A pair of London-based adventurists with big hearts are giving new meaning to the phrase “summer road trip.”

Nick Harvey, 29, and Maria Novatschkova, 31, will embark on their 10,000-mile adventure from London to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, to raise money for Mongolia’s homeless children on July 24. ”Team Wanderlust” will join some 350 other teams from around the globe in the 2010 Mongol Rally to raise money for the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. Funds raised will support the Blue Skies Ger Village in Mongolia, which houses abandoned or homeless children and provides them with a safe place to live, education, and the support of a family.

When it is all said and done, they will have crossed 18 countries, five mountain ranges, three deserts and the second highest road in the world in a tiny  847cc, 72hp Malaysian Perodua Nippa they affectionally call “Polly.” In case you aren’t impressed yet, I will add that Maria and Nick will be living out of the pint-sized vehicle for the duration of their five-week trip. Without A/C.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Team Wanderlust about their upcoming adventure. Here is what they had to say:

What made you first decide to do this?

Maria was looking for a good cause to volunteer for some time already and then Nick came across information about the rally and thought it sounded like an incredible adventure… something that not many people could say they’ve done. Once we started looking into it and realized that there was a charity aspect to it as well, it really motivated both of us to take part.

How did you hear about the Mongol Rally?

I’m honestly not sure where we first heard about it. Nick had been looking into it now for a few years and decided that right after graduating from business school would be the perfect time, before he started working again. We looked into some other similar rallies such as the Trans-Siberian, which is a very professional rally, and also the Paris/Beijing Rally where you drive a classic car. We settled on the Mongol Rally because being unsupported, it is a lot more adventurous, you can drive any route you want to, and it raises money for a really great charity.

Do you live in the UK?

Maria is based in the UK and has lived there for the last 12 years, although she is Bulgarian and German by nationality. She has travelled a lot of the world as a child with her parents such as to Pakistan, India and Russia, but hasn’t been able to stand still much as an adult either. She came to the UK to study, stayed here and has built a career that has involved a lot of travel and international work.

Nick was born in Philadelphia and raised in the US. He went to Lafayette College in Easton, PA where he earned a BS in Chemical Engineering. After school he went to work for a specialty chemical company which sent him to Yantai, China for a 6 month contract. At the end of the contract he liked it so much that he decided to stay and start a factory with a business partner making small trailers, which he ran for 2.5 years. In 2008, he came to the UK to study his MBA and has now started to work in Copenhagen Denmark.

What do you do career-wise and for fun?

Nick just moved to Copenhagen, Denmark to start a new job with a medical devices company called Radiometer. He is a project leader within their R&D department. As part of his hiring negotiations he took the six weeks off in the middle of the summer to participate in the rally.

Maria is a project manager that specialises on marketing and communications with a focus on digital channels. Amongst others, she has managed projects for the UK National Health System; Transport for London, who control the London Underground, red London buses and black taxis that are the most used transport modes in London; BP Biofuels, which is looking at sustainable energy sources.

Are you quite the adventurists?

We’d like to think so. We’ve both visited the Taj Mahal in India, on separate occasions and we’re planning on hiking to the Annapurna Circuit, a 3 week circular walk through the Himalayas in Nepal. Nick has also backpacked through Thailand, island hopped across the Nusa Tenggara chain in Indonesia to Komodo Island, home of the Komodo Dragon, and been attacked by monkeys in Malaysia.

How do you and Maria know each other?

Her cousin is a classmate of mine at London Business School. We met in late 2008.

Why the Perodua Nippa? Will that be an uncomfortable ride?

After speaking to many of the participants from last year’s rally, we decided to go with the Nippa, which we subsequently called Polly. Though it is one of the smallest cars on the rally and no one has ever heard of it before, it is based on solid Daihatsu engineering and was one of the few cars last year that completed the rally with no mechanical failures. It is designed as a city car for the Malaysian market, but she’s got some pep to her, and though her engine is only 847cc, because she only weighs 675 kg she is quite ‘Nippy’. She is a very basic car though… power nothing and not a very comfortable ride. Once you get past 60 miles per hour, she starts shaking hard enough that you can’t really see anything in the rear view mirror because it’s shaking so much – and that is on paved highway. On dirt track and gravel roads, as much of Asia will be, we’re pretty sure it will be very uncomfortable. She has a top speed of 80 mph and only has 72 horsepower.

