JOE CHILDS and THOMAS C. TOBIN, staff writers of the St. Petersburg TImes, are writing a scathing expose of the "church" of Scientology. Based on extensive interviews with high ranking defectors of the faith, their story is broken down in chapters and includes video interviews, and anecdotes describing all kinds of weird cultish behavior. What else would you call playing "Musical Chairs" to prove your devotion?

But that is not really the point of this post.

Can you spot the point in this picture?

_{Click to see full size image.}

Unless this is some Advanced SEO Tactic I haven't heard about, the scientology banner ad won't get the desired results. I am going to assume that it was a keyword targeted ad based on the perceived subject matter of the page.

In this world of unintended consequences,. I can only imagine that their click-thru rate will be thru the roof from uninterested -if not hostile- visitors to this page.

Check out http://www.rollip.com/ which takes you to a site by Rollip. Click the website to start; this takes you to a page of original images and Polaroid "look" variations that take you back to the days of slight color mismatch, over and under development; atmospheric effects and the day-to-day variations of the Polaroid process. Do you remember the excitement of the image developing before your very eyes?

Choose one of the illustrated effects and double click on it. The next window you will see gives you a "click here to upload photo" button. Go ahead, click it! This opens a window to your computer that allows you to browse until you find an image that you want to process. Click and select an image and wait a brief time for your image to upload. The size of the image and your upload speed determines the upload time. But generally, it's brief. Out of curiosity I sent a four megabye .jpg and the upload time was about three minutes in which the upload bar worked its way from red, to orange, to yellow to green. Another thirty to sixty seconds had the image processed and the processed version came up in the display window ready for me to download or send it somewhere.

That's it! Talk about instant nostalgia!

Links are available to send your newly created image directly from Rollip to e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, and other choices you may select.

If you enjoy the use of the site, the folks at Rollip have a Donate link where you can send them what you think the process is worth to you and it's obvious that they have put in some pretty intense work because as a long time user of Polaroid cameras I have to say that they got the "look" down pat, so if you use them and enjoy the effect, then consider a donation.

Along with the twelve basic effects available one of the interesting ones is to choose SMALL POLAROID and several border effects become available with the ability to add a slight amount of text below the image. The text styles range from typewriter to printed handwriting; and all these frames have the slight dark vingette associated with a lens hood on the camera lens or an image square selected slightly larger than the circular image that the camera lens produces.

For the disclaimer, the folks at Rollip don't have any connection to the original Polaroid cameras or film people company which owns the trademark to the Polaroid name. Rollip has simply given you the opportinuty to make a modern photograph look like a process that has sadly, slipped from the current technology scene. Have fun!

What do you say? It's all in the look http://www.rollip.com/

But I joined. For some reason, we are all crazy busy. I am booked solid until mid-September. Digitalapplejuice haven’t been updating as often as we should because, bless us all, we are making money in an otherwise difficult economy. As a result, Facebook has become a quick way to keep up with the other writers, upload a quick image of our last gig or post a link to an interesting news story without getting completely sidetracked in an email or phone call.

Today I tried to become a fan of The Daily Show. WEl, I have always been a fan of The Daily Show- all the way backj to Craig Kilborn. Today I decide to add The Daily Show to my wall.

When I went to comment on JohnBolton’s recent interview I discovered that I have to verify my cel phone first.

Hmmm.

Why does Facebook Want My Cel Phone Number!?

1. Keyword stuffing is just bad SEO.

There are thousands of websites and consultants out there that promise to produce immediate results with their almost mystical knowledge of SEO and their clairvoyant understanding of the use of keywords. They will talk of keyword density and keyword combinations, alt text keywords and on and on and on.

The truth is much more complicated than this. If you are not bidding on keywords for ad purposes, then the importance of the "right" keyword is diminished.

If you are writing about cats that eat dinner with a spoon attached to their paw, adding keywords like "silverware" is not going to increase your traffic much. Your subject should define your keywords.

