Mario Nissan

Yesterday, May 18th, marked the 32nd anniversary of the devastation brought on by Mt. St. Helens when it erupted in a wall of black ash and lava, leaving a path of destruction 250 miles long and killing 57 people.

The volcano was widely regarded as a beautiful part of the Cascade area before the eruption and often drew mountain climbers, tourists, and nature lovers to its base, where serene waters offered fishing and perfect camping areas. When a 5.1 magnitude earthquake rocked the mountain, however, it literally blew its top and spewed hot ash that traveled thousands of miles. Some photographers risked their lives to get shots of the event and managed to capture both the eruption and the swath of its destruction.

Image credit: D.R. Mullineaux

Image credit: Austin Post

Image credit: Dan Dzurisin

Image credit: Lyn Topinka

Image credit: Lyn Topinka

Image credit: Washington Herald

Photographer Vern Hodgson captured some of the first images of the eruption while on a camping trip and barely made it out of the path of destruction alive.

“Every time you took a breath it would stick to your throat or get stuck in your nose,” he remembers. “At that point I started to go into shock,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We accepted the fact we were going to die.”

Hodgson captured this image from 11 miles away just as the volcano blew its top.

“Even today it sends chills up my spine and puts goosebumps up my back,” he said. “To see that whole mountain collapse, there’s no words to describe it.”

The thing about kids is, they’re expensive. If you’re a parent, you know what I mean. It’s not just formula and diapers that can sweep your bank account clean; there’s always an expense to worry about even as they grow older, between school needs and any activities they take part in. Sports and cheerleading can add up outrageous amounts of dough for parents, as often schools don’t have the funding for everything the kids need and the outlay is up to Mom and Dad.

Apparently, a Tennessee man didn’t count on any of that before he fathered 30–as in three zero–children.

33-year old Desmond Hatchett has kids with 11 women, and twice now, four of those women were pregnant in the same year. Not only is that an insane amount of birthdays to keep up with, it’s also bleeding Hatchett’s wallet dry. He says he only makes minimum wage and since the courts demanded that part of his paycheck be divided up for child support, he’s having a hard time making ends meet. Because the amount has to be divvied up between so many people, some of the moms get less than $1.50 a month, which makes the whole thing seem sort of counterproductive. Now he’s asking the courts for a break, although there’s no word yet on how they’ll respond.

Stop-motion animation has always fascinated me, mostly because of the extreme amount of patience it takes to pull off. If you’ve ever watched the behind-the-scenes of a stop-motion film, you’ll know what I mean. Each movement a character makes is done by hand, and the animator has to figure out what the movements are ahead of time, mapping out how many moves it will take for the character to hit their mark. When it’s done well, stop-motion is beautiful, like a moving piece of art.

One of my favorite examples of stop-motion is the film “Coraline”, adapted from the Neil Gaiman book of the same name. The film is gorgeous, colorful, whimsical, everything you want in a movie, really. The art direction is amazing. In order to get everything perfect, the animators ran through the entire thing once before they even filmed it, which means they basically made the movie twice. The amount of detail they managed to put into that miniature world is astounding, and I highly recommend it to anyone who appreciates art or animation.

If you know what you’re doing–and are extremely meticulous–you can make your own stop-motion video. A guy going by the name of Mystery Guitar Man has done just that, featuring Mario of Super Mario Brothers. While it’s not movie-quality, he says it only took a week to make, and that’s pretty impressive. The video gives us a slightly more 3-D look at an 8-bit world and takes some creative liberties with the mustachioed plumber that will make you smile.

It can’t be easy to be the King’s daughter. Not only does Lisa Marie have an enormous legacy to live up to musically, she’s also been scrutinized her entire life because nothing she does is private.

Of course, she hasn’t always chosen the most low-key ways to go about things; in 1994 she married Michael Jackson, perhaps the only other man in the world as famous as her father. The marriage lasted two years before she moved on to actor Nicholas Cage, which lasted a whopping 108 days.

