The Daily Dose

Last year, the buzz surrounding social networking concerned “data portability” — giving Facebook and MySpace users, for example, an easy way to connect to one another without the need to create new profiles. That once-deafening buzz has now fallen silent, and the social networks are back working to corner more of the Web in exclusion of others.

“Facebook and MySpace are having trouble monetizing their database,” said Tony Roth, chief executive officer of Celect.org, part of the VComm Network. Celect.org provides Web-based network services, including integrating a variety of different social networking tools, for its various membership organizations.

Facebook friends, for instance, are valued at 5-to-10 US cents each, Roth estimated.

“Social networks are indeed becoming more antisocial,” he told TechNewsWorld. “If they start to commingle, they will find their member values decreasing even further.” Read the rest of this entry »

While reading the book on SEO by Kristopher Jones, I came across a great tip. The advice given was to maintain fresh content on your website so that users and search engines alike, crawl your site more often. Enter www.freshcontent.net The site offers tons of FREE feeds from a vast selection of categories including arts and entertainment, business, marketing, shopping, travel and many many more. These feeds appear as your own content on your site and there’s never any need to update as freshcontent.net pushes “fresh content” to the feed on a regular basis.

The script is easy to install. Simply click on the category in which you want to feature on your site, and copy the javascript source code. Once you’ve copied the code to your clipboard, open your web pages source code in your favorite editor and paste to your websites source code. If you find difficulty in doing so, freshcontent.net provides support and instructions to install as well.

I strongly encourage those who have a website and/or build websites to pick up this book. The topics are easy to understand and 100% relevant and helpful. After applying the techniques discussed within the pages, our website has received a significant increase in traffic. A Dark Rising Grafx “Best Buy”

Dark Rising Grafx brings you their first “Pack” of wallpapers for the Apple iPhone entitled the “Animal Kingdom Pack”. When downloading from your computer simply unzip the file, browse the images in the package and choose those you wish to use. Email or sync these images to your iPhone, open photos and set your new Animal Kingdom picture as a beautiful wallpaper, optimized for the Apple iPhone.

Browsing from your iPhone right now? Great!, Simply click on the images you like and save them to your iPhone directly. Couldn’t be easier.

This is a pack of over 100 icons that can be used to fully customize any website with a similar theme already in place or perhaps you will take a look at the set and be inspired to build your site around them. Either way, we hope they are useful and most of all… enjoy!

Click Here For Free Download

Icon set comes to us courtesy of Web Treats Etc. Be sure to visit the site and follow them on Twitter for updates.

Dark Rising Grafx is in the process of creating it’s first pack of wallpapers for the Apple iPhone. It is set to include 10-15 great wallpapers depicting different animals of the world. Depending upon how the feedback is for these papers, Dark Ri

sing is considering launching a whole new page/site dedicated to custom wallpapers. It is a thought that we may offer custom wallpapers upon request as well as user submitted wallpapers that are subject to review before post. Anywho, this is the first prototype in our “Animal Kingdom Pack” feel free to download and use on your iPhone or any other suitable mobile device where screen resolution is 320×480. Hope you like.

What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? We deliver answers. Here is the list of the most useful SEO-tools you might be willing to use, developing and optimizing your next web-site. Our personal choice: 156 Seo Tools – one of the most comprehesive lists with essential SEO-references and tools. For even more resources check out the SEO section of The Web-Developer’s Handbook. Links checked: May/11 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone user? Us too. We thoroughly enjoy finding websites that cater to our iPhone cravings. Today we came across www.sciphone.net which provides applications, wallpapers and other items specific to the Apple iPhone. We have taken 15 wallpapers that we found particularly interesting and aesthetically pleasing and posted them right here on The Daily Dose. Download and use as you wish but please show some love to sciphone by visiting their website for more great products. Without further ado…

With the internet and all of it’s glory becoming a more and more popular form of communication with each passing second, sites like Twitter (a mini blogging service), Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, WordPress, and many others have become essential to a business marketing plan. It is the number 1 way to get on the ground floor and interact day to day with the exact customer base that is using your product. It allows you to keep them updated on new products, improvements to existing products and gain REAL feedback directly from the client. Im quite sure that if you run a business, you have invested in a website and perhaps you have some stick in the mud answering phones for you with the drab scripted ” It’s a great day at blah blah blah how may I yap yap yap?” And I am positive that you have a nice set of corporate or business minded business cards. These are some of the basics. So here is the awesome opportunity to leave the professionalism behind, be fun and free! Do things that ten years ago might have lost a customer but today will actually grow your company and the market it reaches. Create Social Cards! These are quite like business cards in the sense that they may have your name and contact info somewhere on them but they are quite different in the sense that the target audience that will recieve them are young, fun and computer savvy. Therefore, the card itself should be reflective of the population. Include a goofy picture of yourself, think outside of the box… Even further than you may already do within your market. Include the URL’s to all the major networking and social sites that your company is part of and perhaps some fun facts. Most of all MAKE IT FUN! Here is an example of our potential social cards for Dark Rising Grafx. Take notice that the company name is not pushed or even present on the card as we are counting on click through traffic once the intended audience lands on one of our social sites.

Click image to visit site

Sorry for the brief neglect on our part for anyone who was checking The Daily Dose for new posts, we have been on vacation this past weekend, but we are back! As I opened my browser window this morning, I decided to see what may be out there for inspiration as well as resources related to graphic design. If I was unable to find something, my plans were to compile a comprehensive list for our readers. Lucky for me (and my clients waiting on their work to be completed) someone has compiled a list just as I wanted to. 99 Sites All Designers Must Know About…. here it is courtesy of www.justcreativedesign.com and it lists such items/sites related to the following categories:

General Design | Web Design | Resources | Show Cases | Development | Flash and Flex | Typography | Video and Motion | Personal Design Blogs | Web 2.0 | Relaxation | Various

Please stay tuned for the list of sites that we have personally found useful for showcasing work as well as social networking within the visual communication community. These sites will ALL be sites that we are members of and/or have our work showcased. So feel free to add us or stalk us.

Css-Website.com

Css Website is an innovative gallery of simple websites. Its purpose is to showcase designer’s work and to expand the CSS design community. They propose a classification by color and contents for a better usability.

______________________________________

designerfolio.net

DesignerFolio.net is a web designers inspiration gallery where a high quality design CSS and Flash websites placed around the world. This is a place for everyone who love web design.

______________________________________

Faveup.com

Faveup is a simple gallery of inspirational design. Everybody gets designer’s block sometimes so it’s nice to have somewhere to go to get your creative juices flowing again. Faveup also gives credit where credit is due, rewarding great design with the respect and linkage it deserves. Read the rest of this entry »