For Google, they are right now, (in terms of social) very much underestimated, and something of the underdog. Their decision recently to bring Google+  social data into the main search results is a strong defensive maneuver designed to force the hands of Twitter and Facebook to open up their data further, and give Google back the personal information that they so desperately seek. Facebook keeping the data behind a walled garden (as is the current Facebook approach) is their defensive strategy against too much Google power, who may use it to supplement their own social efforts and allows these networks to consider other markets, such as search as they evolve.

See Eric Schmidt video below, which more or less undermines Facebook and Twitter’s position.

I’ve read various articles on Google’s announcement over privacy, may of the critics shout war cry’s of ‘Go back to core search, and leave social alone’ or argue that Google are losing their focus on what once made them great. Just as Facebook in the past have suffered from PR shit storms before, now the barrels of the privacy gun have shifted to Google. Not least because this particular blend of Google bashing is great linkbait. Many of the reports I’ve read are grossly exaggerated and whilst they make for interesting pageview fodder, fundamentally miss the mark on exactly what the new policy entails. Microsoft, in typical bandwagon jumping fashion have thrown their hat in the witch hunt ring as well, with (obviously) the perfect solution to your privacy concerns- Bing.

Don’t make me laugh.

MS have an inferior product, and everyone knows it. If they’d concentrate on improving rather than taking cheap shots at the competition in times of furore, maybe search would be a more competitive space. The response from Google calling them out on such bullshit tactics speaks volumes.

Isn’t it time that we all grew up and realised that advertising on the web has to evolve? Let me quote from Tim O’Reilly who echos my own sentiments.

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It’s important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

If you haven’t already noticed, the reason Google are putting their fingers in the proverbial social pie, its because this is where content is now being created, its where its being shared, and it contains a boatload of data about the relevancy of web pages. For Google, social isn’t some sort of “me-too” effort, its a reflection of a fundamental evolution of the web, and how we are now finding information. The lines between search and social are blurring at an alarming rate. A rate that Google is all too aware. There is a slowdown in their core search business, and social and other markets such as television provide the much need reinvigoration that they need to stay at the forefront of their business.

Q4 earnings missed the mark – see Forbes article on ‘Google’s Big Problem they don’t want you to know about‘. A telling tale for future forecasts for the company, that predicts that as mobile searches grow in popularity, this could be inversely proportional to click through rates on ads. For anyone familiar with Adsense, you’ll be all too aware of the challenges of advertising on mobile devices. Facebook have also shown through their S1 filing have shown just how important mobile is to their business, and in turn the difficulties with monetising mobile. (They have yet to do so).

425 million people visited the site on a mobile device in the month of December. That’s over half of the company’s user base. – Wired.

Those critical of Google’s approach often forget that its evolve or die time for Google. If they fail to get social and mobile right now, they will end up losing control of the web, and the advertising dollars that go with it – and they know it. Now is not the time for hesitation, or faltering. Larry Page’s team talk shows just how passionate he is about making that part of the business work, and its a roadmap for future success of the company.

I for one recognize that there isn’t any place for altruism in business, and considering that Google fundamentally need to get into these areas of the web to survive, am neither surprised at their recent announcements, nor do I particularly care. With algorithms performing the work behind the scenes, with automated systems (a fact often left out of relevant stories about the privacy issues), I’m not quite sure how we can call foul play when Facebook et al arguably are *alot* more sophisticated in their targeting of people, and yet 845 million of us have given Facebook access to our personal connections. Those same people complaining about the loss of their privacy on Google, can often be found sharing geo-located photos on Facebook. Show me a tech journalist complaining, and I’ll show you someone happily embroiled in social media, willingly giving up their personal information to advertisers on Facebook or other platforms. It’s the ironic echo chamber in feeding frenzy.

If we apply these principles to the real world, how many of you have thought about the information stored about you by say your credit card company. How long do they store the purchases you make, or how many of them resell the information? Or our phone providers who record how long a telephone call we make to friends lasts? Can’t remember the last article I read on these subjects, yet there isn’t anywhere near the level of controls over privacy that Google and Facebook currently provide us.

Such is the world we live in. Personalised advertising isn’t going anywhere, and I’d rather have a relevant ad that is useful, than be bombarded with crap that clutters my online experience. I also believe that as these services evolve, we’ll eventually find ourselves accepting that personal advertising can be useful and relevant. Call me stupid, call me reckless, but if  we all think about the amount of time (and therefore money) we’ve all made and saved with the aforementioned services that we take for granted as being free over the years – if personalised advertising is the currency of free, I’m willing to pay.

