This new Add-on gives you an advertising-free, direct way to get a website IP address you need when working on site development.

No doubt you, like ourselves, work with many different internal and external sites during development, and find it difficult to remember which website uses which server. We thought it would be convenient if there were a Add-on that would display the current IP address as you were working on a page.

However, we were unable to find any that didn’t direct us to an advertising-filled page before getting us the address. Others bombarded us with unnecessary information before giving us the address, and others required an extra command prompt step before getting us the address.

So we created a direct, easy to use Add-on that avoids all those extraneous steps and information.

Simply add the Current Site IP Add-on to Firefox. It will show you the IP address for the site you are browsing in the status bar at the bottom right of the Firefox window.

We hope you find this new Add-on useful, and we’d appreciate any suggestions for additional features or reports of bugs. Let us know what you think at firefox@webdatamation.com

Here is a link to the Add-on on FireFox.com

1. Sitecore Admin needs to load faster
2. Need an easier way to assign renderings to place holders
3. Need an easier way to Assign roles & users to folders and content items
4. Right now it is a pain to get it setup on Windows 2008 with SQL Server 2008, it would be nice to get an installer which does this for you (Sitecore posted a note saying that this is in the works).

I don’t know if I say it enough, I love Sitecore.

Attention and Economy may be two diverse terms but in the modern times is naturally amalgamating, with one becoming highly interdependent on the other. Let us consider an example to show you exactly how attention affects economy.

While searching for the latest book reviews or releases, how often do you navigate away from a page that does not contain the review of a book that you have been looking for? The chances are high. The fact is, with so many websites and blogs being continuously updated with information on your favorite genre(s), you do not bother to stick to a page and search for information that is not there in the first glance! It takes seconds before you decide to look for your information on a different website or a web page and navigate away from the present one if you are not satisfied with its content. In the process, have you noticed the crisis of attention?

If you observe closely, you will find that this attention deficit not only affects us, but also the organizations keen to reach out to you with their products or services. The moment you are navigating away from a page presuming that the information provided in it is not relevant, you are hurting their economics. Search engines, online retailers, blogs, and news sites are coughing up an overabundance of information for the end users or the consumers every passing hour. This can lead to a loose-loose situation where eventually, a consumer leaves a website, un-happy and a retailer looses business. The irony is, a consumer wants to spend money for a commodity, but does not have the correct retailer reaching out to him.

The entire idea behind attention economy is to create a virtual marketplace where consumers are presented with streamlined content that makes them feel happy and satisfied, in lieu of their attention. More specifically, consumers are made to consume advertisements however, in exchange of certain personalized services. For example, personalized searches, news, alerts and buying recommendations, to name a few.

You might have noticed the “sponsored links” in the Google search pages. You get to use the search feature of Google for free; however, you are being presented with some relevant advertisements based on your search keyword on the search results page. This is an excellent example that demonstrates attention economy in action.

One of the important aspects of attention economy relates to the fact that the consumer can exercise the power of his or her choice. Therefore, the consumer gets to decide where to devote their attention. Websites are also capitalizing on the “online surfing habits” of the consumer, thereby optimizing the way in which information may be sorted and presented.

One might probably argue with the usage of the word “Economy” here. Attention economy is different form its conventional counterpart in the way in which barter is established. The latter has a more explicit or direct form where goods and services may be bought or sold. However, in the former, there is no immediate buying or selling of commodity. The focus is more towards creating deterministic opportunities to sell.

According to the TIMES report, the petition says that Google Earth “aids terrorists in plotting attacks” and offers “absolutely no control to prevent misuse or limit access” of the services. Investigation to Mumbai terror attacks and interrogation of the only live terrorist reveal that the terrorists used GPS and other high tech tools to plot, execute and then monitor the attacks with ease.

This is not the first time when Google Earth has been asked to blur the satellite images of the sensitive areas. In 2005, Australian officials asked to remove the pictures of their only nuclear reactor Lucas Heights from Google Earth. In 2006, Bahrain officials barred Google Earth, and China too banned websites that sold unapproved images. Some countries like Holland have gone into an agreement to block or censor the sensitive areas especially their military bases. Some countries have even concealed their sensitive military bases by putting them underground. According to a USA Today report, some countries like India can detect when a satellite passes overhead and conduct sensitive military activities accordingly so that the satellites do not capture the images of these activities. Even in USA,  google mappers and google street view photographers were banned from accessing Pentagon and other military bases.

Google earth has revolutionized the way the internet works today. However, one should also understand that gifts for some might be curses in disguise for the others. When it comes to sensitive issues like national security and the like, Google should co-operate with the respective authorities.

Here is a little bit about the project:

“The Life Raft Group (LRG) launched this website, What does a cure mean for you? to find out exactly that…

We want to know what a cure actually means to those people who are dealing with cancer every day.  Unfortunately, cancer has touched us all in some way – whether you’re just concerned about it, you or someone you love has cancer, or you have lost someone to cancer.

We also want to show the scientific world that their work REALLY means something. We want to remind them that we are here, we are counting on them and we are real people.”

