HTML5 is revolutionizing nearly every facet of Web work – from applications to layout/design. It’s importance to search engine optimization is also something to note. Website Magazine’s upcoming August issue tackles the subject of structured data but what we quickly found was that there’s much more going on that Web workers (particularly those in SEO) should definitely be aware of – for example, the meta charset tag in HTML5. Character encoding tells the browser what character set the web page is written in. Failure to specify a character set forces the browser to assume that the web page uses a…more»

Google has been focusing heavily on mobile and local search recently and released two features today which help further its prominence in these arenas. Google added new “shortcuts” (see image below) to commonly searched local categories e.g. restaurants, bars, coffee shops, on the mobile Google homepage. Selecting these icons will send the visitor to a results page which displays a map with markers of the users current location and nearby places. Users will be able to scroll through the results while the map remains constant at the top of the page and will adjust to the listing being viewed. Other…more»

Businesses on the Web looking to move beyond their walls and info pages on Facebook now have the opportunity to add custom tabs that reward fans with exclusive brand content. Fan Tabz is a new social marketing application from Fan Appz that empowers businesses to create multiple Facebook tabs with just a few clicks, including campaign-specific tabs for sweepstakes or promotions, custom welcome pages, fan-only wall tabs and more. Key features include the following: •    Ease of Use: Get Fan Tabz up and running with just a few clicks, then use the tab creation wizard to create and launch your…more»

Ericsson, the Sweden-based mobile company, recently conducted a survey that found 35 percent of U.S. Android and iPhone users “…interacted with such non-voice apps as Facebook on their smartphones before rising.” In other words, many smartphone users check Facebook, Twitter and very likely email, before even getting out of bed in the morning. Of course, this is just one study and 35 percent is still a minority. But it’s not hard to imagine that this is exactly the case. And perhaps that number goes even higher after the user is out of bed but not yet on the way to…more»

Millions of blog publishers using Google’s Blogger.com service were unable to use the service mid-afternoon Thursday (including Google itself). Service has since been restored after 20.5 hours of issues. According to Google, during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, the service experienced some “data corruption” that impacted its behavior. As the near 24-hour long meltdown continued, bloggers and readers were experiencing a variety of anomalies including “intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages” according to the official announcement post. Google did indicate that a small subset of Blogger users (estimated at 0.16%) may have encountered additional…more»

Several Adobe Photoshop Touch apps were released today including Adobe Color Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav for Apple iPad. The apps were developed using the Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) and demonstrate the potential for new interaction between Photoshop and tablet devices. Using the suite of Photoshop Touch apps, Adobe is enabling users to create custom color swatches, paint directly onscreen and use popular Photoshop tools from their tablet devices. Adobe Color Lava for example allows designers to use their fingertips to mix colors on the iPad, creating custom color swatches and themes which can then be transfered…more»

The Time Has Come to Increase Your Time on Site Most online marketers and website owners tend to measure the success of their online business by the amount of traffic they are able to generate (and, of course, revenue). While increasing the number of unique visitors is most definitely important (and something that everyone should be concerned with), it is arguably only half the battle. Unique visitors and visits alone should not be the only means by which you are measuring success. It is easy to understand that there is little in the way of benefit from attracting a visitor…more»

Freelancer.com has released the Freelancer Fast 50, which is the company’s findings on the fastest-growing online outsourcing jobs of the first quarter of 2011. The Freelancer.com Fast 50 charts the top 50 rising job categories in the online labor market quarter by quarter, providing a rolling, up-to-the-minute account of online freelance job trends. The top three trends for the quarter included the following: • Panda Pounds Writers: The most noticeable digital labor shift this quarter was not seen in what went up, but what went down. Freelancer.com has cited a massive decline in content writing jobs all across the board…more»

Adobe today announced the availability of Create Suite 5.5 – and the designers and developers rejoice! Creative Suite 5.5 delivers important advances in HTML5 and Flash authoring, lots of innovation in video production and editing, and some powerful tools for digital publishers (tablets anyone?) for delivering work to multiple platforms, operating systems, browsers, and smartphones. Over the last year Adobe and publishers including Condé Nast and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia have worked to develop new digital publishing workflows based on Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign®. Prepare to be dazzle – by our estimation Creative Suite 5.5 will enable print publishers…more»

Display advertising has the potential to reemerge as an essential promotional technique for online advertisers thanks to remarketing. Google, on its Inside Adwords blog, makes the case today for remarketing on display advertising by showcasing a few advertisers that grew an average of 113% every quarter after launch using the technique: – Yankee Candle Company used remarketing to re-engage shoppers and increased conversion rates by 600% while cutting cost-per-conversion in half. – Lenovo PC manufacturers increased sales by 20% and lowered their overall expense-to-revenue ratio by 14% in a campaign that included remarketing and display across multiple networks. – etrailer.com, an…more»