If targeted advertising is the currency of free. I’ll pay. is a post from: Webdistortion

Sometimes, web applications get bogged down in the tedium of registrations / corporate jibber jabber  and other such clutter. Its refreshing to see that ScreenLeap, the recently launched screen sharing application has avoid all of that hassle, and makes sharing your screen within anyone around the world absolutely effortless. There are alternative solutions in the market for this – namely WebEx and GotoMeeting, but they are pretty clunky in comparison. ScreenLeap moves out of the way, and lets you get on with the task in hand; better still – its absolutely free of charge. Viewers can see your screen from any device, including tablets and smartphones and there are no downloads, installs, fees, or sign ups required.

Definitely one for the bookmarks.

via HackerNews.

ScreenLeap – Hassle free screen sharing with friends. is a post from: Webdistortion

In any case, its not true realtime communication.

One of the most interesting parts of the HTML5 specification designed to solve these technical problems, is WebSockets – a way for browsers to communicate in realtime between server and client, by pushing messages directly to the browsers who need the information.  There are a number of libraries, startups and open source projects which are making life easier for developers to integrate this type of technology today – (Although its worth pointing out that the specification is in something of a flux at the minute). Some of them are truly realtime, others offer a half way house until this browser technology and its widespread adoption becomes more commonplace. With scaling often being an issue for real time systems, some of these technical solutions and hosted platforms offer developer solutions to what can be a tricky technical problem.

URL: http://pusher.com/

Pusher is a hosted service for quickly and easily adding realtime features into web and mobile applications. The main benefit is that Pusher is scalable out of the box, as they take care of any infrastructure requirement, and lets you concentrate solely on building the application layer. They are used by numerous startups, and offer a variety of hosted plans that match any requirement.

Some of the neat features which are available out of the box with Pusher include authenticated channels so you can control who has access to the messages you broadcast and you can also easily receive a list of users connected to a particular channel.

URL: http://www.pubnub.com/

PubNub is another hosted service for real time. Again, they take of the scaling issues associated with real time communications as part of their overall service.  The fundamental difference of PubNub versus Pusher, is that the transport mechanism used is HTTPstreaming, whereas Pusher exclusively uses WebSockets.  This isn’t necessarily a negative; arguably the reasoning for this is that currently many WebSockets solutions, even those which degrade gracefully, don’t work for all situations.

Pubnub runs on C behind the scenes, and there are out of the box client libraries for Javascript, iPhone, Android, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, C, and Flash so developers have some of the donkey work already done for them.

URL: http://x-stream.ly/

From the guys behind real-time application platform Cerrio – X-streamly is a spin off application which is both affordable and scalable. They are built on top of socket.io and provide cross platform support via this library. A number of language APIs are available but they do offer to build out support on your language of choice if you happen to be using something else.

URL: http://socket.io/

Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms. It gracefully falls back to the most capable transport mechanism, with native Websockets being the most capable. In essence, Socket.IO lets you forget about the problems of cross platform capability, and concentrate on building your application without hassles.  It also enhances websockets by providing built-in multiplexing, horizontal scalability, and automatic JSON encoding/decoding.

URL: http://beaconpush.com/

Beaconpush offers message persistence meaning that between page reloads and potential restarts of browser/tab, messages will not be lost. You can also address individual users on particular channels in the same way as PusherApp, and whilst it started life as a fully hosted solution, also offers a half way house in the form of  their ‘On-site’ edition. This is an alternative hosting model than that in the the cloud-hosted version in the sense that you host the Beaconpush server(s) within your own data centre allowing more control over scaling and technical approaches within your own system architecture.

URL: http://www.spire.io/

Spire.io runs on a highly elastic worker-based architecture, backed by Node.js and Redis, with a secure REST-based API which currently providing a notification / messaging service. They are only recently out of Beta, but these guys are hard core javascript geeks, and bring with them a wealth of technical talent. Definitely one to watch.

Notable Mentions

URL: http://nodejs.org/ - It’s hard to mention the word real time without mentioning Node, which brought evented javascript to the masses.  Built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime Node.js uses a non-blocking input / output model that makes it fast and easy for the majority of tasks in modern web development. It’s maturing rapidly with support and extras from the open source community.

