Unrelated to that, I've got myself a new job as digital Product Director at Trinity Mirror, concentrating on stuff like who won Strictly Come Dancing.

I'll keep my blog going - so DON'T WORRY (I'm sure you weren't). But I probably won't be posting as often (as you may have noticed by now). And it'll probably be a bit more newspapery and a bit less SEO-ey.

Apologies to those I was a twat to over the last few years. And thank you to all those of you who've read the stuff I pumped out. Sorry about the Pippa Middleton stuff as well. Really.

Unfortunately, like many people, the Mail was caught out by the judge finding her guilty of slander - before clearing her of the murder. At the sound of the word "guilty", they hit publish on a story about her appeal being rejected that includes reactions from the family and prosecutors being delighted - reactions that can't have happened as she was found NOT guilty of murder.

But she wasn't guilty ...

The Sun did it too I later discovered.

It's the Sun wot run it

Anyway, here's the story from the Mail's site:

Mail story

And some quotes:

"Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction. ...

As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.

A few feet away Meredith's mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'.

Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.

Both will be put on a suicide watch for the next few days as psychological assessments are made on each of them but this is usual practice for long term prisoners."

And here they are publishing the right story a bit later.

So which is it?!?

And here are the Sun's two stories ...

The Sun's two stories

Embarrassing. (To be fair, Sky News and the Guardian also claimed she'd been found guilty - just not quite in so much detail ...!)

Tricked him!

When you share a link on Facebook, you can edit any of the text - which means you can fool your friends into clicking on something that isn't what it seems. Which will make all their other friends think they have an STD or are getting divorced or something.

Here's how.

Alex Moss and I are connected on Facebook. And we are both using the Guardian's new Facebook app.

I shared this link on Facebook. Facebook does all the work when you share a link, so it turned my link into this.

Here's how it looks by default ...

You can actually edit all this (just click the bits you want to change), so I removed the thumbnail and edited all the text, to look like this. I've always thought it weird Facebook lets you do this - as I could be sharing a link to anything and it seems wrong it lets you obfuscate this.

I changed it to encourage Alex to click it

The result - when Alex clicked on the link, the timline feature updated instantly to say "Alex Moss read STDs in England: Breakdown by region, gender and ethnicity" (see the screenshot back at the top of this post).

Depending on what articles the Guardian has, I could trick Alex into clicking an edited link and make it look like he was reading up on depression, STDs, adoption, murder, divorce, applying for a new job, or joining Soulmates.

You can click to remove the update that you've read something.

But that just proves you've got something to hide.

This isn't a problem with the Guardian app per se - it's a problem with any app that might contain content that you wouldn't want friends to think you're consuming.

EG Spotify users - click here for an example of the sort of problem you could have.

Cover

A unique image that sums you up.

Facebook timeline cover

Your stories

Memorable posts, photos and events.

Facebook timeline beta - your stories

Your apps

Movies you quote, songs you play etc.

Facebook timeline beta - apps

Twitter - from the past!

Ever watched a recorded TV programme and wished you could see what the reaction was on Twitter? Now you can!

Together with the brilliant developers at Raak, I've (beta) launched Tweet Rewinder.

It's a mobile web app that lets you rewind your Twitter timeline and see tweets from the past unfold in real time

So you can jump back to the time a TV recording had actually been on, and then watch what people were saying in sync with the programme.

You can do the same thing with certain hashtags (there's a list anyone can use or users of the paid-for service can choose their own hashtag to capture - whether it's a TV programme, news event or conference).

Anyway, if you go to www.tweetrewinder.com, you can watch a video that explains how it works and sign up for the beta version (which works best on a mobile phone right now). But here are some screenshots. (You can follow Tweet Rewinder on Twitter, too).

Going back in time

Choose your timeline or a hashtag, then choose the time

Tweets from the past in real time

Then watch tweets from the past unfold in real time

There's also a write up at The Next Web.

Let me know what you think!

These aren't what you think

Notice anything odd about these two web results? They've got Google's new author profile pictures in, right?

How you normally make those photos appear

Well, no. Normal websites have to go through a slightly complicated process to get photos of the author of a page showing up in Google's web results (the old process, the new process). This basically involves cross linking your Google profile and either the page in question or to an "author page" that the page in question also links to.

There's a "by Malcolm Coles" link next to the photo

But when you do that, Google's results show not just a photo - but also a link to your Google profile.

And this link to the Google profile is missing from the screenshot above (but you can see it in the picture here).

So what's going on?

It turns out that those two web results from the Guardian aren't showing photos because of Google's normal process for making them appear.

There are no links from the author profiles on the Guardian to the journalist's Google profiles. And their Google profiles don't link to their author pages. (Here is Charles Arthur's author page on the Guardian and his Google profile. Here is Jemima Kiss's author page on the Guardian and her Google profile.)

