Things that I’ve given a good review to …
I pointed out last week how awful Google Trends UK was – because it was full of American results. In some good news, Yahoo’s trending list seems a lot better (although it doesn’t give much in the way of explanation of how it’s put together).
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Completely unrelated to my usual blogging, but if you like Modern toss, there’s an exhibition on in East London …
Read the full post ...I wrote a guest post about when you should pay professional rates for great copywriting – as opposed to 2p a word via some content mill, or even less for some automated keyword spewer.
If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).
Read the full post ...Standing in the snow punching your mobile phone screen aimlessly with your mittens? Here are some tips from people on Twitter for getting your phone to work.
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This roundup of what some paywalls look like when you hit them illustrates that publishers – and Johnston Press in particular – need to massively improve the way they promote the benefits of subscribing …
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Like most bloggers, I’m plagued by comment spam – but I’ve found a good way to spot the spammers: Backtype. It shows you comments on blogs that link to a specific URL.
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The Guardian has changed its comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one.
With the old system, once you loaded a page, some javascript would go off and look up the comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments. It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript. And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.
Read the full post ...I’ve pointed out that any concerned parents searching Google for information on the cervical cancer jab (in the tragic wake of a schoolgirl’s death) see a mass of negative and inaccurate information about the vaccine linking the girl’s death to the vaccine.
It turns out she died of an unrelated tumour. However, the results are likely to give parents second thoughts about allowing their daughters to be caccinated, even though the injection will save hundreds of lives a year.
YOU can help do something about this.
Digg has started nofollowing links below a certain threshold of popularity. From a quick hunt around, I reckon it’s somewhere above 200 Diggs. However, some sites appear to be trusted and need fewer. Other sites need more.
Read the full post ...Instead of lambasting the BBC for the “chilling” effect of its online activities, and blaming the problems of online news sites on the BBC “dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market”, News Corp chief James Murdoch should thank the BBC for all the traffic it sends his way.
The BBC is responsible for about 870,000 visitors a month to Times Online and 1.1 million to thesun.co.uk (see methodology, below).
Read the full post ...The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).
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Adding a related-posts plugin can reduce your bounce rate by around 3% if my site is anything to go by.
In the two months before I installed the Yet Another Related Posts plugin my bounce rate was 84.3%. In the two months since then, my bounce rate has averaged 81.6% – a drop of 3.25%.
Search for cottage hire birmingham, and Google shows you a map of bethlehem in pennsylvania. Huh?
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I’m seeing increasing numbers of pages linking to this blog that, when I go to look at the linking/referring site, list one of my posts in a box called “Related articles by Zemanta”.
Wondering what it was all about, I asked Andraz Tori, CTO of www.zemanta.com a few questions. Here are the answers …
Read the full post ...The other day, tr.im, the best URL shortener in my book, shut down.
Good news. It’s back! According to the tr.im blog:
Read the full post ...Short and to the point. But @guardiantech reached 1 million followers early this morning.
It benefits massively from being on Twitter’s suggested users list. But impressive nonetheless. You can see more UK newspaper twitter numbers here.
Ofcom has revealed that people don’t get the broadband speeds they pay for. Well, duh. Here’s a timeline of how we already know that. Their research isn’t groundbreaking or new or revealing something for the first time, as is being claimed. What we need is action: ISPs should be forced to publish a typical range of speeds rather than an upto speed that no one can get.
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You may not know it, but the www version of your website is not the same as the non-www version.: yourdomain.com/page is NOT THE SAME PAGE as www.yourdomain.com/page. It’s treated as a different URL by search engines, for instance. And if someone leaves off the www (on a link or when they type a URL), they may not get any page at all unless you’ve set your server up right.
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Three’s a trend. And five’s a default. Four examples of sites whose logo is a link to the homepage – and who make this abundantly clear by changing the image on mouseover.
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