The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Their recent stats
Google PageRank 6
Alexa Rank 804
Links in Google 17
Inbound Links 25,348,267
Domain Reg 18th May, 2007
Compete Ranking 7,643
Compete Uniques 262,202
SEMRush Rank 292,636

Claimed Traffic
Page Views Per Month 100,000,000
Uniques Per Month 35,000,000

Ziddu Analytics Data

Everything looks great isn’t it? The only catch is that they don’t reveal their reason for selling the site. But of course it isn’t that mysterious isn’t it. Recently a couple of file sharing site showed a defensive move following the raid of one of the biggest file-sharing site in the world, MegaUpload. File sharing, which was a really booming service 2-3 years ago suddenly plummet and now trying to play safer.

The owner of Ziddu.com may be trying to cash out and pursuing a new venture. It’s still a great deal anyway. But the new owner must have a smart ideas to keep the site delivering revenues while kept safe from any danger. File sharing sites obviously not in the same league as the guys here, but nonetheless they still feel the heat.

So here’s a poem that summarize all that reasons. It’s a modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982), in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. It is a famous example of constrained writing and demonstrate the hard part of Chinese Languages (or Mandarin in particular).

《施氏食獅史》

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

Looks like a fun language to learn doesn’t it?

So, what’s been updated? Most of the knowledge acquired with the old Analytics version will still be valid and useful for the new exam. But, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the new version and start using it.

To be more specific, the exam participants should understand accounts, web properties, and profiles in the new Google Analytics, know the goal types and when to use each type, understand the concepts of metric and dimension, aware of new Google Analytics capabilities and reports. Visits to http://analytics.blogspot.com/ would be really helpful to learn new features of Google Analytics. Try this as well for a starter.

Introducing EdgeRank

Just like search engines, Facebook utilize a couple of algorithms as part of their rules for sharing information. EdgeRank is the algorithm which determines who sees what, basically – it determines what objects (updates, posts, photos,  etc) you will see in the news feed.

Whether you work in marketing or just run a Facebook page for your local shop, knowing what you can do to have your updates seen by a wider audience is the key to spreading the word about your content. Unlike search engines, who keep their algorithms pretty close to their chest, Facebook regularly discuss the factors that make up their algorithms – particularly EdgeRank, at conferences and events for Facebook Developers. Unlike in SEO, where revealing the algorithm would immediately opens it up for exploitation, having people know the basics of Facebook’s algorithm (theoretically) just encourages people to create better content – which should be win-win for both Facebook and the user.

So what factors make up EdgeRank?

According to the Facebook nerds, EdgeRank is made up of three distinct factors:

• Connectedness or how well connected you are to the audience. You can see this in action as a regular Facebook user – if you regularly find yourself sharing content with certain users, Facebook will increase your “affinity” and you’ll see their content a lot more often. The same works with brands and pages – the more a user interacts with you, the more likely they are to see your content at other times.
• Weight or how popular a piece of content is, as well as what it is. Popular wisdom tells us that Video, Photos and Links have more weight than a regular status update, and are thus more likely to be shared with your followers. Weight is unique to different users though – if you’re the type of user that watches videos a lot, videos will be given a higher weight in your news feed.
• Recency or how fresh the content is. To put this in simple terms, newer content is given more preferential treatment than old. Seems pretty obvious really, but it’s good to know that this is a factor.

How can you improve your EdgeRank?

• Post content that encourages interaction. If you follow a lot of big brands that seem to show up on your feed more often than others, you’ll notice that they post updates that seem to get a LOT of responses. Whether it’s posing an interesting question, sparking debate with a controversial statement, or simply chatting with your fans – encouraging debate works wonders for EdgeRank
• Use media creatively – one thing seems to work particularly well for photos is to ask for funny caption suggestion
• Encourage tagging – people tagging themselves in photos immediately opens that content up to a wider base of the taggers friends, which is one of the reasons that brands often run “tag yourself and win a prize” competitions.
• Encourage actions – don’t be afraid to ask for an action from fans, such as sharing a piece of content or hitting “like” underneath it.
• Post regularly – but don’t spam. Ensuring you have fresh content up every day (and at different times of day) means you’re giving out the right freshness “signals”, and also makes you less reliant on short-term success having an impact.

In simple terms, you’ll start seeing more interactions – though you need to keep a close eye on Facebook Insights to give you more fine-tuned information. There are also a number of services that claim to check your actual EdgeRank.