Did you buy the car? How did you get it and how/why is it being donated afterwards?

We bought the car over the phone from APT Motors in South West England without ever having seen her in person. We did that because Nippas are not very easy to find, particularly one with such low mileage. Polly the Perodua is a 2001 year old car with only 15,000 miles on her. Nick took the train out on a weekend and drove her back to London.

It is part of the rally that once we arrive in Ulaan Baatar, Polly will be donated to a charity run by the Adventurists called Adventures for Development, Mongolia (AFDM). AFDM will then either sell Polly, donating the proceeds to local charities, or if she’s still in good enough shape, will give her to a local charity in need. Last year, some of the cars were converted into ambulances or other emergency vehicles and given to a regional area in need. The charities or regions can really use the extra money raised by the sold cars, or in some cases the cars are still perfectly usable.

How long will this trip take you?

The plan is to leave England on July 24 and arrive in Ulaan Baatar by August 28, so 35 days or five weeks.

Are you funding it yourself? If not who is?

We have raised £1,350 that go directly to the CNCF charity from friends, family and co-workers. Anyone can donate to CNCF by following the Just Giving link (www.justgiving.com/team-wanderlust-cncf) on our website. That money goes directly to CNCF without ever passing through our hands.

The costs of the actual trip itself, including the car, equipment, food, fuel, etc. we have been entirely funding ourselves, but we are seeking corporate sponsorship to help cover part of these costs. We are more than happy to offer companies advertising space on Polly, our website, any merchandise that they want to give us, and mention in news articles, on a radio show where we will be featuring on a repeated basis throughout our trip, etc.

We hope that newspaper and blog articles such as yours will help raise awareness of the Mongol rally and the great cause it supports and that some individual or corporate sponsors will come forward with donations or products. As everything we take with us will remain in Mongolia and be donated to AFDM, any moneys or products we receive and use on the trip will effectively help the charities and children they support.

How much money do you and Maria hope to raise? Does each team raise money for CNCF?

The Mongol Rally has various official charities that the participants are raising money for (available from their website) and some teams spread the money they want to raise across multiple charities. We chose to support the CNCF because of the work they do with homeless children and children at risk of sex trafficking and child labour.

The minimum amount of donations that we were obliged to raise for the rally and CNCF was £1,000. We set ourselves the goal of £3,000 and we have raised £1,350 so far. For the direct sponsorship money, we are hoping to raise between £5,000-10,000 although any contribution, no matter how small is very welcome.

How much work has gone into preparing for this?

A huge amount. It seem like all we do is talk about ways to approach sponsors for donations or products, fundraising events we can do, modifications that need to be made to Polly. We have driven around to many autoparts shops and car junkyards looking for various spare parts we require. Having a care that is quite rare doesn’t help in this instance.

Some people have been generous and donated equipment such as a tent, fire extinguisher, oil filters, octane booster (to deal with watered down gasoline in some countries), etc. Additionally, Polly will need several modifications to make her sturdy enough to tackle the long journey – we will be installing steel guards under the car to protect vital parts from sharp rocks, our air intake will be raised within the engine compartment so that we can drive through streams and small rivers safely without her drowning. Nick has had to hunt down special reinforced tyres that can cope with the beating we will give them by driving on gravel for thousands of miles.

Maria has been busy setting up our website and raising awareness through online methods. We have quite a substantive following of our website and our facebook page, which we hope will expand as the rally gets going and we start to post both photos and updates from the road.

Are you excited/nervous?

Not a day goes by, where we don’t think or we get told that what we’re doing is crazy, especially now that there are unrests in Kyrgyzstan, but our excitement is mounting. It will surely be an incredible adventure and we’ll have lots of stories to tell and photos to share. Best of all, we’re doing it for a good cause which really makes a difference in so many lives. For more details about what donations can do, please read our blog posts on our website.

