If you are like me the majority of your wardrobe is cool t-shirts (or what we think is cool). Here are a few more you can add to your collection. Source: cafepress.com via Melissa on Pinterest Source: hongkiat.com via Melissa on Pinterest Source: hongkiat.com via Melissa on Pinterest Source: hongkiat.com via Melissa […]
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The 1990s comprised a fascinating, transitional time in technology — more people were buying home computers, Windows 3.1 was released, and we all started logging on to this thing called the World Wide Web.
Of course, none of that innovation would have been possible without the creative minds behind those advancements. To that end, let’s catch up with some of the people that made ’90s computers and Internet culture cool.
It’s hard to believe now, but when many people got their first home computers in the ’90s, they’d never even used a mouse before. To master this basic skill, they often turned to a little program written by Wes Cherry, called Solitaire.
Cherry wrote Solitaire while he was an intern at Microsoft in 1989 as a way to learn the Windows programming environment, and because there just weren’t that many games available for Windows at the time. Unfortunately, despite Solitaire’s presence on millions of computers for the last few decades, a contract technicality meant he never received any royalties for the game. However, the internship paid off and he wound up writing code for Microsoft Excel for most of the ’90s.
Today, Wes Cherry works with apples – but not of the OS X variety. He and his family recently moved to Vashon Island, WA, where they are planting seven acres of apple trees as part of a new venture: Dragon’s Head Cider. He still does the occasional bit of programming in his free time, but mostly, Cherry works on odd projects, like the restoration of a six-wheeled Swedish fire truck. He also makes the trek to Burning Man (see picture). Despite not getting paid for the popular game, Wes Cherry might be only person in history for whom Solitaire wasn’t a total waste of time.
Before the Internet spawned identity theft and viruses, home computer users only really worried about two things: power surges and screen burn-in. A good power strip solved the first problem, and flying toasters solved the second.
The After Dark Screensaver was released in 1989 by Berkeley Systems, a company that, at the time, wrote Mac software accessible for the vision impaired. The screensaver soon became a Mac staple and was later ported to Windows, where the signature flying toasters really took off.
Later, Berkeley released the very popular trivia game series, You Don’t Know Jack, which helped gain the attention of Sierra On-Line, the makers of classic games in the Space Quest and King’s Quest series. Sierra bought the company for just under $14 million.
After Dark key figures Jack Eastman and Patrick Beard had support from Berkeley Systems co-founders, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. After the Sierra On-Line buy-out, Eastman left to co-found CloudSource, a developer of website production software, and is now co-founder of Eightfold Way Consultants, which offers website management software with a special emphasis on people with disabilities. Patrick Beard left Berkeley for graduate school, had stints at Apple and Netscape, and has since returned to Apple as a senior engineer. After the 1997 buy-out, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades founded MoveOn.org, which has since become one of the most popular political sites on the web. Blades also founded MomsRising.com, and is an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post.
Throughout the ’90s, there were only three things you could be certain of: death, taxes and another AOL CD in your mailbox. You could also expect to hear “You’ve Got Mail!” about 500 times a day — from the TV, the radio and your Great Aunt Margaret’s computer.
That familiar phrase was first uttered in 1989 by Elwood Edwards, whose wife worked for Quantum Computer Services, which later became AOL. Quantum was looking for a friendly voice for their new email program, so Edwards sat in his living room with a cassette tape recorder and spoke those now-famous words, as well as other AOL staples: “File’s done,” “Welcome” and “Goodbye.”
Edwards’ voice-over career didn’t end there. Aside from a few gigs, mostly parodying the AOL catchphrase, he’s been working as a graphics and film editor at WKYC-TV in Cleveland since 2002.
Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, finding all of those X-Files message boards and “under construction” animated GIFs wasn’t easy. Then came WebCrawler, the first “full-text” search engine. The service enabled keyword search among its 4,000 indexed webpages, and set a standard that is still the norm today.
WebCrawler launched in April 1994 as a spare-time project of University of Washington student Brian Pinkerton. By November, WebCrawler had served its 1 millionth search result (for “nuclear weapons design and research”). Just over a year later, WebCrawler was purchased by AOL, which later sold it to Excite, and was then acquired by InfoSpace in 2001. Believe it or not, it’s still around today as a meta-search engine, combining results from Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Not surprisingly, Brian Pinkerton is still kicking around the web, too. After Excite closed shop in 2003, he’s worked at a variety of companies as a search engine expert, including his latest gig as chief architect of search at A9, the company that helps you find all the cool stuff on Amazon.com.
For much of the ’90s, the average person’s email address was tied to his or her Internet service provider. You could change providers, but that meant you’d lose the associated email address, so you were kind of stuck. But that all changed on July 4, 1996, when Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched the first web-based email service, HoTMaiL (the strange capitalization emphasized “HTML”).