But Presley is moving to stamp her mark on the music industry in a different way than she set out to with her first album, “To Whom It May Concern” (2003), which she says wasn’t truly what she wanted to convey because it was full of defensive songs mixed with a bit of anger.

“I made a lot of defensive and angry songs, probably anticipating what was expected of me and fighting against it … there was a lot of production and hiding behind things, not really wanting to lay myself out there because I was afraid or feeling too vulnerable,” she said.

Her new album, “Storm and Grace”, is released this week and represents what Presley calls the quiet, calmed down side of her. She references her father briefly on the album by way of the song “Sticks and Stones”, touching on the fact that everyone expects her to live up to his name and talent, but for the most part it’s pure Americana, and it’s garnering good reviews so far.

Presley’s performance on “American Idol” earlier this week, however, is getting some mixed reactions. It seems she will always have her detractors, no matter how much her father was universally loved…or perhaps because of it.

Note: Perhaps the headline of this article is a little sensational, but don’t overlook the “what if” part. I’m not suggesting Google has some plot to kill the web. However, many businesses rely on Google and people are freaking out about backlinks. Some are going so far as to threaten legal action if links are not removed. Links. If such legal action ever resulted in the outlawing of links in any capacity, the web as we know it could be put into great jeopardy. People would be afraid to link. I don’t think Google intends for anything like that to happen, but people don’t always respond to things in the most rational of ways. I don’t believe we will see links outlawed, or that the Penguin update will kill the web. However, reactions to Google penalties are leading to some pretty strong actions from some.

Google has said on multiple occasions that it thinks the Penguin update has been a success. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

PageRank And The Web

WWW, as you may know, stands for World Wide Web. It’s a web because it it’s connected by links. Sites all over the web link to one another, creating a path for users to click from page to the next. Often those pages are to different sites. This is the way it has worked for years. Just think what it would be like if sites couldn’t freely link to one another. The web would be broken, and users would suffer.

When Google launched with its PageRank algorithm, it was a revolution in search. It seemed to be a better way of doing search. It gave a rhyme and reason to the ranking of search results. Today, Google uses over 200 signals to rank its search results, which are becoming more personalized than ever before. PageRank still matters, but it’s far from the only thing that matters.

Yet, it is PageRank that has given links on the web so much power to influence the visibility of web content. Now that just about everyone is on the web, everyone is fighting to have their content seen. Once upon a time, you would have thought: the more links the better. More links can only lead to more chances people will see your content. Now, somewhat ironically, people are finding that that the links they have out there are making their content less visible. In some cases, they’re making it practically non-existent in Google, or at least so buried, it might as well be non-existent.

Freak Out Time?

Google’s Penguin update has been a major wake up call to webmasters about certain kinds of linking practices. The update was designed to target sites violating Google’s quality guidelines. Among those guidelines are: “Don’t participate in link schemes” and “Avoid hidden text or hidden links.”

Some of Google’s guidelines are obvious – avoid obviously unethical practices. But in the link schemes department, things can get a little blurry. Just ask WPMU.org, which got hit by Penguin over a few questionable links (interestingly enough, after seemingly benefiting from Google’s Panda update, designed to reward higher quality sites).

A lot of webmasters have taken to the forums and blogs to complain about the Penguin update, but Google has, on more than on occasion, deemed the update a success. We’ll also be seeing it come back around every so often, much like its Panda predecessor.

Even before Penguin, Google was sending out tons of messages to webmasters alerting them of questionable links. All of this has gotten webmasters in to a frenzy to clean-up their link profiles, and reduce the number of links Google considers to be of poor quality, in hopes that their content can find its way back into Google search visibility.

Legal Action Over Links?

Some webmasters have even gone so far as to threaten legal action over sites that are linking to them. We referenced this in another article after Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable mentioned that this was happening. Now, Greg Finn at Search Engine Land has pointed to a specific example where PSKL got a DMCA take down notice from LifeShield, after writing a positive review.

