Author: AOD

The Story Of Youtube

The Birth of YouTube

youtubeYouTube was founded in early 2005 by 3 PayPal employees , Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim . As another great garage invention it started out when they got frustrated trying to send a video through email.

They saw the opportunity and offered a solution to the problem. After the official launching they secured external funding from Sequoia Capital all of which was used to improve the infrastructure and add needed features. From then on it kept growing, getting bigger and bigger. It was sold to Google 18 months after it’s lunch for the sum of 1.65 billion USD.

It recently surpassed the 4 billion views per day and is currently the third most popular site on the internet (under Google and facebook). It constitutes one of the most powerful components of Google.

Why YouTube Chose Flash

It’s biggest ingredient is flash. A major decision with great effects in the software industry and the “battle of the codecs” . Beside the bad quality of the video it has the – much more important – advantage of availability and flexibility. You can embed or link a video and be sure that the other end will have no problem watching it. Only thing necessary is a web browser and a hyperlink. Back in the old days you had to search through a variety of sources to find the files you needed , download them, find the right codec to play them in something like Windows Media Player, or QuickTime, which you had to have installed in your computer and it was pretty complicated. YouTube offered something much easier. There wasn’t even the need to get registered…

YouTube and Copyright

A major issue for YouTube is copyright rights. Virtually everything of interest on YouTube is copyrighted content. 90% of the videos in YouTube is breaking that rule! Reading YouTube’s copyright tips page you get the idea that anything other than 100% original content is strictly forbidden . Yet there was a “window” out of this that made YouTube what it is today. It’s name is “fair use”. What this says is that you can use content from another source without permission as long as it satisfy the the four factors of fair use . These are

  1. the purpose of the use
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work
  3. the relative amount of the portion used
  4. the market effect of the use on the copyrighted work

What these rules obligate is that with your video you somehow offer a new interpretation of the data you are using and you only use the content in ways that they are producing something new. A new knowledge sort of speak. Like when you comment part of a show in the news report. Another classic example here is the parody videos. Although the visual content is 100% copy, it is used for entertaining purposes giving a completely different purpose to the original video. So with the banner of fair use the copyrighted content stays up until someone complains. It is only then that it is taken into consideration to be removed.

YouTube is the leading video sharing service on the web from it’s beginning till now. It is a “visual information” database recording everything happening in the world around us. The fact remains though that Google is spending million of dollars to be able to keep up with the amount of video uploaded every minute (that is about an hour long) and it is still no able to bring earnings back. The way it’s going to evolve is only remain to be seen..

LIMBO – An Adventure Masterpiece!

Limbo-review-1LIMBO – A new adventure/puzzle PC game was recently released that made quite an impact! The game is based in a black & white background and has quite a “dark” atmosphere.

Plot

The main character of the game is a boy without name who wakes up in a middle of a forest. There starts a journey in order to find his missing sister. In this mysterious forest you will come across a great number of traps and a number of other children who will not always be friendly!
The quite sudden end of the game is a little of a surprise but the game has received very good reviews in overall and it is worth to give it a try.

Reviews

“A triumph for independent game development, which manages to transcend all that came before it without having to re-write the genre.”
– Xbox World Australia

“Stunningly beautiful and hauntingly atmospheric, Limbo is a modern day masterpiece. The puzzles are balanced and intelligent, and the art direction is phenomenal. This is one of the classics you owe yourself to experience”
– Gamer.no

Company

The game was developed by the company Playdead, an independent game studio based in Copenhagen which was founded by Arnt Jensen and Dino Patti in 2006.

Requirements

OS – Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
Processor – 2 GHz
Memory – 512MB RAM
HDD – 150MB
Video Card – At least 5 years or younger with Shader Model 3.0
DirectX – 9.0c

More Info at http://limbogame.org

Serif or Sans-Serif ?

fontsFor many years there is a “war” going on about the legibility of the sans serif fonts over serif fonts and vice versa and the right use of them inside a web page or article.
Fonts

Through the years there were a lot of different opinions or suggestions indicating the superiority of the one type of fonts over the other in both legibility and an aesthetic level.

Introducing Serif and Sans Serif Fonts

An easy way to remember the difference between these two different types of fonts is that the Serif fonts have some ‘extra’ strokes at the edges of a character. Sans-Serif fonts don’t. Also, this extra detail in the characters is called “serif” while “sans” means “without” in French, so “sans-serif” means “without serif”. Here is an example of Times New Roman (Serif) and Arial (Sans-Serif):

serif-sans

serif – sans-serif

 

Definitions

The criteria on which this conflict was based upon were the ability to recognize an individual letter or an entire word (Legibility) or larger blocks of text, paragraphs (Readability).

The Argument

In Favor of Serif

People who supported Serif fonts over the years have claimed a number of things in favor of this type of fonts. More specifically they claimed that Serif fonts:

  1. Guide the eye in order to better follow the horizontal flow of the text.
  2. Are constructed in a way that helps legibility by adding more space and by increasing the contrast between the characters.
  3. In reverse with Sans serif fonts do not cause fatigue to the reader.