URL: http://labs.gameclosure.com/hookbox/

Hookbox is a Comet server and message queue that tightly integrates with your existing web application via web hooks and a REST interface.

URL: http://www.ape-project.org/

APE is a full-featured OpenSource solution designed for Ajax Push. It includes a comet server and a Javascript Framework. APE allows to implement any kind of real-time data streaming to a web browser, without having to install anything on the client-side.

URL: http://faye.jcoglan.com/

Faye is a publish-subscribe messaging system based on the Bayeux protocol. It provides message servers for Node.js and Ruby, and clients for use on the server and in all major web browsers.

URL: https://github.com/hookio

Hook.IO is a distributed EventEmitter and i/o framework for Node which enables the use of small chained processes, each focused on solving one particular task, that forms building blocks for larger and more complex applications. You can build up your application piece by piece by gradually adding small processes that communicates by sending and listening to events.

11 innovative solutions to bring real time push to your webapp is a post from: Webdistortion

Utilising freely available open source tools, the team managed to create a working clone of Siri in just an afternoon. An impressive feat made possible partly to OpenEars an open-source iOS library for implementing round-trip English language speech recognition and text-to-speech on the iPhone. Combining that with the Wolfram Alpha API they  managed to emulate the Siri user experience, emphasizing on the artificial intelligence part of information retrieval process.

You can grab the code for yourself here, as it has been released freely on GitHub.

Whilst localised in-app speech recognition is not yet possible with the hardware limitations of the iPhone (Siri works by processing speech recognition server side before sending the result back to the client), undoubtably we will see the trend of quality voice recognition APIs in mobile apps continue, particularly as recognition databases grow in size and become more accessible to developers.

Hackers Build Siri Clone in an Afternoon. is a post from: Webdistortion

StoryWheel

URL: http://storywheel.cc/

Released by Johannes Wagener and Katharina Birkenbach during the music hack day boston in 2011 Story wheel is a great example of what opening up your platform to hackers can do. Recognising the somewhat illustrative and situational nature of its users content, Storywheel combines hipster photos from Instagram with sound to create a unique storytelling experience. Little subtle touches such as the Kodak moment sound between slides perfectly help to set the tone of the story being told.

The team have leveraged the power of the Soundcloud API to provide voice recording facilities, and this mashed up with photos shared from Instagram produces a show and tell slideshow with voiceover which perfectly compliments their existing offering. The SoundCloud team have also created a story wheel to tell the story of their growth – its an entertaining introduction to how StoryWheel can be leveraged to produce beautiful yet compact storytelling experiences.

HipGeo

URL: http://hipgeo.com

HipGeo is a social mobile application which allows you to tell stories which are intrinsically linked with particular locations. It’s of particular merit for anyone who loves travel, as it automatically organises your photos, comments and places, and lets you search and follow the adventures of other travellers.

The web interface presents a way to find the most popular and most viewed trips from its users, in a fluid and easily understood way, and you can simply sit back and watch the popular routes travelled by others.  The majority of trips plotted within HipGeo focus a combination of no fuss mobile photography accompanied with minimalist text, providing an engaging and distinctive way to tell the story of your recent trip to others.

Cowbird

URL: http://cowbird.com

According to their mission statement – Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Brainchild of Jonathan Harris – no stranger to digital storytelling projects (Harris has previous created ‘We feel fine‘ an online art piece which showcased emotion by tapping into blog mentions) Cowbird attempts to enfuse some of that emotion and depth into the narrative, and in my opinion – succeeds.

Where social media platforms tend to take a 10,000 foot view of the world in quick fire bursts, Cowbird brings depth back to the web. Recent events such as the Occupy saga have been captured in both a preserved and human way on Cowbird, and the visual yet simplistic experience that it provides will be sure to attract the everyday man and encourage them to tell extraordinary stories.

3 digital storytelling apps to watch out for in 2012. is a post from: Webdistortion

Meta Description

Probably the most well known way to improve your click through rate is through the trusty meta description tag. This gets picked up by Google and used as the main introduction to a particular article. See below screenshot for a sample.

You have about 140 characters or so to play with, so get creative and test your descriptions. One of the easiest and quickest ways of doing that, is via social media. See what garners the highest amount of interaction from your existing audience, and chances are you’ll have a pretty decent chance of attracting a click through. Sharing tools such as bit.ly provide real time analytics (add a + sign on the end of your shortened link) so feedback can be instant.

