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.
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.
Well not teenagers, that’s for sure.
Twitter is defying the early-adoption model that claims teenagers and college student are the first to start using new websites and social networking tools. This was after all the case with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. However a recent survey of the new social phenomenon has found that teenagers are way behind the tweet times compared to their older, traditionally more technologically challenged internet users. Only 11% of Twitter’s users are between the age of 12 and 17 inclusive. I know that I certainly heard about Twitter from an older friend of mine (not that I am a teenager). But what are the reasons behind this uncommon demographic trend?
The truth is that social networking has been taken over by the oldies! And by that I mean anyone over the age of 18. Although children and teenagers were the main demographic behind the growth of social networks, their user-ship has been drastically over taken. Now only 14% of MySpace’s users are teenagers, whilst Facebook holds an even smaller percentage at just 9%. And the amount that older people use social networking is on the increase. In 2008, the use of social networking sites by people aged between 35 and 54 grew 60%, a massive jump in numbers. But why is this trend so specific with Twitter?
There are several reasons why teenagers prefer to use Facebook or MySpace over Twitter. We can also see reluctance among teenagers to move towards any type of social networking away from text messaging as the primary forum through which they instantly communicate with their friends. From my research I can see four main reasons why Twitter has not become as popular with teenagers as it has with adults.
1. No Need to Tweet; As mentioned above, teenagers are avid users of Facebook and they use text messaging as their primary method of communication. Texting lets teenagers share instant news/thoughts/feelings whilst Facebook allows teenagers to have more fun and interaction with their friends. There is no room in their communication needs to use Twitter.
2. This is because the reasons why teenagers use social networking sites are different to adults’ motivations. Teenagers socialise to keep in touch with and make new friends. They form an identity through social media based on their profiles, likes and dislikes, favourite music, the quizzes they take and more. Adults are not so interested in this and whilst Twitter was intended to be a way for people to stay in touch with their acquaintances, it has become a forum for sharing ideas, asking questions and marketing products/people to the wider world. 
3. There is a very simple factor in the low numbers of teenagers using Twitter, and it comes down to money. One of the most popular and easy ways for Twitter users to update their profile and add Tweets is by using a ‘Smartphone’ like the apple i-phone or a BlackBerry. Whilst most teenagers in the western world own or have access to a mobile phone, the majority of them do not have the capacity to navigate social networking sites. If they do they can be limited by the amount of money they are prepared to spend surfing the internet on their mobile.
4. Finally, the public arena that Twitter users find themselves in is a turn off for many parents and safety conscious teenagers. There are two reasons why teenagers may want their activities and communication hidden from people outside their social circle. Firstly, 99% of teenagers you ask would be aghast to think that their parents knew what they were thinking or doing all the time. It’s simply too un-cool. Imagine the horrified shriek I let out when my mum added me as a friend on Facebook and then continued to comment on my status and photos, and I am 21! Secondly and much more importantly, it is vital that children and teenagers are protected against strangers when using the internet. Anyone can see everybody’s tweets on Twitter, and this may lead to some unwanted attention from potentially dangerous strangers. Teenagers as well as their parents recognise this and prefer to use Facebook where they can be surer about the identity of their friends.
twitter safety
The heavy use of Twitter by people over the age of 18 should be a warning call to new social network developers. They need to take a broad look at who uses the web and design websites around a general audience instead of focusing on teenagers alone. Video games and consoles like the Nintendo Wii has already proved how much adults enjoy technology and computing, the widening if the online market can surely only be a good thing for those in the internet business.
Now all we have to worry about is creating witty and interesting enough Tweets so that people will follow us!
Google Knol has now been available to the public since July 2008, and was intended to be a knowledge forum. Expert authors are encouraged to share their knowledge with the rest of the world, and Google wanted these ‘knols’ to be the first port of call for any Internet user needing a quick answer or wanting to learn more on a particular topic.
Whilst this is what Knol basically does, its success is somewhat less than Google had hoped for. Most people you ask will name Wikipedia as the best online encyclopaedia, and a large number have never even heard of Knol. And whilst many SEO experts have criticised Knol for been to similar to Wiki, it has been no way as effective. The first page 1 ranking Knol I came across through an organic search was just three days ago, and I am a fairly considerable Internet user. When you consider that Wikipedia results are on the first page of search results for nearly every search you do, you can see just how ineffective it has been in its first year.