Now, to be clear, this DMCA takedown notice is not in reference to any content theft or content use. It’s about links. It threatens legal action. It says:

I request you to remove from following website (pskl.us)
all links to www.lifeshield.com website as soon as possible.
In order to find the links please do the following:
1) If this is an online website directory, use directory’s search system to find “LifeShield” links.
2) If there are hidden links in the source code of website, open website’s main page and view its source code. Search for “lifeshield.com” in the source code and you will see hidden links.

It also says:

LifeShield, Inc will be perusing legal action if the webmaster does not remove the referenced link within 48 hours.

Jeremy at PSKL actually shares the entire conversation around the matter, which did include an apology, indicating that PSKL shouldn’t have been on the list of sites that received a notice. Jeremy, however, took issue that there was a list of sites getting such notices. Throughout the conversation, it is revealed that LifeShield had a site “cloak lifeshield and generate over 700K back links” without LifeShield’s knowledge, and that “Google stepped in and slapped” them with a penalty, which led to layoffs at the company.

Jeremy responded with, “So you’re saying that somebody went out and bought 700K back links for you, knowing that it would get you penalized by Google? So does that mean you had (Company name) send out 700K DMCA notices? Talk about throwing good money after bad. Report the linkspam to the spam team at Google, then spend that money on an SEO expert rather than on trying to bully people with intimidation.”

The response was actually longer than that, and included the metaphor of putting out a house fire with manure, but that was the main gist.

I suggest reading Jeremy’s entire post. It’s pretty interesting.

Is This Where The Web Should Go?

He does make another important point in this: A party creating large quantities of backlinks to a site in order to generate SEO (or, in this case, destroy SEO) is unethical. It is not illegal.

While many may not have a problem with such practices becoming illegal, it’s the idea that the law could intervene with linking in any form that could lead to greater problems. Just consider all fo the gray area there already is in fair use law. There will always be different interpretations, and that can get dangerous.

For the record (granted, I’m no lawyer), I wouldn’t expect any legal action, such as that threatened in LifeShield’s DMCA notice to hold much water in a court of law. Finn also points to two cases (Ford Motor Company v. 2600 Enterprises) and (Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.), where the legality of linking prevailed.

But even if things like this have to go to court, it’s going to be a major inconvenience, and legal fees will have to be paid. If sites practicing legitimate, ethical linking habits get caught up in this, where will that leave the web?

Is this what linking on the World Wide Web will become? Will you have to worry about getting sued because you linked to a site, and that site may or may not find your site to be a strong enough site to desire a link from? Could you get sued because your page didn’t have a high enough PageRank, and not enough link juice to help the site you’re linking to in its search engine visibility?

LifeShield seems to be targeting some very specific webspam, but sending out notices to a whole list of sites. It’s likely that LifeShield isn’t the only company panicing and resorting to such action. It’s unfortunate, for the company if some negative SEO (it’s unclear if this was from a competitor) was able to have such an impact on its business, as Jeremy suggests, this may not be the best way of trying to resolve the issue.

Let’s Give Google Some Credit.

You can point to Google’s guidelines and its algorithm updates, which clearly do cause some to think this way, but just the same, Google can’t be held entirely to blame for this kind of mentality either. The company has said in the past that people shouldn’t obsess with PageRank, and that it uses over 200 signals to rank content. PageRank is not the only thing that matters. In fact, the company puts out huge lists of signal changes every month.

It shows the power over society that Google really holds though. It shows how much businesses rely on Google search that they will go so far as to threaten sites that are simply linking to them with legal action.

Should such legal action ever lead to a victory in court, that could mean very bad news for the Web as we know it, and people could be afraid to link. I would imagine that would spawn more issues of sites not getting the credit (and possible referral traffic) they deserve.

Do you think Google’s guidelines and penalties can have an influence on the law? Now that would be power, and made even more ironic still, by the fact that Google is constantly under scrutiny of its own.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: Batman Returns (Warner Bros.)

