What is native application development ? Whats new on HTML 5 ??

Good Article , Know about HTML 5 !

HTML5 versus native apps. It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail.
But what if that never happens?
Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. It’s not even remotely close. In fact, you could argue that the discrepancy isn’t much smaller than it was three years ago. And considering that the App Store was only on the verge of launching at that point, in many ways, the discrepancy is even bigger. Just look at mobile games now, for example.
Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward. But many have no choice. Native app development is not only difficult, it’s expensive.
These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android. That means at least two developers for each different language, and preferably more. And if your startup is big enough or hot enough (like Foursquare, for example), you’ll probably want to have apps for Windows Phone, Blackberry, and webOS as well (which, to be fair is largely HTML-based).
Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. And many talk about HTML5 as the remedy. A number now choose to build an iOS app then settle on a web app for Android at first. Others do both iPhone and Android but only offer rudimentary sites for the other platforms.
But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling. If we were anywhere close to the language being a unifier and savior, at least some would. We’re not close.
Let’s look at the debate from the perspective of the three hottest technology companies right now: Apple, Google, and Facebook.
Apple is basically all-in on native apps. Google is half-in on native apps, half-in on HTML5. Facebook is seemingly all-in on HTML5 (at least going forward).
Apple is very interesting in this regard. When the iPhone launched in 2007, the only native apps were the ones made by them. Developers were told to build web apps in order to get on the device. Who knows if Apple planned third-party native apps all along or if they pivoted when they saw the opportunity, but a year later, we had the App Store.
It’s the single reason there’s any debate right now.
Apple is now obviously native app all the way. But it’s on their own terms. When a developer makes an app that Apple doesn’t like in some way, they recommend that they make an HTML5 app to bring it to one of their devices.
It’s more or less a “my way or the highway” approach — it’s just a nice way of putting it. Apple is using the hype around HTML5 to their advantage here. They know that those apps can’t compete with their native apps, but so many people are so bullish about the future of the technology (and, to be fair, Apple seems to be as well at least on the Safari side of things) that Apple is able to play that to their advantage.
They might as well say, “you’re welcome to build an HTML5 app *snicker*.”
Google is significantly more gray with regard to their position.
At the past two Google I/O conferences, all we’ve heard about from the search giant is HTML5-this and HTML5-that. But their actions speak louder than their words.
Google has done some great work with HTML5 — some of their mobile web apps are quite good. In fact, they’re arguably the best web apps out there. But they too are nowhere near native app good.
And take something like their Jules Verne logo today — it utilized the iPhone’s accelerometer via the HTML5 baked into Safari to move around. Very cool. But would anyone have thought twice about it if it were a part of a native app? No.


Read More http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/html5-versus-native-apps/

Google searches to become personalized

Google has wielded its dominance of web search as a key weapon in its battle with Facebook, with a new approach that draws information from its Google+ social network directly into users’ search results.

By including more personal and social information in its results, the new feature also takes Google a big step towards fulfilling a dream long talked about by its top executives: to create a personalised search engine that “knows” its users so well that all the results are tuned directly to their interests.

“They could have done this for Facebook and Twitter and they didn’t,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. “That will probably make some antitrust people even more anxious over what [Google] is doing.”Known as Search plus Your World, the new approach marks the most direct attempt yet by Google to use its core service to help it make up lost ground in social networking. However, favouring its own Google+ network at the expense of rivals could heighten regulatory concerns at a time when the company’s behaviour is already under the microscope in Brussels and Washington.

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, tweeted that it was “a bad day for the internet. I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.”

The immediate impact on the rivalry with Facebook is likely to be limited given the newness of the Google+ network and the relative lack of content posted on it, some observers said. “The intent [behind personalisation] is great but I’m not sure today Google+ is of sufficient volume or sophistication,” said Martin McNulty, general manager at Forward3D, a UK search marketing firm.

Google said it would “certainly be open” to including other services, but justified the current exclusion because it “does not have access to crawl all the information on some sites.” It also said it only has “persistent access to information from Google+”.

With the new feature, content shared privately with contacts on Google+ will be included in search results, though Google said it would ensure that it kept the same levels of privacy as applied on its social network. Google also said it would be able to show profiles of friends when a user enters a name in its search box, and that it would suggest interesting people or pages to follow on Google+ in response to some standard search queries.