How do you plan to pass the time?

Polly doesn’t have a radio or A/C. We currently cool off by rolling down the windows, but one of the most important things we are adding is a radio. We plan on listening to lots of music, quite a few books on tape, and lectures from the TED series. When we’re not driving, we will set up our tent on the Mongolian step, trying to avoid too many encounters with indigenous wildlife or go on the hunt for food, which will be an adventure in itself, since Maria is a strict vegetarian. We’re also hoping to take as many pictures as our portable hard drive (which we would love donated) can take and meeting some interesting cultures and people along the way.

Any destinations/sightseeing you plan to do?

We would like to stop along the way to see some of the places we’ll pass through, although our schedule doesn’t really allow for much of that. In order to complete the rally within the five weeks, we will need to average 300 miles per day; a long drive on tarmac, but tough on dirt roads in a car the size of a thimble. Nature will be our sightseeing, with some spectacular views of the Black and Caspian Seas, the Pamir Highway and the Gobi desert to name but a few.

What happens when you reach Mongolia?

The Adventurists have arranged a big party at the finish line on the 28th August. After recovering from these celebrations, nick will fly back to Denmark and to his job, while Maria is planning on visiting her family in Bulgaria.

What do you hope to get out of this?

Aside from the views, the donations raised for CNCF, the trip itself and actually making it, we are looking forward to meeting people in places that we’ve never seen and where we’d have otherwise never gone to. We would love to be invited into a Ger in Mongolia by a herding family to share Yak butter tea with them.

However, in all of the places we’ve visited, we’ve learned that deep down people are all the same – we all have hopes, dreams, and worries. Sometimes it’s not until you get out of your own comfort zone and immerse yourselves in the lives and realities of other cultures that you really understand this.

This is why we’re hoping that our contribution will make a difference for CNCF and the lives of the Mongolian children it supports and we look forward to visiting CNCF and their Blue Skies Ger Village to see the work they do.

Anything else?

We would love to raise enough awareness of the rally and CNCF to reach our donations goal. If this blog post has moved you to donate to the charity, please use the donate button on our website. Every donation, no matter how small, makes a difference for the children of Mongolia.

Of course, if instead you or anyone you know might be interested in providing corporate sponsorship, we would be very happy to send you more information about the rally and what the advantages of sponsoring are for you and your business. Please email us at teamwanderlust2010@gmail.com.

Finally, we would love for as many people as possible to subscribe to our newsletter feed through our website and the Mailchimp button. This will keep everyone up to date with how our trip is going and what we’re experiencing along the way.

Adventurists Prepare for 10,000 Mile Road Race to Benefit Homeless Kids in Mongolia is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains the Caffeine Update (which has FINALLY and COMPLETELY live) in this interview with Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced. A synopsis of how Google indexes documents via Caffeine is also posted on Google’s official blog.

Google Explains the Caffeine Update is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

University of Essex Throws Away Undisclosed Amount of Research Dollars in Attempt to Determine if Top Gamers are as Fit as Pro Athletes

A recent study conducted by the University of Essex compared top gamers’ psychological and physical health to that of professional athletes. It concluded that while the “mental sharpness and psychological health of the “cyber-sportsmen” was similar to that of the “real” athletes, their fitness levels were shockingly low. The study cites the example of a leading gamer in his twenties who had a slim, athletic physique yet had the lung function and aerobic fitness of a heavy smoker in his sixties.

Dr. Micklewright, who authored the study, blamed the gamer’s poor physical health on the gaming lifestyle of spending 10 hours a day in front of a computer.

”Someone of this age should be much fitter, but perhaps this is the occupational hazard of the professional gamer who can spend around 10 hours a day in front of a screen,” Micklewright said. ”It is always difficult to say how these things will develop, but it could have long term health implications such as an increased risk of heart disease.

Micklewright went on to explain that while gaming shares some characteristics with sports such as being competitive, skill-based, and governed by structured rules, the fact that video gaming does not require physical exertion precludes it from being a bonafide sport.

