This is well worth a read:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Very interesting stuff.

Whether you like it or not you are living a new era of communications and you are being part of the fast-growing social media phenomenon (Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Photo-sharing, Video-sharing, etc.). You have joined communities, groups, forums…

Being part of so many communities is giving you the opportunity to increase your business, family and even old friends network but at a price: how are you going to keep up? On one hand you’ve got the possibilities of a great social network you are already involved in (in most cases not very well organised, let’s face it) and on the other hand you are literally holding a “smart” phone you are not using very smartly… yet. Let’s go mobile and let’s do it the smart way.

Organise your contacts

Have you started to count your contacts in hundreds? It doesn´t matter anymore if your social network is spread across different communities (Facebook, Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, etc.). Everybody is trying to keep up with the latest ways of communications and so are you. Now it’s time to organise your social network.

I love testing applications that are going to help us being in contact and in a very simple way. This is why I recommend Nimbuzz Mobile. Nimbuzz is a new-generation mobile service that allows you to combine all your buddies from Skype, Messenger, Facebook, ICQ, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc. into one contact list. It allows you to chat, make phone calls, send messages and files… and it´s free

In your growing social community an important step is being able to communicate, keeping up-to-date. The concept of being in touch adopts a new meaning and goes further with applications like Nimbuzz.

Try it out and don´t forget to let us know what you think! We appreciate your comments.

Download Nimbuzz and start to really enjoy being in contact.

We’ll be at StudyWorld London 2009 from the 7th to the 9th of September this year, spreading the good word of SEO to language schools across the world. You can find more information on the event here (PDF).

Alex can’t wait to see you there!

A couple of weeks back I posted about Goofram, a site which takes both Google and Wolfram Alpha search results and places them side by side. Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi came up with a somewhat similar idea, but gave it an experimental ‘blind taste test’ twist: display search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo on the same page – but don’t give the user any clues as to which one is which – and let them choose which results were the most relevant. Try it for yourself.

8 weeks later and he’s posted some results on his blog, and as somebody who works a lot with Google and thought that Bing wouldn’t stand a chance against the almighty yardstick of search, I was a little surprised by the results.

From 559,239 search queries, the experiment showed that Google was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top choice as the engine that gave the best results, with 41% of the vote. But following closely behind were Bing at 31% and Yahoo at 28%. I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t the only one surprised that Google’s results had not wooed the lion’s share of searchers: even users who were consciously trying to pick Google from the available results were left wondering how they had ‘accidentally’ chosen Bing.

So, does this spell the end of an era as Google is slowly usurped by search competitors? Well, the answer is… no. Google is still the first choice for those out there who do know which one they’re choosing, but it just goes to show that the alternatives probably aren’t that far behind. The influential Joy Of Tech continues to poke fun at the newly-forged Bing/Yahoo partnership, but for a webcomic that is fundamentally a four-panel leadup to an anti-Microsoft gag, that’s hardly surprising.

In his conclusions so far about the experiment, Kordahi does mention the surprise aspect of the results:

Many were surprised that Google wasn’t always their choice. There were many instances of surprise that Google wasn’t as superior as they thought it was.

Still, “hang on, I’ll Bing it” just doesn’t have the same ring to it…

So Rupert Murdoch has finally confirmed the rumours that have been circulating in recent months: his newspaper websites are no longer going to be free to use. This announcement comes on the back of a bad year for News International, which has seen advertising revenues plunge and tough times online as users desert MySpace for the less spammy climes of Facebook.

Murdoch’s announcement is a significant development in the world of online news and, if the move proves successful, is likely to be copied very widely, very quickly.

The situation regarding online content provision is finely balanced and has caused huge consternation for newspaper owners in the past decade:

Quality journalism costs money; free news websites lose money. So surely users need to pay for online content?

