Confabulations

Ever since the release of the iPod, all new offerings from Apple are awaited with baited breath – and this was no different when they announced the Apple iPad a while back. It was with great fanfare and to an eager audience that Steve Jobs revealed the next big thing from the Apple stable.

Pricing of the iPad wasn’t mentioned at the time but, if reports are to be believed, a recent slip up by a number of leading websites may just have given the game away! Electricpig shouted a purported price leak from the rooftops after a search on the website Play.com revealed that the 16GB version of the iPad would be priced at £499 with the larger 64GB version setting consumers back a cool £699.

Personally, I’m not sure I’d be too keen on shelling out that much on what essentially looks like a giant iPod Touch – but I am in no doubt that there will be millions of consumers that beg to differ! In most cases, a product will merely need to have the Apple logo located somewhere upon it in order to be successful and it would be a foolish man (me?) to suggest that the iPad will be anything other than a resounding success.

Apple iPad

It was only a matter of time before the behemoth that is Microsoft dipped their foot into the online video-on-demand market and it has now fully arrived in the UK after a seven trial of the technology. We all know that Microsoft are synonymous with all things computer related and it stands to reason that they are now trying to get their share of the action – after seeing the success of the likes of BBC’s iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4OD.

Watching our favourite programmes on the internet is becoming more and more commonplace as streaming technology has improved a whole heap over the last few years – so, if we miss our favourites, such as Eastenders, Mad Men or Peep Show, we can just head online and watch it at our leisure.

Microsoft seem to have taken note of people’s love of watching their favourite programmes online and have recently rolled out MSN Video Player. Apparently, it won’t just be television shows that can be caught on this video-on-demand player – it will also boast everything from movie trailers to the latest news bulletins.

Personally, I think it may be difficult to dislodge internet viewers from their favourite online video services, such as the iPlayer – purely because they are now fully used to the way it operates and may not want to learn a new way of doing things. Or perhaps that’s just what an old dog like me thinks!

But if anyone is capable of winning over consumers, it is Microsoft. They have experienced domination in the software world for decades now and if they think their online video-on-demand player can be a world-beater, who am I to argue?!

MSN Video Player

In the last post we discussed how videos can be used by internet marketing teams as another tool in the battle for search engine rankings. Following on from this story I have been investigating other ways on which movies and animation can be used in SEO, and have come across a great site called GoAnimate. This website allows you to create characters and cartoons which can then be embedded onto blogs, bookmarked and shared around the web, with the potential to go viral should they get enough views.

In a fun activity that shouldn’t really be called work, I have been playing around with the characters, themes and sounds available on the GoAnimate website, however you can also import your own music and images from around the web or your own computer. Just like my video in the last post, I do not claim to have totally mastered the art of animation just yet, but it does give you a good idea of what can be done.

As a little bit of blatant promotion, my cartoon focuses on the SEO services offered at my workplace, 9xb.

GoAnimate.com: SEO at 9xb by fruitbat

There has been a lot of discussion recently concerning the value of multimedia including videos. pictures and audio appearing in search results. Google is now displaying more and more information on each page of its search result and this is valuable for users.

I have been using the internet for over a decade and do not have that same length of experience with SEO, and I know that as an internet user you are likely to click through to the more interesting multimedia results thatn the website links. This way the client is sure to get traffic through these forms as well as with high ranking web page results. They could end up being the only company above the fold when they have well optimized results for video, images, web pages, blogs and local search.

With this in mind I have had a look around the web for some sites with which you can create images. You can use computer software or internet based services to create basic and more technological videos. I have had a go at designing a video for this blog-but be warned-it is very very basic! It does however show you the type of information that you can fit into a multimedia video.

Enjoy!

Following my recent post on the introduction if SideWiki to the Google toolbar, I have already started seeing comments full of spam. Whilst the spam is related to the webpages that the comments appear on, it is spam nonetheless.  It remains to be seen what Google will do to try and reduce this or if it intends to take any action at all.

To see how effective spamming SideWiki comment posts is remains questionable, especially since few people have yet to start using the new tool.

Confabulations will keep you updated with all the latest news!

October is an awareness month for many causes, and now the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) has teamed up with Google, government agencies, schools and non-profit organisations to promote cyber security tips and tricks with users of the world wide web. Whilst this campaign is really only taking place in the US, we can all learn some important information on keeping ourselves, our children and other internet users safe as we browse the web. Google has created a cyber safety channel on YouTube with Google experts sharing their security know-how with the rest of the world. If you live outside the USA you can still take advantage of the other initiatives that the NCSA is undertaking by visiting their website at www.staysafeonline.info or watching the videos from Google on YouTube.

Google has recently announced the introduction of Sidewiki, a tool that allows internet users the chance to comment on any site they visit on the web. When you have sidewiki enabled you can also see the comments that other users have made. So, we must ask ourselves, is this one of Google’s better inventions, or will it cause more harm than good?

During the early days of its release, sidewiki is available to internet Explorer or Firefox users, and Google are hoping to have sidewiki on Chrome as soon as possible. You need to install the newest version of Google toolbar and install the enabled version. This allows Google to know all of the pages you visit; otherwise it cannot send you any of the sidewiki information available for the page you are viewing. However this is not a new feature of the toolbar as anyone who has page rank enabled will have let Google know what pages they were looking at.

Taken from the Google homepage, you can see a tiny blue line at the left hand side of the screen. This is what you will see on every site that sidewiki can be used on.
If you put your mouse over the >> or the bubble, the sidebar will expand and you will be able to see the comments and comment yourself.

This is a snapshot of what you see when    you click on the >> or bubble. You can click on the down facing arrow next to Google Sidewiki to add your comments. You can move through the comments by clicking on ‘next’ or ‘previous’ at the bottom of the window.