Really, Sherlock? A university poured coveted research dollars into a study to prove that video gaming is not a sport in the way that basketball, soccer, running and volleyball are? What is the world coming to? And how, do pray tell, did this study get funded?

First, it is ridiculous to compare professional gamers to elite professional athletes. I do not feel the need to explain why. Second, the study did not mention professional gamers who spend 10 hours in front of the computer and then put in an intense two-hour workout. There was no mention of professional gamers who run marathons or compete in other sports. The study assumes that all these poor geeks do is play video games, period. And that being a gamer precludes their participation in any sort of athletic endeavor, or even hitting up the local rec center a few times a week. Ugh. And I thought science wasn’t my thing.

Professional Video Gamers’ Bodies Comparable to 60-Year-Old Chain Smokers, Study Says is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Cover bands are typically lame, but Pomplamoose is different. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is the first cover band I have ever liked. Ever. And now they are one of my favorite musical duos of all time.

Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn formed this Indie duo almost two years ago in San Francisco, showcasing their work almost exclusively on YouTube through a medium they have dubbed VideoSongs. They are, in fact, the reason I now have a personal YouTube account.

“There’s no hidden sounds, there’s no lip-synching, there’s no overdubbing. What you see is what you hear,” is how Conte described VideoSongs in a recent interview with NPR about how Pomplamoose is making a living on YouTube. “Sometimes, there might be two or three Natalys harmonizing with herself, and then you’ll see those three videos juxtaposed together on the screen.”

Their totally unpretentious homespun VideoSongs feature them playing a gajillion different instruments (including a xylophone, drums, and piano), goofing off in a good way,  dancing around their living room and, most of all, putting their own musical spin on the motley assortment of pop songs they cover. And when I say motley, I mean just that. Their YouTube channel features them working their mojo on everything from Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” to the Chordette’s “Mr. Sandman.”  They also have some songs from “The Sound of Music” and a couple Michael Jackson covers.

Mostly, though, they cover the kind of pop songs you hear on mainstream radio. The kind I love to hate. Until Pomplamoose works its magic on them. For example, I never thought I would be able to tolerate, much less actually enjoy listening to a Lady Gaga song. These days, however, I often catch myself throughout the day humming her hit single “Telephone” thanks to Pomplamoose. (No really, thank you, Pomplamoose. I love your  cover of “Telephone”! Lady Gaga’s version, however, still makes me nauseous. Go figure.)

Instead of gushing on and on about this couple’s music (yes, they are romantically involved … according to YouTube comments), the best way I can describe what makes Pomplamoose so special is to tell you where you can judge their work for yourself. Here’s where you can get the good stuff:

Pomplamoose’s VideoSongs on YouTube

Download Free Pomplamoose Singles from Myspace

Buy Pomplamoose’s Music and Fan Gear Direct from the Source – Cut Out the Middleman!

Buy Pomplamoose’s New Album on iTunes

Check Pomplamoose and let me know what you think!

P.S. Special thanks to my coworker Andrew Alford for filling me in on Pomplamoose.

P.P.S. Pomplamoose means “grapefruit” in French.

Follow Friday: Pomplamoose, YouTube’s Best Cover Band Ever is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

The next time you need to turn that frown upside down, consider visiting these sites. If at least one of them doesn’t bring a smile to your mug, well, there’s just something wrong with you.

The Daily Puppy – Bookmark this site now so that the next time you are about to have a meltdown at work, you can get an instant warm and fuzzy feeling. There’s just something about looking into a puppy’s little face that puts everything in perspective. I bet this site has saved several computer screens from being thrown through office windows. Yes, it is that awesome. Check it out.

INCREDIBOX – This site lets you direct your own beatbox or  a capella band. ‘Nuff said.

Gabor’s Positive Thoughts – ReMail founder Gabor Ceselle’s blog of inspirational quotes and quirky photos. Check out his snapshots of possible Halloween costumes, including a very realistic banana costume. With quotes written by quintessential idealists like this, you’ll either love this blog or it will make you want to hurl:

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, while an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

JacksonPollock.org – Virtual art therapy. Don’t read the instructions on how to create your masterpiece on this site, just go crazy with your keyboard and mouse. You’ll feel better for it, trust me.