Sometimes shorter messages can be just as effective as long ones, but you are losing a small amount of screen real estate in the SERPs by not having the full two lines. As people scan the results, sometimes this can have a negative effect on click through.

Another simple tip is to experiment with characters not commonly found – (for example ❤ ♡ ❤ ღ ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬) – my experiments with this have shown that Google strip a lot of extra characters directly out of the descriptions, however Bing.com doesn’t. Using numbers to reinforce a positive message is also worth a shot to encourage a click, for example “Find 1000′s of Mulberry products…” etc.

Page Title

The title tag also plays an important role in attracting a click through from a potential visitor. However, there is one caveat with messing around with the title – you have to balance the search engine ranking versus the click through impact. Unlike the meta description, which isn’t used in Google’s decision on ranking a page at all – the page title is. Ideally, the perfect page title needs to contain the keywords you wish to rank for, AND also needs to be engaging and tempting enough to make people click through to your site. The title tag is limited to 70 characters, but you can use uppercase characters for each word within it, this alone can positively impact the ctr of your results. Mashable use this tip pretty extensively in both their results and tweets.

Open Graph Protocol

The open graph protocol enables us web masters to describe our pages for the social graph in which they can become objects. If these statistics are anything to go by, more and more of us are providing this data to Facebook and other social sites. In simple terms, this lets us dictate exactly how our pages will behave when shared inside Facebook and now Google+  with everything from the location where a page has been published, to the image to associate alongside a particular post being capable of control. You can read more about the ins and outs and how it all works over here. 

Its important that you provide this format for the same reasons you provide a good meta description. When content is shared inside social networks and people are looking at your content on their stream, this code lets you control and shape that to encourage click throughs. There are a number of properties to use, depending on your website niche, but the more you provide the better IMO, as the extra information will encourage both eyeballs and clicks.

To see what your URL’s currently look like – try the Facebook debugger. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend the og:image tag for starters is on every page, which will provide a thumbnail image alongside your post in the Open Graph. See the below capture as a sample of how information can be pulled back from a site.

Video

Getting video in your search engine result can massively increase your click through rate. It’s one of the primary reasons sites need to be taking it seriously, and there’s no excuse considering the multitude of free and open source tools out there for creating it.

Consider the impact of seeing this sort of result:

versus:

There’s a huge impact in terms of the number of clicks between these two results. Video sitemaps help associate a URL with a video result, as does micro format markup (see Rich Snippets) and improve the chances that Google will showcase a video alongside your result. You can indicate the preferred thumbnail you wish to use in an element within the feed. If you embed videos directly from YouTube, sometimes this sort of result will occur naturally without any work on your part at all, as Google already have all the information they need to build a richer result.

Authorship

In June last year, Google announced a massive change which will impact click throughs for those authors who implement it. I’ve hinted at where I think this change will go in the future, but for now, regardless of whether you have multiple authors or (like myself) are a lone ranger – you could step up against the competition by implementing it. Here’s a sample of how the authorship markup impacts the SERPs and in turn the click through.

Yes even my ugly mug makes an impact on the click through rate, and Google have provided us with all the statistics you need to improve the impact of that even further.

Rich Snippets

Google Rich Snippets are another structured format that Google are encouraging web masters to use in their markup. There’s a number of different vocabularies, but Google currently make use of Reviews, People, Products, Recipes and as mentioned earlier – Video.

Here’s a sample of how Review markup can change the SERP – notice the star rating.

Here’s a sample of how LinkedIn are utilising the people markup:

If you are involved with a food site, it makes sense to utilise the Recipe markup, as you can see below the extra image, reviews and cook time for the SERP provides much more SERP real estate to encourage the click through.

If you have either multiple or single events – event markup brings through the time and place. However, I’d be careful with this one, as often that’s the crucial piece of information that your visitors are looking for. The juice may not be worth the squeeze as visitors don’t need to click through.

Sitelinks

Some of the factors which influence click through are provided on the basis of how authoritive Google denotes your site to be. Unfortunately brand site links are one of those, and short of building a site and brand which attracts a decent amount of named searches, there’s not much you can do to influence their creation. New sites are unlikely to see these for at least a while. You can however change which site links Google picks, and change them inside Webmaster tools.

