Living or hosting from Africa is no exception to the very busy online activities; casinos, shops, holidays, lessons, videos, modeling, mailing, etc. All you do online will receive feedback one way or the other. I have taken some time to compare and learn the benefits of having a comment, number of views and the number of pingbacks. The good thing is that this cannot be influenced as it happens behind your back and have almost no control over them.

My discovery has been made possible by participating in a free article directory that I always make sure they link back to my blog. Other than having learnt how people can steal links from your site and limit your well deserved traffic, I learnt the following:

1. The topic is your first marketing point – I have written articles in the past for posting on article directories and the internet readers’ reaction tells me that people get attracted more to the topic than the rest of the content.
2. Quality articles matter when posting free article directories – You never know who will take interest in your article. Your article may get popular and many people may want to post it in their websites where the credit and links will direct them to your website. As you know as much as I do that first impressions count, poor articles can make you loose potential traffic.

Some article directories may not have all three features (number of views, pingbacks, comment), but having said that, you will notice any or all of these for your work. All these three have an impact to defining you and your intensions of participating online.

The reason why some people will steal your links is because they would like to link to your website but not like to see your website linking back to them. This is how they do it. After you have posted an article on an article directory and for some reasons they like it, they take your article and post in their website. They make sure to follow all requirements for a valid pingback and then they remove your article from their website. In other words, if you follow the pingback link from your website, you won’t find the article in their website.

This is how you loose. When people search for information that bring search results with your article referring to the thief website, the traffic only gets to their website and have no way of referring to your website because all the information that could redirect people to your site has been removed. Guess what happens. The visitor then looks around for the information they were looking for in the wrong place – the thief’s website.

I have already hinted on how to spot such website, follow the link from your ping back and you’ll discover if you article is has been posted or not. How do you deal with such a situation: read part 2 to follow very soon or visit my website for website business advice. You may also be interested in some online goodies that you can often get for free

Search term : Pingback

Semiotics is the science of sign: any thing which functions in the communication. Semiotics is extremely flexible tool which is used in wide  range of academic field

l      Semiotics provides the translator of advertisements with a means to manipulate and manage language (linguistic sign system) and non-verbal sign systems.

l      It is a sign system, which works in conjunction with images to promote or to sell or to persuade consumers into changing their behavior.

l      In 1989 the first Marketing and Semiotics Symposium was held in Copenhagen.

l       It was arranged by the Marketing Institute of the Copenhagen Business School and attended by various people from universities and business schools.

Over all successful of an add depends upon image,text, colour and other signs

Semiotics do the following:

l      Read the text.

l      (ii)  Read the culture.

l      (iii) Make connections between the two.

The use of semiotics varies with the kind of product being advertised

Knowledge of semiotics gives the translator a better understanding of the intrinsic appeal of an advertisement

l      In cases where cultural elements play an important role in persuasive advertisements, semiotics acts as a tool or measure to gauge the cultural elements

l      Semioticians drag the unconscious messages being transmitted into consciousness by isolating and identifying the signs to constitute the message. 

Persuasive advertisements can (and should be) translated in terms of semiotic guidelines, if cultural codes are at work and as such evident. Some advertisements strive towards a state of no-cultural categorization: in other words the advertisement focuses on emotions rather than objects or ideas

Visual Semiotics

Studies of meaning evolve from semiotics, a philosophical approach that seeks to interpret messages in terms of their signs and patterns of symbolism. The study of semiotics, or semiology in France, originated in a literary or linguistic context and has been expanding in a number of directions since the early turn-of-the century work of C.S. Pierce in the U.S. and Levi Strauss and Ferdinand Saussure in France.

A sign can be a word, a sound, or a visual image. Saussure divides a sign into two components–the signifier (the sound, image, or word) and the signified, which is the concept the signifier represents, or the meaning. As Berger points out, the problem of meaning arises from the fact that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional. In other words, signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, and they can mean different things to different people. Given the nonverbal nature of the “1984″ commercial, it might be expected that the complex sign system in the commercial might produce a variety of meanings.

Pierce categorized the patterns of meaning in signs as iconic, symbolic and indexical. An iconic sign looks like what it represents–a picture of a dog, for example. The meaning of a symbol, like the flag or the Statue of Liberty, is determined by convention–in other words, its meaning is arbitrary; it is based upon agreement and learned through experience. Language uses words as symbols that have to be be learned; in Western languages there is no iconic or representational link between a word and its signified concept or meaning. An indexical sign is a clue that links or connects things in nature. Smoke, for example, is a sign of fire; icicles mean cold. Visual communication,–including video forms–uses all three types signs. Because of the essentially nonverbal nature of the “1984″ commercial storyline, it is particularly rich in complex visual signification.

Most signs operate on several levels–iconic as well as symbolic and/or indexical, which suggests that visual semiotic analysis may be addressing a hierarchy of meaning in addition to categories and components of meaning. As Eco explains, “what is commonly called a ‘message’ is in fact a text whose content is a mutilevelled discourse. In the “1984″ commercial, it would be interesting to deconstruct the visual image to determine what elements are iconic, symbolic, and indexical.

The broadening concept of text and discourse encourages additional research into how visual communication operates to create meaning. Deely explains that “at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs.” Semiotics now considers a variety oftexts, using Eco’s terms, to investigate such diverse areas as movies, art, advertisements, and fashion, as well as visuals. In other words, as Berger explains, “the essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and appply linguistic concepts to other phenomena–texts–and not just to language itself.” Anthropologists like Grant McCracken and marketing experts like Sydney Levy have even used semiotic interpretations to analyze the rich cultural meanings of products and consumer consumption behaviors as texts.