The changes are part of a shift towards including personal and social information that marks “the most radical transformation ever” for Google’s search service, Mr Sullivan said, while also meeting a long-held ambition of the company’s leaders.

Eight years ago, Eric Schmidt, then Google chief executive, said: “We would like to have a Google that knows you, that understands your preferences.”

Making search more personalised, meanwhile, could make it harder for brand owners to use search engine optimisation techniques to ensure their pages appear at the top of “organic” or natural results for particular keywords, some experts warned.

As a result, advertisers are likely to switch some their marketing spending away from optimisation, said Stefan Bardega, managing partner at MediaCom, WPP’s media agency. “All of this pours more money into the core business of Google, which is the pay-per-click AdWords model. It will become almost impossible to get the same level of effectiveness in organic results,” he said.

Source : Financial times 

Financial Times Acquires London-Based Developer Of Its HTML5 Web App

The Financial Times has acquired London-based application development firm Assanka, which built a nifty HTML5 web app – and other applications – for the publisher.

(Hat tip to Benedict Evans)

FT staffers such as Katie Morley and Jonathan Wheatley started spreading the news on Twitter, garnering retweets from FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw and PR rep Tom Glover, who confirmed the acquisition to me but declined to share more details about the deal terms.

The FT has good reasons for purchasing an application developer that focuses squarely on developing for the Web rather than building native mobile applications. As I wrote in aprevious post, when the publisher’s HTML5 web app was unveiled:

“The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.”

Assanka has eloquently expressed  its love for Web apps in the past:

“Assanka firmly believes that the craze for native apps is a short one and we are already seeing it on the wane. Native apps, which need to be distributed via a proprietary app store controlled by an operator or device manufacturer, also suffer from being restricted to the platform for which they are built, necessitating an almost complete rewrite for each different platform. Maintaining separate, functionally equivalent apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry OS6, Playbook, WebOS AND Windows Phone is an expensive and time consuming business, something that major publishers realise only too well.

Native apps have other limitations too. Web technology has matured over 15 years to provide a rich set of tools for making web applications that are open, accessible and linkable. The very ethos of web development is that it is fundamentally an open platform, inviting integration, connecting, linking and sharing of information. Native apps construct a silo around themselves and operate in their own artificially constructed world. Everything in that world may be beautiful and the user experience may be dazzling, but the value is locked into that container.

Native apps will always have a place on mobile devices, particularly for applications such as gaming where the performance demands are high and graphics requirements are intensive. Games often also take advantage of features such as accelerometers which are not (yet) available to access from web applications. For apps that need to take advantage of bleeding edge technology and offer exceptional performance, native code is still a good option. But for news and magazine publishers, the tide is turning.”

Information provided by CrunchBase

For anyone that's experienced the joys of doing SEO on an exceedingly large site, you know that keeping your content in check isn't easy. Continued iterations of the Panda algorithm have made this fact brutally obvious for anyone that's responsible for more than a few hundred thousand pages.
As an SEO with a programming background and a few large sites to babysit, I was forced to fight the various Panda updates throughout this year through some creative server-side scripting. I'd like to share some with you now, and in case you're not well-versed in nerdspeak (data formats, programming, and Klingon), I'll start each item with a conceptual problem, the solution (so at least you can tell your developer what to do), and a few code examples for implementation (assumes that they didn't understand you when you told them what to do). My links to the actual code are in PHP/MySQL, but realize that these methods translate pretty simply into most any scenario.
OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: Although I've been successful at implementing each of these tricks, be careful. Keep current backups, log everything you do so that you can roll-back, and if necessary, ask an adult for help.

1.) Fix Duplicate Content between Your Own Articles
The Problem
Sure, you know not to copy someone else's content. But what happens when over time, your users load your database full of duplicate articles (jerks)? You can write some code that checks if articles are an exact match, but no two are going to be completely identical. You need something that's smart enough to analyze similarity, and you need to be about as clever as Google is at it.

The Solution
There's a sophisticated measure of how similar two bodies of text are using something called Levenshtein distance analysis. It measures how many edits would be necessary to transform one string into another, and can be translated into a related percentage/ratio of how similar one string is to another. When running this maintenance script on 1 million+ articles that were 50-400 words, deleting only duplicate articles with a 90% similarity in Levenshtein ratio, the margin of error was 0 in each of my trials (and the list of deletions was a little scary, to say the least).

