It's possible the following post may prompt the Apple police to break down my door in a pre-dawn raid. No, I didn't find an iPhone 6 prototype in a bar. I'm just a guy who's annoyed at the hypocrisy sometimes exhibited by our friends in Cupertino. My latest gripe involves the recently ratified streaming media protocol MPEG DASH.
Behind closed doors, online content providers waste enormous amounts of time, effort and expense repackaging audio and video content to stream over various protocols. You may not have heard of Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Adobe HDS, RTSP and RTMP, but they are just some of the protocols that need to be considered when trying to support media on every possible device that can connect to the Internet. The explosion of tablets in the past two years has only intensified the problem. We like to call this fragmentation.
DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, has the potential to unify streaming communications. The spec allows content creators and distributors to take a media file and deliver it to any device that can accept DASH, and it supports many of the best features of existing http streaming protocols. The new standard is gaining serious momentum from the likes of Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco among other heavy... Read more
Tagged 'google' 
MPEG DASH..it's time for Apple to put up or shut up
Google's SEO Over-Optimization Penalty
It's not often that Google tells us about algorithm changes they're about to release but, at this year's SXSW conference, Matt Cutts let it be known that Google engineers are working on an over-optimization penalty. At the heart of the discussion for most site owners is one quote in particular that Google will,
"…start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area…"
With the implication that a site's use of keywords and links will be inspected, many site owners have become concerned that they might get caught by the coming over-optimization penalty. In today's short post, I'd like to highlight the SEO practices that are likely to be penalized by the new algo, present items that should be inspected and finally offer a few tips for remediation.
Likely To Be Penalized:
Link exchange networks
Paid links
Forum/blogspam
Pages with ultra-high target keyword density & little semantic context
Inspect the Following:
"soft" duplicate content/canonicalization
sitewide incoming links
footer links (incoming and outgoing)
heavy advertising above the fold
blending of JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, images,... Read more
