Here's my first Slideshare presentation shared. What a fantastic service and I'm going to pull together my fav shared slides next week. Well actually it might be in a few weeks. But until then please post your fav presentations in the comments.

Young Guns have added a new category this year entitled "The Craft of Quitting" and put together a site to house the submissions. It's best explained with their press release.

"The site calls on employees with a grudge to bear to dream up inventive ways to quit. Ideas already posted on the site include cultivating maggots in your boss’ desk drawer; corroding their collection of industry trophies; spray painting gold ‘up yours’ symbols on their office door – a fresh interpretation of the ‘golden handshake’ – or freezing the secretary’s goldfish bowl."

You'd want to make sure you don't actually follow through with most of these as the industry is quite small and it's going to be tough times soon for some.

Here's a few that have been seeded by Young Guns. Surprisingly all Vimeo instead of Youtube?

Deep Fried from Sam on Vimeo.

The Finger from Gomez on Vimeo.

What sh*t from poobandit on Vimeo.

Lock Down 2 from mister.richie1 on Vimeo.

There's also a bunch of text only and image submissions on the site. The campaign is by Droga5 Sydney. I think Matty from there has been working on the Young Guns stuff for a while now.

It's restricted to US and UK non profit organizations but Youthbe now has a non profit channel option. "So what" you ask? Well a lot as it actually has Google Checkout built in which allows donations to be directly sent via Youtube.

The check out the Youtube Non Profit page for more info. Let's hope they roll this out to Australia. This is a great move on Google's behalf as it could generate another revenue stream for non profits. It's early days, Mashable reported on it just a few weeks ago so we'll see if people are willing to part with cash while on Youtube. I can see non profits integrating the call for donations into their videos and even holding users to ransom for more funding until the next video is released (well maybe not but you get the idea).

Youtube also introduced Theatre view. For full length videos. It's a welcome feature as this "lights out" feature has been on other sites for a while. You can restrict YouTube's search results to feature length videos by appending &longform=1:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=site:youtube.com&longform=1

Cheers to Google System Blog for the tip.

People are inherently competitive. Whether it be in their career, sport or a friendly game of Pictionary on a Saturday afternoon people like to win or at least beat other people. The same can be said for bloggers which is a subset of the population who want to get their voice heard and thus want attention. The recent spate of blog rankings has got the whole community excited about being in the top XXX of something.

However when you start to rank people by their blogs you run into a few problems. How do you rank something as complex as a blog? What metrics do you use, when the majority of real data is hidden to the outside user? It's easy to compare sports stars as you rank them based on their performance on the field. If you started adding in income generated, fans and other vague data it'd become a lot more complicated just like it is with blogs. Many assumptions need to be made.

There are a few global and localised blog ranking systems around with some drilled down to specific industries.

We have the omnipresent Technorati influence. For all blogs of shapes and sizes.
Ad Age's Power 150: Global advertising blogs
Australia's Top 50 Marketing Blogs: Aussie blogs
Blogponds top 100 Blogs: Aussie blogs in general
Scamp's Top Ad blogs: with a UK subset
Top Blogs for Women: Australia again
There's even a top scrapbooking blog list.

There's also special editorials posting the top blogs here and there including Time's Top 25 blogs

Imagine if they ranked the Billboard Top Albums based on more than just sales? It'd become a nightmare and open to tactics used to generate higher rankings.

Right now to rank blogs we have a my rid of metrics such as Technorati inbound links, Technorati inbound blog, Google Page Rank, Bloglines readership, Feedburner readership, Alexa ranking, Yahoo! links.

There's also companies with their "patent pending" technology to rank blogs like Collective Intellect. There's also a wealth of other easy to track buzz on social media.

One thing missing from a lot of these rankings is participation and loyalty of readers. Bannerblog has a very vocal audience who like to share their opinion on banners, and regularly get 15+ comments per post. (not so much in the news) Other blogs find it hard to garner more than 3 comments per post. (like this section) This type of participation I think is an important part of the strength of a blog. I run other blogs (Sleevage, WTFcostumes) that get more traffic but the audience is very transient. Mostly based of search engine traffic. There is a 30%-50% increase in the number of new visitors. Bannerblog sits at a 45% new visitor rate most months. No one really searches for "VW Banner" on Google. But they search for "CD Covers" all the time.

Let's hope Google can come in an create a one blog ranking system to rule them all. They have the Blog Search now which specifically filters results from blogs only. Here's a nice breakdown of Google 's "Patent pending" blog ranking algorithm.

The only Top 100 list I usually agree with is FHM's Top 100 sexiest women.

It's almost here. Flash 10 loaded with all the eyecandy features that you never asked for but now you see are pretty awesome. 3D transform, IK (bones) and a motion editor will make stuff much easier to animate and work with. See full feature list here.

Flash versions always seem to go in cycles.

Flash 6 - 7 was all functionality and no eyecandy.
Flash 7 - 8 was pretty much all eyecandy
Flash 8 - 9 was just for AS3 which is not exactly eyecandy but made flash run fast.

Now the release of Flash CS4 (or flash 10) is here and it's loaded with eyecandy!

make sure to register for the free events happening around Australia too. Click the promo image below for more info and to RSVP.

Bring on Flash 10 banners I say!