div|whisperer

For those of you who have your own blog and include YouTube videos on it you will notice that YouTube decided to add a big, ugly YouTube search bar to the top of your embedded videos this morning. You’ll probably also notice that the embedded YouTube videos on my blog are sans ugly bar.

Here’s how you get rid of it:

&showsearch=0

Add that parameter to the end of the video URL when you are embedding it. Remember it shows up twice per embed.

If you are a standardista like myself, use &showsearch=0 instead.

Here’s some example code using YouTube’s default embed code:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Below is the standards compliant version, since we all know I haven’t just sailed on that ship, I’m the captain.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:344px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0" />
</object>

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks the new search bar is hella ugly.

I’ve been in several meetings over the past four months or so where the topic of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has come up and people have asked me about it.

Buying search engine optimization services from a SEO firm is like buying an engine for your brand new car from your mechanic. The first question you should be asking is why didn’t the engine come with the damn car?

SEO firms don’t want you to know this but if your web design firm didn’t suck, you’d never have a need for SEO services.

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN don’t exist to assign page rankings. They genuinely give no shits if the most “optimized” web site is number one, or number five-hundred. What they care about is being the absolute best resource for helping people find the information they were looking for.

When you’re picking out a prostitute you don’t pick the ugly one just because they have the best smelling perfume. How much money you pay some guy spouting buzzwords to “optimize” your web site is inconsequential.

Most SEO firms have a long list, of things they like to call tactics, for improving the frequency and quality of page rankings. This list of tactics changes all of the time. In the past it included such things as keyword density, meta tag optimization, reciprocal linking and writing useless copy on the web site itself designed to be parsed by search engine bots.

The problem with these old approaches is that they don’t help the search engine to provide the best results to users searching for information and that’s their core concern. So search engines change their formulas - often. In fact today sites which employ the tactics I mentioned above will be punished by almost all search engines.

Continue reading The Real Secret to SEO

A really slow day ended with a surprise. Six Apart is buying Pownce and shutting it down - in two weeks. I don’t normally post “breaking news” but I thought it was noteworthy because I posted about Pownce earlier and my inability to commit to the platform, even though I really liked the site

I had the opportunity to meet Leah Culver and Daniel Burka at mesh ‘08. All the best guys!

UPDATE: The Pownce blog has been updated with a goodbye post. There is a funny part, the goodbye post is powered by WordPress.

LinkedIn is spamming me. Or perhaps more accurately, LinkedIn is enabling other people to spam me without allowing me a way to opt out. I’ve been critical of LinkedIn’s recent Application launch. Those problems still remain and a few weeks later, now that people are actually using them, they’ve presented more annoying issues.

In fact the homepage spam is much, much worse than Facebook. That’s right I said it. LinkedIn’s application/group spam is far worse than Facebook. The reason is simple, in my mind: corporate underlings spend more time trying to look smart than tweens and drunken frat boys.

Here’s an example of the crap I am forced to digest with my face holes every time I log into LinkedIn. I’ve highlighted in a soft yellow colour that which is unwanted crap.

Not only am I not interested in the pre-budget possibilities, I am equally uninterested in the budget itself. The real annoyance though is that I have specifically made an effort to opt-out of receiving these “reading recommendations” from people who I am not connected to and whose only connection to me is that they too took the time to join the same group.

Below is a highlighted example of my update preferences. One would think that by turning off group updates I would stop receiving them.

Continue reading Please LinkedIn, Make It Stop

The animation in this advertisement is fantastic. Kind reminds me, in terms of sheer epicness, of the Guinness award winning commercial Evolution, which is one of my favorite ads of all time (the Cannes judges agreed with me).

It’s in German, but you can’t tell until the very end - at which point you’re not sure if she’s trying to sell you something or asking if you want a spanking. The ad is called The Evolution of Technology and is actually for an electronics retailer called Saturn, if that helps you understand the concept. Probably not.

Client: Saturn Electronics
Agency: Scholz&Friends

I haven’t bought a lot of books recently. Mostly because I am an avid sponge of encyclopedic data and the web is perfectly suited to do that. I really have only one good reason to buy real books and that is to punish trees. Trees may not have a heart but they are evil to their woody core.