But the reality is somewhat different. Why would users pay for content in one place, when it is free elsewhere? Buying one newspaper per day is perfectly normal, but our behaviour online is different: we can find the news (through search, blogs, news portals, aggregators, bookmarking sites) or the news can find us (RSS feeds, Google Desktop/Reader, etc). So are you loyal enough to a particular newspaper to pay for their content as opposed to getting it for free elsewhere (The Guardian, for example)?

The truth is that nobody knows. Rupert thinks people will be happy to pay for celebrity scoops at the Sun and News of the World and he could be right, especially if the other red tops follow suit and start charging. But would people really pay to read content at The Times Online when the other broadsheets (and particularly the politically-aligned Telegraph) are still free to view? And what about that perennial thorn in Murdoch’s side, the BBC?

And how long until the general public completely bypass the red tops for celebrity gossip and go direct to source at free sites like TMZ, Popbitch, Perez  Hilton etc?

So many questions!

As an aside, it is interesting to see how some newspaper websites have embraced bookmarking sites. We know of a couple that are using social bookmarking sites extensively to drive visits, a topic we have touched on before. But if there’s one thing the bookmarking sites prove, it is the huge variety of news sources out there and how little loyalty many internet users show. This bodes badly for the paid model.

The exceptions to the rule (or perceived rule) are niche publications that have truly unique content, such as industry publications and, arguably, local papers, although many of these have been slow to adapt and have their online policy dictated from on high.

We all love free stuff, but the situation is increasingly unsustainable. As Techdirt point out in this thought provoking article, old school media outlets feel like Google owes them something because they are profiting from the content providers’ hard endeavours. But the media owners are missing the point; Google makes it’s money from transactional searches, not news searches. The news services they provide are great branding, of course, and helping them to dominate the online landscape, but they are not generating significant revenues.

So, what next for online news? I would guess that eventually Google will start paying some form of subsidy to free news providers in order to avoid a war and keep the quality content coming. The search engine is a success because it provides the right information to people who want it, so logically it would be in their interest to keep the quality information coming. Maybe they will provide this subsidy through a new advertising model for news sites. Personally, I can’t see how subscription-based mainstream news websites will prosper.

Whilst we do (and seemingly always will) see Google as our first choice search engine, in the past couple of months we have come to enjoy Wolfram Alpha’s computational search. The two are different yet comparable – whilst Google focuses on results most relevant to your keywords, Wolfram computes an answer to your query based on its own database of knowledge.

So, sometimes you’ll find yourself wanting to use both. For example, if you wanted to know something as specific as the current population of China, Google will give you plenty of sites and pages with information pertaining to the answers, but Wolfram Alpha gives you the data straight away, and as many statistics as it deems relevant (such as population density, average age, life expectancy etc.). Of course, Wolfram is less useful if you’re after something less specific, or something that couldn’t be in its knowledge base, for example if you typed “SEO company Brighton”, Wolfram Alpha can’t help. Yet.

In a way, the difference between the two is as marked as the difference between intelligence and knowledge. Google (the intelligent search) adopts complex algorithmic searches that take myriad factors into consideration before presenting you with what it perceives to be the most relevant results. Wolfram Alpha (the knowledgeable search) parses your keywords and relates them to its own accumulation of facts and figures, and presents the relevant data in both textual and graphical formats.

Between the two, you can usually find what you’re after (and plenty of irrelevant yet interesting material besides); and happily, some clever chap has combined the two into a two-column search mashup, unimaginatively titled Goofram. One query, two pages of results. Convenient.

This September, we will be exhibiting at StudyWorld London, the language industry’s premier event for schools and agents.

Come and visit us at stand 20, upstairs the the Hilton London Metropole on September 7th-9th to chat SEO, social media and online strategy. We work with a number of Europe and the world’s leading language training companies and have achieved some striking results over the past six years for brands including Linguaphone, International House, Enforex, ESL, Cactus and many more.

If you would like to book in some face to face time with one of our team, drop us a line in advance and we can schedule a meeting in either at or around the event. If you are a language school with a website that you suspect could be performing better, please send us a link to your site so we can have a look through before the event and offer some expert feedback.

For more about the event, check out the website here.