This week could have been a better one for Facebook. An ominous constellation of events aligned that conjured up a palpable cloud of doubt over Facebook’s ability to lure and sustain advertisers. First, WordStream released the results of a study that shows Google leads Facebook in a number of advertising-related areas like ad targeting options and ad formats. Then, the week was capped off with an announcement from General Motors that it would be pulling all $10 million from its paid advertising campaign on Facebook because, in short, GM says they don’t work.

Do you ever click on Facebook ads or do you pretty much ignore them as clutter? If you’ve purchased any Facebook ads, do you think they’re fairly useless or have you enjoyed some success with them? Share your experiences below.

Not the best sentiments to have attached to your company if you’re Facebook considering the company is likely to make its initial public offering this coming Friday. Facebook wants people to spend and invest money with the site, not withdraw it. So were the last few days a dreary period of runic divination for Facebook or just unfortunate happenstance? The short-term ramifications will largely be nonexistent but such developments do cast a thin pall on what should be Facebook’s most glorious achievement yet: having the most lucrative IPO in the history of tech businesses.

Going Places

GM’s announcement to stop paying for ads is likely a lot of sound and fury signifying very little. What’s of greater import is which party, GM or Facebook, let the other down. As far as GM goes, there’s been some talk that it was handling its social media campaign poorly or simply had misguided expectations from advertising on Facebook. One of GM’s chief competitors didn’t shy away from highlighting this possibility.

Zuh-zing.

GM insists that its decision to stop with the paid Facebook ads was purely coincidental that it happened so soon before Facebook’s IPO and the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story yesterday, reports that GM had always intended to reassess how it’s spending money on the site. Regardless, whether you call it fate or call it intentional, it’s hard to dismiss this peculiar sequence of events.

“A lot of people are probably suspicious of the timing of that announcement,” said Andrew Frank, a marketing analyst with Gartner, who spoke to WebProNews about GM’s decision.

Although the timing may be curious, Frank doesn’t think GM’s withdrawal of advertising funds is a hostile decision nor should it be seen as a total freeze on Facebook’s potential to appeal to large companies. “Facebook very frequently updates its formats and releases new products, so it will have another chance to pitch to GM,” he said.

GM’s cessation of paid ads on the site isn’t such a dark omen for Facebook’s future relationship with other high-profile advertisers, either, he adds. “It won’t have too much of an effect. $10 million is pretty small to the overall scheme of Facebook revenue.” He added, “It’s clearly a negative, but I think that advertisers will probably look beyond that one data point.”

Still, others think there might be cause for some apprehension on the advertisers’ side of the street. Larry Kim, the CTO of WordStream, the company that produced the report yesterday that showed Facebook lagging behind Google, told WebProNews that he isn’t surprised GM dropped its paid ads on Facebook.

“It’s not a great way of selling cars,” Kim said, “but if it truly isn’t a great way to sell cars, is there a risk that other brands need to figure out as well? Absolutely.”

The potential certainly exists for Facebook to become a great place to sell cars, however, that would take a lot of big directional changes on the company’s part. Just don’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon.

Backseat Drivers

Mark Zuckerberg (now) famously wrote to shareholders in Facebook’s official S-1 filing, “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” A recent profile in New York portrays a Zuckerberg who was disdainful of advertising on Facebook in the early days, not wanting it to become the “ad-choked cesspool” that MySpace eventually melted into.

It would appear that Zuckerberg’s disposition toward advertising has survived to this day and, riding into the company’s IPO lucre, he is content to relegate advertisers to the backseat. He claims that he’s sticking to the mission to make the internet more social, not more fertile for advertisers.

Whether you’re a frustrated advertiser or just a studied speculator on the side, that may not exactly come as news to you. “Based on the very slow pace of ad innovation in the last six years, it’s clearly not Facebook’s top priority,” Kim said. “They’ve made significant advances with social networks, such as with Timeline, but not nearly anything of that scale on the advertising side. It’s ten year’s behind.”

Facebook’s lack of prioritizing is what informs Kim’s lack of surprise that GM won’t pay for more ads on Facebook. “There’s no shortage of places that companies like GM can spend on advertising,” he said. “Why spend money on a website that’s not even doing their best to make the most out of advertising?”

