SEO Werkt!

With the release of their BlackBerry 10 beta development tools and Dev Alpha devices earlier today, RIM has made it very clear that they want to build up as much developer love as possible before BlackBerry 10 officially launches.

Well, as it turns out, that’s not the only thing they’re doing to attract devs. Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, revealed at BlackBerry World that RIM will guarantee developers of quality apps a minimum of $10,000 in annual earnings — if developers come in under the $10K mark during their first year, RIM will actually pay them the difference.

Ah, but there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). In order to qualify for RIM’s generous offer, the apps in question must meet a strict new quality certification program whose standards have yet to be laid concretely laid out. One thing is known for sure though — once an app has been officially approved for sale in the App World and nabs that new certification, it has to generate at least $1,000 on its own before RIM swoops in and cuts the developer a check.

Translation: the apps can’t completely suck. Sorry fart app devs, that means you.

It may not be the most novel approach — hell, just look at Microsoft’s track record — but it certainly drives home their developer-focused point. Frankly, it also smacks a bit of desperation. The one-time king of the smartphone realm now seems so hard up for more good apps that they’re willing to pay developers to build nifty things for their new platform.

Then again, with all of mud that’s been flung at RIM in the recent past, I can’t really blame for turning to payouts to make their platform a safer bet for developers. Creating rich, meaningful mobile content takes plenty of time and effort, and RIM is clearly doing whatever they can to make sure their app store gets some of that good stuff. Now the big question is whether or not RIM will be able to keep the momentum from this program going after they blow through their budget.

Google has announced the latest in its ongoing updates to the Panda algorithm that targets low-quality websites. And they’ve taken the somewhat novel approach of using Twitter to make this announcement: Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6% of queries noticeably affected. Background on…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

iPhone: The Eatery is a free iPhone app that aims to improve your eating habits. It starts with an approach we’ve seen several times: Every time you eat something, you snap a picture of it. From there, The Eatery takes a novel approach that may actually help you eat better without pulling out your scale and calculator, hunting for a calorie counter, or dealing with other tedious food logging tools. More »

Here’s the one in which we figure out what Paul Carr’s startup will actually do; Okay so it is a publication! Okay it’s a whole company focused on publishing only for tablets and e-readers! (Actually doesn’t a tablet count as an e-reader? Wasted thirty minutes having this discussion this morning …)

Carr’s post-TechCrunch company, NSFW Corp, will shun the Internet in favor of a publishing direct-to-the-tablet model because Carr thinks that high-quality content and the web are two mutually exclusive things. NSFW Corp’s first publication will be The New Gambit, which Carr describes as The Economist as written by The Daily Show writers — something like The Onion, but for real news.

The New Gambit will launch in public beta at the end of next month Carr hopes, and will be available cross-platform — on the Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc. Carr wants to hit a regular publishing schedule by the early part of 2012, with the weekly subscription costing 99 cents a ~50 page issue.

“We 100% won’t be on the web,” Carr says, a novel approach which means that his team of ten or so writers won’t have to worry about Internet writing annoyances like caring about SEO or breaking news.

“If we accidentally break news that’s great, but breaking news lives on the web, and it’s going to be free. [The New Gambit] will be more like ‘Here’s what we think and here’s what we know.’ We want to be breaking jokes. I mean we might just break news every so often just to fuck with people, and hide it at the back. Or maybe we’ll create the first range of news breaking merchandise? I like the idea of a plush toy breaking news … These are all just ideas,” he says.

Carr says he chose the name The New Gambit because he wanted something that sounded sufficiently pompous, and was inspired by the Simpson’s episode where Homer reads an issue of the The Economist with a “Indonesia’s New Gambit” headline on the cover, asking Marge, “Did you know that Indonesia is in a state of turmoil?” Carr explains,”I’m a strong believer that jokes are even funnier in a grown-up setting … I mean, come on — the Economist and the Simpsons!”

When asked about the challenges of launching a new kind of journalistic magazine in a tumultuous time for the industry, especially when considering The Daily’s failure, Carr said, “I think there is something so satisfying about laughing out loud that it’s worth 99 cents of people’s money.  I am not below hiring a team of researchers to follow people around ensuring that they laugh, or giving a money back guarantee.”

Funded by Crunchfund and Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, Carr is currently hiring for positions based out of Las Vegas, “I don’t want a consistently funny man woman or child that isn’t on my payroll. In the same way that Rupert Murdoch owns every single scumbag, I want to own every single funny person. I want the funny Glenn Bleck. Wait Glenn Beck is the funny Glenn Bleck.” At this point in the interview I started laughing really hard, telling Carr that he was, in fact, being really funny. “Imagine how funny this is going to be when you read it on your iPad and there’s 49 pages left to go,” he said.

Update: Carr just posted about it on his own blog. Also, here’s that Simpson’s clip he’s referring to, en Español.