We love social media optimisation. And it seems the legendary social media expert Tamar Weinberg loves our Social Media Optimisation work too, calling our latest project the “best viral marketing strategy of 2008″.

We recently created a Flash game for sister company Language Trainers. Users are played a clip of someone with an interesting accent reading a line of Rudyard Kipling’s iconic “If” and asked to guess where the reader is from.

Have a go at the accent game here. A word of warning… it’s hard!

Tamar interviewed project leader Dave Khayat and posted it on her great Techipedia blog. You can read the whole transcript here. It’s an honour to receive such high praise from an expert like Tamar – she is acknowledged as one of the main authorities on Social Media and her opinions are sought after by experts around the world.

Social media projects like the accent game are becoming a much larger part of our work at Upstream Connections. The reaction to the Accent Game shows that social media can be successful in industries that don’t obviously lend themselves to viral marketing. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can promote your site through social media, click here to get in touch.

Many happy returns to our boss and SEO guru Jose Mendez, who has added yet another year to his impressive tally. Without his leadership, frenetic bordering-on-obsessive-compulsive keyword checking and stress ball bouncing antics around the office, Upstream would not be the awesome SEO force we are today!

We hope you’ll all join us in wishing Jose a good one! No doubt that the best birthday present for him would be getting another major keyword to #1, which is a slightly worrying preference, but at least a decent indication of where his priorities lie.

Happy birthday jefe, from all the team! See you on Monday – no doubt slightly the worse for wear…

Homer Simpson’s email address has been hacked!

In an episode from the 14th Series (bless you Wikipedia), Homer is seen chatting on AIM with the email address chunkylover53@aol.com. One of the show’s writers registered the email address and set about replying to the thousands of emails that inevitably flooded in.

The email address was allowed to lapse into inactivity but was recently hacked by some naughty types who used it to direct Homer’s many new friends to nasty, botware breeding grounds.

Check out the full story here: http://blog.spywareguide.com/2008/07/who-hacked-homer.html