Aye, but if you’re looking to advertise, there’s the rub. Facebook has an unprecedented reach of users with so much information collected on each and every one of them. The built-in reach of ads on the site is one of the most alluring reasons companies choose to advertising on Facebook in the first place, even in spite of a glaring paucity of research that shows whether advertising on Facebook even works. With Facebook on track to register its 1 billionth user as soon as later this year, advertisers can’t ignore Facebook anymore than iron shavings can resist a magnet.

The problem isn’t whether to advertise or not on Facebook – it’s a foregone conclusion at this point – but what to expect to get out of advertising on Facebook. One of the big problems that companies are having with Facebook advertising is measuring the efficacy of the ads, which may have been GM’s problem.

“People are still trying to figure out the return on investment on Facebook,” Kim said. “The most effective thing you can do is drive fanpage “likes,” but the economics of a fanpage “likes” are really unknown. It isn’t clear if those are even worth anything.”

Until such values get established, for now companies are banking on the extraordinary access that Facebook has to people as the best return on its ads.

“A lot of advertising decisions are based on reach and frequencies and Facebook has pretty good metrics,” Frank said, “especially with engagement metrics, which are just off the chart.” He expects that the optimization and effectiveness of the ads will come in due time.

Asleep at the Wheel?

Facebook’s revenue ballooned on the strength of advertising sales to $3.7 billion in 2011, which makes the absence of GM’s $10 million a proverbial drop in the bucket for Facebook. Nevertheless, some spectators began prognosticating Facebook’s demise following GM’s announcement. And while it’s true that GM’s reduction of how much it spends on ads – it still plans to spend $30 million on maintaining a presence on the site – does mean that two of the top three advertisers in the United States have decided to spend less on Facebook this year, it’s hardly any indication that we should expect Facebook to start wheezing along after its IPO. After all, it’s got nearly a billion users’ worth of data it’s largely not using.

“Facebook has yet to really tap into the value of the data they have for advertising,” Frank said. “From a targeting standpoint, most of the ads that Facebook sells are probably not really optimized for the platform.” While Facebook might monetize their audience at a lower rate than, say, Google, he doesn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. “It’s just a question of whether they prioritize that side of the business.”

Realistically, Facebook probably doesn’t need to take advertising too seriously for now because it would require a grand overhaul of the site’s advertising platform. The company seems to have a developed a ridiculously successful formula, so why mess with it?

In the end, Facebook obviously doesn’t need to cater to advertisers in order to succeed – just watch the company’s stock blow up on Friday (or whenever the IPO happens). It probably wouldn’t even need to change up much, really, to enhance the way it makes money off of advertising. “Facebook has all these fan Pages for people that they’re just giving away for free,” Kim said. “Instead of charging for ads that are boring and nobody clicks on, start charging for Facebook Pages.” By making the brand Page as engaging as possible with pulls and such to engage an audience, Kim thinks that method of generating revenue through ads would be much more lucrative.

And that’s the easy route of changing things, according to Kim. If Facebook really wanted to go for Vegas-level winnings with ads, it could easily retool its targeting options. “I don’t think Facebook is doing a great job in terms of ad targeting options,” he said. “It knows what demographic you belong to but it doesn’t know anything more specific, like if you’re looking to buy a flight to San Francisco.” By tapping into more specific data of its users, Facebook could easily maximize the value of its ads.

“There’s no technical reason why Facebook can’t optimize its targeting options,” Kim added.

Whether it’s stuffing a cookie in your browser that retargets ads on Facebook based on what you’ve been looking at elsewhere on the internet or making it easier for Facebookers to connect directly to a business via mobile ads, Facebook has an inventory of options when it comes to really maximizing the site’s advertising potential. The means exist. It’s just a matter of whether Facebook wants to go that route. Or, more dreadfully, if it ever needs to take that route.

Regardless of where Facebook goes after this GM blemish, one thing’s for certain: nobody thinks that Facebook’s star isn’t done rising just yet.

