There was a curious end to tonight's Dragon's Den when presenter Evan Davis uncomfortably turned to the camera and said:

Why not tell us what you think of today's programme by joining the conversation on Twitter.

Dragons' Den

I'm not sure it looks like much of a conversation, though ...

This is what the Dragons' Den Twitter account looks like an hour after the programme finished:

Dragons Den tweets - no conversation

Leaving aside the hashtag confusion, they don't seem to have actually replied to anyone's tweets. A blanket "thank you" to people for their comments doesn't quite seem the same as the "conversation" promised in the programme itself.

Google tries to answer some questions itself, like how many horns a unicorn has. More usefully, it can tell you stuff like how many metres are in a yard or when sunrise is in London.

It also seems willing to try to tell you celebrities' dating status, although it appears to be quite rubbish at it ...

For instance, look under the pictures with this result and Google says Angelina Jolie's spouse is Billy Bob Thornton - but she hasn't been married to him since 2003. And she's adopted a squillion kids with Brad Pitt since then.

Angeline Jolie - with Brad Pitt now

Although Google still thinks Jennifer Aniston and Brad are together - sweet (again, look under the pictures).

Jennifer Aniston - all alone still

Jordan and Peter Andre are divorced - Katie Price as she now is married Alex Reid recently. But Google's totally, like, OMG, I'm not having that.

Katie Price and Alex Reid - car crash. But married.

Katy Perry is engaged to Russell Brand, not dating Travis McCoy.

Katy Perry - can't see it myself

I suppose Elin Woods is still Tiger's spouse until the divorce comes through.

Elin Woods - soon to be rich

But Nicole Kidman is not married to Tom Cruise - he's with Katie Holmes now. Poor little Katie Holmes (poor big Katie Holmes from Tom's point of view).

Nicole: didn't have to keep quiet during birth

Back to the drawing board with that one, I think ....

The Guardian has poked some fun at the Edinburgh Fringe website for banning people linking to it in its terms and conditions. This is more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers (most of those subsequently removed the offending clause after I pointed it out).

All that culminated in the hilarity of my attempts to get the Royal Mail to post me the paper licence they insisted I needed to link to them.

But here are some more sites that still think they can - or should - ban people linking to them in their terms and conditions of use. YOU ARE ALL CLOWNS.

Independent: "Third parties must not deep-link to, or frame or use other techniques to enclose any part of the Website."

Vodafone: "You, and any persons you allow to use the Service or the Content through your access to the Service, are not allowed to: -  ... include or create links (including deep-links) to or from the Content and/or the Service;"

Ticketmaster: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by Ticketmaster to do so."

TimeOut Tickets: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by TimeOutTickets.com to do so."

Kent Online: "You also agree not to deep-link or frame to the site for any purpose, unless authorised by KM Group."

News International jobs: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited."

Anglo Irish bank: " Any unauthorised linking to this Site is also strictly prohibited. Please note that ... linking to it may be in breach of statutory or common law rights which could be the subject of legal action."

The new Times website: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited. " (Well, there is a paywall I guess ...!)

Easyjet: "You are permitted to provide and maintain a Link to the easyJet Website Homepage only at URL http://www.easyjet.com. You may not direct the Link to any other webpage contained within the easyJet Website.

Jimmy Choos: "Unless authorised in writing by JCL, JCL expressly prohibits linking of any part of this Site to or from any other Sites (including so-called "deep-linking")."

Thanks to Chris Coltrane for pointing out the Guardian link.

The government is to close 600 websites in order to save £100 million it was announced last week - including the lovechips.co.uk site run by the marketing department of the Potato Council to encourage us to stuff our faces with fat-soaked portions of starchy foods with no real nutritional value.

Chips: fattening

Poking around a bit, it soon became clear that:

1. The government is lying about the saving
2. The people who commissioned this website are idiots.
3. This website should have been shut a long time ago for lying

The government is lying about the saving

The lovechips site is run by the Potato Council, a division of the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHBD). (I like the Potato Council website - at the bottom it says "If you can read this your browser is standards complient". I don't really like it - as well as being bad at spelling, it's awful.)

Anyway, the AHBD  is funded by a statutory levy on producers, growers and processors. Although its chief exec's £150k salary (plus £30k bonus) used to be paid by Defra, this arrangement was stopped after 2008 according to the last annual report.

