Two weeks ago, James created a nice post here on bokeh photography here in hongkiat and I got to be honest it is great and inspiring but it just can’t quench my thirst for more. So I went ahead and look for more.

It is really amazing how these out of focus helps in telling your eyes the area of the photo you should focus on. Now without further ado, let’s take a look at more beautiful bokeh photos. Here’s another round of showcase of bokeh photography – we present you another 70 beautiful examples of Bokeh Photography.

Bokeh II (By Alfredo11)

I’ll have some sancerre wine and an order of bokeh, please. (By Peanut Lauren)

Berry Bokeh (By Aspidistra)

Bokeh! (By Rachywhoo)

Bokeh (By When-seven)

Candy Cane and Bokeh (By Believer)

Fountain bokeh (By Liyen)

Rusting Bokeh (By KF)

Love With A Side Of Bokeh (By Pnkparis1233)

The Ace of Spades (By Aspidistra)

Rainy Bokeh (By Sunny)

Funyuns + Chucks + Bokeh = Geektastic (By Jueno)

Candy bokeh (By Tanakawho)

Cup-o-bokeh (By Fuzzirella)

Corkscrew in the bokeh (By Liyen)

That Bokeh in her Fingertips… (By Uvair)

Bokeh Sushi (By Japhy Riddle)

The Bokeh Whisperer (By Katbphotos)

Bokeh Watcher (By Jueno)

Autumn Leaf Bokeh (By Pisces Romance)

The bokehs are mine! (By Desiree Delgado)

Bucketful of Bokeh (By Shoosh)

Domo and The Bokeh (By Soldierofsolace)

Bokeh (By Ra3y-AD)

Merry Christmas Bokeh (By Clairecollyer)

Cup of Bokeh (By Pinkcherry06)

Velvet bokeh (By Savatey)

Bokeh Trampoline (By Nestr)

Web Bokeh (By Inertia09)

A bokeh play (By WorthyG)

Bokeh (By Light from Emirates)

Bokeh eye (By Ftourini)

Photographobia (By Tiago Ribeiro)

OMG! I missed the sledge of 2008 because of my mission! (By Moaan)

The Fingers of Summer (By Ryan Brenizer)

Bokeh-vision (By Aspidistra)

Day One Hundred Twelve (By Dustin Siaz)

2000/1713 (By June1777)

Kara Carlson (By Sara Kiesling)

Garden fireworks (By Mark-E)

Liquid Gold (By Sandy515)

Hollywood Starz (By Astig)

Suki’s Scarf (By Kaoni701)

2×1 Bokeh – Splash (By Faisal)

We’re so awesome, even our kisses are explosive! (By The half blood prince)

Sensitive space (By Futureancient)

Golden days (By Moaan)

Day 7: hidden lens cap (By LSG)

Have a Happy Bokeh-licious Week of Finals (By Monjori)

Welcome to Cafe Bokeh (By KKTP)

Happy Bokeh Wednesday my Friends! (By JannaPham)

Ellen in the Sky with Bokeh! (By Viviandang)

50 Special (By Ielle)

I wish I was special (By Irene Gr)

… ed è come perdere la testa per il vento! (By Tgphotographer into the wild)

Let’s Watch Together (By Andw)

Bubble Blizzard Bokeh (By hinthint)

Memories of Winter (By Glenn Waters)

40::365 Urchin & Bokeh (By Machel Spence)

Consolation prize (By Andy)

View full post on hongkiat.com

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I spotted this on Buzzfeed this morning. Very simple, yet powerful video from South Africa which illustrates attitudes to violence against women. As it says on the site, don’t condone violence by doing nothing.

View full post on Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

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I’ve been familiar with Brian Solis as many have, for several years. We’ve done a few video interviews with Brian and he’s contributed to popular posts here like this one on social media marketing and this one on content curation.

I have to admit that based on his early writing, I thought Brian was overly confident about the opportunities with social media. When I finally met him in person at a Media Relations conference we were both speaking at, I gained a much better understanding and appreciation for the talents and insight behind the evangelism for what has become the most significant change to the web since the introduction of search engines.

As a successful author, speaker and owner of Future Works, Brian has many opportunities to face tough questions from clients, peers and conference attendees.  In the realm of social media, it’s not unreasonable to have a lot of questions about the who, what, why, where, when and how.

How to start? How to create a strategy? How to find customers and influentials? How to create engaging social destinations? How to promote without offending? How to measure? How to report?  Those are just some of the critical questions answered in Brian’s newest book, Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web.