See you at the fair!

Alex and I are both big MJ fans, and were naturally upset by his passing last week. However, Alex and I are also both fans of Google, so it was interesting – if still slightly upsetting – to see what effect Michael’s death had online (besides the setting up of billions of decentralised “RIP Michael Jackson” Facebook groups, of course).

Taking a look at the last 30 days at Google Trends, well, some pretty clear results here:

Such was the increase in search volume (from index 0 to 10 in fewer than 48 hours!), that Google actually interpreted the influx of Jacko-related searches as a malware attack or similar. In fact, by the time I had managed to get to a computer (the news was broken to me midway through a wedding reception – poor form by the DJ, if you ask me), Googling “Michael Jackson” popped up an error message, telling me that my search looked like ‘an automated request from a computer virus or spyware application’. Well excuse me, Google, for wanting more information!

This graph from news.cnet.com shows the surge in Jackson queries in an hourly format:

Interestingly, Google received a massive increase in searches coming from mobile devices – not surprising since most Americans were at work at the time the news was announced – and they also set a record for visits in a single 24-hour period: over 16.4 million unique visitors. And with Michael’s penchant for breaking records, Google’s front page story covering his death was the most popular story to date.

Even at the time of writing – about a week after his passing – 9 of the top 10 bestselling albums in Amazon.co.uk are by Michael Jackson (10 out of 10 on Amazon.com)… his death has put his body of work out there to a new audience in ways I didn’t really expect, and I can only see this as a good thing.

Apologies to anybody reading this who is still suffering from Michael Jackson over-saturation – we just happened to think this was worth blogging. But what celebrity death won’t the media turn into a feeding frenzy these days? RIP Michael!

Source: blog.facebook.com

Facebook have decided – some would say at long last – to offer personalised usernames on a first-come-first-served basis from 12:01am EDT (4:01am GMT), linked to the user’s profile via a vanity URL such as http://www.facebook.com/dave.upstream. The only limitations are that only one username is allowed per profile/page, it must be at least 5 characters, and it must be made up only of alphanumeric characters and, if you want, a full stop. Thank the Lord that they’re not allowing counter-productive usernames that proliferate sites when they allow ASCII usernames such as ´¯`°¤.¸.¤…Bøñd. Jåmê§ Bøñd´¯`°¤.¸.¤ , or (L)pÛÑk~PrïÑcꧧ(L) …

So what does this mean? Well, for a start it’s going to be easier to link people to your Facebook profile, so you won’t need to give out your full name in order for people you just met to add you as a friend. Most people find my surname impossible to spell (even though it’s only 6 letters), so this would be useful to me if I weren’t so picky about who I add as my friends in the first place. It also not only gives companies a great opportunity for branding on Facebook, but finally gives ‘normal’ users a chance to match their Facebook username with the handle they use on other social media and bookmarking sites. This may not seem like a big thing, but username consistency will also make it easier for people to find you (that is, if you want to be found).

In SEO terms, however – which is the interesting part for us – it may well mean that you can pick pretty specific keywords for your profile to show up in Google search, which has even further-reaching possibilities. As so eloquently put by Jeremiah from web-strategist.com: “If the Blog is the new résumé, then is “Google Me” the business card?”. Businesses may be able to make strategic use of this by registering their primary keywords as the vanity username for their page, and with the power of Facebook’s pagerank this could end up being a very useful – if a little morally grey – exploit. All of this, of course, depends on whether Google will index the new Facebook URLs; but with sites like Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter and LinkedIn featuring prominently in search results for a while now, it’s fair to say that this has become the norm for social networking sites.

Happily, Facebook have issued the following caveat to prevent the all-too predictable abuse of the new system:

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or “squatting” on names.

Still, how much are you willing to bet that Facebook will be down within a few minutes of the floodgates opening for username registration…? If I could have gotten www.facebook.com/dave, I probably would have been willing to stay up until 4am on Friday night to try to nab it, just for the bragging rights. Damn their arbitrary 5 character limit…

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.