However, both those author pages link to the journalist's twitter accounts - as do their Google profiles. And it appears that Google has decided that on the basis of this, it can presume that the photo on their Twitter profile picture is a picture of the article's author - and is showing the photo.

I think we can assume that this isn't going to work for most sites ... Thanks to @yesiamben, @ysekand, @danbarker and @yoast for helping work all this out yesterday.

Conferences: expensive

Update: Andy has replied in the comments below. Although I stand by my criticism of the pricing model, the £100 gimmick does look a bit blackmaily the next morning. So apologies to him for that. It seemed a good idea at the time to avoid the accusation of not putting my money where my mouth is.

Original post: Andy Budd has written an impassioned defence of "big, expensive conferences" - describing criticisms as nonsense - which I'd like to take issue with.

Coincidentally, I'd already drafted a post about how I was never attending £500+ conferences again. This was after speaking at the free 'Brighton SEO' the same week I'd missed Content Strategy Forum 2011 - which costs £840 but work commitments had caused me to skip. Bye bye money.

First: the offer

But first, in the spirit of being constructive, I'd like to make Andy an offer.

UX London tickets are £1,200 (including VAT). Gulp.

Now I'm a one-man-band consultant - but I'll put up £100 if Clearleft Ltd (the organisers, of which Andy is CEO) will match that in proportion to our respective turnovers last year (I'm guessing theirs will be about 20 times mine but let's compare notes and see).

And let's use that money to subsidise someone - or a few people - who would otherwise never afford to go. They could be students or first-jobbers or those under 25 or the self-employed or the unemployed. (And, dear reader, if you're reading this and want to put some money up, so much the better. Do get in touch.)

But let's use the money to make sure that expensive conferences aren't the preserve of big agencies' employees and make sure that at least a couple of those with no one to pay for them aren't excluded.

Anyway, I hope he'll take me up on the offer.

Now, let's take issue with the cost

Andy explains how conferences are expensive to run - and I believe his budget. It's just that it involves spending nearly $160,000 on paying speakers, flying them over and putting them up in a hotel for a week.

Do we really need that many speakers from abroad?

Apparently we do as the high costs mean that "organisers try to mitigate some of these risks by picking big name speakers that we know will fill seats".

Call me naive but if there weren't so many big name speakers costing $160,000 wouldn't the costs be a bit lower? And hence the risks? And thus the prices? It's all a bit circular.

Andy rightfully points out that conferences are about more than the content. They're about meeting people - clients, contacts etc.

But what sort of people do you meet at a £1,200 conferences? Well, you don't meet many of the unemployed, graduates at small agencies or that many consultants. Why? Because the risk is the opposite of the organiser's - that you spend £1,200 and don't get a return on it.

Sure, you do meet some people in this position - I paid for myself to attend UX London when Don Norman spoke back in 2009. I thought it was great. If expensive.

But many people whose company can't afford to pay for them to go (or who don't have a company) are priced out of the market by costs of £1,200.

One of the comments (by someone else) under Andy's post says:

One point I would add, is the pricing a conference in some way sets the tone of it. UX London is full of UX professionals. A €99 or €129 per day conference tends to have a different crowd, different attitudes, different expectations and different ways of complaining about things.

If UX London was a €99 conference, I expect it’d full of people falling into the “f**k it, why not?” category. The relevance of delegates would be minimal for me, so I wouldn’t be interested in attending. At the saying goes, you can make a pizza so cheap that no one wants to eat it.

I mean, who would want to attend a conference that just anyone could afford to attend, eh?

In conclusion

I used to have a policy to go to one expensive set-piece conference a year, whatever the discipline - which I paid for out of my own money.

But this year I've concluded that I just can't see I get enough value from them - especially if you end up booking way in advance to get the early-bird prices and then can't go. Plus big name-speakers can be cool, but so can hearing other sorts of people at smaller conferences. And you meet people in the bar afterwards, regardless of what sort of conference it is.

Anyway, I hope Andy and Clearleft will think of a way to help those who can't afford - and shouldn't have to afford - £1,200. If my £100 can make that happen, I hope they'll accept it.

Photo credit.

But it turns out that you can dominate Google's search results in the short term via duplicate content - and here's the explanation, based on a talk I'm giving at Brighton SEO.

Look at all the traffic I got

Here's a graph that showed how I got loads of traffic to this blog by exploiting duplicate content. Don't look any further if you're easily offended or love the royal family.

WOW. Where did all that traffic come from? Where did it go?

I took this blog from a few hundred page views a day to 30,000 at its peak by exploiting the fact that Google was looking for new content when it comes to suddenly popular or brand new search terms. Then I stopped and I went back to normal levels.

I'm sorry to report those search terms involved Pippa Middleton's arse and underwear and super injunctions and twitter.

