Using Stuff: Technologies for new and improved users
Professor Mark Blythe, Chair in Interdisciplinary Design, School of Design and Professor Kristina Hook, Interaction Lab, Swedish Institute of Computer Science will discuss persuasive technologies designed to help us improve our health, consume less energy, straighten up and fly right.

Touch of Stuff: Mass production means we are losing touch
Professor Bruce Montgomery, Chair in Design Craftsmanship, School of Design and Caryn Franklin, Fashion Commentator will be discussing the tactile and emotional aspects to design and products and how this impacts upon our appreciation of them.

Design of Stuff: We’ve all got too much stuff
Professor Paul Rodgers, Chair in Design Issues, School of Design and Alex Milton, Director of Research, Heriot-Watt University will discuss the challenges that the design industry and designers now face in the light of us all possessing excessive amounts of stuff.

Cost of Stuff: As the price of stuff drops the human cost goes up
Professor Doug Miller, Chair in Worker Rights in Fashion, School of Design and Fiona Sadler, Head of Ethical Trading, Marks and Spencer believe this just can’t be right. But what can you do? In this session Doug and Fiona will talk about their work in this arena and look to debate the issues with the audience.

It’s not just about having a great web video, it’s about what Google does with it!

Don’t underestimate video marketing. Maybe you won’t put it in first place, as you see it as too difficult or expensive, really, it’s not. Plus, right now, Google seems to be favouring videos. It’s easier to get ranked for a video than almost anything!

This is the magic of video marketing. Those who have mastered this traffic tactic, are going forward in leaps and bounds. Those who have, until now, overlooked it, are being left behind. Don’t be one of them!  These are the basic steps we use to leverage the video online:

Below is some of the the specific procedures we go through to optimize your video content:

HTML surrounding video – When we publish a video on a website, we want to make certain that it is surrounded with HTML content. This way the search engines can get additional information from the surrounding page as the information contained within a video file can be limited.

Filename, title, description – These elements are not be enough to allow your video to rank well on its own but it is a necessary step and without this information, your video will definitively NOT rank well.

Video Files Metadata Optimization – Encode the keywords into your video’s meta data. Tag videos with specific keywords, even if it means tagging each scene.

Keyword “video” – A lot of people add the word “video” to their search query keyword phrase. As a result, we make sure that you we add the word “video” to the title, description, meta data, etc.

Links and Backlinks – Just as with SEO for regular webpages, we get as many backlinks as possible with the relevant keywords and phrases as the anchor text for these links.

XML Video sitemaps – The Video Sitemap tells Google exactly where and what the video content is on your site. This will help it get picked up by the Googlebots and be fully searchable on Google Video.

No to Flash Video Players – Search engines have a hard time crawling video content inside flash players so we stay away from them!

Make good thumbnails, first and the last frames – A video thumbnail is what users view when they are deciding between which videos to watch. Different video search engines will grab thumbnails differently. Some will use the first frame while others will take a frame from somewhere in the middle.

Video Submissio – Upload the video to as many sites as possible – either manually or via 3^rd parties like Tubemogul. Video should be submitted to be video sharing sites and social bookmarking.