For some of the Answers users – the ones who have shown their expertise in certain topical areas – the UI includes a new section on the homepage labeled suggested questions.

The suggestions are based on your most recent activity on Answers. For example, if you recently answered many questions related to a specific make or model of mobile phone, it is most likely that you will get more Suggested Questions related to this subject matter.

But why is that so important? Well in the past when you asked a question on Yahoo! Answers you had to be lucky actually very very lucky to get an answer from an expert in a certain topic area. Just imagine that there are more than 140 Mio Unique Users on Answers in one moth. All living in different countries and time zones all over the world. So when you are located in San Francisco and ask a question about clubbing in London the best people to answer your question – London clubbers – will be asleep and won’t see your question on the Answers homepage. Your question would be long gone by the time they wake up.

But this is only one tiny example on how this new engine will change the way Yahoo! Answers works. Personalization is the big thing these days and what’s good for web search is a paradigm shift for social search.

And yes there are players out there in the Q&A market who have tried to do something similar. But for one this engine is much more versatile, precise and flexible than any of the competitors. Plus based on the unrivaled huge user and knowledge base Answers has already the impact of this change will be very significant.

Now Answers is this place where you “know” where to find an expert for the question you have.

KUDOS to the team at Yahoo! Answers – especially to Dan, Sebastien, Tomasz and Nalika!

There is some more info here in the Help section of Yahoo! Answers

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Yahoo! Answers launches “Suggested Questions” Engine

And I’m not only saying that cause she gave me a free copy of her new book called Blogging Tips – What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging.

I met Lorelle the first time – virtually – back in 2007 – when she taught me the important lesson to “Always check first before you blame” in the comments to this post about WordPress incoming links monitoring.

Now I do not only have one but two copies of her book here with me and am willing to give them away for free – even pay for the shipping costs wherever in the world you are!

I’m going to make this a simple first come first serve contest – just leave a comment to this post and subscribe to Lorelle and me on Twitter. (make sure the mail you leave is an active one as I will need to get your address details for shipping)

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What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging – free book giveaway

Just like reading his books its always a pleasure to hear from Malcolm. He has what I would call an agile mid. Combine that with his curiosity and his unique talent to tell stories about seemingly boring topics in such a vivid way make it a real treat – at least for me.

Here is a little summary.

Only Malcolm Gladwell could bring Fleetwood Mac into the design discussion and make wonderful sense. In his enlightening talk about innovation and misconceptions about what it takes to become a success, Gladwell uses this unlikely metaphor for creative synthesis in an entertaining entrée into the concepts of his forthcoming book, Outliers… more

The conference was hosted by the  AIGA.

AIGA, the professional association for design, is the premier place for design—to discover it, discuss it, understand it, appreciate it, be inspired by it. It is the place designers turn to first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis, and research and advance education and ethical practices. AIGA sets the national agenda for the role of design in its economic, social, political, cultural and creative contexts.

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Video: Malcolm Gladwell speaks about Outliers

I love mafia movies, gangster flicks and mob films. You could call me an addict I guess. There is just no other category of movies I enjoy watching quite as much.

There is a huge list of movies I really enjoyed watching and I felt like putting them all in one list with the movie trailers right next to them for your consideration – should you not have seen one or the other listed.

I hope you like the selection of my 27 best Mafia, Gangster & Mob Movies of all time

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Top 27 Mafia, Gangster & Mob Movies of all time

image by hoveringdog

It’s clear that cross linking from other pages of the project helps massively. Not only with indexation but with ranking of the pages as well. SEO black-holes like Wikipedia are the living proof of the effectiveness of – what you can call excessive cross-linking.

The other obvious helper to high volume indexation is back-link power. A nice back-link from the yahoo.com homepage will do wonders to the deep-crawl frequency of your site and the number of pages listed.

Ideally you will get back-links not only to you homepage but on any level in the hierarchy of your site.

Time is an additional factor in this equation. It takes time to get millions of pages into the index of search engines.

Now the above is very well known common knowledge among SEO people and even the below is no ground breaking paradigm shifting revelation – but at the same time its a very effective method that’s easy to implement but still rarely used amongst sites with huge numbers of content pages and multiple levels of categories.

The method I’m talking about is a non constant based pagination. It is often referred to as concertina.

And the method is as simple as effective. When in most cases the pagination will look like this.

And the pages will show 1 to 10 on the first page 11 to 20 on the second and so on and so forth. This scheme will stay the same even if you have tens of thousands of pages.

Due to the fact however that few sites have back-links from the yahoo.com leads to the fact that search engine crawler will get “tired” after a while. This means that the crawler will only get to a certain depth of pages on your site.

To help with this it is much more effective to implement a pagination that looks like this.

or this

For the first couple of pages its identical to the example shown above. But after page ten you will get page 20 then 50 then 100 and so on.

By using this method you make sure that the crawler hits pages further down the hierarchy quicker and this does lead to a significant increase of pages indexed.

Here are a couple of sites that use various types of concertina paging for you to have a look.

• Digital Point forum
• Kelkoo Shopping
• Flickr uses a kind of concertina as well

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Concertina pagination – getting large scale websites indexed

Keywordfinder. It’s a tool that will retrieve the 20 top search terms related to the term you enter. And since yesterday comes with some nice little updates and enhancements. You can choose from 44 different markets now everything from Argentina to Vietnam.

The service allows to share the results via URLs with specified parameters now.

http://keywordfinder.org/index.php?term=microsoft&locale=German|de|de for German results

Nice and handy tool to get a quick idea of what terms are popular in Yahoo!’s web search around the world.

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Keywordfinder – updated now offers results for 44 markets

His books like Tipping Point or Blink have been pure joy to read and were a great source of inspiration and knowledge. The way he explains highly complex topics from the whole range of modern science is unrivaled.

Here is what he says about the new book – Outliers

I have been really waiting in anticipation for this book since months.

Now that he’s gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

I have read the first chapter on my way home from central London, on one of the lovely red buses and whilst usually that takes way too long with all the traffic it way way too short today.

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Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers – The story of success

Now what has that to do with me being a Punk? Well it literally made me one. As a US colleague told me last week Punk stands for Professional Uncle No Kids.

Nice one. Proud to be a Punk and even more to get to be a Godfather as well – shared role with my brother Rudi.

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I’m a PUNK now and proud of it

It is just super versatile and intuitive – and the best is that right now you can just get a full version of it for free.

If you want all the latest features, you’ll have to upgrade to SnagIt 8.2, which costs $20. But SnagIt 7.2.5 is still way better than the print screen button.

Some of the features you will get are:

• Capture a an entire web page
• Capture a region
• Capture a file
• Capture a freehand region
• Save in multiple image formats

You can download it here

Quick side note:

FireShot is a neat firefox plugin that helps you create your website screen grabs.

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Get SnagIt absolutely free till Jan 7th (WINDOWS)

Not having updated my WordPress version since more than a year for this blog – somewhat because I didn’t want to break anything and somehow cause I was too lazy – I figured its really about time to get that going.

After a database Backup with PHP MyAdmin and turning off all my plugins – I was all set and ready to go – and it was a piece of cake. After 5 minutes all was done and back to normal again.

Thanks to the peoples at wordpress.org this software is just bloody awesome! And thanks for Akismet – kept 60.000+ spam comments away from me… 

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Finally updated WordPress – 60.000+ spam comments