Read Print – Need a good read but too lazy to go to the library? I hear ya. Choose from over 8,000 books on Read Print plus plays, poems, and short stories. This site is especially excellent for classic enthusiasts. And cheapskates minimalists like me, who would rather borrow a book than buy own. Having moved one two many times, I personally have gotten over the desire to build my personal library, complete with two-story oak shelving and ladders. Boxes of books are really heavy, you know.

Follow Friday: Where to Get Your Puppy Fix & Other Online Smile-Generators is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

I have a confession. Early this month I blogged about how I had cleaned up my Firefox  toolbar, insinuating that I only needed three primary browser extensions in my SEO tool kit. At the time I wrote this, this was true. I swear.

Less than a week after publishing “Is your SEO tool kit getting a little heavy?”, however, I discovered a forth power tool that I simply cannot live work without: SEO Site Tools. Developed by Carter Cole, this is a killer SEO extension for Chrome, not Firefox. That’s right – I have completely broken my personal rule of keeping all of my SEO, dev, and design tool extensions exclusively in Firefox. Up until this point, this has worked exceptionally well. When working, I do my heavy lifting over in Firefox and then pop over to Chrome when I need a huge browser window not impeded by a tricked-out tool bar. Keeping SEO plugins out of my Chrome installations has also kept this super-fast browser running well, super-fast.

When I stumbled across SEO Site Tools, however, I knew things had to change. Take a look at what it does (in a single extension) and you’ll see why I caved:

First of all, you do not have to sacrifice one pixel of space in my browser window in order to install this extension. As you can see from the screen shot, you can select SEO Site Tools from a drop-down list. The icon in the drop-down list also displays either PageRank, mozRank or mozAuthority of the current page you are viewing, depending on how you configure this extension to suit your preferences.

Here is a sample of the at-a-glance metrics SEO Site Tools provides  for Google, Bing, and Yahoo:

• PageRank
• Date page last cached
• Number of indexed pages
• Number of unique visitors
• Average number of visits per user
• Number of page views
• Average time on site

This tool also provides external data from:

• Alexa (including a traffic graph!)
• Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool (provides the most important link metrics from both)
• Dmoz
• Majestic SEO
• Quantcast
• SEMRush

You also get all the standard on-page information, too (meta tags, etc.). To be honest, there is nothing really outstanding in this section of the tool. However, I really like the fact that the number of external and external do-follow links is easy to find and add up in the interface of SEO Site Tools. Very handy. This information is in most other SEO extensions for browsers that I’ve used, but is always buried deeper into the tool’s interface. AND it also provides a cute little pie chart that shows the proportion of external to internal links on the page. I also like that this tool include important header information.

My favorite aspect of SEO Site Tools, however, is the social media data it collects. It not only shows how many times a particular URL was featured in a tweet, but it shows the tweets themselves along with their shortened URLs and the number of TweetMeMe comments related to the URL. 

It also shows reaction 0n Facebook (including shares and comments), Digg, del.icio.us, Google Buzz, and reddit.com.

Other tricks SEO Tools performs includes:

• Extracting targeted keyword terms and alt-tags with the touch of a button
• Running a page load speed test
• Examining anchor text
• Breaking down visitor screen sizes by percentage
• Showing basic server and domain information
• Providing links to the keyword research tools such as Google SKTools and Google Search Insights
• Numbering the first 100 results in the SERPs for a search query, and showing the PageRank of each results

If you try this extension out for yourself (or have already done so), I’d love to hear your own take on it. I am also very interested in hearing what other SEO extensions for Chrome ya’ll have used.

Why I Couldn’t Resist Adding SEO Site Tools to Chrome is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Do you know what Africa’s biggest killer is? Nope, it’s not HIV. Until last night, that’s what I thought. It’s malaria.

