The Web Strategy Blog

HOW TO: Share Voice Notes via Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs

2009-05-28T15:05:00.002Z

By Ben Parr Mashable

When you need to send a voice note or a dictation to multiple contacts, Phonevite has always been a strong option. However, while it does have an iGoogle Gadget, Phonevite has mostly been limited to voice-to-phone sharing.

That was until today, when Phonevite opened the social media floodgates of its voice services. Starting today, you can not only send voice messages to your friends via phone, but you can also share recordings via Twitter (Twitter reviews), Facebook (Facebook reviews), MySpace (MySpace reviews), email or just embed the audio directly to your website.

Once you have made a voice recording (either via a recording browser app or via phone), the recording will appear in your recording inbox. Now, however, you’ll see five small icons at the bottom for each of the key social services and embeds...

Full article.....

How Twitter Was Founded (CLIP)

2009-05-28T15:01:00.002Z

By Nicholas Carlson

Here's Twitter cofounders Biz Stone and Ev Williams at the All Things D conference explaining how Twitter was their second idea for a startup after the first one they tried after quitting Google failed.

The other interesting part of the interview comes when Walt Mossberg drops a telling stat: 51% of people with Twitter accounts don't use it once a month. Twitter CEO Ev Williams says the number raises a question the startup knows it has to answer: How does Twitter go from a thing everyone's heard of to a thing everyone uses everday?

Full article....

AOL Officially Sweeps Embarrassing Bebo Saga Under The Rug (TWX)

2009-05-28T14:51:00.002Z

We hear it's a bit early in the morning for high-fives over at AOL HQ, but that doesn't mean AOLers don't have plenty of reasons to celebrate after Time Warner's (TWX) board approved an AOL's spin-off last night.

Not the least of them: As a part of the re-org that will follow the spin-off, new CEO Tim Amstrong plans to take a stiff brush to its $850 million social network Bebo and firmly sweep it under the rug

Bebo, as well as start-ups AOL has bought recently, such as the Userplane social media apps unit and its Truveo video search service, will be “relocated” into AOL Ventures. Each will operate on their own, and AOL will try to get venture capitalists to invest in them.

Full article....

The Culture & Economy of Participation Presentation by Gerd Leonhard at Emergence 2009 in Cyprus

2009-02-19T21:56:00.002Z

Here's great presentation by Gerd Leonhard at Emergence 2009 in Cyprus yesterday morning on Tourism and Web 2.0 Basic theme of the presnetation is that Web 1.0 connected people to information and data while Web 2.0 connects people to people and this fundementally changes many indutries (think how internet file sharing has broken the music industry business model) including tourism.

We have gone from the pre media age (run by the state and the church) through the mass media age (run by the professional media) and are entering the social media age where the consumer dictates. Google becomes Twitter, Web Search becomes Social Search and Data Context becomes Social network as context. Don't ask Google as your friends on Twitter or Facebook. When did you last trust a stranger to give you advice on a holiday destination?

Information Culture to Conversation Culture Tourism businesses need to offer conversations using the usual tools;

Blogs
Micorblogs,
RSS
Widgets
Social Networks
Photosharing
You Tube and others.

It seems to me that tourism lends itself naturally to this new environment. the key to future success is around personalisation, sharing, engagement,transparency and participation. Let your fans do the marketing for you. Its all about attention. Where-ever attention flows money follows.

"You used to use your budget to buy an audience. Now you have to invent ideas to attract an audience" Think the recent Cadburies Dancing Eyebrows video on You Tube as a silly example of this.

What this means for a tourist business:

Open communications via blogs twitter etc
Shift marketing to video, social Networking (take a look at the iPhone App Open Table)
Maximise Google Juice
Customer Experience becomes drastically more important.

But read this blog post on social media first

Attention is the new Currency
Content is the new Advertising
Engagement is the new Marketing
Participation is the new Consumption - not quite sure what he meant by that one.