Warning: I use Google Translate, and haven’t done any proofreading, expect some mistakes

我 – Wǒ – I
你 – Nǐ – You
的 – De – Of
是 – Shì – Be
了 – Le – indicating past events
他 – Tā – He
么 – Me – It
们 – Men – Are
在 – Zài – In
有 – Yǒu – Have
这 – Zhè – This
那 – Nà – That
不 – Bù – Not
什 – Shén – Even
个 – Gè – [quantifier]
来 – Lái – Come
要 – Yào – To
就 – Jiù – On
一 – Yī – A
人 – Rén – People
里 – Lǐ – In
会 – Huì – Will
没 – Méi – Not
她 – Tā – She
吗 – Ma – You
去 – Qù – Go
也 – Yě – Also
说 – Shuō – Say
为 – Wèi – For
好 – Hǎo – Good
吧 – Ba – [commonly used as a way to invite]
知道 – Zhīdào – Know
我的 – Wǒ de – My
和 – Hé – And
你的 – Nǐ de – Your
想 – Xiǎng – Would like
只 – Zhǐ – Only
很 – Hěn – Very
都 – Dōu – All
对 – Duì – To
把 – Bǎ – To
啊 – A – Ah
怎 – Zěn – How
得 – De – Get
还 – Hái – Also
过 – Guò – Had
不是 – Bùshì – Not
到 – Dào – To
样 – Yàng – Sample
能 – Néng – Can
事 – Shì – Thing
看 – Kàn – See
我們 – Wǒmen – We
上 – Shàng – On
给 – Gěi – To
可以 – Kěyǐ – Can
现 – Xiàn – Present
斯 – Sī – Sri Lanka
做 – Zuò – Do
儿 – Er – Child
时 – Shí – Time
点 – Diǎn – Point
开 – Kāi – Open
让 – Ràng – Let
就是 – Jiùshì – Is
但 – Dàn – But
呢 – Ne – It
着 – Zhe – With
它 – Tā – It
這 – Zhè – This
如果 – Rúguǒ – If
跟 – Gēn – With
邪 – Xié – Evil
听 – Tīng – Listen
克 – Kè – Gram
再 – Zài – Again
快 – Kuài – Fast
嗎 – Ma – You
被 – Bèi – Be
是的 – Shì de – Yes
大 – Dà – Large
先生 – Xiānshēng – Mr.
别 – Bié – Do not
告 – Gào – Tell
真的 – Zhēn de – Really
谢 – Xiè – Thank
哦 – Ó – Oh
话 – Huà – Words
械 – Xiè – Mechanical
见 – Jiàn – See
当 – Dāng – When the
芯 – Xīn – Core
该 – Gāi – That
西 – Xi – Western
子 – Zi – Child
已 – Yǐ – Already
會 – Huì – Will
小 – Xiǎo – Small
爱 – Ài – Love
特 – Tè – Special
不要 – Bùyào – Do not
些 – Xiē – Some
不知道 – Bù zhīdào – Do not know
不能 – Bùnéng – Can not
因 – Yīn – Because
觉 – Jué – Sleep
发 – Fā – Hair
像 – Xiàng – Image
太 – Tài – Too
但是 – Dànshì – But
多 – Duō – Multi-
打 – Dǎ – Fight
机 – Jī – Machine
來 – Lái – Come
好了 – Hǎole – Done
用 – Yòng – Use
他的 – Tā de – His
诉 – Su – Complaint
德 – Dé – Virtue
叫 – Jiào – Call/Name
什麼 – Shénme – What
真 – Zhēn – True
干 – Gàn – Dry
心 – Xīn – Heart
走 – Zǒu – Go
比 – Bǐ – Ratio
死 – Sǐ – Dead
嘿 – Hēi – Hey
出 – Chū – Out
车 – Chē – Car
一下 – Yīxià – About
中 – Zhōng – In
好吧 – Hǎo ba – Well
需要 – Xūyào – Need
经 – Jīng – After

George Zipf finds that given some source of text of language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus the word “the” is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf’s Law, the second-place word “of” accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by “and” (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

It’s not exactly that way for other languages, but they’re pretty much exhibit the similar pattern. We’ll take a look at the frequency of words in Mandarin Language.

I found interesting data sets from opensubtitles.org that contain all words in the database of subtitles they have. For Mandarin language, they have 788 files that contain 97,909 unique words, 1,362,738 total word and 7,033,863 word count. I tried to crunch the data sets for the whole words, but it keeps crashing my old laptop , but even the list of 50.000 words already reveal the patterns. Well actually even the list of 5,000 words already reveal the same pattern anyway. It isn’t intended as a perfect sample of daily usage of the Mandarin Language, but movies pretty much reflect daily life don’t they?