Yeah, malaria, that disease that no longer exists in the Western world. However, if you have the bad fortune to be born in sub-Saharan Africa, you are well-acquainted with what is one of the world’s oldest diseases. Because it has likely killed people you love. Like your four-year-old siter. Your baby. Or both of your parents.

This disease is transmitted to humans by mosquitos bites. When a mosquito infected with malaria bites a human, the parasite carried by the mosquito enters the bloodstream and causes fever, headaches and other nasty flu-like symptoms. If caught early, a 10 cent pill can stop malaria in its tracts. If left untreated, it can lead first coma and then death.

Despite the fact that malaria is very preventable and treatable, more than 400 million people are infected with it each year. About a quarter of those infections result in fatalities, with 90% of malaria deaths occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. 75% of deaths resulting from malaria are children.

I could go on and on reciting the horrifying statistics I learned last night at a screening of When the Night Comes, Invisible Children founder Bobby Bailey’s documentary about malaria’s deadly impact on African, including his personal friends in Uganda. However, I think I’ve given you enough information to realize what an absurdity it is that a disease that is preventable and treatable is causing so much misery. Can we agree on that?

Good. Now let’s talk about some organizations that are actually doing something about this unnecessary tragedy. Like Ten Thousand Nets, the organization that organized the screening I saw last night. Ten Thousand Nets is a Denver-based campaign focused on putting malaria firmly where it belongs: in the history books. As their name implies, they are trying to raise enough funds to send 10,000 bed nets to Africa. Because one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of malaria is a $10 bed net that has been treated with insecticide. One bed net can protect up to four children sleeping under it.

Only two weeks ago into the campaign, Ten Thousand Nets has raised enough money for 2,000 nets, which means 2,000 to 8,000 people will be able to sleep better at night knowing that they are not going to wake up with a mosquito bite that ends up killing them. So they are doing a pretty good job I’d say. At the very least, they’ve knocked me out of my fog! They also have some pretty awesome partners, including Bono’s ONE Campaign, Malaria No More, and The Church in Denver. I definitely recommending following all of these organizations, it being Follow Friday and all.

If you would like to purchase a mosquito net for Ten Thousand Nets, text “DENVER” to 85944 and $10 will be added to your mobile phone bill. You don’t have to live in Denver to donate via text, either.

Other “do-follow” organizations fighting malaria

• Nets for Life
• Bite Back
• Imagine No Malaria
• Nothing But Nets

Follow Friday: Ten Thousand Nets & Other Organizations Dedicated to Stopping Africa’s Biggest Killer is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

According to news reports, Facebook called a company-wide meeting today to discuss its privacy polices. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Facebook’s meeting on privacy issues is a result of a growing number of Facebook users who have become alarmed alarmed by the company’s casual attitude towards protecting user information.

As a result, the ACLU is asking Facebook users to sign a petition to give users more control over their personal information. The ACLU’s petition to Facebook asks Facebook to give users control over all the information they share on Facebook, including “connections,” to protect user information by default, and to et users choose who can see any part of their information. In recent months, the social networking mega-site has taken away some privacy controls altogether from users, and has made other information public by default.

The ACLU is also petitioning Facebook to not share user information with any third party without a user’s “express opt-in consent.” Facebook recently opted users into a beta program that shared user information with third parties by default. Many users did not know that they were sharing their information with other websites, and it’s my guess that the majority of Facebook users that were automatically enrolled in this program still don’t know that their information is leaving the walls of Facebook.

I am going to sign the petition myself. I am all for Facebook being allowed to monetize itself, but not at the cost of tricking the average user into handing over their personal information. As the ACLU stated in the email it sent out to users today, “the less control you have over your own personal information, the more likely that information could end up in the wrong hands—including the government’s.”

The ACLU and Google are not the only organizations freaking out (and rightly so) about Facebook’s recent disrespect for the privacy of its users. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other consumer groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook. This week, a European Union group slammed Facebook publicly.

Please join me in signing the petition.

I do not want Facebook to go away. It has enriched my relationships with friends around the world and even acted as a catalyst for forming some new friendships. And until recently, my entire family stayed in touch on Facebook. We were able to interact with each other multiple times a day despite being flung across every time zone in the US. Previous to Facebook, that was impossible.