Obviously you can see the footprint that these leave in the SERPs, so they are worth getting both in terms of increasing click through, and helping to push third party results for your brand name further down the results.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs through your site are an important navigational aid for your visitors, and Google are smart enough to work these out when you provide them with a format they recognise.  See here for a explanation of how to markup your site best. Some of the SEO plugins for Wordpress have already taken this advice on board – the results can be seen below, allowing visitors to click straight through to individual categories within your site and providing a more attractive SERP.

Lists

A recent addition to the SERPs is structured list formats. If you have a lot of information on one page, this format aims to condense each piece of into a useful summary. Here’s a sample:

From the Inside Search post back in August, Google unveiled that list pages with appropriate markup would produce this format. From my own research, unordered lists seem to work best at generating these with ten results or more.

Clickthrough is one of those factors that can make a difference to your traffic even if your ranking stays the same, and for that reason, its worth taking the time and effort at improving your SERP result with some of these tactics.

Improving click through rates with killer organic results. is a post from: Webdistortion

Seth Godin nailed it recently.

The signal to noise ratio is far too low in many cases to be useful, and for our voice to be heard we’ve begun to realise that sometimes we are really better off concentrating on providing value to a select few than artificially inflating numbers for the sake of it.

Social platforms have become so overcrowded, and full of people that we don’t really know that they are largely useless for the majority of people. I’ve scaled back on my social efforts in recent months, and have considered starting fresh to cultivate only the valuable and intimate relationships.

I think we’ll see the power of social media combined with the relevance of hyper local as people build more meaningful relationships online. Some of the startups which are showing signs of this trend:

Path

URL: http://path.com

Path allows a maximum of 150 friends, encouraging users to focus and connect with the people they care about most. At its core it provides a microblogging service that is private by default, until you choose the people you want to update. It’s the opposite of most of the social services found on the web today, and is receiving glowing reviews – not least because of its UI design.

OurSpot

URL: http://www.ourspot.com/

OurSpot concentrates on the people closest to you, allowing you to create virtual online ‘Spots’ where you can share things you find online, or events that occur in your life.

Fridge / Google+

URL: http://www.google.com/landing/fridge/

Some of you will remember Frid.ge – others not so much, but essentially it started out life as a web application which allowed sharing only amongst people whom you have chosen. You could quickly create groups as private or public as you want and post information into them. Being both a close technical fit, and their app moving in the direction of the trend – the team were acquired, and are now working on Google+, where circles and this form of limited, personal sharing take centre stage.

Google+ in particular positions itself perfectly at the cusp of the wave which is happening in social, with control over the messages shared with others, and is skating where the puck is going – not just where it has been. As mobile devices increasingly become the norm, it stands to reason that the trend of viewing updates from  ’people that matter most near me’  rather than just ’people’ make their way into the apps we love.

Small is the new big – social media is growing up. is a post from: Webdistortion

There is however something of a chicken and egg effect. Without visitors, you won’t find brands. Without brands you won’t find visitors. The same goes for celebrities, and as the CNN article reveals – Google have made a conscious effort to bring famous people to plus for this reason.

Google Direct Connect also gives further weight to being on the platform. (Direct Connect kicks in when Google detects you have an active and engaging page). This alone makes a compelling argument for why businesses should potentially be on the platform, but is it enough?

We’ve already seen the ability to add authorship markup to blog posts, in an effort to get publishers and bloggers to bring their content directly into Google+, and to associate themselves with a piece of content. If you haven’t yet got around to doing this, I’d absolutely recommend giving it a go, regardless of your particular niche. This guide from Blind Five Year old takes you through the necessary.

The benefits of this are impressive. Increased clickthrough rates and the uplift in traffic has seen many people including myself diving straight in. For Google, knowing the influence of authors is also pretty useful information, particularly in working out influencers, and people who you should be circling in the suggested users panel. I’ve no doubt, that this is just one scenario where that data becomes useful.

What if there was the ability to get a little friendly Google+ image beside corporate website content that is written by multiple people, and controlled by the brand? What would the uplift be in the number of brands flocking to the Google+ platform to receive such an endorsement over their competition?

Asking brands to join Google+ to (could potentially) change their SERP from looking like this:

to this:

This is just one aggressive tactic that Google could play to increase the number of brands and businesses on Plus. Whether they will need to play that particular card remains to be seen. What do you think? A step too far? Or natural evolution of their acquisition strategy?

Will Google link business pages to profiles in the SERPs? is a post from: Webdistortion

That said, there are things you can do to make sure that people don’t ignore it when they see it first time around.  So without further ado, here are the most common reasons people don’t like your content.

1) They haven’t seen it.

