Hello World! LTNS.

Today I am going to hook you designers up with some links to sites that make the blocking of your content easier and faster. Traditionally we all use Lorem from to demonstrate text appearances in almost any design, But it seems that with a lot of clients, in my experience, if you show them Lorem, they think you are replacing their content with gibberish. In a way, that is true. Since most clients wait till the last possible second to get you content (which is backwards but that is for another post) using generated text for blocking is the sort of standard in our industry. But they always try to read it.

Where does this come from

Like most things in the web design world, the usage of Lorem and its creation comes from print.

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin.

–wikipedia

So if we are going to use this archaic method for dummy text placement, does it all have to be the same? Not at all.

I submit to you these Four Fine websites that will help you generate text and amuse your clients while you do it.

For the Thug in You check out GANGSTA LOREM IPSUM
Although the site doesn’t work very well, the concept is amazing and I hope that this concept of meme-ing the lorem with other english coloquial dialects.

For the Literate check out FILLERATI
This is really a fascinating generator that pulls sentences words paragraphs and lists from books that are public domain such as A Princess of Mars.

For the Adventurer check out MALEVOLE
This simple generator is both humble and a surprise with what seems to be lines and lines of text all slapped into a single box from the mind of the author perhaps.

For the Company Man check out CORPORATE IPSUM
Sadly this widget is only for the mac owner but the concept is fetching an unique enough that you may not be going to far.

Let me know if you have some other great generators!

Best,

Zach

The catalyst a short trip to cssmania.com for some clever inspiration led me to Mr. Dan Klammer’s personal portfolio http://danklammer.com/, which is captivating in its own right. After a couple of usual poking around examinations I really started to look at his site. Read content, see social icons, etc, and discovered a little link to 8tracks.com or more specifically to a mix he had posted on 8tracks. The mix was great and his followers also had profoundly good taste in music and so I proceded to listen to their work and made an account for myself.

Someone out there is snidely thinking, “Good job grandpa, you finally made into the mixtape digital age.” Shut your food hole mouth breather.

I really truly love this site, if for no other reason that its elegantly simple and utterly usable interface allows me to take the art nerd passion of Rob Gordon and share it with friends and family. The selfless nature of making things for other people (like mixtapes) is a great exercise and it can turn you on to all sorts of great artistry that you didn’t know was there.

Thank you internet for making me believe in the mystery and magic of information, again.

Best, Z

There seems to be something deliberate and deceptive about our culture. I love the idea of accidental replication but this is really not one of those cases.

It’s been a while since I have spoken to you my faceless friend (the internet) about much of anything and while I am preparing a post about a couple of recently launched projects that I am quite fond of I would like to quickly catalog something that I found quite interesting. ANAMANAGUCHI which is ironic in its name and production. An 8bit alt-rock group of electric leanings that is apparently quite popular throughout the gamer scene (of which I keep some loose ties with) and actually produces audio landscapes that hearken back to happier times in my somewhat cloudy childhood.

I remember all of the sights, sounds and smells of original NES getting opened with uncontrolled excitement on my 9th Birthday. The cold winter seemed a bit warmer as I traversed the caverns of Metroid and shot flying ducks from the projected skyline. The audio scape of the 90′s in its 8bit and 16bit forms are still fixed in my mind as prime examples of what is possible given available technology and true musical artistry.

ANAMANAGUCHI seems to have a real grasp of both the nostalgia and the sophistication of how to use it. Their site ain’t half bad either. Check em out here

Freelancers, Artists, Designers and Developers can all agree that the hardest thing to deal with coming out of an Agency environment is how to begin growing your lead or customer base. Word of mouth and connections through friends are usually the first thing that we establish because we are looking for what is familiar. Agencies have an old business ethic that teaches us to treat our clients like transactions, to quote a new friend of mine, and that very thinking is what has destroyed many companies in our country.

What is the first human agreement? It is the relationship.

What creates the need to be ethically and morally fair with your friends, family and customers? Knowing them, empathizing with them.

I would like to present a theory for making connections. Make friends.

Outgoing doesn’t mean “life of the party”

When I say that you need to make friends and allies to attract honest opportunities, I don’t mean you need to be the king of the keg to win people’s affection. I simply mean that you should first pursue groups that are in the same field and dedicate time every month to trying some of these meetups out and seeing if there is a group of people that you identify with.

If you like a particular type of software like Drupal or WordPress it is quite possible that you can find a user group in your area filled with other people who are interested in either teaching you how to work with the software or possibly work with you.

In Denver DBUG is a place to start or you can peruse the MeetUP website.

