Type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade…

["simple" is the key word here]

CAPTCHAs present a very controversial topic: you can’t do without them as a webmaster and you can’t stand them as a user.

Some CAPTCHAs are just impossible to figure - no matter who you are (a robot or a human), you won’t pass the test. Here’s my gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs:

Read fast:

Source: mgccl.com

Find cats:

Source: Depressed Programmer

Train your imagination:

Source: Digg.com

Learn other languages:

Source: Sveit.com

Look for the hidden code:

Source: hidden-3d.com

Just guess:

(The second character cannot be figured I guess)

Source: neogaf.com

(Do you see text at all?)

Source: flickr.com

Know your 1-2-3:

Source: backreaction.blogspot.com

Post image: Geek and Poke via Search Engine People

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• You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
• You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!)

Create several FireFox profiles:

Imagine you can run several FireFox profiles simultaneously and be logged in to various profiles there at a time (again, this is not (only) for spamming). For example: you have one for stumbling professional sites and one for other fun stuff you don’t want people to know you like it.

I did a detailed post on how to do create several FireFox profiles previously and here’s a quick recap:

1. Exit FireFox;
2. (Windows) Go: “Start” button => “Run” => Type “firefox.exe -ProfileManager” => “OK” button;
3. Click “Create” in a profile manager and choose the name for your new profile, then click “Start FireFox”;
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to create as many profiles as you want;
5. Done! Now each time you want to switch to another profile or change the default profile, repeat steps 1-2 and choose the one you want.

• Install this sweet FireFox extension to quickly switch between profiles.
• Now save different sets of social media profiles on different profiles.

Quick tip: I name my FireFox profile same as my social media moniker I want this profile for.

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

If you have several IMs installed or even various accounts on each one for various groups of your friends, you can connect them all in one handy utility.

DigsBy is by far my favorite such application because it connects so many IMs and social networks that you can hardly think of any suggested feature for it. Find inside:

• IMs: GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook chat;
• Email notifications: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL mail;
• Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My favorite features of the app are:

• For each social network add as many accounts as you want;
• Sort Gtalk (and other) contacts into groups (!);
• Set tracking for any GTalk buddy: e.g. get notified when some person signs in or changes the status message;
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows;
• Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

• This script makes it easy to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. It is pretty fast and can make my life much easier.
• Use temporal email address to sign up: most sites require an email address to sign up. If you do not care about their updates, just use any temporal address for quicker registration;
• I thought of adding a few tips on IP switching but then thought I’d look like a complete spammer in that case. So I’ll just stop here, hope I managed to do that before you thought I was a jerk and just left this site for good.

Post image by SideLong

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Still, there are some tactics behind crafting something that becomes viral. One such tactic is making fake mini websites that feature some sensation or weird concepts.

Those websites create their own imaginary world around them (for example, describe the life in a non-existent country) or share some spoofed scientific research or experiments or claim to describe an event that never happened, etc.

The best thing about those sites is that they don’t require much time or effort and are eagerly shared. Very often all you need is to contact a power blogger or even a journalist and share your hoax and it will work like a charm.

Let’s have a look at just a few examples to get an idea and inspiration:

Brand it:

Notice how the Onion, the weekly “satirical” stream of fake news, brand their video category: the logo, video watermarks, and the overall design are CNN-styled. This trick already makes their stream viral:

Make it easy to believe:

Male Pregnancy, the official site dedicated to the first male pregnancy, is a great example of how to design a hoax site. Everything here testifies for the reliability of this “scientific experiment”: video documentary, online EKG, magazine cover, etc.

Brainstorm a sticky concept

Some ideas don’t even require any design work or time to develop. Look at Internet First Page and Internet Last Page for example: all they needed was an idea and the domain name for that, and here we go a nice naturally-linked page to transfer link juice wherever you need:

Another cool example: turnofftheinternet.com

Grab a sensational domain

Sometimes a domain is what makes a website spread. A great example of that is PetsORFood.com for the site that claims to deliver exotic animals (like baby seals) meat to American dinner tables. The domain speaks for itself and provokes emotions by combining two “uncombineable” concepts that do not fit together: pets who we love dearly and food which we eat:

Post image by Capture Queen ™

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I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox addon Search Cloudlet that generated a tag cloud of Google and Yahoo SERPs. I have also suggested its possible implication for keyword context research.