The Technical
Levenshtein comparison functions are available in basically every programming language and are pretty simple to use. Running comparisons on 10,000 individual articles against one another all at once is definitely going to make your web/database server angry, however, so it takes a bit of creativity to finish this process while we're all still alive to see your ugly database.

What follows may not be ideal practice, or something you want to experiment with heavily on a live server, but it gets this tough job done in my experience.

1. Create a new database table where you can store a single INT value (or if this is your own application and you're comfortable doing it, just add a row somewhere for now). Then create one row that has a default value of 0.
    
2. Have your script connect to the database, and get the value form the table above. That will represent the primary key of the last article we've checked (since there's no way you're getting through all articles in one run).
    
3. Select that article, and check it against all other articles by comparing Levenshtein distance. Doing this in the application layer will be far faster than running comparisons as a database stored procedure (I found the best results occurred when using levenshteinDistance2(), available in the comments section of levenshtein() on php.net). If your database size makes this run like poop through a funnel (checking just 1 article against all others at once), consider only comparing articles by the same author, of similar length, posted in a similar date range, or other factors that might help reduce your data set of likely duplicates.

Read More http://www.seomoz.org/blog/scripting-seo-5-pandafighting-tricks-for-large-sites-14455

Facebook’s New Advertising Strategy Is Brilliant and Unexpected

Facebook and Google get compared a lot these days, but with its new advertising strategy, Facebook is adapting Google’s ad strategy to its social media.


Improving advertising on the popular social network is not a new or particularly innovative idea. Still the transition from advertising as a message-delivering medium to a platform for social sharing is a radical departure for Facebook. It could be the Facebook advertising solution that turns advertising partners (brands) into better social media communicators and gets Facebook members to start recommending and sharing advertisers as much as they do they latest cat video.

As for the Google comparison. Recall that in the early days, Google had a choice: Take money from advertisers for higher search rankings or ignore such offers and focus on making its search engine the best it could be.

Google at first didn’t know how it would make money. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured that if they built a better mousetrap, the money would eventually flow. And it did.
Like Google, Facebook didn’t invent a category, it refined it. Friendster and MySpace predated Facebook just like Yahoo and Alta Vista came before Google. Like Google, Facebook figured that if it got enough people on board and continually improved its social network, eventually it would figure out a way to make money.

Facebook’s overtures at first were clumsy. Beacon, the advertising platform Facebook introduced in 2007, informed all your friends when you made potentially embarrassing purchases or rentals on Blockbuster and other retail partners — and was eventually shuttered. Since then, Facebook seems content cashing in on its huge user base via display advertising.


SEE ALSO: The History of Advertising on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC] Now, however, Facebook’s ad strategy is becoming clear. And it’s not only brilliant, it’s unexpected. Facebook’s strategy, like Google’s, is to not only improve its network and experience, but improve the advertising as well. Now, that’s not so clever, admittedly. The really interesting part is the way Facebook plans to improve it: by making brand Pages better.


Why? Facebook doesn’t make a dime on any of the Pages set up by advertisers. As a marketer, you could do quite well for yourself by running a brand Page and never buying a single ad. But you could only do so well. The reason you will have to buy ads on Facebook goes to the heart of why you need to advertise in the first place.

A few years ago, I wrote a story about the marketing for Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith the last movie (by release date, not chronologically) in the Star Wars franchise. I was genuinely baffled as to why Lucasfilm was putting such a heavy advertising push behind the movie. I mean, after all, didn’t everyone who cared already know that the movie was coming out?

Jim Ward, Lucasfilm’s vice president of marketing at the time, though, told me the stakes were huge for that movie. If the studio did absolutely no advertising, it would likely lose $110 million or so in box office returns. “What we need to do is go beyond the core audience, not only from a box office perspective but from a brand-management perspective,” he told me at the time.

In other words: You don’t need to let Star Wars fans know that a Star Wars movie is coming out, but you do need to target all those millions of people who are on the fence about Star Wars or are too young to remember it.

The same is true for any brand that really wants to grow. You will get only so far keeping your base happy. What you need to do is reach beyond them.
It turns out that approaching friends of that base may be the best way to do this. Why? Think back to the last time a friend convinced you to take a flyer on a new product or maybe made you think of an old brand in a new way. For instance, I have a friend who is a total Mac-head who surprised me last year when he said that Windows 7 was as good as the Mac OS. Movies are another good example. Have you ever written off a new movie only to be completely turned around when a friend told you it was actually really good? (Of course, this cuts the other way, too.)

