Last Friday, the 16th, I joined Improv Everywhere with a friend and attempted to create a series of flashes across the Brooklyn Bridge, going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again. If you don’t know Improv Everywhere, they are responsible for such pranks as a Frozen Grand Central, Slo-Mo Home Depot, and a Fake U2 Concert. Anyway, our evening on the Brooklyn Bridge was windy, cold, and wet, but still fun. I uploaded my set of pictures to Flickr, and you can find more photos by other people bysearching for the tag ‘IEBB’ on Flickr.
I thought I would briefly mention a blog post that discusses Image Replacement and how Google views the technique. Basically, Image Replacement involves placing a banner image (or any type of image) over text. The reasons for doing so are simple: keep up the appearance of your site, but also allow Google and other web crawlers to index the text, because bots can’t read images (yet). For example, if you disabled images on my website, you would notice the text ‘Mike Pinkowish’ in place of where my banner image is. This way Google gets the idea of what my site is about (me), and I get to place a pretty image so my website looks nice. It’s win-win.
Finally, Yelp!, a community-based restaurant and city guide (and I wrote about in March), was featured in an article in today’s New York Times. The article discusses why Yelp has been so successful. It’s a short and interesting read and covers how Yelp managed to compete with big name sites like Citysearch.
-Mike
