Hot off the social networks this Monday morning is an article over at TheNextWeb about the Billion dollar economy that has sprouted up around the “free” (open-source) system that is WordPress (the image above comes from there as well). There is a solid 5 paragraph overview of how WordPress has come to be. It then goes on to outline that massive economy : from companies dedicated to selling Themes and Plugins that are either half or wholely under the GPL, to jobs focused almost entirely on designing and developing around WordPress, to, as WP lead developer Mark Jaquith points out, 24,000,000 self-hosted WordPress sites * $5/month * 12 months / year = $1.44 billion a year. That is Billion with a B.
Husband and wife Taal Safdie and Ricardo Rabines, and the rest of their team, do some righteous architecture work around San Diego and the world, and when they wanted a new look for their own website, they came to Ninthlink. Their requests were to keep the site super clean, while showcasing their work in the most real estate (pun intended?) possible. So that is what lead designer Craig, and myself on the development side, delivered in the new SafdieRabines.com. READ MORE
I do not like this. I do not like this one bit. “If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you’re ready for any emergency.” Get your social media badges, and more info, at emergency.cdc.gov. But why ask if we are ready for a zombie apocalypse?! What are they trying to warn us about? I mean, I like my brains as much as everybody else, but they’re MY brains!
This interactive road map takes you through the anatomy of a search, from the moment you type in your query to the results page and additionally covers some of Google’s milestones such as the creation of Gmail in 2004 and Street View in 2007. Each step in the process is broken down and explained visually – a pretty remarkable process considering search results pages are displayed almost instantaneously (total time: 0.25 seconds).
Once Inside a Google Cluster (step 4) , your query goes through a Spelling Server. “Google doesn’t read words; it looks for patterns of characters, be they in English or Sanskrit. If it sees your requested pattern a thousand times but finds a million hits for a similar patter that’s off by one character, it connects the dots.”
It then suggest what it ‘thinks’ you meant, while providing you the results, if any, of your original search.
A new twist was introduced in the daily deal market as Groupon launched their highly anticipated Groupon Now, which delivers local, real-time deals to consumers using their mobile application. Once your location is determined, a list of time specific nearby deals can be seen. The biggest benefit for businesses using Groupon Now is it’s ability to drive sales and customers during non peak hours of business. Deals can last anywhere from a couple of hours to an entire day depending on how long a business wants to run it, giving them greater control over their specials.
Currently only available in Groupon’s home city of Chicago, it won’t be long before these realtime deals make it to a city near you.
Before yesterday, if you were trying to find product specifications for a particular Jacuzzi Baths bathtub, you had to go to each individual product page, and view/download the PDF(s) one at a time. Now, you can just click on “Product Specifications” in the handy utility bar that flows across the bottom of each page, or from the Sitemap “navication” flopdown, and you are greeted by all available Product Specification downloads on a single page. With the Cake PHP custom content management system powering the Jacuzzi Baths site, it took some serious collaborating between Ian, Russell and myself, but the finished product (pun?) worked out nice. READ MORE
Despite hundreds of millions of active users, Facebook and other social networks are lagging behind more ‘traditional’ customer acquisition and retention tactics such as paid search (PPC) and email marketing campaigns in generating a solid ROI.
And just in time for our Cinco de Mayo Celebracion too! See you tomorrow? ( has it really been over a month since my last blog post? oh how time, it flies… )
Ninthlink (Re)Presents Beautiful Organic Catering with Eco Caters fb.me/2AeuOI95D
4 days ago via Facebook
Ninthlink (Re)Presents Beautiful Organic Catering with Eco Caters
Added by: Alex Chousmith on June 14, 2013
Twitter Analytics for Everyone
Added by: Alex Chousmith on June 12, 2013
Coming Soon; Google AdWords Image Ad Extensions
Added by: Ron Weber on June 11, 2013
Ninthlink (Re)Presents Beautiful Organic Catering with Eco Caters fb.me/2AeuOI95D
4 days ago via Facebook
Twitter Analytics for Everyone nblo.gs/M70dN
6 days ago via NetworkedBlogs
Twitter Analytics for Everyone fb.me/1biRSvCqj
6 days ago via Facebook