That’s the thinking behind two new announcements Facebook is making this week. One is a new ad unit. The other is a set of metrics that will help administrators create better brand Pages.
The combination of the two reveals where Facebook’s thinking is going. Facebook is putting pressure on advertisers to create better content for their brand Pages. If they do, those brands will have a better chance of winning over friends of fans either by advertising or by creating something viral. It’s a cycle that has the potential to redefine the way we interact with brands. From now on, brands will be friends or friends of friends rather than spammers trying to bombard your consciousness.

Social media is still new, but so was search once. While figuring out how to make money off of search seems obvious in retrospect, it clearly wasn’t at the time. In the same way, someday we’ll look back at how Facebook invented social media advertising and wonder why no one thought of it sooner.



Source: http://apps.facebook.com/wpsocialreader/me/channels/16647/content/NDyPJ?fb_source=home_multiline&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_action_ids=231486003576964%2C2412007509859%2C270619449627426

7 Google Analytics Advanced Segments

Segment 1:  1 word keywords

This first segment will just give you all of the one-word keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Sometimes there are crap keywords, but I am increasingly finding it interesting how sites can rank for one-word keywords because of personalized results.

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$

Segment 2: 2-3 words

This next statement gives you all of the two and three word keyphrases driving traffic to your site. These are normally the important terms for you, because 2-3 word phrases have been shown to drive the best targeted traffic. For example, "vouchers" might be too general too really bring you good traffic but "voucher codes" or "quality voucher codes" will probably give you better traffic.

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

Segment 3: 4+ words

This segment is like the statements above, but instead gives you all keyword phrases that have four or more words in them. This is all you need for segmenting down to your longtail keywords quickly and easily in Analytics.

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3,}\s*$

Segment 4: Social Media Traffic

Sometimes you need to see the easy breakdown of your referral sources, and even more often it can be helpful to see just your Social Media traffic. Here is how we have our Social Media Advanced Segment set up in the Distilled Analytics account:

Segment 5: Traffic to Blog (where URL is http://www.site.com/blog)

If you have a separate blog where you write and try to generate both links and traffic, it can be helpful to have a way to easily segment out the traffic to just this section of your site. Sure, you could just use the Filter section, but why do this when you can set up an Advanced Segment and have it forever? A little more work in the short term can save some big headaches. Note: this is really only helpful if your blog articles have the URL structure of http://www.site.com/blog/(post-url) Here is how I have set up an Advanced Segment to do just this:

 

Read More   : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seven-google-analytics-advance-segments

9 Actionable Tips for Link Prospecting

Tip 1: Advanced search queries

Advanced search queries are our starting point. They’re quick, easy to use and they are great for finding opportunities for guest blogging, collaboration projects, sponsorship etc.

Examples of advanced search queries:

Inurl Search (Dental inurl:blog / Dental blog inurl:.co.uk)

These search queries will filter websites with your preferred domain extension or search term within its URL. The above examples will return dental blogs and dental blogs based in the UK.

Exact Phrase Search (Dental “Guest post” / Dental “Write for us”)

These queries (using speech marks to find the exact text) are ideal for finding websites that are either looking for guest bloggers or accept guest blog posts. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites that are looking for writers.

Intitle Search (Dental Intitle:Guest Post – Dental Intitle: Advertise)

Searching for specific content within the title helps to filter the pages that are most relevant and also find opportunities by searching for advertising or guest posting opportunities. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites with advertising opportunities.

Wildcard Search (Dental “Guest *” blog)

Using the wildcard (*) filters results that contain the exact words within your query and an additional word in the position of the wildcard. The above query will return dental blogs that feature “guest post”, “guest writer”, “guest blog” etc within their content or title (with the second word in place of the wildcard).

Using more than one of these strings within the same search will help to further refine the results and provide very specific prospects for you to use to build links.

Example of a query that could be used for finding guest blogging opportunities for a dental website.

Tip 2: Use Twitter tools to find niche bloggers

Building relationships on Twitter is a great way of generating opportunities. By regularly talking to bloggers within your industry, you’re developing an outreach that could be utilised for product launches, obtaining reviews, guest blogging and much more.