I promised Brian to talk about Engage! here months ago, which was a no-brainer since we already did a review of “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations“. While I thought about a variety of perspectives to take on sharing my opinions of this book, nothing stood out until now. In the course of answering many social media questions on a daily basis, I’ve often referred Engage! to people as a resource. Therefore it makes perfect sense to share some of the top questions this book answers for marketers. Essentially, this is a list of 10 reasons why you should check the book out.

1. Where does social media fit in marketing and communications?

2. What social tools and technologies are available? What are their differences and how do they work for marketers?

3. How do you manage multi-channel social media participation? What tools are there for listening, publishing, promotion and measurement?

4. Search results can be optimized, how do you optimize social media?

5. How do you develop social networks and distribution channels?

6. What are social champions and how do we find, engage and develop influentials?

7. How do you develop a social media strategy?

8. What are the logistical and process considerations for planning, implementing and managing social web participation for companies?

9. How do we foster and manage social customer relationships?

10. How can we develop social media teams in an organization and create a model for social participation within our organization?

There you have it. Ten key social media questions that the new Brian Solis book, Engage! answers for communications professionals, business owners, marketers and social netziens all over the web.  If you have different or more questions than those listed above, by all means visit Amazon and get the book. If you need a person to walk you through the answers, then you can always talk to us at TopRank Marketing .

If you’re in Minneapolis tonight, be sure to come and see Brian present at Solera from 6-8pm.  For the millions of marketers that will not be in Minneapolis this evening, fear not. Vocus is hosting a free online event (Retweet: Engagement Means Business) all day tomorrow that features Brian Solis amongst others like David Meerman Scott and Deirdre Breakenridge.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Social Media Marketing Questions Answered by Engage! | http://www.toprankblog.com

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One strange and creepy patent

Imagine if you had a program that would automatically go through the posts on your site/blog and automatically find concepts and dynamically add links to related documents from the web. Now let’s go further and have that program track the people reading your page and by looking at their history and implicit past actions, ensure the links were tailored to each person reading said content. Wouldn’t that be freakin awesome?

Now imagine if Google wanted to do that. Not so cool anymore is it? Lol.

That’s precisely what was proposed in a recent patent awarded to Google. I really am not sure how it was intended to be used, but I’d have to imagine for their own properties… there would be wholesale mutiny if they tried using the toolbar (or Chrome browser) for such implementations. Here’s the patent;

Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information
Awarded; June 17, 2010 – Filed; February 23, 2010

Although this was an update to the one filed in 2004

Publication Date: 04/13/2010
Filing Date: 06/30/2004

How Google might add links to existing content

They give the example of an article/document about a hiker’s (Bill Cross) effort to climb Mt. Everest. The system would find additional links to supporting documents about Mount Everest, Novolog Peaks and Poles Challenge and maybe even reference something relating to diabetes (which he suffers from). Those skilled in the art, search geeks, get the idea I am sure.

Now, they don’t stop there, it gets personal. Let’s say for example the searcher/user has previously queried for items relating to photography. Other links can be included for items such as ‘Everest photography’ and so on.

The personalization data can also be geo targeted. Let’s say the user/viewer is from a given location. Then the system might also put links to localized relations such as ‘hiking Mt Rainer‘ for someone from the Seattle (USA) region. For those familiar with the various methods of personalization, I am sure you can extrapolate from there. We can further take this to include any form of personalization that they have at their disposal that are relevant to the document being viewed.

So it would be looking for related information to the document being viewed through query data and personalization.

“The information relating to the current document may include information based on the text of the current document. The text may be processed to obtain, for example: (1) all terms appearing more than some pre-determined number of times, (2) named entities that can be automatically extracted; (3) dates in the document; (4) author and publication names; and/or keyword or category extraction.”

The bits about named entities is interesting and sensible given whom worked on this patent. More on that later, but this is generally related to persons/place/thing. Terms that appear more than a given threshold are deemed to important and/or descriptive. The date element can be used in concert with these to find contemporary documents relating to the one being viewed. This would be especially important with News.

The question is; where would they use it?

The implementation is somewhat fuzzy though. The discuss displaying the notation separately, with a link and snippet, but also as an in-line link. A link that is added to the content dynamically. How this is proposed to be accomplished is unclear. Obviously Google can’t just start modifying the page without the page owners permission, thus the intent with this patent is somewhat unclear unless implemented on a Google owned property.

“(…) may incorporate the additional documents located by search component 410 into the current document (i.e., the document currently being viewed by the user) or into a new document that includes the current document. The additional documents may be incorporated with the current document in a manner that informs the user that the documents are available without being overly disruptive to the user’s reading of the current document. ”

Once more, that is about all they really discuss as far as implementation. There is no mention of 3rd part content nor use of a browser add-on nor toolbar. Where they were going this this isn’t entirely clear.

