I had lunch with my father the other day, and I explained this series as well as I could to someone who didn't start programming when he was 11. His immediate reaction was, "Why are there so many different formats? Why can't everybody just agree on a single format? It is political, or technical, or both?" The short answer is, it's both. The history of video in any medium — and especially since the explosion of amateur digital video — has been marred by a string of companies who wanted to use container formats and video codecs as tools to lock content producers and content consumers into their little fiefdoms. Own the format, own the future. And when I say "history" — well, it's still going on. Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Constraints’.
The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.) Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Lossy Video Codecs’.
As content on the Web grows exponentially, our ability to make sense of it is inversely proportional. In other words, we are fast sinking under the sheer amount of content pouring onto the Web every day. The Social Web hasn’t made life any easier on managing content production either – in fact its lowered the barrier to entry. Read more – ‘Tools to Help You Manage Your Websites and Blogs’.
Back in April last year, Google announced that it would take page download speeds into account when indexing web pages; officially linking a website’s performance to search engine marketing. Google’s fixation with page speed took an addition last Thursday with the launch of Page Speed to Google Labs. Read more – ‘Google Launches Page Speed Analyzer In Labs’.
Given the option, most people prefer to watch a video than read good old fashioned text. Therefore, it’s no surprise that video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion are increasing in populatrity, with YouTube inparticular being recently ranked the third most popular website in the world by Alexa. Anticipating the need to find video content online, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) have created their own video search engines. These spider the web for unique video content and publish it in their video sections. Read more – ‘Get your Website’s Video Content onto the Search Engines’.
Social media is relationship and conversation media. At its core is the art of building relationships with others, human-to-human. However, you can’t be everywhere conversing with everyone at the same time. You need to pick your battles. Where you "hang out" digitally, just like any outreach and marketing program, should be driven by where your constituency hangs out. Read more – ‘Steps to a Strong Brand’.
The decision to utilise a sub-domain, sub-directory or even a microsite is simply an architectural decision, but one that is often compounded with a marketing decision. In general, sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about. Read more – ‘When to use Sub-domains versus Sub-directories’.
Google Analytics describes itself as an “enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.” However, to really leverage the power of Analytics you need to set up profiles and filters to segment your data and create more meaningful reports. You’ll then be more prepared to write better-targeted adverts, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. Read more – ‘Segment your Google Analytics with Profiles and Filters’.
Google’s AdWords product helps connect you with potential customers in the right place, and at precisely the right time by placing relevant adverts on the right-hand-side of Google’s search results pages (SERPs) or through their content network, via AdSense. Read more – ‘13 Google AdWords Tips and Tricks’.