Which means that (1) the government has no real power to shut the lovechips site and (2) if it was shut, any saving would benefit AHBD and not the government at all - so it could not form part of any efficiency saving that could go towards reducing the budget deficit.

The people who commissioned this website are idiots

Love chips website

It might be AHBD's money, but it's still a waste of money. For instance, here is a page to find a chip shop in London. Apparently there are 5 chip shops in London (Update: there are 6 I see. Lambeth is listed separately to London).

There is also the lamest game ever. Honsestly - I challenge you to find one lamer than this.

In some ways they are getting value for money, as if you go to lovechips.com you can see the whole site all over again. Actually, they are framing the .co.uk site - so as you move around the .com version, the URL at the top stays as lovechips.com, making it impossible to copy any URLs to link to. Try it. (They're not really getting value for money - I was kidding).

A chip on my shoulder about their poor SEO

If we do a site: search on Google, we can see how their pages look. As you can see, the HTML titles of their pages (the bit of meta data that the website owner sets and which Google shows in its results) are mostly meaningless. Pages like "Scotland" look fairly ridiculous in Google's results - who would imagine you would click a page called "Scotland" and get a list of chip shops?

Then there's the page called "Chip Inspector", which has some chip films, none of which appear to involve inspectors.

Anyway, I'm not really sure of the point of the lovechips site. But the people who built it also built the Love potatoes site and did some SEO on that:

"Allies Design worked with GPMD [some other agency] on a Search Engine Optimisation strategy which we implemented through the design and content of the site. Within just 5 months of launching the new site, we'd more than doubled the number of visitors through Google every month."

I'm not going to comment on the meaningless of this statement (EG was it from 1 to 2 visitors?). But you'd have thought that they would set up the HTML titles properly so that the pages looked sensible in Google (and so that Google could work out what they were about). Maybe I do them an injustice and they gave some very clear rules but the potato people couldn't get their heads round them? Or the Alt text for images, which is also very poor. Or the fact that meta descriptions are missing from nearly all the pages?

Either way, I'm not sure how both the design agency and GPMD persuaded the potato lot that they should both have a design / build credit link at the bottom of every page. Or why they felt they would want one.

One measure of its success would be traffic I guess. I'm not fan of the accuracy of Alexa's data, but it will have to do for the lovechips site. Apparently it's the 2,553,642nd most visited site in the world. Which given this blog is the 136,515th according to Alexa is pretty lame.

Oh, and as for the lies ...

According to the lovechips site, chips are healthy:

Chips are rich in vitamin C which scientists say can help fight off cancer

There is also a panel that says "Click here to find out why chips have all the goodness of potatoes!" However, according to the Food Standard's Agency's Eat Well site:

Potatoes ... don't count towards our [five-a-day] daily fruit and veg portions ... And although potatoes don’t contain much vitamin C compared to other vegetables, in Britain we get a lot of our daily vitamin C from them because we eat so many of them.

Conclusion

So there we have it. It lies about the nutritional value of potatoes. The people who commissioned it don't know or care that hardly anyone visits it. But shutting it down won't save us a penny.

Mobile versions of websites - what a train crash they often are. As I write this, at 10.30pm on Monday night, neither the BBC nor Guardian mobile websites are mentioning that Gordon Brown has promised to resign ... a story that their web news pages are unsurprising leading with - and have been doing so for several hours.

I'm sure it's hard to implement a mobile version of a website - with ITV's mobile site particularly demonstrating why they're often rubbish.

But I expected rather more of the BBC and the Guardian. In fact, if you've been using their mobile sites for the last few days, you'd have been under the impression that there has been little news about the election to report...

The Guardian

Here's the Guardian's mobile version tonight - no mention of Gordon Brown quitting.

Guardian: no sign of resigning PMs

And here's its web version - leading with the news.

Guardian web: Brown's resigned

The BBC

Here's the BBC mobile site on Sunday morning - literally no mention of the election whatsoever. It's been like this for days...

BBC mobile: any election news?

And here's the web version of its news pages at the same time. Oh, there's an election.

BBC web: there's an election!

And tonight, again, there is no mention of the election and no mention of Brown's resignation on the mobile version of the BBC's news pages:

Brown has resigned, I'm sure ...

