Entries from November 2010 ↓

A photographer experiments with Kinect’s structured light: “The Kinect – an inexpensive videogame peripheral – projects a pattern of infrared dots known as “structured light”. Invisible to the eye, this pattern can be captured using an infrared camera.”

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I get a fair number of PR emails every day, but this one is strange. It came last Friday from Lois Whitman, whose name will be familiar to Techcrunch readers. The email makes it known that Hugh Macleod (@gapingvoid) is available for interviews, which makes it look like Hugh has retained services of a PR company. This, in turn, is puzzling: why would someone who is followed and read by just about every ad blogger hire a PR firm to send the same ad bloggers an email blast? (I noticed AdPulp got the same email.) Or maybe I am completely misunderstanding this message and it’s simply Lois promoting her PR practice, and Hugh has nothing to do with it. I emailed both Hugh and Lois last Friday, but haven’t heard back yet.

Speaking of “smarter conversations”:  if advertising is the cost of being boring, what’s, then, an email PR blast?

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Search engine optimization  used to mean attracting more traffic to your site by getting your site to rank higher on a page that displays search results for a specific query.

SEO by proxy is a new(ish) twist.  Hijack a page on an already established site, optimize that instead for the query, and pepper in abundant links to your own original destination. Here’s a document on Scribd that doesn’t make any sense to anyone but a Google spider, which put it on the first page of results for “brand expectations,” above a link to a much more legible but less keyword-stuffed book on Google’s own Books site. The big red Click Here” links go to some affiliate page.

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