On the other hand, if you are writing timely material for which you expect a lot of competition, then the choice of keyword can greatly increase your traffic. According to The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, when Heath Ledger died, The Huffington Post managed a #1 placement on Google by adding "Leger" to their keyword list, capitalizing on the misspelling of the actor’s last name even though they were not the primary source of the story. Other online publications quickly followed suit.

In fact, HuffPo claims a keyword expert on staff who tags each post and tweaks that day’s keywords as the day progresses.

Another example:

If you peek behind the curtain at Smash Magazine, specifically their story about 404 pages, you will notice that their meta description and keywords are actually based on the content of the first two paragraphs of the post. There is no endless combination list of 404 + something. This is just an organic description of the content of the post.

And still, if you google "404", Smash Magazine appears within the top five.

Want to increase your site’s visibility? Make all your domain links"pretty links". So instead of  http://www.your domain.com/page1.html, use something germane to the content of that page like http://yourdomain.com/smith-family-picnic.html.

If you are using wordpress, read the wordpress codex on premalinks carefully BEFORE you choose your permalinks structure.

As for keywords,  if you are blogger and use Wordpress, install the All-in-One SEO plug-in. If you don’t have the time or inclination to write keywords or tags or specify a page title for each post, the plug-in will attempt to automatically generate keywords from your content, use the post title as part of the webpage title and incorporate the blog name as well. For most sites, this is enough.

If you have an html site, the best scenario is that you write keywords that are relevant to the content of each page. Yes, that means writing keywords for every page. 

2. Said another way, too many keywords, too many tags on any one page will not get you the traffic you want. If it does anything at all, it will just increase your bounce rate.

The actual definition of bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits. This definition doesn’t work for us. Most of our visitors come specifically for the Illustrator tutorial or the Lens Baby review.

My definition of bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your site within the first 10 seconds of arriving because they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Back when I slaved away for a boss and a meager paycheck, I had a boss who took a seminar at the local chamber of commerce. She came back with all the knowledge in the world about keywords. When it came time to bid on keywords, she handed me a list containing 200 keyword combinations starting with "Miami", "location", and "photography". (The company booked locations in and around South Florida for print and TV advertising)

I suggested that her keywords were too broad but she insisted. So I bid on them. What do you think happened? Within a few days we had a bill for over $300 (and growing). The bulk of the inquiries were from people wanting help booking sites for weddings, or help booking hotels on the beach, not from photographers or advertising agencies looking for shooting locations in the greater Miami area.

A wiser approach would have been to test out keyword combinations. If keywords are really important to you, and your whole advertising model is based on keywords, then you MUST test your keyword combinations. Create different landing pages for different keyword phrases or combinations. I suspect you will find that 80% of your keyword phrases don’t attract a single visitor to your site.

3. Write. Just write. Write every day. Forget about keywords and keyword density.

I think that the "science" of keywords is only relevant to static sites that rarely update their content or sites that are regurgitating copy from other sites and need to best the source of the text in the rankings. (see Huffington Post).

If you are a blogger, you are probably writing about stuff that interests you. If you are consistently writing about ponies, and different types of ponies and what ponies eat, then your content will define the keywords meant to attract people who are interested in ponies. The writing will be natural and appealing and readers will enjoy visiting your site.

However, if you have been reading too many out-of-date SEO books and websites, you may decide to exercise a concept called "keyword density". I hate the whole concept. If you are able to discern what the correct keyword density is supposed to be, mazel tov. But all the sites that speak of this concept sternly warn you that the wrong keyword density can either diminish the optimum benefit or get you flagged for "keyword spamming".

So let’s say that you decide your keyword ratio should be 3% to 8% . If you think about this rationally, 1 in 20 words will be a keyword. Really. Try that. Try writing a coherent 250-word story with 5% keywords. Not only is it difficult to do, its difficult to read.

Screw the keyword density. Screw the whole concept of keywords. Just write. There are ways to increase your traffic. Keywords are not the way. Trust me.

How do I know? Our blog is an SEO nightmare. We write about Photoshop, and Illustrator and Pixelmator, and dozens of other software programs, and we write about artists and how to sell art. We write about comic books, and conventions and software and Lensbabies. Sometimes we even write opinions. There is no way to weedle our keyword list to ten strong candidates.

