Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds

This must be 'Live Science'... Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse. A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human. The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations. "Our paper proposes a new model for why modern human behavior started at different times in different regions of the world, why it disappeared in some places before coming back, and why in all cases it occurred more than 100,000 years after modern humans first appeared," said study researcher Adam Powell of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. The idea that demography is linked to modern human behavior has been around for decades, but this is the first time scientists have run

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32 Nifty ways to build links and drive traffic

Link building is an essential necessity for all bloggers, unless you don’t want to be indexed by google and drive a ton of traffic to your blog, then by all means - skip right past this blog post.

Here is a definitive - simple list of things you can do to get incoming links.

1. Give away Freebies
2. Contribute to popular forums, using your link in your signature.
3. Write a pillar or link bait article, and get it plastered on digg, reddit, and other viral sites.
4. Create video link bait that goes viral on youtube.
5. Post your link as the source on Question and Answer sites like Yahoo Answers.
6. Write a Wordpress Theme, or Plugin. Themes are great because you can link back to your site in the copyright area.
7. Do something unusual that gets you noticed on a popular news site.
8. Share the link love, link to others who may link back.
9. Insult an authority in your niche, might get you flamed but it may get you some good backlinks.
10. Become top commenter on do-follow blogs.
11. Produce killer content that people quote, and link to.
12. Use Ping.fm to post your blog posts across multiple social networks so people see it, and link to it.
13. Cross link from your other websites.
14. Provide a great service, or design a web app.
15. Make an ebook. Give it away for a great way to get new email subscribers for your blog.
16. Starting an affiliate program, is a great way to get a ton of incoming links, and authority.
17. Write guest posts for other blogs in your niche, make sure to add your link in the bio box.
18. Submit articles to article sites, linking back to your site in the bio.
19. Purchase Reviews, or ask people to Review it.
20. Become DoFollow and Submit your blog to dofollow directories.
21. Write reviews, if you give a good review the site may link to you, if you give a bad review then other sites might link to your review.
22. Submit to free and paid directories.
23. Write list posts, people love lists(you’re reading this post aren’t you?), and lists get lots of links!
24. Make a poll or survey that people are interested in.
25. Create a wikipedia page about your blog, that links back to it.
26. Sponsor other sites, get them to review you.
27. Start a charity or non-profit.
28. Hold contests. Then post that contest at Blog Contest Site.
29. Release a firefox extension or plugin that is a must have.
30. Interview someone famous, or at least semi-famous. Even a popular blogger will work, your mom, though in most cases won’t work.
31. Writing meaningful, non-spammy, comments on do-follow blogs.
32. Ask for people to retweet, digg, or stumble your best articles.

Source: There's a blog in my soup

ABC - Gallipoli 3D immersive presentation

The online innovation sector of the Australian Broadcasting commission have developed a 3D immersive map where you can explore what happened on the first day of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and follow individual soldiers through the day.

There is a lot of information to look through - very interesting.

Link to it here

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world. This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

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