Chambers of commerce

Another fantastic resource are small local city chambers of commerce, the reason for going for the local groups will be the familiarity you get with the group that you are apart of. Being in a room with 20 people from other fields that want to talk to you and get to know hwo you are and how you work in the community is great way to not only make friends but find resources that you may also need.

Of course with COC the bar for entry is always cash but, in a smaller city or a suburb of the nearest large city there are plenty of inexpensive and fruitful places to meet other professionals.

Call on your heros

The other thing you can do is email people whom you hold in high regard as professionals or perhaps as role models in your field. I recently emailed craigmod of the Tokyo Art Space and Link Spice fame. He was nice enough to answer some questions that I had about a particular market and took the time to give insight to an area that I had been exploring.

Whenever you email someone that you are a fan of it can be rather strange, like sending fan mail to a musician that you enjoy, the results can really change your perception of them or what you found engaging about them.

I have been met with my own fair share of experiences where the image in my mind was better than the real thing. It will happen. But you have to remember that if someone you respect isn’t gracious with you it’s either because:

1. They are really busy and cannot afford the time for idle chatter OR
2. They are pretentious dicks!

Look for the humanity and feed your creativity from this. Then, you will be the greatest artist in the world!

Sincerely Your Pal,

Zach Attack Meyer
ps. I am sorry if I have every been a dick to you. call me.

A godfather to the ideas of digital communication and information surfing is Marshall McLuhan. While I was studying communications in college I found myself totally enthralled by McLuhan’s book “The Medium is The Mesage.” After watching him debate other intellectuals of his time it was clear that his premise would be an important thing to review and study as someone who wants to communicate online.

The idea that my words, images, videos and websites would become a medium by which others learn and interact with me would be something that McLuhan would adopt if he were alive today. It’s amazing to think that McLuhan advocated TV’s in the class room and discussed the idea that in a few years books would be an antiquated form of research and reference because visual learning is so much faster and effective. I personally don’t think that we will ever eliminate books as a form of communication or record keeping. The instability of digital memory is far to great to ever totally eliminate paper records of information.

Reading this book is a good way for designers and developers to get an honest idea of what this communication medium should be doing.

Let me know what you think,

Zach “attack” Meyer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

I believe the car industry tried this trick a while back, and we all know what rave reviews the Taurus received–that’s right consumers, you are all going to pay us to be our beta testers. Long gone are the full years between upgrade. Seems like every January you have the latest release of some awful thing. The software industry appears to be taking business tactics from the music industry, with regards to the timeliness of hot new models being shoved into the public’s face.

Maybe you’re different than I am, but I really don’t want a product, be it hard- or software, that is going to fuck with me for six months before it does what it was supposed to do from the beginning. I’m a “late adopter” for this very reason and, even then, disaster can strike. Enter the latest streak of operating system releases from the leading monopolies.

Snow Leopard is here, and well, I have heard some really great things about the “upgrade” but, for the most part, I am sure there will be kinks to work out, as with any new framework that gets released. Apple’s track record for releasing less buggy OS has been good so far and long gone are the memories of the first incarnation of OSX. But those of us who know better, will wait to upgrade until we get the OS bundled with our new hardware.

Windows 7 likewise, will be released well before the eve of Vista’s third year in the public domain. And due to its fantastic approach of alienating and frustrating users by not having drivers available at launch I am sure that the masses are unlikely to leap all over Bill Gates’ Ken doll luggage.

I think it’s safe to say that anyone would wait for real upgrades. Real honest to goodness changes, improvements and stability bought and paid for by us. Here is the issue I see, with all the tech industry lazily launching whatever they feel is sell able to a public that is so easily distracted by the reputation of brand, there is no real backlash against inferior products. We need to stop buying from these jackasses till they get their act in line. Sony has learned from their mistakes and at least attempt to hold some kind of ethics level with their products.

Lets hope that our consumer future shows a bit more competition and a bit less wang.

Special thanks to the genius at the rantpuppets.com for these little gems of wisdom.

To get a hold of this immaculate little trailer please make your way to the back side of Flynnlives

(if you have link troubles http://www.flynnlives.com/media/video/0xendgame.aspx )

Design-wise it is already really breathtaking ( I THINK ) but to top all of this off, Daft Punk is doing the soundtrack and  Joseph Kosinski is directing the picture. You may remember him from the Gears of War and GOW2 tv campaigns as well as several car commercials. His style reminds me of a less creepy Chris Cunningham, clean, futuristic, ambitious and engaging.

I also decided to put together a little Screen Art for you to download and hopefully use

Hope you like it,

Zach “TRON GEEK” Meyer

All original imagery is the property of Disney.

Obtaining and maintaining rankings in the search engines starts with writing people friendly and therefore search engine friendly content – and writing your content should always start with keyword research.