5000 words is the minimum number of words to memorize for someone to reach the highest level of Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, (simplified Chinese: 汉语水平考试; traditional Chinese: 漢語水平考試), Chinese equivalent of TOEFL or IELTS. And guess again, we don’t even need to memorize that many words to reach, say, 50% or 80% highest appearance frequency of words. To reach 50% we just need to memorize 135 Mandarin vocabs (surprisingly similar to Zipf’s finding) but to reach 80% we’ll need to memorize 1321 words, to reach 90% we’ll need to crunch 3673 words. How much needed to reach 100%? I don’t even sure there is anyone who manage to do that, most of the words won’t be used anyway, why bother

If you finish your Advanced HSK test and score perfect 6, you’re likely to master around 92% of the words in daily use.

And by the way, lots of languages follow a similar pattern, when I’m done with the data, I’ll post the result.

You can see the live demo here.

Basic Usage

Tinycon.setBubble(6);

Tinycon can take a range of options to customise the look

• width: the width of the notification bubble
• height: the height of the notification bubble
• font: a css string to use for the fontface
• colour: the foreground font colour
• background: the alert bubble background colour
• fallback: should we fallback to a number in brackets for browsers that don’t support canvas/dynamic favicons

Tinycon.setOptions({
width: 7,
height: 9,
font: '10px arial',
colour: '#ffffff',
background: '#549A2F',
fallback: true
});

Jika internet disebut sebagai salah satu batu pijak terpenting peradaban manusia, Google mungkin bisa disebut batu pijak terpenting bagi Internet itu sendiri. Sampai-sampai kata ‘googling’ sendiri sering dipakai sebagai pengganti ‘mencari di Internet’. Namun hal terbaik yang bisa dilakukan Google ‘hanya’-lah memberikan jawaban, dengan kata lain kitalah yang memegang peran lebih penting untuk memberikan pertanyaan yang menghasilkan jawaban bermakna.

Sekitar 85 persen dari pengguna Internet menggunakan mesin pencari untuk menemukan informasi yang dibutuhkan. Dari jumlah itu, sekitar 85 persen juga yang merasa frustrasi karena tidak bisa menemukan informasi yang sesuai dengan keinginan mereka. Tutorial ini akan membawa rekans lebih dekat ke informasi yang sesuai dengan keinginan.

Google sendiri memiliki banyak fitur selain web search-nya yang akan sangat membantu kita dalam menjelajahi rimba maya. Secara sekilas akan diperkenalkan dengan sangat singkat layanan-layanan yang disediakan oleh Google.

The answer is out there, all we need is a good question.

Tips Pencarian Google

Setelah mengintip sejenak fitur-fitur yang ditawarkan Google, sekarang saatnya kita mempelajari tips dan trik dasar web searching. Google Web Search memakai algoritma PageRank untuk menentukan urut-urutan dari query hasil pencarian. Secara garis besar PageRank mengurutkan berdasar relevansi dan jumlah link yang merujuk ke halaman. Query nomor satu di Google tidak selalu berarti jawaban tepat yang rekans cari, namun banyak orang di luar sana yang menganggapnya relevan dan signifikan. Siapa tahu, mungkin itu membawa kita lebih dekat ke tujuan.

Setelah menguasai jurus-jurus dasar Googling, sekarang saatnya kita mempelajari jurus-jurus lanjutan. Mulai opsi-opsi tingkat lanjutan, modifikasi URL, dan fitur-fitur lain akan dibahas di sini.

Sintaks pencarian yang bergaris bawah menandakan perintah-perintah yang bisa kita modifikasi untuk mendapatkan hasil pencarian sesuai keinginan kita tanpa memasukkan kata kunci di kotak pencarian google. Meskipun cukup ribet, tips ini akan sangat berguna untuk melakukan otomatisasi dan kustomisasi pencarian lebih sesuai dengan keinginan kita. Apalagi jika dikombinasi dengan bahasa pemrograman seperti Perl dengan bantuan Regex. Perintah custom bisa kita masukkan setelah tanda ‘&’ yang menandakan akhir dari perintah sebelumnya, untuk mengakhiri perintah custom kita sendiri, gunakan ‘&’ lagi.

Contoh-contoh perintah pada URL di atas

Fungsi-fungsinya bisa kita dapati pada table di bawah