The interesting part of this whole thing is that the tool developers appeared to be based in my home country - Ukraine. Naturally, we got into contact and arranged to keep each other up-to-date of search news.

So today I received a message of them (it is hard to believe but we still communicate in English ) sharing the tool awesome feature: it now works for Twitter.

So, if you have it installed, you will see a tag cloud whenever you visit anyone’s profile or Twitter search.

For a profile page you will see a user’s favorite terms used, as well as who he recently addressed his tweets to:

For Twitter search see most popular term “neighbors” as well as recent related hashtags, most actively addressed Twitterers:

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It is funny I’ve started a new project but haven’t shared it with my best friends - SEOsmarty readers (no, actually it is sad)…

From now on, apart from seeing me regularly on Search Engine Journal, you’ll be able to read my posts at DailySEOtip.com - a new blog I’ve started together with my boss and good friend Loren Baker.

The site will be featuring one fresh SEO tip daily. You are welcome to come along and comment (we DOfollow all links in the comments by the way). Besides, you can submit your daily tip and either I or Loren will publish it and link back to your site.

We will also be twittering SEO tips at DailySEO Twitter profile.

No related posts.

I’ve lately had to deal with a huge database-driven website. What troubled me most was the huge navigation menus - and I am wracking my brain over the ways to optimize it both for users and search engine bots.  It is always the hardest - to organize huge number of links into one easy-to-navigate and clear menus.

I am researching the topic now, drawing the site structure on a sheet of paper and still have to come up with the “perfect” solution.

Now, the best way to educate yourself is to learn from examples. Therefore I decided to look into one of the most successful (in terms of performance, not implementation) examples dealing with the huge database of products and sections: Amazon.com

Below, I am giving the history of Amazon.com navigation menus evolution without going into any extra ramblings. Your thoughts, resources and opinions are much appreciated! I promise to do a follow-up here or at SEJ linking to everyone whose comments I’ll be referring to!

I’ll start my analysis from 1999 when Amazon sidebar navigation looked overwhelming to say at least:

The key features:

• Website sections sorted into first- (bold links) and second-tier (”… And More” section - containing all things that can’t be combined - is a good sign of broken website information architecture) ;
• Inconsistent website navigation: why do “Top Sellers”, “Recommendation Center”, “New Releases” and “Soundtracks” come in one pack?

In 2000 Amazon took some steps to make the navigation menus much shorter (the image below) - second-tier levels were removed. It might be much more focused that way and less disturbing but does provide much less information for the first-time visitor.

During the whole next year it remained still top-tier-only but it continued to grow until it turned into something surprisingly huge and even more unfocused. Most elements seem to be completely in the wrong place: Video and DVD? In Theaters? Magazine???

It had remained to be that huge monster until 2006 when they changed the design twice again: first time it turned into something even larger and clumsier (with second level being back):

And then into something even huger but surprisingly much better organized (click to enlarge):

Positive steps in information organization:

• Main categories are listed in alphabetical order;
• Categories and subcategories are all logically related (e.g. there’s no more “Top Rated” and “Soundtracks” listed under one roof).

As of today (January 2009) Amazon sidebar navigation (hover) menus contains even more links (screenshot from Google cache to get an idea how it looks like with JavaScript disabled):

The first thing that comes to my mind is that they renamed the whole block from unclear “Browse” to “Shop All Departments” (which is already a good move).

Secondly, they have reconsidered the alphabetical order and probably list them by popularity now (I guess popularity was also the criteria behind re-arranging the subcategories).

So, what do you think on the whole topic of arranging links into the navigation menus? Any tips links observations to share?

Post image by flattop341

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Today in the morning I was pinged by one of my Facebook friends with some cute news: a start-up called Magpie (aff link) offers you to monetize your Twitter account and earn money for Tweeting the ads.

My instant reaction was “Nah…” The whole idea of earning money from friends sounds somewhat not good. But curiosity won, I went ahead and signed up. You can estimate how much you will be earning by clicking the “Start” tab.

