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App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview

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“iTunes preview pages rank well in Google search results because they are very search engine friendly for app names. The URL, page title, meta description, meta keywords, and the H1 tag are all loaded with the app name. These pages also have lots of incoming links from every blog entry, review, and so on that uses the iTunes link. I suspect that the Playboy app comes in at #7 because of all the recent news and opinion articles that link to the app as an example of a big publisher that escaped the iTunes sexy app purge.

It is interesting to note that the iTunes preview page uses the “nofollow” attribute for links to the app’s homepage, so the PageRank of the preview page does not convey any benefit to the developer’s site .”

Developers, take note.

Dan Moren on the iTunes LP

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“For most people, listening to music is something you do while you’re doing something else, not an activity that occupies your entire mind. By contrast, the iTunes LP requires the same kind of attention that you might give to a movie or a book. While that might appeal to the serious music fan, it’s overkill for most consumers.”

Apple’s Long History of Lousy First Reviews

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“As the Wall Street Journal reported, the mouse was considered a miss: “Useless,” said Charles L. Mauro, president of an engineering firm. “It isn’t all that easy to learn,” said Amy Wohl, president of a corporate consultancy. “I think it’s awkward,” added Clem Labine, a newspaper publisher. “Since it doesn’t get you away from the keyboard altogether, why go back and forth?”

The Mozilla & Metalab Fiasco

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I guess they’re gonna publish a statement tomorrow saying that you can’t blame inspiration. And of course, we won’t believe that.

But you know, worst part is Mozilla could have used some copy for Firefox - next time choose wisely which project to rip off for.

Being Flash Free

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Interesting post over at Cocoia’s blog. It’s true, uninstalling flash precludes you to a lot of content on the current web - so you keep it installed on your computer.

And that’s exactly Adobe’s strongest point in why you shouldn’t uninstall Flash.

Doing Less with More - A Maximalist Workflow

There’s a huge misconception about minimalism, and it’s in regards of graphical minimalism and workflow minimalism. Whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, one of the most popular trends of the ’00s has been that of adopting a minimal and simple approach to computing. As the trend went by and people even wrote books and essays about it, the original purpose of the whole concept slowly faded away, leaving place to users who only care about making their computers minimal and simple to their eyes. Yet the original purpose is still there, and I want to focus on that.

Read more

Virgin America Rejects Flash. “HTML Is Good Enough”

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“Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: “I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].”

See? It’s that easy.

html5media Enables The HTML5 Video Tag In All Major Browsers

Earlier today I posted a tweet regarding this new project I found on Google Code, html5media. With only two lines of code in the <head> of your webpage html5media allows you to use the <video> tag in almost every browser by simply calling two .js files.

From the wiki page:

“The html5media script scans your page for video tags, and checks whether your browser is capable of playing the files they contain using a HTML5 media player. If the browser can play the contents of the video tags, then the script does nothing.

If your browser does not support HTML5 video, then the offending video tags are dynamically replaced with a Flowplayer instance, providing the same functionality as the original video tag.”

This makes me think how ridiculous is the debate on keeping the current Flash alive. There’s something better out there, even for you porn aficionados.