Now, beyond the tin foil of wondering where and how they were thinking of implementing it, this does make an interesting idea for anyone optimizing for search. Imagine a WordPress plugin that could do this for you? Sure, we wouldn’t have the level of personalization data that they do, but dynamically creating links within a document, say from top results for related terms, would be a handy gizmo and play well with trust algorithms such as TrustRank and HarmonicRank.

I leave you to ponder it all… just thought it was a strange one.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google dynamic linking

View full post on Search Engine Journal

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Ranking higher in search engines is something that every business is trying to do (or at least they should be). If you search the web, there will be no end of advice on how this or that will get you to rank better. This sea of information can lead to decision paralysis when it comes to actually implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This post pulls all this together into a practical blueprint for ranking higher in search.

Step 1: Do Keyword Research

First, pick a set of keywords you want to target. Make a list of 15-30 keywords that are relevant to your business. Choose unbranded keywords that relate to your business or industry, as opposed to choosing your company name. List these keywords with their associated information in 4 columns titled Keyword, Relevance, Difficulty, and Volume. Pick your own relevance score on a scale of 1-5. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find information on difficulty and volume (the number of searches per month).

From this set of keywords, pick about 10 of them that have high volume relative to their difficulty, and are relevant to your business. These are the keywords you want to target.

Step 2: Set Ranking Goals

Now that you have basic information on your keywords, you should set ranking goals for them. These goals should be time-framed, For example, you can have a 6 month plan, and monitor your progress bi-weekly or monthly.

In the end SEO is a bit of a black box. Setting realistic ranking goals is not a pure science. The goals act as more of a motivator, and can be modified if your results are not what you thought they would be.

To make your goals as realistic as possible, see how well you are doing in SEO relative to your competitors using Website Grader, a free tool powered by Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.. If you’re score is below 50, chances are there are some easy things you can do to improve it.

Step 3: On-page Optimize

By now, you know what pages you want to rank higher, and what keywords you are targeting for them. Now, all you need to do is target them. I recently wrote a little guide on keyword targeting, which I hope you check out.

One warning I should put here – before you tailor your page to target a keyword, make sure your target page is not ranking for other other keywords. If you have one page targeting multiple unrelated keywords, you might consider creating multiple pages for each keyword.

Step 4: Build Internal Links

On-page optimization is only about 25% of search engine optimization. The other 75% is link-building. To gain SEO authority, you want to get links from relevant pages going into the page you want to rank higher for. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging your current online real estate. Here are two effective and overlooked strategies for internal link-building:

Put Links in Your Blog Posts

Blog posts are a probably the best opportunity to build internal links. Each post is a new page that search engines see. If you put a standard link bar or footer on your blog, then each new blog post will contain a link to the pages you’re targeting.

Put Links on Your Home Page

Your home page will usually be the page with the best authority on your website. Putting links to your target pages in your navigation bar or in a footer with keyword-driven anchor text can be an effective way to improve SEO.

Step 5: Build External Links

Finally we arrive at external link-building. Get links from relevant websites with high authority is the most effective way to raise the authority of your own site. Some people call this the ‘hard’ part of SEO. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that it takes patience. If you follow the guidelines below consistently, you are sure to gain plenty of inbound links.

Blog

Link building is one of the many benefits of blogging. Blog posts can be great viral pieces of content that gain inbound links.

Promote Your Content in Social Media

If you want people to link to your content, they need to know about you. Get involved in Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. Connect with people in Google Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Whatever you need to do to connect with your audience in a way that’s engaging for them, do it. Become a valuable resource and they will be more likely to link to your content.

Make Your Content Shareable

Make sure to put links on your site so that people can tweet and share your content via facebook. Instead of spreading the word about yourself, let people take the initiative to spread the word about you. Not only is viral content more likely to gain inbound links, but links in social media now count as inbound links for search engines.

Submit to Directories

Submitting your website to legitimate directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory can help you get found, and gain inbound links. You can check out these free directories to instantly improve your search engine authority.

Step 6: Monitor Your Progress

Now that you’ve done all the basic steps, its time to monitor your progress. Create a basic SEO Dashboard with the columns Keyword, Target Site, Monthly Searches, Difficulty, Rank, and Rank Change. Monitor and update your rank on a regular basis – for example, every 2 weeks. Your rank change is the difference in your ranking since the last time you checked.

