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Joy - Our new web identity is now online!
2008-04-08 10:39:00
Hey there Shifters!We are proud to annouce the relaunch of our web presence and corporate identity! We have completely upgraded our Website, Blog, WebTV Show, Search Engine Landing pages and Email Newsletters.We hope you like the new us! Any feedback please leave a comment.We look forward to talking with you soon :)CheersNick, Matt, Greg, Stewart, Tom and everyone at The Shifted Pixels Team!
More About: Online , Identity

Free CSS Templates
2008-04-07 16:42:00
A great website with hundreds of sexy css templateshttp://www.freecsstemplates.org/
More About: Templates , Free

Is poverty self-perpetuating? (boston.com)
2008-04-07 16:39:00
In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.Read the full article at the Boston Globe
More About: Poverty

Maintaining a Sense of Urgency
2008-04-07 16:37:00
We all see a value in maintaining a sense of urgency when delivering whatever project your working on now. "Getting the job done" is the meme that should be at the core of all actions, processes and decisions we make as part of our business, project or startup. Interesting article on maintaining a sense of urgency at jabbik.com
More About: Sense

An all in one window into all your Social Networks, IM and Email Accounts?
2008-04-07 16:28:00
Manage all your existing IM, email, and social network accounts from one easy to use application.www.Digsby.comCommunicating with coworkers, social networks, and friends across the Web is getting more complicated by the week. Some friends use e-mail, your garage band members stick to Yahoo! Messenger, and you probably spend half your day keeping an eye out for your boss while you swap between an Excel spreadsheet and Facebook to stay in touch with your Web 2.0 acquaintances. Right now, keeping pace with all these groups requires some serious multitasking skills, but the developers at dotSyntax believe things can be easier. With a new cross-platform product called digsby poised as a universal communicator between IM, e-mail, and social networks, they're off to a strong start.
More About: Social , Email , Social Networks , Networks , Window

Torentspy Shuts Down
2008-04-06 16:20:00
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order ... and the like." - Justice William O. Douglashttp://www.torrentspy.com/

Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking' ?
2008-04-01 14:55:00
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. Professor Khurana ? a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers ? reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal. It draws on growing evidence ? exclusively reported in the IoS in October ? that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that "there is a significant and increasing body of evidence ...
More About: Mobile , Mobile Phones , Phones , Smoking , Dangerous

Managing urgencies (Seth Godin)
2008-04-01 13:58:00
Do you have a plan? A long or medium term plan for your brand or your blog or your career or your project? You can have grand visions for remodeling your house or getting in shape, but if there's a fire in the kitchen, you drop everything and put it out. What choice do you have? The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time. I gave a talk the other day, all about the unstoppable slow decline of interruption (traditional) media and the opportunities for rethinking how we communicate with people. At the end of the talk, someone came up and had very nice things to say about what he'd learned. The he leaned over and asked me to help him brainstorm about his brand's upcoming ad campaign, because it was due to his boss on Friday. Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along. I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more ur...
More About: Seth Godin , Godin

Conversational Marketing - How to disagree... (Paul Graham)
2008-04-01 10:24:00
The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do?in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it...
More About: Marketing , Paul , Graham

In 2007 Print Advertising dropped 9.4%, Online Advertising rises 18.8%
2008-03-29 06:35:00
The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950. The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year. There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion... The NAA reported that online revenue now represents [a completely inadequate] 7.5%...
More About: Advertising , Online Advertising , Print , Online

Use the internet too much? Chances are, your insane (yay for science)
2008-03-25 13:03:00
I couldn't help but chuckle at this hard hitting journalism from News.com.au Net addicts mentally ill, top psychiatrist says According to the article about Internet Addiction"About 80 per cent of those needing treatment may need psychotropic medications, and perhaps 20 per cent to 24 per cent require hospitalisation." "Dr Block said he believed about 86 per cent of internet addicts also had at least one other mental disorder.""Unfortunately, internet addiction is resistant to treatment, entails significant risks and has high relapse rates." Soo according to Dr Block and NEWS.com.au, heavy internet users, the ones who are typically both highly educated and highly informed, should be medicated and stopped from informing themselves further...
More About: Science , Insane , The Internet , Chances