Comments

Comments are not listed in age order. There is a complex Google algorithm with many factors which determines which comments appear first. Some of the factors that Google have identified and internet users have guessed at include;
•    The quality of the entry
•    What Google knows about the author
•    User contributed signals including flagging and feedback
•    Use of sophisticated language-Google has a language sophistication detector which works in the 14 languages that sidewiki supports
•    User reputation
•    User history-How long have you had a Google profile, when did you start commenting, etc.

Just as Google gives every web page a Page Rank, every Google profile has a Profile Rank, and you are more likely to have your comments posted higher if you have a better profile rank, although as of yet there is no way of knowing what your profile rank is.
If your comments are not deemed to be of a high enough quality, they will be flagged by Google, in a yellow top bar pictured below.

You will always see your own comments if you are logged into sidewiki. If you want to try and find where your comments rate, sign out of sidewiki. You will still be able to see all the comments that have been made but you will not be permitted to add anything new. If there are not enough comments for a particular page, Google may use blog posts that comment on the webpage. The sidewiki window on Twitter is full of blog posts. As more and more comments are made by individual users, these blog posts will start to disappear.

Rating, Making and Sharing Comments

You can rate comments that have been made through sidewiki. If you click onto a comment, you are asked whether you found the comment useful, and can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this. If you think that the comment is inappropriate, you can flag the comment by clicking the ‘Report Abuse’ tag.

Making a comment is easy. All you have to do is open the sidewiki side bar and click on the logo at the top. A drop down menu will appear with the option to write a comment. Once you have finished click save and your comment has been made. You can put links into the text using HTML however these will be nofollow, or drop a YouTube link into the comment so people can see associated videos. If you need to edit the post, there is an edit option as well as the option to delete your comment.

If you want to comment on a particular part of the page, for example a quote, you just highlight the text you will be commenting on and make a sidewiki about this text only. The added bonus is that if the quote appears on any other web pages, your comment will be used on these too.

Each comment in sidewiki exists as a standalone URL, and Google encourages these links to be shared. You can share your comments by clicking on the ‘share’ tab next to edit and delete. When you click on this you have the option to copy the link, send it via email or post it on your Twitter or Facebook page.
Site Owners’ Comments

Even though the links you add to your comments are nofollow, they could still be a valuable source of traffic to your website and that of your competitors. If you have verified site ownership through Google Webmaster Central, you have the chance to claim the first comment on your web pages when you first open sidewiki on your site. If there are several owners of the web site they will all have this option. If you claim the first comment it will always be shown at the top of the comments. When you make more comments, they will be spread throughout the rest of the comments on the basis of the sidewiki algorithm.
Do not try to fill the whole sidebar with one long comment however, as Google has taken steps to prevent this by condensing comments. You cannot block your competitors from commenting on your site, but by making several well written comments you can try to dilute their influence.

Problems With Sidewiki

Although the algorithm used by Google when choosing which comments to rank higher than others is supposed to filter out any unhelpful comments, the tool is open to spam and comments that will be of little help to anyone.

Companies will be able to fill pages of relevant content with sidewiki comments containing links to their sites, increasing traffic for themselves but it may come at the cost of the original webpage losing custom. Also, until the comment boxes for all web pages are used, what is to stop spammers entering irrelevant content into the comment boxes?

There is sure to be uproar when controversial comments are made, like holocaust denial comments or pro-racism comments. Having no way to censor this type of content may act to kill sidewiki. Threats, hate rants and socially unacceptable material may be added to the comments. There is nothing to stop a link to a pornographic site from being entered as a comment on the sidewiki bar on a children’s website. All of these things are sure to attract much criticism towards Google sidewiki.

When you get it right, the perfect website should be creative, usable for consumers and structured so that it can be optimised. What is the point of creating a fabulous, show stopping website full of flash and JavaScript, when it is impossible for search engines to crawl, consumers to see, and optimisers to market?  Every client who hires your company to design and optimise them a new website will expect the two teams to work together to create a finished product which does everything they asked in their brief. If the design/development team and the marketing team are not communicating, your site may well end up as a flop, with no traffic, no sales and no success.

This is especially important when it comes to ecommerce sites. People who use the internet to do their shopping have experience with different ecommerce sites, checkouts and navigation. I cannot tell you the number of times I have gone onto a website, put something in my basket, gone to the checkout and got my credit card out, only to abandon the transaction because the payment process was too complex. This problem is simple to remedy. Any SEO will be quick to tell you that a checkout process should be quick, and if it cannot be quick, then the stages should at least be listed so that shoppers can see they are progressing through the purchase.

The checkout is just one area where designers and marketers need to communicate more.  Another area of debate is product images. Product images need to be easily discernible from decorative images so that consumers know they can click on them and it will take them through to a more detailed product page. It is all very well designing a page so that the images float or overlap and look super nice, but if customers cannot use the page because it is all about looks and not about utility; you have not served your purpose of building a profitable site.

If you work for a digital agency, as a web designer, web developer or in SEO, think about how design, crawlability and usability go hand-in-hand. By looking at a website from a user’s perspective, you will be able to design a site that suits their needs as well as incorporating new technologies and special features.

This story in the local paper is proving that website design in Leeds, digital agencies and SEO is beating the credit crunch as they continue to grow and see profits, even during troubling economic periods.

Check out The Harrogate Advertiser’s article here.

A digital agecy in Harrogate has found a flaw in the internet that could be costing online retailers millions if it ever became widely known. When you buy something on the internet, 9 times out of 10 you are taken to a virtual shopping basket. BUT, did you know that by changing the quantity to -1 instead of 1, you could end up getting the products for free!

There are ways to solve this, but it is something eccomerce stores should think about and resolve quickly unless they want to be giving their products away for free!

For the full story visit www.9xb.com or click here.