Of course none of these claims ever proved to be true; on the contrary, studies have shown that all these claims are false:

  1. There is no horizontal flow of the eye in reading,
  2. There is no need for serifs in order to increase space between characters,
  3. There is absolutely no need of contrast in order to better identify a single letter (on the other hand, a single character is better recognized when in a word)
  4. There is no evidence nor a single relative scientific research what so ever, in order to prove that sans-serif fonts cause fatigue.

In Favor of Sans-Serif

On the other hand, people who are in favor of sans-serif fonts claim that Sans-Serif fonts are:

  1. Better in smaller sizes
  2. Better when used in a webpage
  3. More legible due to the simplicity of the characters shape

Again all these claims are without a scientific proof.

Common Combinations Used in the Past

Serif Titles – Sans Serif Body or the other way around?

A common opinion about this issue until this day is the use of sans-serif fonts in the title of an article and the use of serif fonts in the body of the article or the other way around. It was said that using this technique could help readability. Many well-known websites use this technique nowadays too.

Again… this is only a speculation.

Conclusion

After all those decades of research, until this day, there is no scientific proof in order to favor one type of fonts over the other. There is not a specific pattern or a technique to follow. Actually there is no war at all! In my opinion it’s just a matter of taste and if you follow my advice…let it be this way.

There is no reason to try to prove which font type is better. Just use the ones that make you feel better!

Read more about historical fonts we are still using today here.

Less Myths – Better Ranking – SEO Principles Round 3

SEONew3And here it is… this is the last “chapter” of SEO principles tutorial and this one is going to be simple, direct and full of truths everybody still ignoring!

In the previous chapters of this tutorial we talked about the importance of the page titles, keywords, links, anchor text, heading and customized content. Here we are going to see more about Page content, Sitemaps, Alt attributes, Site structure, Page Load Times, Duplicate Content, Navigation and last some ugly situations you wouldn’t like to put yourself in…

1. Page Content

Maybe the most important thing of all though, is your page’s content! It is the place where you can use all your important keywords in order to gain the best possible position in the search engines about it (along with the page title as we saw in the first part of this tutorial). Keep in mind that search engines love unique content and hate the copied/duplicate ones.

2. Alt Attributes

The only clue search engines have about images is what you declaring into the alt property. So it is always good to try to describe your image in order to “categorize” them better when they get indexed by search engines

3. Site structure

It is always critical the way you are going to construct your navigational structure of your website. All websites have a “link depth“. The greater the number of clicks a link is from “home”, the greater the difficulty of reaching it & the same thing applies to search engines too! A good practice is to always try to keep your website to a 2 or 3 level depth and also use breadcrumb navigation.

4. Sitemaps

Websites with great link depth always need a sitemap. Sometimes, it is difficult for search engines to find pages hidden deep into your website’s structure (a lot of clicks are required…). So, in order to “help” search engines find them, you could submit a sitemap. This is not something you must do and it is not guaranteed that search engines will find your pages after that either. But you have nothing to lose after all.

5. Small Page Load Time

One of the most important things for your website is your page load time. In other words, the time needed for your website to load in a user’s screen. Always try not to get over the 3 or 4 seconds of loading time, as this could first of all be a problem for users as they must wait a certain amount of time before they take a look at your page. Internet users usually get bored quickly and… this is going to increase your bounce rate. It is also quite unsure if search engines would index a website’s page with an 1 minute page load time…

A lot of things have a role to play in this one and here is how to overcome them:

i) The server’s location
a. Choose a server that is closest to your country (or according to your targeted audience)

ii) Great number of images served and external scripts:

a. Try to decrease the size of images and scripts.
b.  Minify the number of requests your server makes.
c.  Leverage Browser Caching by setting expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources (files,images,css,scripts)

iii) Page size

a. Minify your CSS or HTML code by deleting unnecessary white space

6. Duplicate content

The first thing you must check when it comes to duplicate content is your non-www and www version of your pages. You must not have these two versions running at the same time because they are going to split up your page rank. Choose one version and 301-redirect the other to it. Also check for other duplicate content inside your site (2 different URLs pointing to the exact same page). Usually Google understands what is happening and chooses one page’s URL over the other as the ‘original’ one but you should really try not to have duplicate content in your website.

7. Myths, Mistakes and cheating…

Always keep in mind:

  1. A high page rank doesn’t always means that you are going to end first in keyword a  search result
  2. Don’t get too excited about Meta Tags. Always try to make a good use of meta-description & never try to stuff more keywords than you can.
  3. Google AdWords and good ranking don’t go together.
  4. Don’t ever try to trick/cheat a search engine. Invisible page keywords can get your website removed from index.
  5. It is always the quality of your content that matter, try to focus more on that!

At Last

This is the end of the SEO Principles tutorial. In these three parts of this tutorial we learned some basic things about search engine optimization and how to get better at it. Of course this was only a first step into SEO practices and there are still a lot of things you must be familiar with before you can master SEO.

Read more about SEO Principles Tutorial here:
1. SEO Principles Round 1,
2. SEO Principles Round 2