So far I have no real data to share as I spread 0 Tweets and thus can’t see any statistics but here’s what the service looks like both from outside and inside:

What the service promises

• Magpie (aff link) promises to give you full control over your Tweets: you can set the ad frequency, stop it any time and even pre-approve each ad before it will be tweeted on your behalf.
• You can add a disclaimer before or after the advertisement text before the ad goes live to warn your friends that the Tweet is sponsored;
• Advertisements are served based on the person’s general networks (so the service appears to classify the whole Twitterati into groups by interests);
• You can spend the earned credits to advertise your own product or site (this one looks pretty cool by the way).
• You can also earn money for any new Advertiser who signs up through your personal referral link, you will earn a 30% commission of our transaction fees.
• Payment is made via PayPal as soon as you earn at least €50.00

Why I am in a doubt:

• Even with disclaimer and pre-approval, won’t this result in my following loss?
• CPM model: will those ads be ever clicked? Will they devalue Twitter: “in order to raise your revenue, all you need is to multiply your tweets or to increase your followers. And their site promotes these two facts for every low revenue account” (as my friend Rishi Lakhani points out);
• While the design is pretty sleek and clear, why would anyone trust the guys? Where are people I refer listed? How all my stats will look like?
• How is Twitter going to react? They have been expected to monetize themselves for a year now - will they bear with someone monetizing their network prior to them?

Anyway, I am curious to see how this will evolve. I definitely see the potential (for both parts: publishers and advertisers). I’ve never been paid for participating in social media communities and it might be a cool opportunity to combine business with pleasure.

So what do you think? Would you join? Would you pay for advertisements? Would you click the advertisements?

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I’ve been banned from StumbleUpon - not banned but put under review - the fact is, I can’t use it any more. I’ve been stumbling for a year, found great friends there and now I feel as if huge part of my life has been taken away. Anyway, putting the emotional part aside, this got me thinking: was I really manipulating the service?

The honest and painful answer would be: YES. I did thumb up the content I was related to in some way or other. I did shared it with some of my friends. I did ask others to promote my stuff.

But what is more important is that I drove more value to the community than I got from it. And I can honestly and open-heartedly state that I was a great stumbler! I rated and reviewed content daily - a lot of content. Many people contacted me saying how great my StumbleUpon blog was.

So did I really deserve the ban? In his recent interview Muhammad Saleem said reciprocal voting is a natural part of social media where people having common interests share content and vote for it.

Lisa Barone recently said marketers were to blame for any negative outcome social media manipulating can have. Follow the rules and you will be OK, she said.

So where in their rules do they forbid to review your own content? Or sharing it with those who liked it?

I had about 1000 friends there and I am sure none of them could accuse me of spamming them or sending them some promotional content.

So where is the line between being a power user and manipulating the network?

Image by helmet13

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The common delusion (under which I’ve also been for some time) is that you can use any image you find at Flickr as long as you link back to it. Well, this is wrong. Let’s try to figure all Flickr image license types to see which images you are allowed to post at your sites and blogs.

You are only allowed to use (not all) images under Creative Commons with appropriate license:

Attribution License

You are allowed to publish the image (even for commercial use) and modify it (e.g. crop, resize, etc) as long as you link back to the author;

Attribution-NoDerivs License

Publish the image (even for commercial use) but don’t modify it and link back to the author;

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

No commercial use is allowed.

Attribution-ShareAlike License

You can publish the image (even for commercial use) as long as you link back to the author and to the license

Note: in all the above cases, when linking back to the author’s profile, you can use ‘nofollow’ attribute.

What is fair use?

Really, journalists and bloggers can take advantage of fair use that allows them to use any web content as long as they credit the original creator. Fair use would apply if you are making journalistic commentary on a particular image

But this fair use does not refer to the cases when you use images for decorating purposes.

How to search for images with appropriate license?

• Flickr built-in search engine;
• Creative Commons search;
• Compfight: the service lets you set the Creative Commons (’Off’, ‘Commercial’, ‘All’);
• FlickrStorm allows to search by keyword and /or by Creative Commons. The tool also has a handy flash-based interface:

Image credit: fair use classroom poster draft by tvol

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A really cool reputation management tool WhosTalkin.com has been launched fro public usage this week. The tool is free, requires no registration and offers plenty of options to play with:

• search blogs (using various blog search engines);
• search social networks;
• search forums;
• search images (with instant preview);
• search news; etc

According to them:

Our search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

Image credit: “Google-talk“

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