Culture is not your friend
2008-03-24 15:17:00
Culture is not your friend. It is for other peoples convienience.It insults you, it disempowers you, it uses and abuses you.Culture: The Ultimate CultTo the extent that you assimilate yourself to a given culture, you become but a cog in a machine to be used and abused by the objectives of that system. And that means, to use the words of the late philosopher Terence McKenna, ?Culture is not your friend.? Culture is the ultimate cult. The cultures of the world are diverse, but they each in their own ways are insidious. Culture is a dehumanizing and infantilizing element designed to make you into little more than a good machine able to sustain the habitual socioeconomic objectives of a particular time and place.HyperrealityIn postmodern philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (pronounced bow-dree-yar), there is a term called the ?hyperreal.? Hyperreality is the simulation of something that never really existed. As an example, kids in coll...
More About: Culture , Friend

Become a music mogul
2008-03-24 14:16:00
"The traditional record companies' business model is dead and gone and they will be too unless they stop acting like they have always done? Their approach has always been twofold: tell consumers that we'll decide what you'll like, and tell artists that we know what's good for you. I don't see any change in that attitude, just them trying new ways to take a cut of artists' earnings." A good article on some of the new business models which are showing great signs of success. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/NewsStory.a spx?story=68441 Thanks JoyKicksDarkness
More About: Music , Mogul

How many employees should your company have?
2008-03-24 03:38:00
Im reading a great essay by Paul Graham, a well respected early stage .com investor/mentor (80 web startups in 2 years)http://paulgraham.com/boss.htmlI really liked the following paragraphs and wonder what you thought?---What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.What you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet - for reasons having more to do with technology than human n...
More About: Employees , Company

Just for kicks (Sneaker Culture Documentary)
2008-03-23 14:42:00
Just for Kicks is a 2005 documentary film about the sneaker phenomena and historyhttp://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=6444453634416523444
More About: Fun , Culture , Documentary

Partying Like Its 1929 (Paul Krugman NYTimes)
2008-03-23 13:22:00
If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will - rightly - be praised for his heroic efforts.But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?Why does the financial system need salvation?Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we're paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s - and having refused to learn from history, we're repeating it.Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn't the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten - and now we're relearning it, the hard way.Read the full article at NY...
More About: Paul Krugman , Paul , Partying

Persistence
2008-03-23 03:26:00
Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.Source: Seth Godin
More About: Persistence

Did we get them back enough yet?
2008-03-22 15:41:00
posted on Monday, 17/03/2008, 19:30 - Link
More About: Back

Sweetest Tweet Ever? Man Proposes Via Twitter
2008-03-22 07:43:00
A San Francisco web designer used Twitter to pop the question Thursday, asking his co-worker to marry him in what might be the microblogging service's second marriage proposal. Max Kiesler's sweet tweet at 3:13 a.m. Thursday: "To @emilychang - After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage?" Emily Chang's reply, a minute later: "@maxkiesler - yes, i do." Kiesler, who founded strategic design consultancy Ideacodes with Chang in 2005, confirmed Friday that the story of the proposal, as reported by Mashable, is true. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Kiesler's proposal could, indeed, be a historic moment for the microblogging service, which has grown in popularity since making headlines at South by Southwest in 2007.Source; Wired
More About: Tweet

How to avoid being Rickrolled
2008-03-19 11:45:00
To be Rickrolled is when browsing internet forums, one comes across a link in a thread expecting to find one thing, but ends up at a website which has nothing to do with the topic being discussed in the thread.The name Rick refers to 80s pop singer Rick Astley. This refers to the ebaumsworld epidemic where people linked a "really awesome video" and it turned out to be Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up."How to avoid being RickrolledRickrolled is an internet phenomenon which happens when a hapless internet surfer clicks on a link with a promising headline such as, "check out this vid of hot chicks in panties!". However, after clicking the link, you will be brought to the music video of the 80's pop star Rick Astley performing the song "Never Gonna Give You Up".A video tutorial of how not to be rickrolled can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSsJ19sy3J ISummary AnswerRickrolling is a new trend in online posting, in which a link is apparently provided to a seemin...
More About: Fun , Avoid