At Facebook’s F8 Conference held April 21, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said his company was “building a web where the default is social,” explaining the new information-sharing features rolled out that day, including Open Graph. Not long after, Google engineers starting closing or deactivating their Facebook accounts in drove. I wonder if Zuckerberg is not concerned for his own privacy, having opened up almost all of his Facebook profile for the entire world to see. While I commend him for walking his talk – subjecting his personal information to the same risks that many unaware Facebook users are now facing – I really want to know if Zuckerberg, who turns 26 tomorrow, has ever read George Orwell’s book 1984. Having come of age in the era of over sharing, many of my 20-something friends don’t understand what all the fuss about. After all, they don’t have anything to hide. Their lives are open books. Like Orwell’s characters in 1984 who had become enslaved to the government, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

For those of us who are awake, let’s show Facebook some tough love. Let’s tell Facebook we care about it, and therefore am concerned that it is completely out of control. Stop manipulating innocent user’s personal information, Facebook, and we will keep sharing our lives (with those we choose to) on your site. Refuse to respect our personal boundaries, however, and we are cutting you off.

If Orwell’s 1984 Scared the Hell Out of You, Please Sign the ACLU’s Petition Against Facebook is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Blackbird Pie is the newest Twitter tool to be released. The tool (or toy, depending on how you look at it) is simple enough to use. To test it out, I found a witty tweet by my tweep Alex Friedman, a quirky online marketer and comedian here in Denver who tweets a lot about the giant tin ball she is building in her office. Normally, if I wanted to embed a tweet in a blog post I would take a screen shot like the one below and save it to my desktop, then upload it to the media library in Wordpress and insert it into my blog post (which is exactly what I did to embed the tweet below into this post.) The process takes somewhere around five minutes, depending on how much coffee I’ve had.

To test Blackbird Pie, I copied the URL of Alex’s tweet and then pasted it into Blackbird Pie’s form field. After clicking the “Bake It” button, I was presented with a block of html code and a preview of what Alex’s tweet would look like once I baked it into my blog. The preview looked really promising, so I got pretty excited.

But I shouldn’t have. When I pasted the code into the html editor of this blog, which runs on Wordpress and Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme, this is what I got:

Yeah … it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but it did include links back to the actual tweet as well as Alex’s full Twitter stream.  To be fair, the developer puts several warnings on her site that Blackbird Pie is an experiment in beta testing. @RobinSloan of Twitter Media even goes as far to see that you are welcome to use Blackbird Pie, “but only at your own risk” LOL. To be even more fair, I should admit that I have 0nly tested  Blackbird Pie on Wordpress blogs running the Thesis theme and didn’t put much effort into trying to style it. Actually, all I did was copy and paste the Blackbird Pie-generated code into my post. With a little time and effort, I might be able to clean the Tweet’s styling up. But that would be a lot more work than embedding a screenshot into a post.

Blackbird Pie is a great idea, it just isn’t fully baked … yet, that is. I am looking forward to future releases that render prettier versions of the originally tweets across multiple platforms (including Wordpress with the Thesis theme). And I’m definitely going to start following @RobinSloan’s tweets so I can be one of the first to know about the next release.

New Twitter Tool Blackbird Pie Leaves Tweets Half-Baked is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

These days, we are fortunate to have a huge variety of SEO tools to make our work easier & more efficient. Since so many of these tools are free, however, it is easy to clutter up your browser with many more tools than you actually need. I recently decided to clean up Firefox on my machines, which was overloaded with so many tools I often found myself opening and closing the toolbars all day long. They had become so cluttered with SEO tools that I was not able to get a decent view of a web page when they were opened, especially on my laptops. I feel a little less crazy and a bit more efficient now that I have lightened up Firefox’s SEO tool belt. And Firefox is even running a bit faster, which is an added bonus.