Gerd Leonhard has a website at www.mediafuturist.com

Top 5 Web Site Redesign Mistakes

2009-02-15T09:28:00.005Z

Just read this post on the Top 5 Web Site Redesign Mistakes from Craig Menzies via the LinkedIn E-Commerce Network which are as follows:

1. Thinking you know your customers, and not actually talking to any of them
2. The “we’ve only got one shot at this, so we have to make it count” attitude.
3. Failure to get educated or the “I can’t let them know how little I know” corollary.
4. Not enough money, not enough time, not enough planning, not enough testing.
5. Junior people doing senior jobs.

Especially recognise the first one - very rare to find organisations using real user centred design processes. Also have often come across organisations who have failed to make the conceptual leap from website as a one off project to a continuously developing business process. Thats why you get junior people doing senior jobs. Many marketers do not understand that digital offers a complete paradigm shift in whats possible for their business. You get the same attitude with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is often seen as a one off job that can be done at site launch and then forgotten about. With tools such as Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer everything is measurable (SEO, PPC Campaigns, conversion funnels, site conversions, form completions, email marketing, offline advertisng etc etc....) and able to be tested opening up the ability to continuously improve the effectiveness of their website and internet marketing.

Go here for expert advice on Google Website Optimizer or implementing your web analytics

The Future of Search Engine Optimisation

2009-01-22T20:43:00.004Z

Just finished a great webinar given by Mike Grehan at www.acronym.com called New Signals to Search Engines which has given me glimpse of what the future probably holds for search.

As the major search engines are beginning to provide blended search results the standard 10 blue links search engine results pages (SERPS) are beginning to show significant vertical creep. Organic text based results are getting crowded out and pushed down the page by paid results, Google Maps, images and other media results. At the beginning of SEO it was important to get in the top 40 results or you wouldn't be found. Then 3 years ago it was the top 10 now it could perhaps be the top result only that gets found. Even if you’re at the top it is difficult for a text based result to compete for the user attention amongst so much exciting imagery.

In the beginning search engines relied completely on text based crawling using the vector space model to establish webpage relevancy. Then when the number of web pages became too many, the search companies became very interested in network analysis. Meaning analysing the number of links to a page - which became the Page Rank score. When Page Rank became too easy to spam the search industry began looking at keywords in hypertext link anchor text. But in this model only individuals with web pages can influence the relevancy of a page. What about the end user?

User generated media content out numbers mediated content by a factor of 5 to 1. It is very likely that the search engines are paying attention to all this web 2.0 social media out there. The new signals will be how many times a page has been tagged. How many times a page has been bookmarked on www.delicious.com , Digg.com, rated on other similar social media sites or linked to from You Tube.

Most of us use toolbars of one sort or another - the Google Toolbar is one of the most commonly used so Google can watch and understand users search trail and look at specific landing pages.

So we are moving beyond traditional web page text based search engine optimisation to a new environment where digital asset management is the name of the game. Making the most of a clients html, video, pod casts, images, blogs and social media. Rather than concentrating on placing the best keywords into Page Titles, meta descriptions and body text.. Mike Greham used the term Connected Marketing by which I think he means joining up all those web pages, blogs, tweets, You Tube videos, mobile applications and RSS feeds into a coordinated marketing strategy ensuring prominence across the whole digital space.

Increasingly organic search will offer diminishing returns as it looses share of voice and has shrinking relevance to the users. Search engine ranking reports will be misleading as users will not look beyond the first result if at all.

The future SEO expert will therefore need to offer full digital asset optimisation There's a download at http://bit.ly/new_signals_to_search

Labels: digital asset management, digital asset optimisation, search engine optimisation, seo

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Quantcast - New Permissions Functionality

Quantcast is a great web analytics tool which uniquely blends panel and javascript web analytics methodologies to provide valuable competitor and sector data at zero cost.

They have just introduced new permissions functionality that will allow you to share your audience reports selectively with other Quantcast users now making it much easier to share data selectively with colleagues and business partners while keping you in control.

This "User Privileges" functionality is available for all publishers and empowers them to:

Share their data internally across different business groups (web development, ad sales, executives)
Provide advertisers, agencies and media planners unique insight into their audiences across the network, individual sites, or segments, without having to reveal that data to everyone
Enable partners to access data on a project basis, while having full control on when that access is removed

Get the full instructions direct from Quantcast here.