Back to the drawing board, please.

I'm not quite sure why the Sun runs Sun Vote as it just ignores it (EG when its readers aren't that fussed over a hung parliament).

But its own on-site poll from last night about who won the debate (and unlike other sites, these aren't easy polls to vote in - you have to go through a lengthy sign-up process)  reveals that Clegg won. Asked "Who won the 3rd debate", Sun readers voted:

• Nick Clegg 50.9%
• David Cameron 29.6%
• Gordon Brown 18.6%

Not sure how this squares with Clegg being toast as its main story says ...

Sun Vote results

Clegg: wins 3rd debate

Main story

Clegg: toast

What a surprise. Not.

The News of the World has trumpeted a poll of mums claiming Cameron is "storming" into the lead.

The figures show the opposite of this - read my dissection of the stats over at The Media Blog.

And shame on Netmums for encouraging this.

The Conservatives and Labour have now launched their manifestos. The Liberal Democrats launch theirs tomorrow.

As with their party leaders' websites, the parties' online approaches to their manifestos leave a lot to be desired - although Labour have done a better job than the Conservatives.

What they should have done

The launch of a manifesto is a tricky thing - you don't want the details to leak out beforehand - but the moment it's published, you want people to find it when they type "party name manifesto" into Google.

Living URL

What you should do is have a "living URL" for your manifesto - one URL (like ...com/manifesto) on which you always publish your current manifesto with links to older ones. That way, your current manifesto will benefit from links to that URL (even from when old manifestos were kept on it).

In the run up to the launch, you spray this URL around liberally, and get your army of bloggers to link to this URL, maybe encouraging them to use handy anchor text like "party name manifesto".

Home page

If you've forgotten to do this, another suggestion is to make sure your home page HTML title contains the word manifesto - that way maybe Google will return your homepage when people search for your manifesto - better than nothing ...

The manifesto itself

It's fine to do the manifesto as a video, podcast and downloadable PDF - but you also need it as a series of webpages with rich interlinking. Some people will want to read it this way - and search engines will definitely want to see it this way.

What they've actually done

Labour party

They've made an effort at a living URL. According to wikinews, the 2005 manifesto was on http://www.labour.org.uk/manifesto.html, a URL which now redirects to http://members.labour.org.uk/ - so at least they've put a redirect in place, even if it's not to their manifesto, which is acutally on http://www2.labour.org.uk/manifesto-splash.

If you search for labour manifesto on google, you see this screenshot.

Labour manifesto search results

Their homepage appears with an HTML title of "The Labour Party Manifesto 2010" - and they've temporarily redirected their homepage to their manifesto homepage, so this all works nicely from a searcher's point of view.

You may notice the second result - the Membersnet 3.2.4 Beta with a URL of http://www.labour.org.uk/manifesto.htm. That's because of old links pointing to that page from when it did contain the manifesto (but which now redirects to the members' site (via a 302 temporary redirect. Sigh).

The manifesto itself is a series of HTML pages which link to each other plus a video.

So not perfect, but at least it's all findable.

Conservative party

They only launched their manifesto today. But they have made a pig's ear of it.

If you search for conservative manifesto, you get the Daily Telegraph website followed by two old pages about other manifestos.

Conservative manifesto search results

One reason is that, according to wikinews, the 2005 manifesto was on http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=manifesto.index.page, which they haven't redirected - you just get page not found. The current manifesto is on http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Manifesto.aspx.

Also, there is no HTML version - just PDFs and MP3s, not ideal from a searcher's or SEO point of view.

Lib Dems

They launch theirs tomorrow. Preparations are not going that well ... On the one hand, search for lib dem manifesto today, and at least their home page is first. Sadly, the word manifesto isn't mentioned on it. There is a list of what they stand for, but I want the actual manifesto - or at least news of when it launches.

Lib dem manifesto search results

And what's all that other stuff underneath?

In particular, they look like they have a subdomain for their manifesto: manifesto.libdems.org.uk.

This informs us that:

Although the next General Election does not have to take place until 2010, we have to be prepared for a snap Election and that is why we need your views now on what our key messages should be.

Guys - IT'S HAPPENING! (Hat tip to Martin Belam for the idea).