Keyword research itself isn’t technically a difficult thing to do, but it does take some practice to earn your chops. When starting, you’re basically looking for 3 general criteria:

1. What keywords are most relevant to your offering, without being too specific? (don’t overlook too much at this point)
2. What keywords have the most search demand in your industry? (usually displayed in projected daily, monthly or yearly volumes)
3. What is the level of competition likely to be for these keywords? In other words, how easy is it going to be to rank (organically) for these keywords?

There are certainly other things to consider like, what keywords are currently driving traffic to your site, if you have an existing site with access to such analytical data. But for this article, we’ll assume you’re just starting off.

Compile A Rough Keyword List

To get started I always recommend using a keyword research tool. Today there are many free high-quality keyword research tools to use. Just a couple years ago, it was better to subscribe to a keyword program such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. And while these two programs are still well worth the subscription prices today, the free web tools of today are considerably more detailed and a good place to start. This is because many of them are coming from the major search engines themselves. My personal favorites include:

After using some of the above tools to compile your list, you may notice you don’t really have a clear picture of the competitive landscape for your keywords. Who is the competition? Even if you’re using a paid tool such as Keyword Discovery, or the SEO toolbar, you may feel confused about how to interpret the data. Try asking yourself one question: What are the top ten websites in my industry that rank well?

To help you answer this question, start typing into the search engines the following search parameters. (Replace “keyword” with what you have determined to be your top keywords according to search demand):

• allintitle:keyword (keyword occurrence in the title of the search result)
• allinanchor:keyword (keyword occurrence in the links to the search result)
• allinurl:keyword (keyword occurrence in the URL of the search result)
• allintext:keyword (keyword occurrence in the text of the search result)

Doing the above should help you get a clear idea of the competition that is applying particular SEO tactics to achieve rankings. Try matching the keywords on your list to specific competitors who rank well for them. Doing this should also give you a better idea of what keywords the competition may not be targeting.

You might realize the competition is scarce and/or sporadic. This doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t strong competition for your industry, it may just mean the competition isn’t applying certain SEO tactics very efficiently and this will be something you can take advantage of. On the other hand, if you find a website or two that is clearly in control of the search engine result pages (SERPs), then you should note this on your list as well. Then you’ll want to analyze their website further to see what additional keywords they may be targeting which aren’t on your list.

Organize Your Keyword List

After identifying your keywords using the criteria and tools above, my advice is to then create separate buckets targeting both the keywords you wish to achieve rankings for in the short term (defined by search volume and competition), and the keywords you wish to achieve rankings for in the long term.

In general, there are two “types” of keywords to take note of:

1. short-tail keywords – keyphrases that are single to three words long. Depending on your market, these will typically go into the long-term bucket.
2. long-tail keywords – keyphrases that are four or more words long. Go ahead and place these into your short-term bucket.

Why should you separate these?

There are a couple reasons why. First of all, it’s important to understand what you realistically will and will not rank for immediately. Again, depending on the competition in the SERPs and depending on the content you write, your goal is to get the most traffic you can from the search engines as quickly as possible. Therefore you always want to try to identify the less competitive keywords to target immediately. Secondly, your list of long-tail keywords is likely to deliver topic ideas when it comes time to write content.

One of the best representations I’ve seen that describes the relationship of short-tail and long-tail keywords as they relate to obtaining targeted organic search engine traffic is the following :

As you can see, the best opportunity to maximize potential ROI is to focus on key-phrases 3-4 words long. However, if you are not relying on ROI as one of your key performance indicators (most people are), then you’ll still want to analyze your targeted traffic potential based on the length of the key phrases and how much time it’s potentially going to take to rank well for all of your keywords.

Once you’ve determined all of the above, you should have a pretty good idea of what keywords you should start targeting in your content. look for common themes as you go through your keyword list(s). Chances are, people are looking for the same thing, but saying it in different ways. Semantics can sometimes play a key role in determining what keywords to target. For example, differentiating between using the term lawyer vs attorney – even though they have the same meaning, they may show different results in the SERPs. Also, be careful with accidentally assuming intent. If someone is searching online for “tax help”, this may mean they need tax preparation help, or it could mean they need tax debt help – two completely different services and therefore the traffic would not be as targeted.

Like I said, keyword research is not technically difficult, but it does take a little time to develop a system. Without doing keyword research, you may start targeting keywords with little or no demand. And even though you may obtain good rankings for these keywords, these rankings may not be driving nearly as much targeted traffic as they could. But if you use the tools above and start analyzing your keywords systematically, you should start to see your content begin to form that is both people and search engine friendly.

Happy Rankings. Joynt