Quantcast - New Permissions Functionality

2009-01-08T20:38:00.002Z

Quantcast is a great web analytics tool which uniquely blends panel and javascript web analytics methodologies to provide valuable competitor and sector data at zero cost.

This "User Privileges" functionality is available for all publishers and empowers them to:

Share their data internally across different business groups (web development, ad sales, executives)
Provide advertisers, agencies and media planners unique insight into their audiences across the network, individual sites, or segments, without having to reveal that data to everyone
Enable partners to access data on a project basis, while having full control on when that access is removed

Get the full instructions direct from Quantcast here.

Measure Your Influence in Twitter

2009-01-08T20:20:00.002Z

The guys at Web Anlaytics Demystified have come up with an interesting little tool for measuring your influence on Twitter.

"Web Analytics Demystified believes that influence is a function of your reach, noteriety, and the likelihood that you will repeat the ideas of others and have your own ideas repeated ("retweeted"). Enter any Twitter username to see their influence in Twitter or have a look at the Twitter Influence cloud or top 100 Twitter influencers!"

Here's how our feed scored - SLOWLY DEVELOPING - looks like we've got try a lot harder:

ju2ltd's influence in Twitter is SLOWLY DEVELOPING. About ju2ltd's Twitter activity. The Twitter user ju2ltd has 80 followers and 21 friends. In the last 30 days, ju2ltd has Twittered 0 updates, been referenced 0 times by 0 by his or her followers , retweeted 0 times by 0 unique individuals and has retweeted updates published by other people 0 times. WHOOPS.

By our calculation, ju2ltd's relative recent influence in Twitter is SLOWLY DEVELOPING. For the past 30 days, the components of this score are as follows:

Relative rate at which ju2ltd's updates are retweeted: NON EXISTENT
Relative rate at which ju2ltd is being referenced by followers: NON EXISTENT
Relative rate at which ju2ltd is retweeting friends: NON EXISTENT
Relative reach based on 80 followers: DEVELOPING
Relative velocity based on 0 updates: NON EXISTENT

Here's the link to how they calculate the score

Google TV Ads

2009-01-04T17:28:00.003Z

Have I been sleeping at the wheel? While looking around our Google Analytics Account I stumbled on Google TV Ads

Amazing service and it was the obvious place for Google to go next and I am guessing a great way for the TV companies to fill remnant TV ad spots. Google TV Ads allows you to use all the targeting (region, demographic, TV network, prgrammes, dayparting) thats standard on AdWords but for TV. Not sur eif the service is available in the UK yet however.

You upload you're TV ad there and then. If you don't have an Ad you can search through recommended agencies that will create one for you.

Ads are charged by 1000 impressions (cpm) and you can set your daily budget as with AdWords. As you would expect everything is measureable and TV ads integrates directly with Google Analytics so you expert web analysts out there will have plenty of data to campare with other campaigns.

There's loads more information on the Google Lets Take It Offline blog When we've recovered from the Christmas break we'll get back to you with more information on this new potential marketing strategy.

Scotland to Get its Own Domain Name

2008-12-14T15:19:00.005Z

After recent surveys showed strong support amongst Scottish organisations and the general public - Scottish Government ministers are likely to apply to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) regards the creation of a .scot top level domain name. Catalonia set up the .cat domain name 2 years ago and has been highky successful with 30,000 registrations. Scottish ministers hope they can repeat this success and hope that the .scot TLD will help strengthen the Scottish community across the world.

More expert advice on website optimisation and analytics here

Discounts for UPA Members

2008-12-13T17:34:00.003Z

The UPA have recently announced their latest member benefits: big discounts on useful tools, software, services and conferences.

As a UPA member you can now get a:

$89 USD discount on Axure RP Pro 5 wireframing, prototyping and specification software
10% discount on Mangold International eye tracking services and software
25% discount on Optimal Sort online card sorting tool
20% discount on TechSmith Morae usability testing software bundle
25% discount on WebSort.net web-based card sorting subscription

Find out more about these discounts and how to claim them by visiting the Usability Professionals' Association . If you're based in Scotland come along to the Scottish UPA meetings - more info at Scottish UPA Events

Oh My God! Search is Changing Forever! SEO is Doomed! Run for the Hills!

