These are the Trends that predicted in 2010 by Trends Hunter:

20. Tangible Personalization –  a desire for personalized gifts.

19. Unservice Forward- unservice not only saves you money, it lets customers get a sense of independence and creative control.

18. Peacocking Bright clothing, accessories and cosmetics are all staples of a bright neon movement that clashes in the dismal face of the recession.

17. Rental Culture – rentable luxury, clothing, baby toys, and fine art are just a few examples of the move towards rental culture.

16. Half Formal shorts with suit jackets, blazers with jeans and semi suits…

15. Prodependancy Next generation couples were already more likely to move in together than generations of the past…

14. Not-So-Tricky Picky – It’s no longer tricky, to be picky.

13. DIY Healthcare – Be prepared to welcome in a new era of healthcare with palm-sized physicals, stress-sensing watches and fertility monitor pods.

12. Nostalgia Marketing – Storybook jewelry, monstrous designs, and alice in wonderland photoshoots,  Storybook sentiment has gotten hold of consumers looking to escape economic woes and seek refuge in the fantasies of their past…

11. Crowdsourced Campaigns – consumer-generated ads were all the rage.

10. Exposed Vulnerabilty – Social media has redefined our access to the personal lives of icons, celebrities and friends.

9. Emotionology Humans aren’t the only once with feelings.

8. Simpletising Fruit – In a cluttered world, visual clarity actually stands out.

7. Ecopolitan – Whether it’s an underground abode, floating home or high-rise living, Ecopolitan Developments are quickly becoming a way of life.

6. Greenpliances – Soapless dishwashers, miniature laundry machines, and dishwashing cabinets not only help the environment, but over time, their increased efficiency will help your wallet too.

5. Nomadabodes – The recession in combination with creative architecture have caused an influx of unique temporary housing.

4. Pop-Uptailing – the latest way to generate buzz and quickly place your product in new markets.

3. Life-Swapping – Today you can swap homes, art, services or even your entire closet wardrobe.

2. DIY Décor – DIY art, furniture and hobbies are the perfect fix for those who are credit-crunched.

1. Next Besting – Instead of purchasing the priciest product and biggest brand , people are trying new products in the pursuit of the “next best” alternative.

(Source : Trends Hunter)

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NoFollow and DoFollow are very important terms when it comes to link building and link building is one of the most important aspect for SEO.

NoFollow mean is to write a line of code to tell the Search Engine spider not to crawl that link. For example, let’s say you want to create a link to this website: NESTLE MALAYSIA website, the coding will look like this:

To add a nofollow to this link, just add a line of code rel=”nofollow”, like this:

So the second link is a nofollow link. In fact, there is no actual dofollow code exist, as long as there is a link, the spider will eventually crawl it unless you add the nofollow code, so we normally classified those without the nofollow code to be dofollow.

One of the famous example is Twitter. Twitter add nofollow to all the links on their site, as such, you won’t get SEO benefit on link building on Twitter. They need to do this to avoid spammers. Lately, they even put up nofollow tag to the user profile section.

As such, if you intent to build links on other websites so that you can increase your search engine ranking (becareful, not all links can help in your ranking), if the site is implementing nofollow, there will be less SEO benefit for external links.

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Please take a look, you will definitely love it.

Note: The music is Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel

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Many people might not heard of this canonical page and canonical link element.  So I just briefly explain what is it:

Due to the use of dynamic URLs, one single web page can have more than 1 valid urls (address) pointing to it.  For example:

http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com

https://www.yoursite.com

Of which the official one (or your most preferred version) is www.yoursite.com. So the page at www.yoursite.com is call the canonical page. A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

However, if you don’t tell the search engines which one is your canonical page, they might not know which one it is, as such, they will just select one of the URL and flagged others as DUPLICATE CONTENTS!

That’s why now with the introduction of this canonical link element, you have to add the line of code in all your other non-canonical pages to identify your canonical page. Your problem can be solved by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Search Engines: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.”

From the above example, this is how you specify your canonical link element in one of the non-canonical page e.g. https://www.yoursite.com:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com”/>

Add this line of code to the <head> section of the non-canonical page.

If you are using CMS, you can just hardcode the canonical URL into the section (please make sure you test and confirm) so that any duplicate variants of that URL should still contain the correct canonical URL inside.

One more important point to take note is Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can specify a canonical page on www.yoursite.com from a set of pages on yoursite.com or help.yoursite.com, but not on yoursite-blog.com.

Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts on the details on Canonical Link Element:

For those of you who use WordPress, there is a plugin by Joost de Valk – Canonical URL’s that you can install, very useful.

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It is call Google Reader – The Ninja Mode:

Got it? Can you see the Ninja?