However, this has not stopped theories that Google gives extra weight to Knol pages because of their affiliation with the Google core domain. Aaron Walls and the Search Engine Land blog both tested knol after it launched and found that a third of articles that had been featured on Knol’s homepage were appearing on page one of Google search results within twenty four hours of it launching. To say that the homepage had no official page rank, and the site was only a day old, these results point towards the fact that Google’s algorithm supports affiliated content.
Google is fighting against spam with Knol. Every outgoing link is a nofollow, so it will not affect search engine rankings for the sites they point to. Also, Cedric Dupont has officially said that Knol will be banned from Google if spam gets out of control. But it is still a good directory to put articles onto to increase traffic for your clients, especially if you manage to get your pages on the homepage.
Knol is making online content submission easier for speakers of languages other than English. It is already available in eight different languages; Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. using the “Google in Your Language’, users can add articles in other languages as well. As of January 2009, there were articles in 59 languages posted on Knol. On average, people from 197 countries visit knol on a daily basis.
These figures should be making Knol a successful knowledge database but figures from 2009 show that after reaching a traffic peak in February, traffic has been continuously falling since. Whilst this is not unusual for relatively new websites, and Wikipedia did take two years to become really successful, with the power of Google behind it, Knol should be performing better than this. The main problem is that most Internet users just don’t know about it. For quick pieces of information on niche subjects, Wikipedia is still the number one forum by a long way. Ask any student what they use when they need quick answers and nine times out of ten, Wiki will be there reply.
For Knol to become as big as its rivals, more people need to know about it. The content in individual knol pages is good, and the authors are experts for the most part. But the fact that spamming is present and the search results tend to be too generalised makes the user experience slow and difficult. Improving this will go a long way to improving Knol and its reviews.
A report this week showed that in the workplace, loads of people aren’t safe online. They either open email attachments willy nilly, post confidential information onto the internet or use the same password for multiple websites.
Hang on…use the same password? No! Way!
I’m being sarcastic. Think about all the different services you use online – your email, your facebook account, your online banking, that world of warcraft forum you don’t talk about…the list goes on. Now imagine you have a job that involves using an intranet or some sort of online application – basically, most jobs nowadays. You’ll have a password for your computer, one for the intranet, one for more for secure documents, one for your work email…the list goes on!
Remembering all of these passwords is nigh on impossible. When you add into the mix the PINS for all your credit cards its no wonder even the best of us have ’senior moments’ at checkouts when we get our PIN number backwards or just type in “help”. That’s why the password for your telly box is 1234 – telly box makers understand that we can’t remember any more passwords so they give us a simple code that you just have to guess every time. It’s physically impossible to guess it wrong.
I know that online fraud is rife and we really should look after our security, but they need to invent something that does it for us. We are but frail beings and Wikipedia has taught us not to remember anything anyway. Either that or they need to let us go back offline – give us paperful bills and offline banking. We never needed passwords then, just a signature and no-one could be bothered to counterfeit those. Right?
I have both my home internet connection and phone with 3. After trying 3 different providers over the course of 2 years to get broadband at home following my move, I plumped for the dongle option and it’s pretty sweet. So sweet that I recently upgraded to a 5gb download limit each month for just £7.50. The connection might be occasionally shunky, but it works and is plenty fast enough for what I use it for (email, facebook etc, some tiny freelance projects, banking and – ahem – ‘other’). So – for a nominal fee I get pretty decent internet use.
The technology behind a ‘dongle’ is, in case you don’t know, the 3G network. It’s a telephony protocol that also can carry data. That’s the stuff behind the whole “catch up with your work emails on your phone” thing that everyone’s so thrilled with the prospect of. Anyway, inside your dongle you’ve got a SIM card, like a normal phone and this is what handles your data connection stuff.
Great.
So riddle me this, 3: if the technology in my dongle is the same as the technology in my phone, and I can have 5gb for £7.50 on my PC, why will that same £7.50 get me about 4 Facebook status updates and a quick peruse of the news on my mobile. It’s pisstaking on a grand scale. I’d use my phone for internet waaayy more than I do were the prices even slightly more in kilter. The stupid thing is that 3 are constantly trying to get me to use it more – every time I login there’s a new application, video thing or Whatever they’d like me to try. At £48 per gig, they can cram it, frankly.