javascript hyperlink, and fixed text size are just a few design mistakes notoriously committed by many new web designers/ webmasters.

For a start, read Jacob Nielson’s articles on web usability and web design mistake
.

Build the website for your visitors. Make easier navigation. Look at Google, MySpace, eBay, and Amazon. There is one striking similarity among them. All four of them have drop simple interface. Many will describe them as “ugly”. But these are few of the most successful sites online.

Fact to be told, web visitors don’t need pretty interface. They need a usable website. Beside helping your visitors, good navigation system will help search engines to find and index your sites.

Or look from other point of view. Your website may be well optimized for search engine, but if your site is not visitor-friendly, the visitors will leave as soon as they come. Like the way this article says it:

In other words, time and money was spent to “optimise” these sites in a way that brought them traffic, and then drove it away!

7) Use Tools

There are many tools to help you rank better in the search engines. By that, I mean tools that can help you to analyze your website so you can make changes accordingly. By all means, stay away from all automated tools that promise to help your ranking, e.g. automated search engine submission software or automated link-exchange software. Your website can get penalized by search engines due to the intrusive nature of many of these automated tools.

Here are few tools that you can use with peace of mind:

- Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)
Google Analytics is powerful site statistic service that tells you almost everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

Currently Google Analytics is offered by invitation only. I have an extra invitation that I’d like to give away. If you are interested, just leave your comments or trackbacks for this post. I’ll give the invitation to the most useful comments/trackbacks.

- Sitemap generator
A sitemap is a file/page where you can list down URL of all pages from your website. A correctly done sitemap can help search engine crawlers find and index your pages.

xml-sitemaps.com provides free service to generate sitemap in three different formats: xml, html, and text format. You can then upload these sitemaps to your site and follow the search engine submission procedure accordingly (see next items). Note that the free service from xml-sitemaps.com has a limitation of 500 pages per website.

You may also try http://www.sitemapspal.com/. It has higher limit, but can only create sitemap in xml format.

- Google Sitemaps (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap/)
Google Sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.

After you have the sitemap ready, you can then submit to Google Sitemap. Google Sitemap takes in xml-formatted sitemap. Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap/ follow the instruction there. If you already have a Google account (e.g. Gmail), you can use it straight away. Otherwise you’ll need to register an account.

But Google Sitemaps is much more than just for sitemap submission. It can also answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site. For example, you can learn about errors and statistics.

- Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo Search. You can view the most popular pages from your sites or competitors’ sites, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

- Yahoo Feed Submit (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request)
Yahoo does not have the service equivalent to Google Sitemaps, but if you are looking for a place to submit your sitemap to Yahoo, you can do it at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. It takes in RSS, Atom, and text format. You can submit the urllist.txt created by xml-sitemaps.com above.

Be patient

Google imposes a period of time called sandbox, which cap your ranking from going top until a certain period of “probation” is passed. This range from few weeks to more than a year for competitive topics / niche.

Many webmasters agree that Yahoo also has a certain kind of “sandbox”, although there is no specific name for it.

So, if your site is not yet ranked well, be patient. Remember that search engine optimization is not magic. Search engine companies closely guard their mechanism for fear that the information will be used to trick the search engine. All these SEO talks that we have are based on observation of many experienced webmasters. Nothing is fixed here. The search engines may change their algorithm – and thus, your ranking – anytime.

Refrain from overdoing anything, including techniques above or any other technique. Search engines’ main interest is to provide quality result for their audience, the web searchers. When you do too much, it raises suspicion that your content might be not worthy enough to build up naturally.

Know your limit and ability. If you are new on search engine optimization, don’t go for a very competitive keyword like gambling, lawyer, or the infamous mesopotamia.

Moderation, thus, is the key.

9) Stay away from black hat optimization techniques

Black hat search engine optimization techniques promise quick way to improve your site ranking and bring visitors to your site. These includes page cloaking, hidden text, link-farm, comment-spamming, and duplicate pages.

You may not understand all these terms, but if you anyone telling you they can improve your search ranking overnight, these are most likely black hat techniques.

They work by tricking search engines to think that your pages hold more value than what they really are. As the search engines competes to provide the most useful search result to the visitors, they shun these techniques.

Nowadays, major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have advanced detection technology to sniff out these black hat techniques. When they fail, your competitors are all too happy to point it out to the search engines.

Search engines will then take action accordingly, like penalising your site ranking or even take them down altogether.

If you are interested to find out, read this blog: SEO Black Hat. Don’t be deceived by the name. It is a great site covering both white-hat and black-hat SEO techniques.

10) Keep on learning

These techniques are just the basic to get you started. There are many resources on the Internet to learn search engine optimization.

Here are some places to get you going:
- Wikipedia
- Google Webmaster Help Center
- Yahoo! Webmaster Resources
- Webmaster World
- Digital Point Forums

Feel free to Comment or ask questions

Ways to implement an effective viral marketing campaign

Using Social media is the greatest way to start viral marketing campaign; but you need to work and think first for the best strategies to become successful in viral marketing.

A successful viral marketing campaign usually grow in social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr because of their promotional features that are useful in developing an effective campaign strategy for your business.