2008-12-07T17:26:00.003Z

I saw an article by Aida Edemarian in the Guardian Saturday 6th December on the subject of search engine optimisation and the dark arts of the blogger.

"Can some artfully placed keywords attract billions of bloggers and instant fame? Not any more, say the experts. The dark arts of the web have grown more subtle, and new media are not so different after all"

It reminded me of a recent blog by randfish at SEOmozBlog.

"With the release of their new yippdy goobledy wobbledy, Google has changed the search game forever. Forget classic SEO, from now on, it's going to be all about blah blah blah"

But the name of the game is still the following:

It's not that Google's other shifts haven't had an impact on SEO, it's just that they haven't been earth-shattering or groundbreaking or given us new paradigms to conquer. SEO remains, at its core, remarkably similar to what it was in 2002:

-Make pages accessible
-Target with keywords that searchers employ
-Build content that users will find useful and valuable
-Earn editorial links from good sources

It's just common sense - nothing much has changed. Research your keywords and write relevant content - its good journalistic practice to include keywords in titles, headings, image labels etc.

But what most organisations forget is the measure the success of your SEO campaign using web analytics. Not only will web analytics tell you how much traffic you are getting from search engines and individual keywords but it will also give you information on bounce rates. Bounce rate may or may not be part of Google's algorithm but they sure are a great way of establishing whether users are finding your content interesting and are a proxy for landing page quality. If your bounce rates are high for specific keywords - you need to look at your content in all the usual places: page titles, headings, body text, images, images tags, anchor text. If you're running an SEO campaign get yourself an web anlaytics expert.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

2008-12-02T21:58:00.004Z

Now that it’s too cold to cycle into the office in the morning I have been able to catch up some reading. And one book which I have found particularly interesting is The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference by Claes Fornell. Somebody at Foresee Results was kind enough to give me the book at Web Analytics Association E Metrics 2008 Conference in London.

The basic thesis of the book is that the satisfied customer is your company’s most valuable asset, is not currently accounted for on your company balance sheet and often not recognised by investors. Basic economic theory states that the customer seeks to maximise utility (satisfaction) while the seller is supposed to maximise profitability. The marginal cost of making a sale to an existing customer is much less than acquiring a completely new customer. A satisfied customer is more likely to recommend your company to friends and family and is less likely to leave you for the competition.

In perfect economically efficient market companies with consistently high customer satisfaction levels will be rewarded by increased profits and which will be reflected in the stock price. While those with poor customer satisfaction levels will be punished by their customers and the value of the company will fall. The book talks about industries where the relationship between satisfaction, profitability and share price s not so strong. These are in markets where choice is restricted (airlines, utilities, cable TV,) or where the cost to the customer of switching supplier is too high (rented accommodation, mobile phones). In these sectors the customers’ power to punish poor service is limited. But in many sectors a drop in customer satisfaction has been able to predict a fall in profitability and company value. Dell Computers and Wal-Mart are used as examples of this.

How to measure satisfaction. Claes Fornell was instrumental in developing the
American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) which is used by many of the biggest organisations in the US. The ACSI can accurately measure satisfaction across elements of your company, benchmark against other companies in your sector and predict which areas of improvement will make most difference to customer retention and recommendation. Fornell has put his money where his mouth is a set up the ACSI Fund which out performed the S&P 500 by over three times between 2001 and 2006. - proving that customer satisfaction leads to share holder value.

What’s this all got to do with digital strategy and website optimisation? Well how well do you understand your online customer satisfaction. Have you ever listened to the voice of your customers in any systematic way? Web analytics experts can tell you how people are behaving but tell you nothing about why they are behaving in the way they do. Listening to the genuine voice of your online customer can tell you loud and clear which parts of your site are not working, are too slow or not as good as your competitors. What a mine of useful information that should be exploited to help you ensure you retain valuable return visitors. How much money do we spend chasing customer acquisition that could be spent more profitably.

