Blog

We have a brand new website. Hopefully posts and pages are now easier to read and easier on the eye. You can submit your details to us a lot more easily as well as request a callback from us via a form in the corner. We are also aggregating some of the pages into each other to make it easier to find information. Let us know what you think, we can still tweak it here and there so we are more than open to feedback.

Click to see the full size image

I made the image below so be nice and link back here if you use it or let me know on twitter, facebook etc.It is a take on the “keep calm and carry on meme” – In times of panic when rankings drop, algorithms change or the new Panda update goes live, and you know you’re not doing anything wrong – keep calm and carry on link building.

Facebook were seemingly working on a project over the weekend to try and improve the new Google search plus your world search results, which unstubtly has a bias towards Google Plus profiles. We all know Google are trying to give the average user a push in to using their service but Facebook seem to have *Fixed* the bias issue with this new bookmarklet.

Interestingly enough it doesn’t just change profile links at random it actually used Google’s own natural ranking data to decide which profile is the most relevant. In a lot of natural searches the facebook or twitter link appears way before the Google plus link and as such this bookmarklet fixes results to adjust this back to the most relevant social profile (as decided by Google)

I’m pretty impressed that it doesn’t just switch out results for the sake of it, or take out the plus profiles completely. Its amazing, but unsurprising to think that Google are pushing Google plus so heavily even against what their own algorithm thinks is best for the user.

The campaign/project is called focus on the user and the bookmarklet is called don’t be evil

From the people at http://www.focusontheuser.org/:

How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure-the ranking of their organic search results-to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.

There is also a really nice video explaining how it works.

The iPhone and Android market are well known for their ability to make millions for their developers from simple apps and games and I’m sure all of us have at some point thought “I could’ve made this…If i knew objective C or Java and whatever they use” but we don’t..and as with a lot of things we never sit down and learn it either.

However there are still some great ideas out there that aren’t seen on the market place. After some research I’ve found a few ways to make games without knowing any code and providing these work as well as expected I should be launching some simple games onto the market soon. I’ve already got some great basic engines working and tested on the actual iphone itself. Its really amazing to be able to get ideas out so quickly and I am quickly learnings how to make an iphone games and basic apps without knowing any code.

With the iPhone App store a lot of simple ideas fail or are made based on their graphics and uniqueness so that is the next step I need to take after getting the engines working. I will be updating this with any progress and with apps on the iphone and android market place I also plan on some great first hand experiments to find the best way to boost sales and optimise for apps to appear both in Google and on the mobile market places.

To be kept up to date with our progress and what we learn enter your e-mail address below

This site as with most of my domains are registered under godaddy, with the reddit protest day on the 29th of December I will be attempting to move my domains to a new registrar. If you don’t know what’s going on, have a look at the SOPA bill that could pass, and you’ll notice godaddy as one of the supporters of the bill that could literally change the way the internet works and is accessed by everyone.Reddit picked up on this and decided to protest in their own way.

Reddit have decided to make it the 29th domain moving day to move your domains away from godaddy to one that doesn’t support SOPA. Godaddy are going back on their support now, but after initially claiming the reddit protest didn’t make a dent, 21,054 domains have been moved so far (and its not even the day of the official move yet) they are certainly going to feel it now and seem to be going back on their support, possibly just an attempt to stop people moving their domains away and forgetting the whole matter. Reportedly Wikipedia are moving all their domains away from godaddy and  the icanhazcheeseburger network are supposed to be moving their domains away (reportedly they have around 1000) so this is going to add up to a hundreds of thousands dollar impact on their business.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/24/go-daddy-lost-21054-domains-yesterday-in-wake-of-sopa-pr-disaster/

Just as I get my new amazing Galaxy Nexus (face unlock is so good) My old HTC Desire gets a new system update. It just seems to be a small 6meg update so I’m not sure if its a full gingerbread package or just some basic system updates. Once I’ve installed the update and run it all I’ll update again with what exactly has been updated and changed.

There have already been announcements saying that there will be no Ice Cream Sandwich on the HTC Desire and its doubtful that if this gingerbread that it will be the full gingerbread experience.

“We’ve been forced to accept there isn’t enough memory to allow us both to bring Gingerbread and keep the HTC Sense experience on the HTC Desire. We’re sincerely sorry for the disappointment that this news may bring to some of you” – HTC

Some of us have been playing with the new timeline for a while thanks to the developer  options. Now the timeline feature has been released officially although you still have to opt in to it at this stage and there is still the 7day optional delay before it goes live to give you time to customise it and check that everything is how you want it. Hopefully some of the bugs we’ve seen the last few weeks (Certain posts not deleting, things reappearing on the timeline etc etc) have now been worked out for its official release. It will be interesting to see how many people adopt the new timeline option straight away and how many people resist the facebook changes as they all seem to do when a new feature rolls out. There is also a new tool called “Activity Log” which lets you review every single activity and chose how, where, or if it is displayed on your timeline adding some much needed control and tweaking to your timeline. None of your privacy settings should change in the new change but its always best to check just in case, the “view as” tool is a nice feature to see exactly what different people will see when it comes to your profile too.

Around the holiday times emotions can be raised and the feeling of being alone can grow to the point where some people feel like they need to end it all. Google is providing a great duty where any suicide searches will bring up (Where available) the number of any “official” service in that country. Hopefully this will help many people who are on the edge and just need someone to talk to.

Matt Cutts has replied with

“Getting the numbers for different countries and making sure that they’re current might be tricky, so I don’t know how hard this would be, but I’ll pass the request on.”

A few days ago Louis CK released his latest stand up show in a way we don’t often see. Despite the popularity of downloading and streaming many companies still rely on their DVD and video sales to make a profit back from a show. Louis CK recorded his show, fronted the costs (the actual ticket sales covered the cost of the theater), had it edited and produced, came up with a user friendly robust website and then released it as a digital download and steam for just $5

The money as far as I know skips all production companies and goes direct to Louis himself and anything after covering costs is then a profit. The risk however came from the fact the download was a simple mp4 file with no DRM, no restrictions or limits making it easy to torrent and share and making it a real risk as to whether people would then pay for a copy or seek it out on a torrent site. The file has no restrictions you can burn it to dvd, watch it when and where you like, on whatever device you want. There was even a message saying – I know you can torrent this easily but its $5, support an artist. “Don’t be that guy” and torrent it. I know I downloaded it and paid for it and apparently so did thousands of other people. The latest update is that he covered his production costs and currently (just 4 days after release)

“As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000″

If you like Louis CK or even just want to support this kind of option being avaliable in the future from other artists and companies you can buy it from https://buy.louisck.net

This model clearly works. And while it might work slightly because of its gimmick and slightly because most of Louis CK’s fans are smart, internet savvy people I would love to see this kind of approach being taken by more people. I am far more inclined to support an artist when I know i’m not being overcharged and when I know the artist themselves are getting fair compensation for every sale.

In the social media world, good intentions and honestly around a new release can spread fast and turn a simple launch into something much much more.