Our SEO approach has become very straight forward–the main subject of the story is always named in the title, the keywords are usually gleaned out of the content. And we don’t worry about keyword density. This very simple approach actually works.

You know what our most fruitful keyword is? Photofunia. 5% of our daily traffic is the direct result of googling "Photofunia". For an article written more than 6 months ago.

Go figure.

For the most part I have ignored the whole Entrecard mishagoss. I really didn’t like the complication of clicking on card and then the next and then next.

After being on an upswing for most of 2008, our traffic started falling off the beginning of this year (2009). For the last few months, all the writers associated with DigitalAppleJuice have been working- yes, we really are working artists. So new content has been lean causing traffic to drop off which causes even more traffic to drop off since there is no one sharing our content with friends. No amount of SEO can make up for the dropoff in traffic.

One night late last week I received an email from Entrecard letting me know that there was an advert waiting for approval. While rooting around my dashboard, I happen somehow to run across mention of Firefox plugin for Entrecard.

Most definitely this Firefox plugin changed my attitude.
Download the Entrecard Toolbar

The Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox 3.x allows for easy access to your favorite list, drop inbox, and the directory of Entrecard members. It’s so easy in fact that I have become an inveterate dropper. I can click and watch TV and sometime I end up reading the blogs and saving them in my favorites list (which has grown dramatically since I got the Firefox plugin)

Some of My Latest Favorites:

http://mydailylist.blogspot.com/

The author of this site writes daily list in an effort to avoid brain rot.
Don’t miss his Dailylist Quiz: Are you a 19th century British author or a 21st century starlet?I laughed out loud. All by myself with only my art director cats as witnesses.

http://behindthebit.blogspot.com

I haven’t been on a horse since I was a teenager- life got in the way. I can almost recall the smell of leather and horse sweat and muck when I visit this site and get to live my alternate reality for a moment before moving on…

http://millcityfiasco.com/comic.php

Yep-i admit it- i’m a generic fan girl.
 

That aforementioned notable exception? Safari, of course. Cross-platform (OS X AND Windows), Safari just works – no registry hacking required.

Turning on Firefox is very easy. Follow the instructions in this article by Datacolor, the maker of the popular color profiling Spyder tools and software, to exploit the new feature. You won’t be disappointed.

Should photographers start tagging their website photos with icc profiles and recommending Firefox, or serving content based on browsers? Great question. When you decide the answer to that, please login and add your comments.

Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, found himself grossly criticized by the "Dancing With The Stars" judges last night.

Wozniak and Karina Smirnoff performed a chachacha ands smiled through downright cruels barbs from the judges.

"I don’t know if it was hilarious or delirious," Italian judge Bruno Tolioni said, prompting audience members to boo him.

"It was like a Tellytubby going mad at a gay pride parade. You should have kept the boa on because it distracted from the feet."

- quoted from Yahoo News Article: Apple co-founder panned in television dancing debut

Despite getting only 12 out of 30 possible points, Wozniak and Smirnoff will have another opportunity to perform next week.

Woz is quoted as saying, "I hope everywhere in the little computer world that the people who use Macintoshes for creative work, for photography, that they are all rooting for me," Wozniak said in an online interview while preparing for the show.

"I hope they are going to vote too. It means a lot."

There is a good chance that getting 6% more viewer votes REGARDLESS of the jugdes’ score acording to Al Luckow on Woz.org.

To vote for the Woz go to http://votewoz.com/

Visit The Woz’s Facebook page to read his plea for support.

For Voting Information go to Dancing With The Stars website

So next week, on Monday, March 16 at 8/7c, call 800-868-34-10 (800-VOTE4-10). The phonelines open at the beginning of the broadcast and say open for 30 minutes after the end of the show.

If you are on a AT&T cel, you can text "3410"  during this same time period.

Onbline voting stays open until noon 9Eastern time) the day after the broadcast.

If you prefer to vote online, go to

http://abc.go.com/primetime/dancingwiththestars/index?pn=index

The best thing I can say about it is that it will probably make a gazillion dollars.