With over 500,000 registered users and 5.0 million downloads in late 2007 (as per official sources), DotNetNuke has become one of today’s largest and effective open source CMS. It has been written in Microsoft’s VB.NET for the ASP.NET (also by Microsoft) framework. With an extensible core and a set of additional customization features that include modules and skins, DotNetNuke can be used to develop, deploy and efficiently manage websites, including extranets and intranets.

What makes DotNetNuke stand apart form the other CMS’s is the way in which it allows you to implement modules and skins, in order to customize your web application(s). Without any expertise of development in ASP.NET, web designers can develop skins for an application and it is this feature completely separates design from content. Only basic knowledge of HTML and understanding the inherent steps to prepare and implement the skins themselves is necessary. Skins have been implemented in DotNetNuke as basic HTML files with placeholders that serve as templates for content, menus and other GUI features. This includes support files such as JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and images.

The DotNetNuke architecture can be extended to provide an additional set of features and functionalities by the use of pluggable modules. The core includes almost a dozen of them that is included with the distribution and other modules can be downloaded from the official DotNetNuke website. These modules include pluggable add-ons some of which are forums, blogs, wiki, e commerce systems and mailing lists.

There have also been some criticisms associated with this CMS. The instructions for creating an appropriate module are cumbersome. A very important feature that lacks in DotNetNuke is the ability to dynamically localize the content of your website. There is no provision for providing content in languages other than English. There has also been debate on the fact that some of its older modules do not work as advertised.

However recently, the quality of the newer DotNetNuke releases have improved and are more stable compared to the earlier releases. The official portal features regular updates. Moreover, DotNetNuke has an impressive fan following. It has grown more and more popular with the passage of time. There are a number of online user groups available for assistance where you can learn more about the DotNetNuke platform.

I remember playing the “Duke Nukem” game once. Speaking of CMS’s, I often DotNetNuke!

JQuery is dual licensed under the GNU General Public License and the MIT License and is hence, free and open source. This allows you to either manipulate the source or implement its range of functions in your scripts for free.

Recently, Nokia and Microsoft have announced plans to bundle JQuery on their platforms. Nokia has plans to integrate this tool on their Web Run-Time platform, while Microsoft is gearing up to provide this framework with their ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET MVC framework in particular and the Visual Studio environment in general.

We had a brief discussion on MooTools last week. Though JQuery and MooTools are similar tools by nature and provide the developers with almost the same set of features, however they have minor differences and are unique in their own way.

Chaining of functions together to perform multiple operations on the DOM at the same time is a default and beautiful feature of JQuery that developers can make use of to develop code rapidly. It also has support for CSS 1-3 and basic XPath and hence gives you more control over the design layout of your page. JQuery has a nifty set of utilities to offer that include browser version, each function, AJAX and support for JavaScript plugins to mention a few. This tool also provides you an event based control over your page and manipulation of the DOM based on events.

Effects and Animations can also be developed using the JQuery platform but however, I personally felt MooTools scores over JQuery in this regard. So, if you want rapid code development with standard animations and a neat look and feel, go for JQuery. If however, you are on the lookout to deliver more eye-candy animations all over your page, MooTools should be the obvious choice.

Data is represented as items. These items of different types are combined in a tree structure such that an item can have a parent and child items.

Templates are like Object Oriented Classes. A template contains fields that contain the actual content for an item. An item is an instance of a template just as an Object is an instance of a class. A template can have a “Master” which is used to create an item of a template. A master plays the same role as an Object Oriented Constructor. Masters can be configured to specify default values for fields and can specify sub-items that should be created when an item is first created. Templates can be based on other templates and inherit their fields, much like Object Oriented inheritance.

In Sitecore, Presentation is built from three things:

• layout
• sublayouts
• renderings

Content is built in Sitecore using a single layout and any number of sublayouts and renderings. A layout is an aspx page. It can contain html, code and place holders to which sublayouts and renderings can be assigned. A sublayout is an ascx user control which can contain html, code and place holders to which other sublayouts and renderings can be assigned. A rendering is an xslt stylesheet which can process the data item provided to it in xml format. Unlike layouts and sublayouts, a rendering can not contain sublayouts.

Content and Presentation are finally united in Sitecore by assigning a layout to a template or a specific Item.

When an item is requested from an http request URL which contains the path to the item in the content tree, Sitecore determines the layout to use to display the item. Multiple layouts can be specified for an item by way of devices. One device could specify for example a browser layout for the item and another could specify a print layout for the same data item.

Content and presentation can be designed in parallel. The Sitecore documentation suggests modeling the content tree based on the desired site navigation. Sitecore also supports internationalization, so that content can be generated for different languages.

It also supports workflows which determine steps that items must traverse before being published. Content will not be visible on a site until it is published.

Sitecore provides a pessimistic security model to assign permissions to users and groups. It is pessimistic in that if a user is not explicitly assigned permission, the user will not be granted the permission.