So I waited for something to happen that I knew would trigger lots of searches. After the Royal Wedding it was Pippa Middleton's arse. Then a few days later it was her underwear. Just as that died down, the whole Ryan Giggs / Twitter / superinjunction thing kicked off.

Each time something happened I would throw a short blog post together and publish as quickly as possible - my ambition each time was to beat the mainstream news sites to publishing something.

Then I pulled a trick - for a few stories, I republished the story shortly afterwards on a different URL and 301ed the first URL to the second one. Then I did it again.

(This trick only works on trending news topics - so search terms that are suddenly popular and which make Google think that it should throw away its usual search results and replace them with pages that have only just been published (to correspond with the new interest in the search term).)

Look, two results for the same content ...

Not sure what I'm on about? Well, look at this picture.

Step one: two results for the same content.

Hopefully at the bottom you can see that I have two URLs for my Pippa Middleton underwear pictures (NOTE: there are no pictures of this kind. She's in swimwear - blame the tabloids).

What I did

I took the first URL which was http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-autosuggest and I changed it to http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-autosuggests - the same URL but with an S on the end. I also tweaked the HTML title a bit (took the word its out).

How WordPress helped

Now a quirk of WordPress means that it tries to match partial URLs and will redirect accordingly. What this means is that if you tried to access the old -autosuggest URL you would get automatically redirected to the new -autosuggests one.

Try it with this URL: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/pippa-middleton-underwear-pictures-google-updates-auto and see where you end up. That's not a manual redirect, it's WordPress doing it automatically.

How this fooled Google

What Google sees is as follows:

• It sees some content on a subject everyone is searching for but no on has published on lately.
• So it shoves my result on page one.
• Then it sees I've published another URL.
• It's still desperate for new content so it gives me 2 results.

Of course, the 2nd one is 99% the same as the first one but (1) it hasn't noticed that yet and (2) it hasn't revisited the first URL to see that it redirects to a new one.

Now I've got three!

But if I can pull that trick once ... Here's another screenshot.

Hat trick

Yes, I've now got three results on page one. I'd changed the URL again. This time from -autosuggests to -autosuggests2. I didn't bother changing the title.

Again, Google is still desperate for new content. Everyone is searching for this term because American sites published the pictures. But very few UK sites have. So it gives me three results.

As a searcher, however, if you click on the old -autosuggest or -autosuggests URLs, which no longer exist, then WordPress will just match those to what it thinks you're looking for which is -autosuggests2. So you always end up at the same place.

Boo. Back to two.

Eventually, Google wised up to the fact that the first URL was 301ing (or was maybe the same, who knows). And it took me back to two results.

Back to two

As you can see, the first -autosuggest has now vanished.

Eventually, all the duplicates were filtered out and my current URL is now top of Google for a search on her undies. Oh good.

But for a crucial few hours, when loads of people were searching, I had the same content several times on page one of Google's results.

Conclusion

One side effect of this is that people think I'm a pervert. That aside, for spiking news terms you can insert the same piece of content into Google's results. It will eventually notice that the earlier URLs redirect or are duplicates of the later ones. But by that time everyone will have stopped searching.

To be honest, you probably shouldn't do this. It breaks Google.

You also need to be on the ball. You need to beat big news sites (if you're dedicated, this is possible). And it only works on spiking news terms (these news data tools might be handy).

And don't cock it up. Duplicate content is bad. Ask the Express. Or the Indy.

This is the last of my posts or conference talks on Pippa Middleton (here's my earlier talk on Karen Gillan's underwear). I hope you enjoyed them. Don't blame me for the fact that nation is a bunch of perverts.

ASA: PCC is as independent as us

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has rejected my complaint about the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) advertising itself as independent.

I don't consider the PCC to be independent because it is "charged with enforcing the Code of Practice which was framed by the newspaper and periodical industry." This is a long winded way of saying that the Code is drawn up by a body that consists wholly of industry representatives.

The ASA has emailed me to say there are no grounds for formal action:

Although the PCC Code of Practice may have been produced by a committee of industry representatives, it is the PCC that make decisions, administer and enforce the Code.  Industry members would not contribute to the PCC’s decision on a complaint.   As such the claim to be “independent” is unlikely to mislead.

The same could be said for the ASA in that our Codes are written by the Committee of Advertising Practice, which comprises a number of industry members, but ultimately the ASA is independent because we solely enforce and administer the Codes.

Well, quite.

In the past, they used to be shoved over on the right hand side (EG see the screenshot here). Now they are integrated into the search results - with a bit prominent link to my google+ profile. See this screenshot of a site: search for this site (I see similar on other sites, too).

Author pictures integrated

Anyone else see this? You can add author pictures by following these instructions (which were recently simplified).