That’s right, if you don’t get it under the noses of the people that matter, you don’t really stand a chance of them liking it in the first place. Promotion is as important, if not more important than the piece itself, and increasingly is becoming the new link building.  What strategies can you employ for promotion of your content?

2) It’s boring

If your subject matter isn’t entertaining, or applicable to your audience – you are dead in the water before you even get started. Ask yourself whether people will find your content exciting, entertaining, or informative to put you on a good footing from the get-go.

3) It’s not universal enough

When people share, typically they are in agreement with your concepts, or aligning themselves closely to your content. It’s important therefore that your content remains universal and has mass market appeal in order to maximise that others will share and link to it. (This is especially true when you are building an audience – remember unless you niche, it’s going to be harder to get people to share).

4) You haven’t made it easily consumable

Little nuggets of information at a time makes for a happy web browser. Breaking up your message with headlines and / or pictures keeps a visitor more engaged with your content- and brings them along for the journey.

5) There’s no passion

Repeat after me. Your content should elicit emotional response. Get people fired up. Shout a little. Make people happy. Do a little dance. Make a little love.

Above all, write your content about something you love. You can’t expect people to swallow something you aren’t 110% passionate about.

6) It’s samey

There’s far too much competition for readership out there on the web for your content to be the same as everyone else’s, especially when you are trying to establish yourself. Stand out from the crowd by really thinking about the core concepts around your content, and present alternate viewpoints and ideas. Try your best not to repeat yourself, as your already established readership won’t reward you for it.

7) There’s no meat on the bones

The web demands a certain level of quality, and sometimes that means really putting the effort in. Loads of my posts here that have seen significant traction have taken more than a couple of days to create. The hard work is often in researching your subject area, and referencing other resources around the web.  Your readers demand it.

Take your time, and really flesh out your thoughts and ideas.

8) It’s filler. Not killer

For blogs which are starting out – content which is news, unless it is breaking typically won’t generate that much of a response.

To add to that problem, breaking news is hard.

In many cases you are competing against other more established sites who are likely going to republish it to their bigger audience and thus receive more traction. Not much you can do about that, but do make sure that your content isn’t just the same news that your visitors can potentially get elsewhere – and quicker than you deliver it.

9) You are missing a ‘hook’

Not sure what angle to run on a particular story or piece of content. Take a read at this from Todd Malicoat.  He describes some of the component parts of a successful piece of content. I created something along the same lines of what I’ve learned about viral content here. Applying these sort of techniques during your content creation will increase the likelihood that people will share with others, and ultimately bring you a decent supply of traffic over time.

10) You forgot the spice. (and all things nice)

Every blog post you create should have a decent image -don’t launch a piece of linkbait without it. Visitors respond to visuals, and are engaged first by what they can see at a glance, and unfortunately plain text (unless it has a excellent headline) simply doesn’t cut the mustard. Using multimedia to enhance your content not only engages the reader, but helps to make it more enticing to share with others.

Creating content that works in driving traffic can be challenging, and is more an art than science. That said, with perseverance, and some of the above tips, you should be well on your way to more successful posts.

10 reasons why people didn’t share your last blog post. is a post from: Webdistortion

One of the recent shining stars of the online presentation world is Prezi – a different approach to the way we think about presentation generally. Instead of the traditional slide by slide / left to right viewport – Prezi allows you to zoom in and out with Flash technology to both play and create the presentation.

Mimicking this functionality, impress.js is a javascript library created by developer Bartek Szopka, which takes the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions and enhances it – recreating the Prezi presentation experience in the browser. If you’ve a browser which supports the latest and greatest in CSS3 3D transforms – have a peek at the demo. For the geeks out there, you can fork the library on GitHub.

It’s not a cross platform solution – obvious enough really considering the technologies used, but for browsers not supporting CSS3 3D transforms impress.js adds additional css classes so fallback styles can be applied.

Google and others continue to improve their online alternatives with the Google Docs team recently managing to improve their animation and transitions within docs earlier this month, to relatively little fanfare.

As web technologies advance we’ve all noticed traditional office based programs such as powerpoint move increasingly towards the browser. The ability to collaborate with others over the web and in many cases use them for free has seen many people abandon the package altogether.

For those of you with the technical chops – impress.js will give the ability to bring flat HTML to life with the same level of interactivity and wow factor of Prezi.

Impress.js – the creative javascript presentation library. is a post from: Webdistortion