Here’s what I kept in my SEO tool belt for the Firefox browser:

SEO for Firefox

When you turn this baby on and do a search query, you can instantly pull up a ton of metrics on each site listed in the SERPS — right there in the SERPS. The data you can view for each listing simultaneously includes Google PageRank, site age, total number of backlinks according to Yahoo, total number of .edu and .gov links, number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Alexa ranking, number of Bloglines subscriptions, how many pages are indexed in Google, whether or not a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ, and a link to WhoIs data. You can also view number of Diggs, stumbles, tweets, Technorati mentions, a link to Google Trends data as well as Majestic SEO, Wikipedia mentions, Best of the Web inclusion, and rankings in Yahoo and Google.

Another great feature of SEO for Firefox is its X-ray tool, which allows you to see if a page has basic on-page SEO components in place such as titles, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and alt-image text. It also has a useful option to highlight nofollow links (see below).

The only thing that I don’t like about SEO for Firefox is that you now have to register with SEOBook in order to download it. And each time you download it onto a new machine, you must go to SEOBook and ask them to email you a link to the download. Still, with all the features you get get (for free, at that), it’s worth the bit of extra trouble.

Firebug, Yahoo! YSlow & Google Page Speed

I use Firebug to inspect source code without having to open a new window and diagnose scripting errors. It also has several great add-ons. The ones I have decided to keep are Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed, which, as their names imply, measure page load speed. But what’s really awesome about these tools is that they not only tell you how fast your page loads, but they grade it based on how well it is optimized for loading and give you suggestions for improving your page load time (e.g., enabling compression).

You might be wondering why I decided to keep two different tools for measuring page speed in my SEO tool kit. The answer is, frankly, I couldn’t choose which one to give the boot. They basically do the same thing, but each one gives slightly different results and has a few unique features. It also is interesting when the results are pretty far apart, such as the tests I recently ran for The Huffington Post’s home page (see below).

YSlow gave The Huff Post a grade of “E” due to too many http requests, lack of a content delivery network, missing expires headers, non-compressed pages, too many DNS lookups, and multiple javascript and CSS files. YSlow did give The Huff high points for calling CSS from the top of the page and javascript from the bottom, avoiding URL redirects, making ajax cacheable, avoiding 404s, using cookie-free domains, and using GET for ajax requests.

YSlow gave The Huff a much higher score, 79 out of 100. Note that YSlow gave The Huff points for some of the same data points that Google Pagespeed docked points for. This is why I need both tools!

Aside from SEO, I also use Firebug frequently for design-related purposes such as previewing CSS changes in Firefox. I also do this for Chrome. Firebug for Chrome isn’t quite as robust as the Firefox version, but is still an amazing tool.

mozBar

I use the paid version of SEOmoz’s mozBar. If you want to try it out, however, the free version is pretty darn useful as well. Here’s what the mozBar toolbar looks like on my Firefox for Mac:

Here’s closeup shot of the most helpful features on the toolbar:

The mozBar gives me quick access to a URL’s Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozRank for the page, mozTrust for the domain, and the number of URLs and domains linking to the URL. And if I want in-depth information, there is a handy link on the toolbar that will pull up more Linkscape metrics for me. There are also shortcuts to the other tools I often access at SEOmoz, including Trifecta, Open Site Explorer,  and the Keyword Difficulty Tool, as well as the Pro Q&A forum where I go when I cannot find a solution to my SEO debacle anywhere else. There are also a lot of other shortcuts that I don’t use, such as one to SEOmoz videos. If I want to see a video, I just pop on over to the SEOmoz site. For some reason, though, having shortcuts to my favorite SEOmoz tools is quite useful.

Some other groovy things the mozBar does is show me on-page SEO factors without having to dig into the source code, and evaluate the link profiles of all the URLs in a SERP. There is also a three-part page overlay feature (see below).

That’s it, folks. These are the SEO tools I have at my fingertips at all times. Streamlining my Firefox plugins has made them even more accessible than they were before when the browser was cluttered by a lot of tools I rarely used.

What about you, is your SEO tool belt sagging a bit? Or have you recently given it a makeover? I’d love to hear what SEO tools are most essential to your daily work.

Is Your SEO Tool Belt Getting a Little Heavy? is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.