This weeks guest was Andy Peatling of the BuddyPress.org Project. BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress which ads many of the features found on sites like Facebook to WordPress blogs in as few as 10 minutes. We discussed how BuddyPress came about, some of the ways it’s used, some tips on getting started, customizing it and most importantly the features it provides. In news, there were a few nice plugin releases/updates and as always quick update on the WordCamp schedule…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• My Dream International Content Management System

  Choosing a content management system which helps you make progress internationally – rather than blocking every move – is a good plank to have in your strategy. Even if you’re not planning that international expansion just yet…

Today we’re announcing the winners of the UPrinting contest that we held on WDD for the past week.

Many thanks to all of you who participated. The response was great and we’ve got almost 500 comments.

Each of the 10 winners has won a set of 500 free business cards of their choice with free shipping to anywhere in the world.

The winners were selected at random and you can see the results after the jump…

A few months ago, we updated the email communication options in your AdSense account to give you more choices about the types of messages you’d like to receive from us. You can now pick the types of messages that interest you from five categories:

• Customized help and performance suggestions
• Newsletters
• Google market research
• Special offers
• Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you

If you’d like to receive emails with optimization tips that are targeted to your specific account settings and ad implementation, you’ll need to choose the category Customized help and performance suggestions…

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords acount, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true…

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff…

Guest Post by Font2U

We all know picking the right font is important when working on your creative projects. There are so many fonts out there, and it litarally may take hours until we find the ONE. To save you some time, here is a collection of 30 quality fonts hand-picked by Font2U. Enjoy!

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One key to building a winning PPC strategy has little to do with PPC at all.

The business you’re advertising via PPC needs to work on the web.

What are some examples of businesses that work well, and those that don’t?

Items that don’t sell so well include items that are easy, and cheap, to source locally, very heavy items that can’t be shipped easily, and items that need to be seen or tried on for size and fit…

With an estimated 245 million subscribers worldwide, the mobile Internet is rapidly becoming one of the best channels for retail sales.

With mobile commerce (mcommerce), merchants can reach potential customers as they commute, wait in the lobby at a doctor’s office, or eat lunch in the company cafeteria. But the mobile Internet can pose something of a challenge for web designers and developers, requiring an additional level of project planning and aforethought…

By Melinda Rainsberger

More and more, designers, illustrators and coders are being asked to animate. Animation adds energy to a brand and heightens a customer’s emotional response. The software to do it is reasonably priced, and Internet connections can now deliver high-quality video. For these two reasons, animation-based advertising is booming on the Web. The makers of a small phone application might even devote a great deal of their budget to a Web animation that explains how the application works…

comScore today released January 2010 data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Highlights from the report below:

• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: BrightRoll Video Network with 27.2 percent penetration of online video viewers, SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 19…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• The Pitfalls Of A/B Ad Split Testing, Part 1

  Most search advertisers have no question that testing ads is a good thing, and can lead to much higher performing campaigns. But is it possible to over-test and over-optimize, actually leading to worse results? The answer may surprise you…

I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBSes and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don’t quite get, I thought I was safe in this area.

Then I went to my first WhereCamp, an unconference dealing with geographical issues and how they relate to the world of Web development…

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue – the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent…

The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the Hot Trends list. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention…

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don’t always get the attention they need and deserve…

Ugly designs abound on the web, and behind each and every one of them is a “designer”.

In many of these cases the designers behind the sites are simply incompetent.

They’re often amateur designers or those who have little or no design training or people who design their own sites based on a book from their local library that’s ten years out of date.

But there are other times when the designer was perfectly capable of creating a better site…

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information…

Thanks to everyone who has participated the hosting giveaway contest. InMotion Hosting would like to thank you by doubling the prizes. As a result, six winners will be getting a free one-year hosting account. The winners are: 56, 71, 103, 192, 198, and 244 (winners will be contacted by InMotion). For those who didn’t win, InMotion is also offering a $45 discount. To redeem the discount, email contests@inmotionhosting…

At SphinnCon 2010 yesterday in Jerusalem, I presented on guest post based link building. The main advantage, in addition to the high quality of links it builds relative to other sorts, is repeatability. View the preso to see what I mean.

Goldenberg Gab SphinnCon The Difference Is Repeatability
View more presentations from guestf7474b.

If you’ve been wondering why I’m not posting regularly lately, it’s because I’ve moved to Jerusalem since mid-January and am currently studying at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem…

We work as outsource link building partners for quite a few big companies who have a good level of SEO knowledge in house but don’t have the resources to do high level link building.

Normally we just charge by the day (£750) but recently we’ve launched a new offer for in-house teams whereby we don’t charge anything for our time, we just charge for the links we get…

With the continued popularity of smartphones, more and more retailers are launching either mobile websites or mobile applications by the day. Many who haven’t yet taken the plunge are wondering what to invest their resources in first.

Aside from “doing nothing,” retailers have 2 options when considering mobile commerce: building an application (or “app”), or creating a website specifically for mobile devices…

Photo manipulation is an art that requires lots of patience along with the expertise in Photoshop and other photo editing tools. With your creativity and imagination, you can manipulate any photograph the way you want! Now it’s all about your imagination and using Photoshop’s effects and other tools cleverly.

You simply have to experiment with different effects to see what feeling they give you as having expertise in Photoshop can help you greatly in producing amazing results…

The design profession is full of happy folks, and understanding why so many designers enjoy their work is not hard. But not all are so happy. If you’re not careful, the joy of getting paid to pursue your passion can be tainted by the less joyous realities of the professional world.

You see, no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in professional matters, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised…

Data, data everywhere yet nary an insight in sight.

Is that your web analytics existence?

Don’t feel too bad, you share that plight with most citizens of the Web Analytics universe.

The problem? The absolutely astonishing ease with which you can get access to data!

Not to mention the near limitless potential of that data to be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided to satiate every weird need in the world…

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.This week’s enhancements include:Stars in searchEvery day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results…

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Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing…

So I’m in Kilkenny, Ireland for WordCamp Ireland, and I’m having a complete blast, thanks in large part to the great organization done by Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan. The tech track is absolutely blowing my mind: it’s really techy!

The people here are great: I met a lot of awesome people, basically to be separated in two groups. Group one are the Automattic people: Donncha, Jane Wells, Sheri Bigelow, Hanni Ross & John Godley…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…