Over the past few years technology has progressed at a very fast pace. Along with it the technology behind digital imaging has moved so fast that even photo industry giant kodak was unable to keep up. They recently filed for bankruptcy. Were they mismanaged? Not really – but they were behind the curve with digital photography which ultimately led to their loss of market-share.

For years, die hard photographers discredited digital and rightfully so - the quality wasn't there. Who in their right mind would do a catalog using digital?

That was 10 years ago. Now its all digital. No more film, no more scans, and no more waiting. Since there is no more film - there can be no more grain either which leads to much clearer photos. Another great thing about the digital photography is the proofing - you don't have to . You can see the end result while doing the shoot. Believe it or not photographers used to shoot the shot twice. Once with the medium format cam and once with a polaroid back on the same cam to make sure they had the shot framed right. Can you imagine that? Now photogs show up on site with a laptop so they can preview the work make color correction on the spot and even deliver the completed project before leaving the shoot!

All of this has really changed the playing field for photographers and photography in general. To me its exciting because it seems to have made the whole process more accessible to amateur photographers. On the other hand, it has devalued the cost of professional photography.

Recently I had a discussion with a friend who is a professional photographer. For him the conversion from film to digital was painless and the ease of use allowed him to push his creativity to a new level. The hard part for him was keeping up with the unbelievable amount of high quality stock photography. Basically, any photo you can imagine can be purchased online from a stock agency within minutes – and you can get it for almost no expense. Stock photography can cost as low as a dollar an image! This unlimited availability of great images for such low prices has made it very difficult for him to book photo shoots. His customers can now find it online.

As the world progresses technology wise, its important to stay ahead of the curve and adapt to the changes. This rapid change has affected a lot of professionals and businesses. What about all of those little film development huts you'd see in the parking lot at shopping malls? Gone like the dinosaurs.

As usual their are 2 sides to every story. and some have benefitted from the shift. Being a designer, I couldn't be happier. It has given me control of the shoot. I can either shoot it myself or find it through an agency. This has allowed me to produce better work in less time and saved me money.

Heres an interesting article:

Kodak: The next Polaroid?
Slow transformation to digital photography forced Polaroid into bankruptcy. Will Kodak move quicker?

In an increasingly-competitive search environment, it’s more important now than ever to have a solid strategy for building quality links to your website. Inbound link quality and count still seems to be one of the most influential factors in determining search rankings. Many of the traditional techniques used for building links, such as article marketing and link exchanges, are still pretty effective and important to an SEO campaign. To gain a competitive edge, however, one has to be creative and adapt new ways to attract quality links. Here are four link-building strategies that you may not have tried.

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Here is a brief critique of a couple of popular sites with regards to design and usability.
1.) www.commarts.com- a designer’s informational site. You might recognize it as it is the best graphic design magazine in Barnes and Nobles priced at $15. But here online, it’s free and it’s just as packed with useful information...
2.) www.tripadvisor.com- a traveler’s site. My friends use it often when they go out of the country. It helps you plan your trip step by step so your time is not wasted...
3.) www.amazon.com- an online shopper’s site. Everyone has been to this site. It started out with books and it’s expanded to sell everything including groceries...

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The importance of the domain name in SEO is a widely debated topic. There are those SEOs who swear by the effectiveness that a keyword rich domain name has on rankings. There are others who swear that the domain name is not all that important. In the end, it’s a really hard thing to test which is why there isn't more collusion. For the most part, we rely on what we see in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to make inferences about this issue. Today, I want to briefly point out both sides of the issue.

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When writing CSS you'll often find yourself with an extremely long CSS doc that could pass the 1000 line mark. Commenting every block of CSS can be very helpful and benificial especially if working within a team of developers who may need to change items in the future.

Aside from just commenting your individual blocks of code there's also another VERY helpful method that we often use here at THAT Agency. We simply break our stylesheets into several documents and link them through a CSS import. Breaking everything apart into it's base elements is a handy way of navigating. Some basic categories could be:

Reset - a full CSS reset to alleviate cross browser issues
Structure - base structure of the layout
Text - controls all copy, header tags, horizontal rules, etc.
Navigation - Primary navigation
Header - Logo header, contact information, etc.
Footer - The all important closing statement

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The internet is full of all kinds of applications. Some are incredibly useful, some are not THAT useful and others are just downright useless. I would say wordle fits somewhere in the middle, but it has one charactistic THAT wins me over - its fun.

Heres what wordle does....it crawls the words in your webpage, pulls out the most used terms then kicks them back at you in the form of a design! You can then take the resulting design and customize it in realtime using a WSIWYG editor. Its pretty cool and can be quite rewarding. Some of the designs they show are really good and it shows you what words are coming up on your site.

I admit THAT wordles usefulness is questionable, but its fun and I find it more entertaining than following Uncle Bens rice on Twitter.

A THATagency Wordle is shown below.......go ahead and try wordle yourself here: wordle.net

When it comes to SEO, link building is probably the most time-consuming part of most campaigns. This is why it’s important to tweak every onsite factor possible to maximize the impact of the inbound links that you’ve acquired. One tactic we’ve used in the past here at THAT Agency is a tactic known as PageRank sculpting. This tactic is geared towards maximizing the impact of the inbound links that a website already has on search engine rankings.

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To keep track of all the SEO tools that I use while working on SEO projects, I've mostly used bookmarks. I've got one bookmark for a tool that analyzes inbound links, a bookmark that tests website speed, two bookmarks that check search engine rankings, a bookmark that checks keyword density and the list goes on. In all, I think I’ve got bookmarks to about 15 different websites, each of which have one or more tools useful to doing SEO analysis.

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In parts one and two of my online reputation management series, I wrote about a couple of great tools that marketers can utilize to monitor online brand reputation. The two tools I wrote about were Google Alerts and Technorati. Today, I want to discuss a third tool that can yield interesting results, Twitter.

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On Tuesday, Google revealed it's newest product...G1. Eerily similar in style to Apple's iPhone, T-Mobile showcased the G1, calling attention to it's large touch screen, trackball, slide-out keyboard, Wi-Fi connection ability and quick access to Google's email and mapping programs.

The phone is set to be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third generation wireless data network. On the planned device launch date, of October 22nd, that will include 21 cities. Included in those cities are New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami. The phone will be available in other areas for purchase, and does run on T-Mobile's slower data network, but it is optimized for the faster networks.

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