Follower Wonk:

Follower Wonk is a great tool that allows you to search through Twitter bios, helping you to identify targets for building relationships or just approaching for link-building.

Example: If you're looking to obtain links from dental blogs, you could search for dental blog, dentist blog, dentistry blog and so on. You can then filter the results and order by the available metrics to help find the most suitable people.

Topsy:

Topsy is a very useful tool that lets you search the social web (including blogs). You could search for your brand, niche keyword or web address, find the people who're talking about you or your industry and then get in touch (and hopefully get a link from their blog). You could also search for guest blogging opportunities using things like 'guest blog dentistry' and then approach the website owner/blogger.

These are just a couple of examples, there are literally thousands more tools that can help you find link building opportunities.

Tip 3: Look at blogroll and directory links

When you find a really good blog that you would like a link from, don't just contact them and wait for a reply! You should be looking for a links page or a blogroll to find other similar bloggers that could also provide a good link to your website. It is important to remember that not all good blogs are optimised for search, making a lot of them really hard to find – unless you use these kinds of techniques.

Also, when you're looking down at your competitors' links from directories like spammylinkdirectory.com (not a real website), you could be finding a few new opportunities. Chances are that you've already looked through your competitors' links, but you might find different websites that you haven't analysed within these directories, some of which may have some good ideas/links that you could emulate for your website.

Tip 4: Reverse image search

I often hear people moaning about how some blog or website has used one of their images in a post or article – without realising that this is a great opportunity to obtain a really good link! If you come across another website using your image, send them a polite email, compliment their content and website, and just ask if they can add a link to your website as the source of the image. This link-building technique is natural and free – which is why optimising your images and making them freely available is a great way of generating these opportunities. You can search for your web address in Google's new-look image search feature or tineye.com, both will help you to find where your images are being used.

Tip 5: Use PPC advertising to find advertising opportunities

Running a short-term, low cost PPC campaign is a great way to find link building opportunities. Once your PPC ad is live on lots of related blogs, you can contact the blogger, mention your advert and suggest that you look at other options.

I would recommend complimenting the blog content and asking to submit a few guest posts about your experience within your industry. Then, once you have obtained a number of links, simply turn off the adwords campaign.

Tip 6: Use BuzzStream

I started using BuzzStream (a link-building CRM tool) around three months ago, with the intention of streamlining my link building process, and it has saved me a huge amount of time! BuzzStream does actually have a feature designed to identify link prospects, but I haven't really used it, I am more interested in the BuzzMarker and the BuzzBox.

The BuzzMarker is placed on your bookmark toolbar and it pulls in a huge amount of data with one simple click. This data includes whois information, social media accounts, contact details and even data from key SEO metrics (including SEOmoz data). All of this is then available within the CRM system itself and can be added too or edited at any point.

You can also BCC the BuzzBox email address into emails that you're sending to prospects, which will then automatically add the emails into the CRM.

Tip 7: Ask questions

Once you have built a relationship (or link) with a blogger or industry professional, why don't you ask them which blogs and news websites they follow? This is a great way of identifying websites that you may not have reached or found otherwise and it will take very little time. If the blogger is a friend of connection of the person who recommended it, you then also have an angle to start contact with.

Tip 8: Use what's already out there

Competitor Analysis:

Looking at the links that your competitors have will provide opportunities and inspiration, but there is a limit to the number of links that you can get. Once you have found new opportunities from your competitors, why don't you look at their links, and then links going to their links and so on? If you're looking at relevant websites, chances are they will have some good links that you can look to emulate.

Old linkbait:

If you're looking to implement an idea or even just get some quick links, looking at what has been done before is a really good place to start.

For example, if you're looking to write a list of the top 50 most influential bloggers in your industry, have a look at those who are featured on the list and check if they link back to the website. If they do link back, they could be an easy win. Also, as your version will be the latest one, it's probably worth contacting the people linking to the previous version and asking them to link to your new release.

Tip 9: Utilize existing relationships

If you're involved within your industry, chances are that you know people that have contacts that have blogs. Well, now is the time to pull in that favor and get the introduction.

If you know people, or know people that know people, make sure you take advantage of the situation, as I can guarantee that your competitors will be doing it.

These links are simple, natural and are difficult for competitors to copy.

Source : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/9-actionable-tips-for-link-prospecting