Here are few ideas that could be helpful in starting-up the viral marketing campaign:

Offer or Give Free Services or Products

People love to receive gifts or sales stuff. Once the campaign spreads-out to social media and offers gifts or sale stuff, it could probably attract viewer’s attention then begin to recommend the entire package with their co-networks.

Make your Campaign Easy and Site Friendly

Don’t play hard to get with the viewers that will receive your gifts. Don’t give too many instructions or conditions like filling out too many forms and clicking too many links because it will surely give so much trouble for your campaign. Make your free stuff in minimal restrictions like signing up by just giving the email address in order to get an updates.

Offer Rewards as much as possible

Remember that every one of us loves rewards and freebies, so don’t hesitate to give rewards for every new client from referrals in order to encourage them to continue to spread out your campaign with other people around their networks. These techniques could generate more exposure to make your viral marketing campaign grows into full bloom success.

Keep the campaign interesting

Use useful “word of mouth” campaign that will give positive effect to your business. Figure out the customer’s need by visiting site reviews, online comments and forums in order for you to give many ideas on how to make your campaign more interesting as much as possible. Knows what people are talking about and answers all questions being asked in your industry. Used and create ideas that can targets the needs and interests of your targeted market.

Do it in a Controversial Way

People love gossip, find ways to make some nice and friendly gossip that will turn to be advantageous with your business. Buzzing is the most simple yet effective in viral marketing. Create a great and exciting buzz that will turn into controversy which may consist only of good business publicity without trying to be rude or hurt anyone just to be on top.

Once you fully established your “word of mouth” handwork. Extend your campaign by keeping involved with people by creating your own blog wherein you can talk more about the latest update and exciting things that are happening in your business. Blogging is one of the greatest ways to maintain good relationship with the consumers and potential viewers. In this way, you could be able to start a small community that will turn into big one. Make your blog be always updated in responding to blog comments and reviews. Make sure to answers question that the viewers may post at all times.

courtesy : SEO Chennai

So now you are probably wondering how does this gibberish tie up with an About Me page. The internet is a brilliant tool that we are blessed to have, judging by how addicted I am to it, I could not see myself living without it. Clearly there are millions of people that feel the same way. Refering back to my previous statement of us wanting to express ourselves, we do a poor job of it online. Maybe you don’t want people to know your favorite color, that fine and I completely understand that you want to keep some things private. However if I’m a business owner looking for a developer or a designer for my next project, how in the world do I know who you really are? Keep in mind that this doesn’t just go for designers or developer. This should go for everybody who runs a website, business, or a blog.

When I visit a website and read an article, I might agree with the authors thoughts and feelings. What if I want to find more info about who wrote this article? Was it a guest author, was it the website owner, or was it a robot (I hope not)? People more than often like to meet and connect with new people, for that exact reason you should at least provide an about the author box, or and about me about us page that lists the people who write the content. An about me page should give a general ideas of who you really are. Here are some things you should share:

Things you should consider sharing:

• List your skills – What kinds of things are you good at? People won’t know unless you tell them.
• Share what kind of education you have – Be sure to tell people about what you know and whether you went to College, Institute, or a Technical School. What
• Offer your name – It’s obvious, but some people still don’t do it. If you want to protect your identity you can create an online only alias that you use for everything.
• Keep the information up to date – Update your page frequently. Got a new skill you’ve learned? Share it!
• Offer your location – This one can be very arguable. Don’t literally list you address, just the city you’re from. If you are a professional agency however, you should list your address.
• Include a photo of yourself – This is completely optional and self explanatory.  Obviously if you run a business, a professional picture with a business suit is very proper. I don’t think people want to see you doing a keg stand.
• Be personal and friendly – Be yourself not a robot!
• Keep it professional – If you run a business be very clear, descriptive, and accurate on the info you provide.
• Consider adding a video - This one is very web 2.0 ish. You could in theory describe yourself and let people know who you are.
• Call to action – Consider listing social networks were people can connect with you like Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin.
• Be Honest - Don’t ever lie about anything, sooner or later people will find out the truth.

Now that you have some knowledge about an about me page, here are some of the best examples for your inspiration!

1. Tyler Galpin

2. Jean Delbrel

3. Red Tiki

4. Epicagency

5. Henry Brown

6. Keenan Wells

7. Aleksandar Grkinic

8. Blogsessive

9. Ngenworks

10. Chris Spooner

11. Rogie King

12. Jaredigital

13. Dawg House Design Studio

14. Joseph Payton

15. Veerle Duoh

16. Leihu

17. Kitschen Sink

18. Gisele Jaquenod

19. Dayna

20. Matt

21. Gary Vaynerchuk

22. Nick Finck

23. Jason Graphix

24. Blake Makes

25. Design Work Plan

26. Toby Powell

27. Tim Van Damme

28. Sohtanaka

29. Emerge and Bloom

30. KitFolio

31. Mark McGall

32. Floating Asian Kid

33. Swiss Miss

34. I love Typography

35. Elliot Jay Stocks

36. Information Architects

37. Subtraction

38. Tschmeisser

39. Finch

40. Obox Design