Semiotics: Language and Culture

Linguistic and Cultural Semiotics is a branch of communication theory that investigates sign systems and the modes of representation that humans use to convey feelings, thoughts, ideas, and ideologies. Semiotic analysis is rarely considered a field of study in its own right, but is used in a broad range of disciplines, including art, literature, anthropology, sociology, and the mass media. Semiotic analysis looks for the cultural and psychological patterns that underlie language, art and other cultural expressions. Umberto Eco jokingly suggests that semiotics is a discipline for studying everything which can be used in order to lie.” (1976, p7). Whether used as a tool for representing phenomena or for interpreting it, the value of semiotic analysis becomes most pronounced in highly mediated, postmodern environments where encounters with manufactured reality shift our grounding senses of normalcy

Conclusion

In conclusion, this study demonstrates that a semiotic analysis of visuals can be tested against viewer responses to identify patterns of meaning construction. It also found that visuals carrying different types of semiotic meanings elicit different levels of response from viewers. In general, more viewers note iconic message elements than symbolic or indexical elements. In terms of sheer frequency of mention, there were more iconic message elements on the list than symbolic, at least in terms of this particular commercial–and it should be remembered that this advertisement has generally been described as being a highly symbolic commercial. However, those elements with symbolic meaning–fewer though they may be–can create great impact. In other words, several of the elements with high levels of symbolic meaning were referred to more frequently than other elements that were higher in iconic meanings, perhaps attesting to the power of ambiguity to create interest.

References

Barthes, Roland, (1957). Mythologies, translation 1972 by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected Writings (Ed. Mark Poster). Sanford: Stanford University Press.

Chandler, Daniel (2002). Semiotics: the Basics. London: Routledge

Search term : Semiologic

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change — hence called permalink.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blog (or forum) entry after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems, including WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, RapidWeaver, Pivot and Blogger, support such links.

An entry in a blog with many entries is accessible from the site’s front page for only a short time. Visitors who store the URL for a particular entry often find upon their return that the desired content has been replaced by something new. Prominently posting permalinks is a method employed by bloggers to encourage visitors to store a more long-lived URL (the permalink) for reference.

Permalinks frequently consist of a string of characters which represent the date and time of posting, and an identifier which denotes the author who initially authored the item or its subject. Crucially, if an item is changed, renamed, or moved within the internal database, its permalink remains unaltered, as it functions as a magic cookie which references an internal database identifier. If an item is deleted altogether, its permalink can frequently not be reused.

Permalinks have subsequently been exploited for a number of innovations, including link tracing and link trackback in weblogs, and referring to specific weblog entries in RSS or Atom syndication streams.

Blogging software creators and blog hosting websites have not agreed on a standard format for permalink URLs. Some within the blogging community feel that standardization would lead to the practice of meta-information about articles being mined from the URLs themselves rather than an associated RSS stream or meta tags stored within the content.

Search term : Permalinks

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is WordPress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of WordPress, the earliest now termed as “WordPress” at WordPress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “WordPress.com” which is of course available WordPress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of WordPress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing WordPress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your WordPress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With WordPress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your WordPress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With WordPress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With WordPress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend WordPress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using WordPress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, WordPress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use WordPress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With WordPress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of WordPress (not WordPress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both WordPress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that WordPress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With WordPress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using WordPress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go WordPress, you don’t go back.

Search term : WordPress

Have you ever created your personal pages or accounts in Global Network? In a case it is so you should afterwards know that together with the short facts concerning yourself you may locate here also your proper photo or any image which will not only present but as well discern you in the virtual field. If you’ve underwent this process you for certain comprehend what we are talking about at present. For certain we hold a deal with avatars. With their help we may simply identify the human glancing at his avatar.

In this composition we intend to make you familiar a bit closer with Web Avatars, their modifications or subgroups famous like gravatars and wavatars, their view and for sure aims
of their appliance.

Firstly let’s start with avatars.

As usual avatar is accepted like your (or your some part) representative. What does it look like? It can be two or three dimensional shot, icon or picture. These little pictures applied on web portals for communication as forums, blogs or chat places or any social portal like MySpace or Facebook serve to help in participant identification without appealing to his name or nick. There are occasions if humans don’t wish to show the way they look. For such aims the use of any image or image, which says concerning the users’ interests, thoughts and likings can be very useful. In such an occasion a human wants to show his bright personality and proper style.

The Avatars are pictures of tiny size, which are displayed near the user’s sent commentary. On some forums or blogs participants can install as avatars any image they wish while others websites only bring an opportunity to select something from the proposed in avatar list specimens. Here can be discovered also animated patterns in which even some heroes stir simultaneously displaying some plot.

You can do your profile or account on as many portals as you want. But it isn’t obligatory to possess one and the similar avatar on all of them. But provided you select one and the same pattern it can view differently in all web portals. On several websites you can view your pixilated face on a photo, if others create a cartoon hero of yourself. Such avatars can go through alterations thanks to which you may alter avatar backgrounds or append any accessory to it.

What is identicon? It is one of avatars groups, which is similar with a geometric picture produced with the appliance of bill’s IP address. Due to this it isn’t necessary for the user to possess registration in order to stay recognized.

At present it is time to know what is Wavatar? Wavatar corresponds for icons making and designation to the visitors who post their commentaries on your profile in Global Network. The wavatar creators possessed the only aim to alive deeling between persons providing them with laughable faces.

What we should comprehend under Gravatar? It is commonly acknowledged avatar, which you apply at all websites for yourself personalization and which emerges every time together with your name when you post a post.

Now concerning avatar view. It can be as your proper shap as well as any image which displays your business. For example you please dogs afterwards choose dog avatars. Or may be you are businessman thus any object of your trade can be set as your avatar.

Pick up something from the Avatar Gallery on avatarswizard.com and hold fun!

Search term : Gravatar