Hotmail offered users free email accounts, each with a whopping 2MB of storage space accessible from anywhere and through any ISP. In exchange, users simply had to look at a few banner ads. With that kind of convenience, the service grew quickly, reaching 40 million users by 1998, when Microsoft knocked on the door with a check for $400 million. Since the acquisition, over 1 billion Hotmail accounts have been created, and there are still several hundred million active users today.
After the buy-out, both Smith and Bhatia briefly worked for Microsoft before striking out on their own. Smith founded Akamba Corporation, which made accelerator cards for high-traffic web servers, and is currently the president of Proximex Corporation, a security system software company. Bhatia has been especially busy founding Arzoo.com, a travel site that services India, then InstaColl, whose Live-Documents.com is an MS Office alternative. And in Nov. 2011, he launched JaxtrSMS, a free, international text messaging service.
Images courtesy of Flickr, monkeymanforever, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wikimedia
More About: aol, features, hotmail, Tech
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This is a Macworld review by Jason Snell on Apple’s third-generation (2012) model iPad. I have the first generation iPad so the iPad three seems somewhat appealing. Are you getting one? Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
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We have had a new series on SEJ called Client Horror Stories. The goal of this series is to help those new to the industry avoid making mistakes and dealing with some of the same issues our writers have. In some cases it is important to fire a client. I know the idea of that […]
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According to a recent interview with Amit Singhal, a top executive at Google Search, Google is planning on making drastic algorithmic changes in the near future in order to provide end users better search results. Google is hopeful that the new changes, which will be primarily focused on semantic search technology, will solidify their dominance […]
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“…profile pages that have been redesigned to look ‘more beautiful’ and to display users’ influencers more prominently.”
Matt Cutts: “We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.”
Posted by randfish
Google's Search Suggest automatically recommends popular searches as you type your query into the search field. Let's examine how Google determines these results and what factors go into influencing them.
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests how you can use these instant recommendations to leverage your brand, or business. Please leave you comments below with your own suggestions!
As part of the test mentioned in the video, we'd love to have your help running the query "Does Anyone Watch Whiteboard Friday"
We'll watch the results for search suggest/instant and see what happens. Here they are just prior to publication of the blog post:
Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the very exciting topic of search suggest, also known as Google Instant or Google Suggest. Bing actually does this as well. So do search engines like DuckDuckGo. Even places like Quora and Wikipedia are starting to do this so that as you type a query, so I started typing "Does anyone . . . " and Google has suggested things to me that perhaps I might want to search for. Curious things like, "Does anyone still use MySpace?" Well, maybe I am interested in that. "Does anyone use MySpace anymore?" Well, thank you, Google, that's quite repetitive of you. "Does anyone live in Greenland?" Well, yes, there are at least a few people. "Does anyone use Google+?" Nope, nobody. I'm just kidding. Hopefully, at least all of you watching Whiteboard Friday are using Google+.
These suggestions are interesting from two perspectives. Number one, they're interesting because sometimes negative things can show up in here as you start searching for a business name. Things like scam or fraud or, I don't know, illegal activity or criminal or something like that, bad stuff can come up. Occasionally, SEOs will receive calls from clients or potential clients seeking to have that altered. Or you might be trying to control the reputation for your own business or your own name, making sure that search suggest is controlled so that the queries that show up in here, the phrases that are suggested by Google, are good ones.
The second thing, of course, that is really, really interesting is thinking about this from a branding perspective. So I'll give you an exciting example. For years and years, if you started a search, let's make our own little search box here, if I started a search for SEO, the first thing that would come up, at least in most of the United States, was Seoul. Seoul, Korea, which is the capital there and the most common flight destination. Now, that's interesting, but there were other things that would come up – SEO book, SEO guide. Then as SEOmoz started to become a brand, SEOmoz would become suggested in there, which we thought was tremendously exciting and we really liked that. Then, over time, that actually moved up, and today, at least in most of the United States, although interestingly enough not Seattle because we have a lot of Korean-Americans here in Seattle who fly back and forth to Seoul and I think we have a direct flight as well, so Seattle has a lot of searches for Seoul compared to most of the rest of the country. SEOmoz is now the number one suggested result under SEO, which resulted when that shift happened. You could actually see the search traffic, if this was the line in our analytics for how much traffic we were getting for our branded keyword, that actually shot up within a couple days of that becoming the number one term. It went from, if I remember correctly, this was about a year and a half, two years go, it went from number three to number one, which is super cool. Really, really interesting stuff. This search suggest is influenceable, and it is something that over time through branding you can change the words and phrases that show up here.
Let's talk about the signals that Google is using inside of search suggest. So, first off, query volume. If lots and lots of people start searching for "Does anyone else watch Whiteboard Friday," how about we all search for that. Wouldn't that be cool? Should we do a test? Let's do a test! Oh, that's a great idea! All right. So try searching "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" I tell you what. I will Tweet some links and share some stuff on Google+, and we'll see if we can't get some people searching for this particular phrase and we'll track how many. I'll use a bitly link and share it. In fact, I'll put the bitly link in this Whiteboard Friday so that we can actually test this. What you'll see, what you'll probably see, is with a few hindered to a couple thousand searches from across the US, about 50% of SEOmoz's traffic is here inside the US, folks who watch Whiteboard Friday, and the other 50% is from other countries all around the world, which is awesome. What you'll see is that may start to show up inside of these results over time. Now this is happening because query volume is something that the engines look at and they see, hey, people are searching for this. Let's start to suggest it.