The great thing is that there are variety of tools available that can help you capture voice of customer on your site. From there is direct step to improving customer satisfaction and greater profitability Customer Satisfaction matters so measure it - read the book too.

The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference

Building the Usability Profession - Scottish Usability Professionals Association

2008-11-27T19:14:00.002Z

This months meeting of the Scottish UPA is happening on the 3rd of December at Microsoft Scotland, Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG. Tom McEwan, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Interaction Design, Napier University will be discussing "Building the Usability Profession" Attend this meeting to find out how you can raise the profile of usability in your organisation and enhance your career.

The meeting kicks off at 6:30om and the entrance is free to UPA members and £10 for non-members (£5 for student non-members). SUPA will stand some early Christmas drinks in a nearby pub afterwards.

More details on Building the Usability Profession here.

Discount Usability Engineering

2008-11-26T20:03:00.002Z

Take a look at this post from Jakob Nielsen's on the subject of Agile Development Projects and Usability. Summary - Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.

"Agile's biggest threat to system quality stems from the fact that it's a method proposed by programmers and mainly addresses the implementation side of system development. As a result, it often overlooks interaction design and usability, which are left to happen as a side effect of the coding. This, of course, contradicts all experience of the last 30 years, in which user experience's importance in system development has steadily increased as we moved from mainframes to PCs to the Web. As the user base and the use cases have expanded, the need for top-notch usability has grown. "

As discussed at the recent Scottish Usability Professionals Association (SUPA) and BCS meeting in Edinburgh this articles reaches very similar conclusions. With a pragmatic it is possible to maintain a user centred design approach in an Agile environment. Really liked the idea of discount usability engineering - a tactical way of user testing with-in the time lines of Agile development.

Haven't yet had time to read the research linked to in the post Agile Usability: Best Practices for User Experience on Agile Development Projects but will report back shortly.

See here for more background on usability testing

User Centred Design and Agile

2008-11-17T20:49:00.008Z

Have just attended a joint British Computer Society and Scottish Usability Professionals Association (SUPA) meeting at Edinburgh University last week on the conflicts between a User Centered Design and an Agile software development process.

The central conflict appears to be that UCD involves learning everything there is to know about the user before starting development. While Agile emphasises teamwork, customer involvement and the frequent creation of small, working pieces of the total system.

User Centered Design is an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes on users through the planning, design and development of the product. It tends to require a more waterfall project management process and it can be difficult to fit into a typical short iteration Agile/Scrum process.

Usability (expert and user) testing forms a major part of the UCD process and in my experience recruitment of users fitting a specific user profile can be difficult and time consuming. Any potential project slippage during an iteration can be a problem to accommodate.

Any important usability issue identified in testing can also be problem when new user stories will need to be created, estimated and prioritised. The consensus at the meeting was that these issues will always occur regardless of what project management methodology is used. It was agreed that Agile provides an excellent framework to make discussion and management of project implications overt. Thus avoiding rushed periods of development and pressure on project teams to deliver against impossible deadlines.

This has got to be a good thing - more information on usability testing here.

Google Adwords Keyword Insertion

2008-11-04T19:06:00.006Z

Using dynamic keyword insertion into any field of your Google AdWords ad variations is an important driver of click through rate (CTR) and therefore an important determinent of the average cost per click (CPC) you will pay to maintain your ad position.

The Keyword Insertion Tag Format

The keyword insertion tag format is as follows: {keyword:default text}. Use only one colon, with no spacing, in the keyword insertion tag. The AdWords system will not recognize the tag otherwise. Correct: {keyword:videoconferencing}Incorrect: {keyword : videoconferencing}, {keyword::phones}, {keyword,phones}
The text after the colon (:), shown as default text, appears if AdWords is unable to insert an appropriate trigger keyword for the user's search from your ad group keyword list.

Keyword Capitalization

There are various ways to insert keywords using capitalisation

keyword - simply inserts the keyword with no capitalisation
Keyword - sentence (first letter of first word)
KeyWord Initial (first letter of each word)
KEYWord Entire first word and First letter of each remaining word
KeyWORD First letter of first word and All letters of each remaining word
KEYWORD All letters of all words

AdWords ads cannot include excessive ad text capitalization (for example, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION). Capitalization may only be used where the natural spelling of a word requires full capitalization, such as in acronyms, technical terms, and trademarked terms such as SEO.

