Spotted this today, which is a rather amusing use of the Google Maps API:

http://www.tomscott.com/realworldracer

Microsoft have announced that the 8th iteration of their Internet Explorer browser will be out of beta and officially released today at noon EST – that’s 4pm for us GMT residents.

Being an early Windows 7 beta adopter, I’ve been using IE8 beta for a few months now and have only really come to the conclusion that it is better – just – than IE7. Alex posted about the IE8 beta over a year ago now, and proclaimed then that “IE8 is quite a handsome beast but it won’t be replacing Firefox or Opera in our hearts (or on our desktops) anytime soon”. In this case, I concur absolutely here – it most certainly is not my browser of choice – but since IE still has the global browser market share (well, besides Antarctica), IE updates are still of great importance to us.

Microsoft have had the unenviable task of trying to please everybody: IE8 is compliant with current web standards, but needs to revert to an IE7 ‘compatibility mode’ in order to render sites correctly that were designed with previous versions of Internet Explorer in mind. It’s a novel idea for Microsoft to be embracing backwards compatibility, something for which they have been maligned as recently as office 2007 introducing the new XML file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc.), which are completely incompatible with previous versions until Office 2003 and older users download a compatibility pack.

Google Street Views – one of my preferred methods of wasting far too much time on the internet – is starting to cover more than just America. The Googlemobile is really starting to rack up the miles – areas of the UK, France and Japan are starting to turn that satisfying shade of blue which tells you that you can zoom straight on down. Sadly, Brighton isn’t on the map yet, but we’ll be sure to wave if we see the Googlemobile coming around the corner.

Up until now Street Views coverage has been limited to America – which is mapped from coast to coast – as well as Australia and New Zealand. When it comes to online map solutions, it’s hard to see how anybody else is going to get close to what has been achieved so far with Google Maps.

This just in from Hitwise:

During February 2009, 1 in 35 UK internet visits was to a video website. That’s up 40.7% on last year, when the figure was 1 in 50.

At Upstream Connections, we love video. Quality video content on an ecommerce site helps inspire confidence and greatly improves conversion rates (if applied correctly). Did you know that a well-timed video can also be a route into Google’s top 10 results?

This is a result of Google’s much vaunted (and much maligned) Univeral Search. In a nutshell, Universal Search is an attempt to provide search results from a variety of sources, including blogs, images, authority sites like Wikipedia and video sites like YouTube. If you can create an interesting video with the right title, you have the potential to leapfrog onto Google’s front page. This can be particulary useful if you are selling a product that people search for using its name.

If you are interested in our video production services, drop us a line and let’s talk!

For anyone who’s interested in how the Upstream office building looks, check out this video which we made last year:

Sadly, you won’t see our subterranean office itself, but what a nice building, huh?

Samsung have made some questionable advertising decisions in the recent past. See:

But they’ve got it spot on with this new viral video for their SSD drives:

This is currently top of Reddit and is likely to be doing the rounds for a good while yet. Just goes to show that social networking people aren’t entirely against big brands as long as they approach viral advertising in the right way!

New figures from Hitwise show that social networking behemoth Facebook is now the most searched-for brand in the UK and the second most visited website overall. Only Google itself had more UK web traffic in  the last  quarter.

YouTube was the second most searched-for brand, followed by Ebay, Bebo and the BBC.

According to the stats, one in every forty-two searches in the UK include the phrase “Facebook”. This nicely illustrates  a couple of trends that have been developing in the UK in recent years. Firstly, our unquenchable thirst for social networking sites (Brits devote more time to these sites than any other nationality). To put this in context, social networking sites received 13% more traffic than retailers during the measured period and over 27% more than adult sites.

This demonstrates the rapidly-changing way that people are interacting with the internet and how comfortable the British public are with online social transactions. Compare this with the stigma of having an internet-based “social life” even five years ago and the societal shift we are seeing is huge.

Secondly, these figures show the number of searchers who would rather type a brand into a search engine than type in the address bar or click on a bookmark.

This second fact is something that we have watched develop with our own clients’ sites. This is arguably bad news for the bigger brands as it allows smaller rivals to piggyback on their names through AdWords. This said, perhaps it’s time Google gave the smaller guys a break; Aaron Wall recently added a fantastic post on his SEOBook blog about Google’s recent tweaks in favour of household names – a trend that we have been tracking closely at Upstream.

Internet super-brands such as Google and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, are now among the most recognised in Britain. Unlike traditional brands, we actively interact with these online services on a daily basis. And the most important factor with all of these super brands? It is our information that makes Facebook work, it is our information that Google search results provide. Brand interaction just doesn’t get better than that.