Everyone has jumped on the “hug a tree” bandwagon but my personal experiences make it tough to do so. I grew up in a heavily forested area. I have dozens of tree related scars.

As a child a crazy, home-schooled, girl jammed a stick into my eye and I had to wear a cage around my face for a summer. It’s a miracle that experience from my youth didn’t scare me off Team Heterosexual.

The following books arrived from Amazon recently and I intend to read them as soon as possible.

More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman

The follow up book to John Hodgman’s Areas of My Expertise which has a prized position on my modest book shelf. John is one of my all-time favourite comedians. His work on The Daily Show and in TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Mac vs. PC ad campaign is fantastic. His ability to form funny sentences with words, also well developed.

The book itself is an almanac style collection of short pieces which are just close enough to being factual to thoroughly entertain and terrify simultaneously.

My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face by Michael Ian Black

I remember Michael Ian Black as McKinley in Wet Hot American Summer. He is also one of the three guys in Stella (the one named Michael Ian Black), for those who remember that show from Comedy Central, and he was the screen writer of Run Fatboy Run, one of my favourite movies, featuring Simon Pegg.

He also has a blog which features rants and commentary on his own life. This book I’m hoping is a continuation of his writing on the blog. If it’s not, I’ll likely be very upset.

Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander

Christian Lander writes one of my favourite blogs, called StuffWhitePeopleLike.com, where he rather pointedly highlights the things which I join my pasty brothers and sisters in liking. Christian, who is also notoriously and inescapably white, does a fantastic job of highlighting why minorities think that we white people are collectively morons.

My girlfriend and I almost never agree on commercials that we both enjoy. I enjoy good advertising, and she apparently does not.

Every couple of years however there comes along an advertisement whose quality is so beyond reproach that we manage to somehow agree. Jill found this one on YouTube and gestured me over with so much enthusiasm that I assumed something must be 50% off somewhere.

It’s about time someone realized they could sell stuff to Canadians by reminding them how much they loath winter. All this commercial needs now is that guy with the beard from the old Canadian Tire commercials and Midas had a classic on their hands.

Client: Midas
Agency: DDB Canada Vancouver

Wieden & Kennedy dropped Starbucks as a client in September and I’m not sure if this is a leftover from their work or from one of Starbucks’ other agencies. I love typography ads. Starbucks is promising to give everyone who votes in the U.S. election on November 4th a free cup of coffee (while supplies last of course).

This is a great idea. From a strictly profit standpoint it is sure to drive people through there doors where they will likely realize that free coffee is good, but a not-so-free triple mocha skin milk latte is even better. I expect the financial damage will be minimal.

PR wise this is a victory because while free stuff does not make for a good sales strategy is does help a company who is better known for being everywhere than helping anywhere.

Of course this could all be a clever Republican tactic. Those democrat-leaning Starbucks drinkers end up in eight-hour lines at the polls and a bladder full of Nicaragua’s best.

My American friends, please STFIL!

I’ll preface this post by saying that I like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the social networks that I actually maintain an active profile on and monitor daily.

With that established I was profoundly disappointed with their latest foray into applications - and it’s not because I hate applications either. How could you hate applications? They’re adorable.

No, my underwhelmence (awesome fake word) is entirely because of the execution of the release. Early adopters, who looked forward to installing applications with the same intensity that virgin teenage boys look forward to the prom, rushed to the site to find:

Continue reading LinkedIn Applications Launch Underwhelming

Fallon lets loose with four new additions to the Holiday Inn Express campaign that suggests that sleeping in their hotels can help ordinary people overcome being an idiot.

The latest batch includes some celebrity appearances from Cal Ripkin Jr. and Jeff Burton - neither of which is particularly funny.

The rapping spot above featuring a previously unknown (and presumably cheaper) actor is somewhat funny if only because in reality the statistics would suggest he would have been beaten, robbed and possibly killed.

The last spot, a delivery room scene, is also entertaining. The ad suggests humorously that a baby’s intellect is determined by where it was conceived - a fact we all already knew was true as proven by Arkansas.

Client: Holiday Inn Express
Agency: Fallon Minneapolis