Great Online Tools October 2008

2008-10-23T21:33:00.006Z

Here are just some of the great tools we've discovered at JU2 this month.

First up EventBrite which is an excellent tool for organising, managing and promoting events. Its easy to integrate into your website and can even handle the financial side of things for a small percentage.

Next up Powwow Now which is a free conference call provider who give you a personal conference call number that is yours for ever. This number is availabe for you to use at any time. They even send out a handy credit card sized reminder to put it your wallet.

Also take a look at Drop Send which is a handy little tool to share or move large files across the internet. Its free and allows you to upload files to a directory structure and subseqently share, send or download.

My favourite this month must be Conduit who enable you to create and share a fully branded browser toolbar. Take a look at the JU2 Web Analytics Toolbar or click on the download button below.

Last up is SheerSEO which is a great little tool for tracking your search engine rankings. You shouldn't be embarking on any search engine optimisation campaign without the ability to track rankings over time. Well thats all from JU2 this month we'll be back soon.

Great Discoveries of the Month - Feb 08

2008-02-28T19:26:00.003Z

There have been a couple of sites that have caught my attention this month.

Thinkature

First up Thinkature. On the Thinkature website they describe the service as follows:

" With Thinkature, you can create a collaborative workspace and invite coworkers, friends, and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards, and adding content from around the Internet. It's all synchronous, too - no need to hit reload or get an editing lock"

As a person who spends most days teleconferencing it can be really difficult to explain things without drawing a diagram. Well this now makes it easy. Everybody can be looking at the same workspace.

Zoho Wiki

Next up create your very own wiki in less than 30 seconds with Zoho Wiki. Not used wikis extensively but this just makes it so easy. Now have my very own wiki just to save notes and various ideas somewhere where I can access then easily.

Telebid

The Telebid site looks like such an amazing deal. At first glance there appears to be some amazing bargains available. Nintendos for £30 iBooks for £70.

According the the site itself:

"There’s a few key things that are different from other auctions you might have used online:

Bidding on our auctions starts at just 10p, with no reserve prices.
The price only goes up by 10p with each bid placed. (7p on international auctions).
If a bid gets placed in the final moments, we extend the auction by up to 40 seconds.
There’s a small charge for each bid placed: this helps us offer you such amazing bargains."

This site is genius each bid costs 50p, and are available in "BidPacks" of 20, 50, 100 and 200 bids. So every time you make an incremental bid of 10p the site makes 40p. This is amazing - bargains appear to be available right up to very last seconds until everybody piles in. And each time somebody piles in the bidding period is extended by 10 seconds or so. So what may have looked like an amazing bargain at first can very quickly look less attractive. But Telebid make 40p on every bid!

Doing some rough maths if an auction for a Wii closes at £120 thats 1,200 bids at 10p but Telebid have made £480 - just on the bids. Plus the £120 towards the cost of the product. They are quids in. But the winner can still get a bargain provding they haven't made to many bids.

I wonder whether this site was designed with the help of an Economist or somebody who knows a lot about Game Theory. The rules remind me of the auction for mobile phone radio spectrum in the UK which netted the UK government £Billions.

Scottish Usability Professional Association Event

2008-01-11T20:06:00.000Z

January 29th - Implementing usability changes on an already successful site, Tamlin Roberts, Mercurytide

Entrance will be free to UPA members and £10 for non members (£5 for student non-members).

Venue: Scottish Enterprise Atlantic Quay Glasgow

Time: 18:30

If you already have a site that is doing well, have lots of visitors and they are using the site as you want them to, then should you be changing it? Many will argue that ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ but others will say that you have to constantly update to keep ahead of the competition.
The property market is highly competitive and in Scotland this company is no small player, but when they we were asked to update an already successful site we had to be sure that usability was a priority and that we were going to add something to the mix rather than take it away.
Come along to this case study presentation to learn how usability can be applied on a commercial site with a wide audience and extensive content. A wide range of user centred design methods, as well as AJAX web design were applied to provide an overall positive user experience.