For dynamically generated content, site core has an extensive .net api that can be used in Layouts and sublayouts. It also provides xslt extensions that can facilitate building xslt renderings from sitecore xml.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

Sample persona

Below is a persona created by one of my link builders for use on a restaurant review site:

Caren is a 43 year old mother of 3. Her children are 15, 17, and 21. Before having children, Caren obtained a degree in elementary education and taught until her second child was born. Since then, she has been a stay at home mom. She has been in charge of cleaning, cooking, carpooling to and from soccer and rugby practices. Her oldest child is attending a university in the city. Her husband is the local family doctor and can still be found making house calls. Caren’s happiness comes from her family and baking. She bakes often and makes the occasional trip into the city to check in on her oldest child.

This persona does make use of some serious specific. However, that’s just so we can get into the mindset of knowing how to approach someone like Caren. If you take the basics, you’ll see our target market for link building here, which is a woman in her 40s who wants a few restaurant suggestions for when she’s in the big city every now and then. We hope to approach the Carens of the world in such a way that they will find it in their hearts to link to our site. Thus, we probably aren’t going to speak to them as if they’re college-age males who are heavily into sports. We also can make more informed decisions on other relevant sites to approach for link building once we’re in Caren’s mindset, as we think about other interests that someone like Caren might have. Once you have the basics (woman in her 40s making a few trips to the big city), you’re well on your way to identifying other types of interests that Caren might have. Armed with this information, your link building efforts should be just the slightest bit easier.

The enhancements to Ask.com will help the site retain existing users and attract new, said Caroline Dangson, an IDC analyst.

Natural Language Search

Ask.com’s new technologies differ from those used by competitors such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN Search because they enable Web surfers to type real questions, instead of a series of keywords, said Erik Collier, vice president of product management at Ask.com.

To find out what football games are on the TV Sunday afternoon, users simply type in, for instance, “What NFL games are on TV this Sunday?”

That is where DADS comes in. The acronym stands for “Direct Answers from Databases.” The technology takes structured data feeds and converts them into information that Ask.com tags.

“It’s different than a traditional syntactical text matching. We’re understanding what the subject is, so we have discrete subjects. We’re talking about TV listings, event listings that have a much smaller semantic breath than a general word search. We optimized that, and it is discrete. We are able to identify that as a TV query; translate the different piece of your sentence into what they really mean,” Collier told TechNewsWorld.

So, today is Monday, Oct. 6, then “this Sunday” means Oct. 12, and NFL means the National Football League.

“We don’t get lost in that traditional what does ‘a bat’ mean when someone says ‘bat.’ That’s DADS, and we’re going to be doing that across a lot more verticals or discrete data sets. Right now, we’ve done that with our TV and event listings,” Collier added.

Giving Structure to the Unstructured Web

Direct Answers From Search (DAFS) is a bit different, in that it does gather the information from a structured feed. It is information gathered from the Web around which Ask.com tries to create some structure in order to best answer users’ questions, Collier said.

“It’s a much more difficult proposition. We’re trying to extract information from the Web pages themselves and trying to then create an answer to a specific question term. If you said, ‘What is the largest state in the U.S.?’ then it would have a DAFS response that would tell you directly on the page, ‘Alaska is the largest state,’” he explained.

DAFS does not offer quite the same level of natural language comprehension as DADS because it is more difficult to deal with unstructured documents on the Web, Collier noted.

Similar to DAFS, AnswerFarm combs through the unstructured content on Q&A sites such as WikiAnswers and Wikipedia searching for what Ask.com calls “Q&A Pairs.”

“There’s a question and an associated answer with it. It flips the way people interact with Web results,” he said.

Say a person asks, “How do I get rid of love handles?” On other search engines the questioner would receive some document it has identified as having a lot of keyword matches, and it will return a title and description in the search results, according to Collier.

“You don’t really know if that page will answer your question. AnswerFarms are different. Let’s say that same URL (universal resource locater) does answer [the question]. We present it in a way that the question, not the title of the page, is immediately visible. And instead of traditional description text, the start of the answer is given,” he stated.

“I love AnswerFarms because it changes the way that people interact with search engines,” Collier added.

Market Status Quo

The new technologies are intended to produce more relevant results so users click less. “Our goal is to return the best answer the first time, every time. We think its a better approach. We make your search faster and we’re trying to reduce the amount of clicks it takes for you to find what you’re looking for,” said Collier

“People don’t want to talk to a search engine like a computer. They want to be able to do a search the way they would ask [a friend] over the phone. ‘Hey do you know what the largest state in the U.S. is?’ instead of ‘state, most area, square miles.’ That’s not the way you really want to ask it. You want it to understand all those implicit things, all the background knowledge you provide in a single word,” he pointed out.

That may be true, but IDC’s Dangston does not see the new Ask.com posing any threat to its leading search competitors, Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

“The Ask.com redesign is not a game changer. Google has incredible brand recognition. An incredible number of U.S. consumers are in the habit of Googling. We know that media habits are hard to change. According to IDC’s recent U.S. consumer online attitudes survey, 75 percent of online Americans said they had used Google.com in the past 30 days whereas only 15 percent said they had used Ask.com,” she concluded.