If can’t, please try the following steps in sequence:

Press the “up” arrow twice
Press the “down” arrow twice
Press the “left” arrow once
Press the “right” arrow once
Press the “Left” arrow once
Press the “right” arrow once
Press the “b” key
Press the “a” key

Ok, now I hope you can see the Ninja!

It is actually the Konami code.

By the way, you can just enter the code again to make them invisible.

Have fun!

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Due to the massive spam via meta tags and include hundreds of keywords and descriptions that are not even relevant to the page,  the big search engines don’t consider meta tags as a basis for inclusion into their directories.  The only tag that is important is the “Title” and “Description” tag.

Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth:

Don’t waste your time.  Search engines today do not look at meta tags like they used to. Meta tags are a thing of the past and they don’t help much these days.

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Ok, I guess you must be keen to know this black-hat method:

1. Create a wordpress blog or blogspot blog of your niche.

2. Make sure this blog has unique content on the home page.

3. Create about 11 or 12 blog postings.

4. Sign up to Google webmaster tools.

5. Submit your site to Google webmaster tools and you should verify your site after that.

6. After that, insert the sitemap which is another important point. You will be eligible to get the adwords vouchers only after all your pages are listed on the google sitemap.

7. And most free voucher will come from Google webmaster itself with worth $100 value within 10 days after your site is listed completely.

Here is the proof :

Message from Google on Free Adwords

Create as many blogs as you like, as long as every blog must use a different Google Webmaster Tools account. You will then get the Google Adwords vouchers worth USD$100 for each account and you can use it or sell it…

Ok, I think this method is valid for now until the Big Brother G find out..

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I have compiled here some good tools that you can use to monitor online buzz for your brands and the best thing is these are all FREE tools.  

1. Google Alerts

This is the most important and basic automated tool that can help people and businesses monitor the Internet for developments and activities that could concern them. Google currently offers six types of alert searches: “News”, “Web”, “Blogs”, “Comprehensive”, “Video” and “Groups” and results are sent to subscribers daily by e-mail or via RSS feeds.

2. Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. Addictomatic shows you results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, etc. You do not even need to register on the site!

3. BlogPulse

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs, a free service by Nielsen Buzzmetric. It is actually a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. 

4. Boardtracker

This tool specializes in monitoring forums. Boardtracker is currently following more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums.

5. Bloglines

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Bloglines can be used to start monitoring the sources you are interested in. 

6. Commentful

Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

7. Ice Rocket

IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs. It also offers a search module for Myspace, and this makes it the only tool of these that does so.

8. HowSociable

HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, Youtube, Myspace, etc, on the same page. This tool can be very useful to measure the impact of your actions across the social networks.

9. Facebook Lexicon

Lexicon is a tool to understand what Facebook’s users are talking about on Walls. Use the tabs at the top to explore different trends in the topics listed in the drop-down menu. Lexicon never looks at messages, Chat, searches, or other private data.

10. Keotag

Keotag allows you to search content tags. Once you have picked a tag, Keotag lets you choose the sites you want to it search for you. Of course, the classics among the choices are: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others. 

11. Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search platform that allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. It monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

12. BackType

BackType is a conversational search engine that index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.

Of course there are  a lots more listening tools available, especially for social media e.g. twitter which I will need to talk about twitter monitoring tools in my next blog.  But I think the above tools would be a good start.

Last but not least, you can also use Yahoo! Pipes to create your own online buzz monitoring tool. Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds,web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps.

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I quickly log on to Twitter and true enough, I can’t enter with my existing password, so I have no choice but to click at the link on the email.  Initially I’m a bit skeptical on all these ask to reset password emails, but in this case, it could be genuine as I really can’t log in.

So I click to reset and get a new password, luckily it is ok now. Otherwise I’ll be crying for losing all my almost touching 2500 followers…

Now I remember that 2 days back I accidentally clicked on a link from a friend’s feed in Facebook that said “I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://1kfollowers.net” , I registered on the site and get all this problem.  In fact, after I registered at the site, I was really regretted as the site didn’t really look good, so I quickly changed my Twitter Password, still, is too late.  

But I just wonder how Twitter realize this phising activities, they must be quite efficient.

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These batch of pavement drawings are done by Julian Beever, he is an English, Belgium-based chalk artist who has been creating trompe-l’œil chalk drawings on pavement surfaces since the mid-1990s. 

You can view more Julian Beever’s artwork at his website here : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

 
Another artist is Edgar Müller , world known european street painting artist from German. 

Take a look at this video for last  year’s Festival of World Cultures, this renowned German street painting artist Edgar Müller transformed a huge slice of the East Pier into a dramatic ice age scene.

Take a look at Edgar’s other art works at http://www.metanamorph.com.

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