If you would like to sign up for this SUPA event, please do so via our website at http://www.scottishupa.org.uk/events.html

Pandora Shuts Down in the UK

2008-01-10T22:30:00.000Z

As did many others, on Monday I got an email from Pandora, my preferred internet radio station, telling me the following:

" in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible"

It appears that both the PPL and the MCPS/PRS Alliance have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so one of the best internet radio stations has had to close.

This seems to have happened just at the same time as DRM and digital copywright legislation are being dropped making music much more freely available. I am now using Last FM

Great Discoveries of the Month

2008-01-10T21:47:00.000Z

January has so far been a great month for discovering fantastic tools on the internet - mainly because I finally started using Stumble Upon properly.

I first have to mention a company called Carbonite who provide a great online backup service. Carbonite is really simple to instal and use. It takes a couple of days to complete the initial back up but after that is a dream to use. Whats more its a fraction of the cost of my previous back up solution.
Take a look at this SEO tool from Quinu - its got everything including the kitchen sink. What I like about thids tool is that it provides data on Back Links, Indexed Pages and Social Bookmarkinig all in one page.
Next ever want a temporary email address try Guerilla Mail which gives you an email that lasts 15 minutes - what a great idea.
This is an old one but I've just started using it - http://tinyurl.com/ which is so useful particularly for printed material.
Compete - I've known about Compete for sometime but I must have been on vacation whne they launched their Search Analytics service. Compete Search Analytics provides you with the most common keywords used to find a site as well as the domains that are most commonly found against your choosen keyword. It provides the sort of information you get from Hitwise but is affordable to the smaller company.

Well thats all folks.

Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages

2008-01-03T14:03:00.000Z

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.In some cases, if Google sees a lot of searches for a query that wasn't popular before, it assumes something has happened recently and shows more recent results.These two changes are extremely visible today. If you go to Google's homepage and click on the special logo that celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year, you'll be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and you should normally see a Wikipedia page as the top result. But the first page of Google's results has changed dramatically in the past hours and all the results are new: most of them are from spam sites, pages that discuss Google's logo and quote from Wikipedia. Most notably, the top result is a Digg page that links to a newly-created blog with a meaningful address: january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com and a highly-optimized title: "January 1 tcp/ip". Obviously, that blog hoped to take advantage of Google's new logo and succeeded: the two top results are Digg pages that link to that site and they're followed by that blog's homepage and a post from the same blog.

See full article here...

Online Videos – How Old Media, New Technology Is Driving Search!

2007-12-31T13:46:00.000Z

Video search is growing rapidly. It is considered third most effective online advertising media today to reach your target audience. More and more newspapers and conference sites are adapting to the multimedia challenge by adding video to their web sites. Video search results are blending in to the main universal search. Currently there is no cost per view for online video. It is time for businesses to get a head started and use it effectively. It is one of the most effective media today to reach your target audience. Interested to see an example?

Here are a few tips and best practices for video production and submission:

Make sure each video has good call to action in the end such as URL address of the website or phone number to call.
Use professional talent to do voice over.
Create a compelling story highlighting all the reasons to use your product or service
Make sure to use right web friendly format. You do not want to have large file which no one can download or view.
Make sure to encode your video with Meta data and create RSS so your video can be found on search engines.
Make sure you have video site map and separate page allocated for each video. The page where you are posting your video should have search engine optimized content, meta data, RSS etc for engines to crawl your page easily.
Submit your video on top ten video sites and track video viewer ship.

Full article

Nielsen Online: Nov. 2007 Search Stats See Google On Top

2007-12-30T03:30:00.000Z

According to Nielsen Online, formerly Nielsen NetRatings in November 2007, Google is leading the pack, (no surprise there) followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. You'll find the press release here (PDF format), showing the top ten most popular services. Here are the top five:

Google: 57.7%
Yahoo: 17.9%
Microsoft: 12.0%
AOL: 4.5%
Ask: 2.7%

The figures above are the percentage of all US searches handled by the leading search engines.