Meet Coder Barbie

What do you think of the newest Barbie? My favourite barbie had a reversible outfit - by day she wore a pink swede power suit and by night she had a sequent bustier and disco skirt.

I'd expect a woman in tech to have a multi-use outfit and nerd tools that would make MacGyver jealous.

Over half a million votes were cast to decide Barbie’s newest career. But even though Computer Engineer Barbie was developed in consultation with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering, the new doll’s appearance has sparked controversy.

Read more about this at Mashable.

Optimise All Content

If you had asked me a few years ago if I saw myself working in online marketing or SEO strategy I'd think you were bent - but here I am, in a role I never imagined for myself. I always thought I'd be working in some role that focused on the user experience. Coming from a forum and moderator background - being in the "trenches" is where I've always loved being. I think it's a great job to interact with people, find out what interests them and what they like and dislike about the platform or website content - and then working with the team that makes it the best user experience possible.

I assumed online marketing was just an old practice in a new media. Sometimes online marketing is a little like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I'm not a huge fan of AdWords and banner advertising - I think it's lazy to be honest and generally ineffective.

I guess because of my background and personality I want to create an experience for people online. I want interactive, fun, and if possible- inspiring capabilities that result in people having a good experience. To me, my job is about making it easy for the right audience to find the right content. That doesn't always mean a website- hence, AdWords and Banner Ads aren't always the right fit. Video is a great tool for just about any brand.

A great example comes from a post by a brilliant guy named Ian Lurie.

One innocent Tweet and everyone went nuts. Sheesh.

The YouTube Video Optimization session at SMX West today kicked butt. Out of many cool tidbits, one really stood out: Matt Ballek pointed out a Forrester study showing that an optimized YouTube video is 50x more likely to get onto page 1 of Google than an optimized HTML page.

I tweeted it. It then got retweeted. And retweeted again. And then some more. And so on.

Since it got a lot of attention, I figured I'd better provide a proper citation. Matt was referencing a Forrester report that said:

Now that's a lot of math, but here's what it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.

Matt's presentation was dynamite. Learn more from him on his site, vidiSEO.

I think it's a great point to raise - SEO is about optimised content. As much as it's good practice to optimise a website it's just as important to optimise each piece of media you create.