Above all, do not give up on SEO. Your rankings might rise and fall over the course of your process, but getting to higher rankings can take time. However, it is a necessary component of an effective online business strategy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Making the Process Clear: Improve Your Search Engine Rankings in 6 Steps

View full post on Search Engine Journal

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Ranking higher in search engines is something that every business is trying to do (or at least they should be). If you search the web, there will be no end of advice on how this or that will get you to rank better. This sea of information can lead to decision paralysis when it comes to actually implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This post pulls all this together into a practical blueprint for ranking higher in search.

Step 1: Do Keyword Research

First, pick a set of keywords you want to target. Make a list of 15-30 keywords that are relevant to your business. Choose unbranded keywords that relate to your business or industry, as opposed to choosing your company name. List these keywords with their associated information in 4 columns titled Keyword, Relevance, Difficulty, and Volume. Pick your own relevance score on a scale of 1-5. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find information on difficulty and volume (the number of searches per month).

From this set of keywords, pick about 10 of them that have high volume relative to their difficulty, and are relevant to your business. These are the keywords you want to target.

Step 2: Set Ranking Goals

Now that you have basic information on your keywords, you should set ranking goals for them. These goals should be time-framed, For example, you can have a 6 month plan, and monitor your progress bi-weekly or monthly.

In the end SEO is a bit of a black box. Setting realistic ranking goals is not a pure science. The goals act as more of a motivator, and can be modified if your results are not what you thought they would be.

To make your goals as realistic as possible, see how well you are doing in SEO relative to your competitors using Website Grader, a free tool powered by Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.. If you’re score is below 50, chances are there are some easy things you can do to improve it.

Step 3: On-page Optimize

By now, you know what pages you want to rank higher, and what keywords you are targeting for them. Now, all you need to do is target them. I recently wrote a little guide on keyword targeting, which I hope you check out.

One warning I should put here – before you tailor your page to target a keyword, make sure your target page is not ranking for other other keywords. If you have one page targeting multiple unrelated keywords, you might consider creating multiple pages for each keyword.

Step 4: Build Internal Links

On-page optimization is only about 25% of search engine optimization. The other 75% is link-building. To gain SEO authority, you want to get links from relevant pages going into the page you want to rank higher for. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging your current online real estate. Here are two effective and overlooked strategies for internal link-building:

Put Links in Your Blog Posts

Blog posts are a probably the best opportunity to build internal links. Each post is a new page that search engines see. If you put a standard link bar or footer on your blog, then each new blog post will contain a link to the pages you’re targeting.

Put Links on Your Home Page

Your home page will usually be the page with the best authority on your website. Putting links to your target pages in your navigation bar or in a footer with keyword-driven anchor text can be an effective way to improve SEO.

Step 5: Build External Links

Finally we arrive at external link-building. Get links from relevant websites with high authority is the most effective way to raise the authority of your own site. Some people call this the ‘hard’ part of SEO. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that it takes patience. If you follow the guidelines below consistently, you are sure to gain plenty of inbound links.

Blog

Link building is one of the many benefits of blogging. Blog posts can be great viral pieces of content that gain inbound links.

Promote Your Content in Social Media

If you want people to link to your content, they need to know about you. Get involved in Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. Connect with people in Google Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Whatever you need to do to connect with your audience in a way that’s engaging for them, do it. Become a valuable resource and they will be more likely to link to your content.

Make Your Content Shareable

Make sure to put links on your site so that people can tweet and share your content via facebook. Instead of spreading the word about yourself, let people take the initiative to spread the word about you. Not only is viral content more likely to gain inbound links, but links in social media now count as inbound links for search engines.

Submit to Directories

Submitting your website to legitimate directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory can help you get found, and gain inbound links. You can check out these free directories to instantly improve your search engine authority.

Step 6: Monitor Your Progress

Now that you’ve done all the basic steps, its time to monitor your progress. Create a basic SEO Dashboard with the columns Keyword, Target Site, Monthly Searches, Difficulty, Rank, and Rank Change. Monitor and update your rank on a regular basis – for example, every 2 weeks. Your rank change is the difference in your ranking since the last time you checked.

Above all, do not give up on SEO. Your rankings might rise and fall over the course of your process, but getting to higher rankings can take time. However, it is a necessary component of an effective online business strategy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Making the Process Clear: Improve Your Search Engine Rankings in 6 Steps

View full post on Search Engine Journal

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I wouldn’t expect Twitter employees to spend a lot of time on Twitter, of course they’re busy with the servers and codes. But if someone ever asks me how not to use Twitter, I’ll point them to my Twitter employees list, without any doubt.

Okay, if you thought that was lame, you might be on the wrong side here. Before making such criticisms, one should understand that Twitter is very personal for people, they have the luxury of doing whatever they want with their tweets..so get over it.