It’s not The Dark Knight.
It’s not 300.

It is better than V for Vendetta.
And as the bard would say, therein lies the rub.

The real problem is the nature of storytelling. Zack Snyder may have given the world 300 (the movie) but the narrative was classic Frank Miller. His vision is very clear cut and his narratives always hammer away at the concept from all angles.

Alan Moore ’s genius lies in telling a story through a series of meandering relativistic vignettes, the equivalent of tugging on a loose thread to unravel a sweater, then choosing another thread to continue the unraveling.   It  is brilliant in print but I have yet to see anyone successfully translate this style onto the big screen.

There is a subtle difference between non-linear multi-thread narrative and an episodic narrative. In the case of Watchmen, the short but constant deviations from the central story – ah hell, I couldn’t really hang on to a central story long enough to care. The whole concept might have worked better as a mini-series.

While Dan Dreiberg banging Laurie Jupiter in Archie may go down as the best Super Hero soft porn yet, I really didn’t need to see that Dr. Manhattan was circumcised.

(did I miss Alan Moore’s name? Or did he not get credit?)

In 1977 while hanging out with some friends in Philly, I inadvertantly left my camera at an outdoor lunch joint near Second and South. Having shared a few bottles of Merlot (to wash down the double cheese steaks with onions and mushrooms) I hadn’t realized the camera was missing until later in the evening and by then, I figured I was out of luck. In those days, there was no craigslist on which to post lost & found, and I had no idea of the name of the place where we’d eaten lunch (see Merlot ref. above) so I couldn’t call them to find out if it was there.

That was then. The camera is history and as time goes on, the memories become soft and faded like an old pair of jeans. Fast forward thirty some years – timing is everything. What you lose today, has a good chance of showing up tomorrow, thanks to the internet and a few good people who still believe in reaching out.

In the summer of 2008 while hiking in New Hampshire, a man named Matt found a camera at the bottom of a river. The camera was completely rusted out and worthless. A kind and curious dude, Matt took the camera home and fiddled with it until he was able to retrieve the memory card from which, after a little more fiddling, he was able to extract over two hundred photos and movie clips.

Taking it one step further, he set up a blog (http://basinfoundcamera.blogspot.com/ ) and posted some of the photos there with hope that the owner of the camera would see them and he could reunite the two. Eight days later, that’s exactly what happened, giving rise to a great new site, aptly called: iFoundYourCamera. (http://ifoundyourcamera.blogspot.com )

Every Thursday the website is updated with photos sent in by people who have found cameras. Those who have lost a camera can browse through the photos and see if they belong to them. The two are then reunited.

The internet provides us with great opportunity, but people and ideas are what bring it to life. For those who look to reach out and perhaps further the greater good, even if it’s only one camera at a time, there is no chasm that can’t be crossed. All you have to do is picture it.

The irony of being an artist:

For that reason, it is deeply rewarding for me to read David Alison’s column. He entertains all apps he stumbles across candidly, unburdened by old school mac snobbery. It is because of him I found Pixelmator.

And because of him, I found Skitch.

I probably spend 25% of any paying job creating tutorials for the end user, another 25% grabbing screenshots of the work-in-progress to send off for approval. So it is vital that my screengrabber be versatile, fast- loading and easy to use.

GRAB, mac’s native screen capture uitility, will only save to tiff files, requiring that I open the screenshot in an image editor. The only advantage to this app is the timed screen grab, a 10 second delay that allows the capture of  drop down menus when documenting program details for a tutorial. For the last year, Imagewell has been my go-to-app for screen capture and annotating but i find the size claustrophic at time.

Enter Skitch.

The webpost function is what is so impressive. Join Skitch.com and you can automatically upload the resulting images, you can edit the image and "reskitch". You can also add your flickr account, .mac, or ftp. 

Catch my Skitch uploads at http://skitch.com/madbadcatgraphics/

plasq even created a video for those people unwillling to read the instructions (like me)

App after app, plasq delivers amazing and whimsical products. Kudos, dudes!