Now, be very careful, because Google did, in fact, have even a particular relationship with Amazon's Mechanical Turk a few years ago. There was a representative at Mechanical Turk who was contacted by Google and Google said, basically, hey we want to know if anyone's asking for search suggest influencing, that kind of thing. Google has gotten a lot more sophisticated about this, so you can bet that today they're probably using things like unique verifiable accounts, independent users. You know, if I go and search from my computer 100 times, that's probably not going to make a big difference, but if 500 people all around the Seattle area all start searching, you can bet that "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" will probably show up pretty highly in these results at least in this geographic area.
Which gets to the second point, the second input, and that is the geography of the searchers themselves. Now interestingly we actually ran a test here at SEOmoz a while back, where I had about 1000 people around the world search for a phrase, and that was "travel blog" and then the word that my wife's blog actually "Everywhereist." I wanted to see if search suggest actually had an influence on ranking position. So, essentially, does putting the brand name here, will that bump up the rankings of a site? It did not appear to, at least in this example. But what it did do is show me that very quickly this would pop into search suggest, and it popped into geographic areas where I had lots of followers or friends who searched for that, which is really, really interesting. It suggests strongly that the geography is influential but that you don't necessarily need that many users searching for a particular phrase in order to get it included in here.
Now, obviously, there is black and gray hat things you could do with this. Don't do that. Don't try it. You're going to get in trouble. Google obviously does some scrubbing of these results anyway, so it is going to get caught very quickly. But if you can naturally do it, through branding, through product naming, through social sharing, through content marketing, through all sorts of forms of inbound marketing, then this is something you can change.
Finally, and interestingly, the keyword a phrase mentions, and what I mean by mentions is actually mentions on the Web. So particularly in news and fresh content seeing the word, right, seeing the word "travel blog Everywhereist" appear or seeing the word "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear, so this video for example, as this blog post goes out and the phrase "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear across the Web as RSS feeders pick it up and people start searching for it and all those kinds of things. That will influence the search suggest as well.
I am betting that Google does something where they verify both geographically and through unique users, and they look for keyword phrases and mentions. So if something is being searched for, but no one is talking about it on the Web, that might be a little odd. But if something is in the news, especially in news headlines, and it's popular, it's in lots of sources, and it's getting search volume, then it's probably going to make its way into search suggest.
Hopefully this Whiteboard Friday has helped you to understand how Google is doing this stuff, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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To promote its new fuel cell vehicle, which has zero exhaust emissions, Mercedes pulled a stunt that showed off an “invisible” car with incredibly low environmental impact.
Although Mercedes says the hydrogen-powered drive system is “ready for series production,” it’s speculated to not be in comercialization until 2014.
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Everyone jokes about the flying cars and robot maids we’ve seen in movies and television, but it turns out the “future” we’ve dreamed of is well on its way.
The majority of these are just concepts, but all are definitely in effect, one way or another. In fact, you can technically purchase a flying car for the low, low price of $200,000. However, it will be a bit longer until we can purchase them as easily as a Honda Civic.
Every day we advance in technology, space exploration, medicine and more. From mind reading to in vitro meat, here are ten crazy peeks at what is coming for the future.
This May we’ll be exploring the future of digital at our signature conference, Mashable Connect. See below for all the details.
Our annual destination conference, Mashable Connect, brings our community together for three days to connect offline in an intimate setting at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World®. It will take place in Orlando, Florida from Thursday, May 3 – Saturday, May 5. Registration is now open.
Held in a unique location away from everyday distractions, Mashable Connect is a rare and valuable opportunity to be surrounded by digital leaders across industries. You’ll spend time with Mashable’s passionate and influential community, hear from top speakers who will provide insight into the the technologies and trends that are shaping the next era of digital innovation, and get to spend time with the Mashable team.
To keep Mashable Connect as intimate as possible, only a limited amount of tickets are available.
Team members check in to a race location at Magic Kingdom during the Mashable Connect Race powered by Gowalla.
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A limited number of sponsor opportunities are available for Mashable Connect. This is an excellent opportunity to get in front of Mashable’s passionate and influential audience. Contact [email protected] for opportunities.
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More About: features, future, Gadgets, Science, Tech
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Outrider has offered a very informative and historical infographic that offers a timeline of Google Algorithm Changes. All SEO’s can use this IG as a tool for learning, the ability to have conversations with respected SEO’s and to try gather an understanding of Google’s thinking and strategies for their search engine. Outrider also offers a […]
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