10 Ways Digital Marketing can help your business through recession
2008-03-19 05:22:00
| View | Upload your own
More About: Marketing , Business , Digital , Recession

Why bother having a resume?
2008-03-18 15:49:00
We are interviewing at the moment, and i have been thinking about the people i want to hire most. Curiously - none of them have resumes (that they have sent me anyway)!This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you're remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn't have a resume at all. Great people shouldn't have a resume. Here's why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, "oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're out. Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve? If you don't have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respe...
More About: Resume

Web Has Unexpected Effect on Journalism (Wired)
2008-03-17 08:24:00
The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago, a study on the industry released Sunday found. It was believed at one point that the Net would democratize the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives. Yet the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many Web sites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism 's annual State of the News Media report. Two stories - the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign - represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found. Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said. The news side of the business is dynamic, but the growing ability of news consumers to find what they want without bein...
More About: Effect , Wired

Launch of BeautyEditor.com.au
2008-03-16 23:43:00
Shifted Pixels has just launched the online magazine site http://www.beautyeditor.com.au/Check it out! Love to know what you think!
More About: Launch

ATTENTION SYDNEY - ANONYMOUS WANTS YOU!
2008-03-11 15:31:00
We are anonymous, we are legion... Sydney Scientology Protest this Saturday...Bring large signs with random internet memes, water guns, digital cameras, horns, sunglasses and anything to hide your identity... you can buy anonymous masks at the event ...Photos from the last protest... HereKnowledge is free...More Event Info http://wiki.auschanology.org/Protest_Plan ning
More About: Anonymous , Attention

Every click you make, we'll be watching you
2008-03-11 12:08:00
According to the SMH"Internet companies are making big money out of tracking exactly where you go and what you do on the web"Yes we do :)Source: SMH
More About: Click , Make , Watching

The most popular viral video of all time (to date)
2008-03-10 16:30:00
98 Million YouTube Views in 9 months and 80 million of them in 2 months...Its interesting, This Video has 98 million views but only 7k ratings and 4k comments.On youtube, the next most popular videos are:Evolution of Dance - 77Mil Views / 275k Ratings / 123k commentsAvril Girlfriend - 75Mill Views / 180k ratings / 182k commentsSo why so few comments and ratings?There is some speculation on the web, that someone has used a botnet or other kind of distributed clicking system to fake the popularity of this video.I think this in indicative of the future of media popularity... in the past journalists, editors and media owners controled what people paid attention too... the future of attention may ultimately be controlled by hackers and social media optimisers...Shameless PlugAt Shifted Pixels, we work with a number of online content producers to dramatically improve the popularity and visibility of their content online, ensuring lots of viewers and pageloads (and no funny bizness with bo...
More About: Time , Viral , Popular

So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
2008-03-10 15:05:00
Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named "href". Why not "url", "link", or even just "ref"?Source: tomayko.com
More About: Stand

The world's 50 most powerful blogs
2008-03-10 14:57:00
Our faves from the list...TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Boing Boing, Kottke, Perezhilton, Icanhascheezburger, Gawker, The Drudge Report, Engadget, Mashable, Crooks and liars, Copyblogger...We were dissapointed to see a few missing... GigaOm, blogmaverick, SethGodin, SignalVsNoise, The world's 50 most powerful blogs at TheGuardian.co.ukWhat blogs do you think have been missed?
More About: Blogs

Blogs, Social Media and Teenagers - 25% of teenagers have blogs
2008-03-10 14:49:00
A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of "super-communicators". Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys. Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age.Source: TimesOnline
More About: Social , Media , Blogs , Teenagers