Frank doesn’t see the GM announcement really slowing Facebook’s ascent, either. “The Facebook story is so full of promise and impact and hype that it’s hard to see GM’s decision having that much of an impact.”

Likewise, Kim is curious to see where that Facebook story continues to. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for what Facebook’s built and I’m optimistic about what they’re going to be doing in the future,” he said.

Facebook didn’t get to where it is by following the rules and just because a company like General Motors withdrew a fractional amount of money from its advertising campaign is hardly enough to slow down Facebook’s momentum or people’s confidence in the site. More, it may signify that Facebook shares the driver’s seat with no one.

What would you like to see Facebook do to improve the ads? Should the company make them more relevant and personal or will you continue to just ignore them either way? Does the GM withdrawal affect how you think Facebook’s upcoming IPO will be perceived by investors? Join the debate below.

It’s been quite the busy day for Facebook. You may have heard: the company went public. They also acquired Karma, which is described as a social and mobile gifting service.

The way Karma works, is: you send a gift, with a card, and Karma will notify your friend via text messager, email or Facebook. They can accept the gift as is or swap it for something else, or donate the value of it to charity. They enter their address, and Karma sends the gift.

The company was founded in 2011.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Facebook uses this. It could be a pretty interesting layer to Facebook as an ecommerce platform.

Facebook released the following statement:

“We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

A post from the Karma team on the Karma blog says, “Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.”

“We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook,” the post continues. “The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.”

No word so far on the terms of the deal.

Unless you are a professional or aspiring illustrator, you probably don’t know who Drew Struzan is. But if you have been to a movie in the past 30 years, you probably know his work, you just didn’t know it.

We have covered a lot of different takes on classic movie posters here at webpronews, all of them unique and creative in their own way. But what about the originals? Some works just cannot be improved upon. Such is the case with Drew Struzan.

For a complete list of his works, and they are extensive, refer to drewstruzan.com

Adventures in Babysitting

Arabian Nights

Back to the Future 1

Big Trouble in Little China

Blade Runner

Dune

Hell Boy

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Pan’s Labyrinth

Star Wars – A New Hope

The Goonies

The Shawshank Redemption

The Thing

The Walking Dead

The Mist

The Name of the Rose

Born in Oregan City, Oregan, Struzan attended the Art Center College of Design in West Los Angelos, California.

Struzan showed promise as fine artist but as he put it, “I was poor and hungry, and illustration was the shortest path to a slice of bread, as compared to a gallery showing.”

He got his start in L.A., illustrating album covers for some very famous bands including The Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Roy Orbison, Black Sabbath, Glenn Miller, Iron Butterfly, Bach, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Liberace.

His first big break, and probably what he is now most famous for, is his 1978 depiction of Star Wars for the re-release. Keeping close ties with George Lucas, he is also the designer of the original Industrial Light and Magic logo.

He currently lives in California with his wife Dylan, and son Christian.

Okay, so before you get started reading this, head on over to this video and get it started playing in the background, then come back. Done? Alright, here we go.

If you’re familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, you will no doubt remember the scene near the beginning where the black monolith appears amongst all the apes. Upon touching it, they begin to make significant evolutionary leaps, including walking upright and using tools (and killing each other with said tools). In fact, chances are you’re familiar with it anyway. It’s so deeply ingrained in popular culture that most people are at least vaguely aware of it. It’s also been parodied and referenced in countless other movies and TV shows, including Pixar’s Wall-E.

Well, thanks to the magic of the internet, we’ve found another awesome tribute to this particular classic. Last night on reddit a user posted a photo with the title “A friend’s husband just built this iPhone charging station.” The link led to this Imgur page, where you can see the following picture (click for full size):

This is just all kinds of awesome. Unfortunately, the image is not posted to any particular Imgur user’s account, so there’s no way to give proper credit to the creator. Whoever he is, though, he’s definitely had a stroke of genius here.

And speaking of iPhones and 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’re probably better off not asking Siri to open the pod bay doors…