photo credit: Alex Osterwalder

I’ve just read an article in The Guardian proclaiming the top 100 essential websites of 2009. I have to say that the majority of them are pretty self explanatory and unchanged from the previous year.

Facebook Facebook Facebook, can we ever live without it? Apparently not as according to a survey conducted by InterCasino almost half of Scots would  gladly give up sex for a year to become a millionaire. Whereas only  one-third would quit Facebook.

The most notable thing to mention today is the development of several blogging platforms and the increased use of micro-blogging and its impact on our attention spans. According to The Guardian 1,000 word stories and articles are being transformed into 200 word blogs or 140 character ‘tweets’ and status updates. Long gone are the days of traditional journalism and documentation, today online users expect their news in one line. It’s pretty much true, I get bored of an article after a couple of paragraphs (makes you wonder why I’m actually still bothering to write this?) No no, according to Google Analytics I have my 66 fans, I must feed their brain, they need me!

The Guardian has been nice enough to summarize their essential websites into neat little lists, I think I’ll do the same with my favourites and what I expect to see in 2010.

Blogging

The obvious choice here is WordPress, I’m pretty new to the world of blogging but was told (by the best) that wordpress was the way to go. It seems pretty good to me – personalised themes, customised and updated plugins, easy to use  text boxes with no need for coding, simple hyperlinking, photo upload and the list goes on and on.

I don’t like this idea of soup, where users basically write status update-like blogs and upload articles, pictures and so on. We are already doing that on Twitter and Facebook aren’t we?

Browsers

On the work PC its firefox and it does the job. On the home MAC its chrome and does the job better. It’s sad to say it but google can do no wrong with this, I use google for everything and since as Chrome is basically google+ it works for me.

Films

The most obvious choice here is IMDb, which is great for plot lines, cast details and rumours but it doesn’t really get involved with social media (apart from its discussion panels). The one to really look out for is Rotten Tomatoes. It’s great for knowing whats doing well, what isn’t and what’s top rated, what isn’t. The best thing about it though is it’s review system. It links to  reviews from all the top critics as well as looking at user reviews and its all set out in tweet like format. Sooner or later Rotten Tomatoes is going to jump on the back of IMDb and take over it completely, something to look for in the future.

Search Engines

If I didn’t say Google I’d look a bit stupid (and no I’m not going to hyperlink this one). I use google to the extent where I know the entire address of a website but find it easier to pop the name into google and get it that way, a little silly I know but it’s very much habit. Microsoft’s Bing is trying to compete but it still has a very long way to go, Yahoo isn’t even mentioned. The one to look out for in the future, and I have mentioned this in a previous post, is Wolfram Alpha. An ‘answer engine’ focused on mathematics and data questions. I have played around with it a little bit and have found that you need to be very specific with your questions – it doesn’t like it when you confuse it and it will provide you with an overload of information. However the idea is there and we should be seeing a lot more from these guys in the future.

Charlie says that these are the only important ones, everything else we don’t care about.

I have just read an article in The Guardian (online I may add) regarding The Times/ Sunday Times and their new pay-per-use subscription to their online newspaper.

According to this Guardian article The Times have lost almost 90% of their online readership since introducing the paywell. Quoting them, The Times is said to have had 15% of online news traffic compared to 4.16% now. Now when you visit The Times website you are either directed to a registration page or asked to fork out £1 for 24 hours access or subscribe to a monthly fee of £2. The cheeky thing is though that you get a sneak preview of the headlines, you actually have to click on the article before it tells you you’re too cheap to read the news. Cheeky buggers (by the way, the reason I might know this is because I wanted to read the story in The Times about Lindsey Lohan – don’t judge me I was curious). The paywell is currently not in full swing at this moment in time – it will come into full effect mid July.

But will it? Loosing 90% of your online readership when you only had 15% of the online news traffic can’t be good right? It’s not even like they are the best. I am more of a Guardian girl myself and previously I read BBC News religiously before their dreadful facelift (read my rant here). I have heard that The Guardian is the most widely read online newspaper and I can see why. In my blog about the BBC layout I spoke about the use of unnecessary icons and silly navigation. I like The Guardian because it doesn’t pretend to be anything ponsy, it is constantly linking to social media and everything is there in front of you without being in your face. This is why I  presume that The Times are only ‘testing’ this paywell. According to figures if 150,000 daily online readers agree to pay the £2 monthly fee this will result in £1.4 million pounds a year. However the chances of receiving 150,000 readers is extremely limited, especially when other online newspapers are offering the same thing, in relative terms and doing it better and for free.

The chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks said that “This is a defining moment for journalism. This is a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition. We are proud of our journalism and unashamed to say that we believe in its value.” Wait a minute, now does that mean that because a paywell was introduced the newspaper had no value? Does that mean that before the paywell, journalism was not an already full fledged and well established business of news?

I am a little confused.

I thought that the fact that news websites were producing articles for free was a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition.

I am a little confused.

My confusion is heightened by John Witherow, Editor of The Sunday Times: ” The launch of a dedicated Sunday Times website is a hugely significant moment for the paper. It will enable us to showcase our strengths in areas such as news, sport, business, style, travel and culture.” OK, so pretty much all the areas that a newspaper does then? Shouldn’t you already be showcasing your strengths in news… I mean you are a newspaper aren’t you.

I am still confused.

I have one overriding issue with paying for an online newspaper. I buy The Guardian (paper) newspaper occasionally, mostly at the weekend. I sit and read it with a coffee in my garden. That is why I buy it, because I can read it in my garden and drink my coffee and take my eyes away from my computer screen for half an hour. So I will not agree with what The Times are doing, I will not pay it. Lets hope The Guardian don’t do this. Watch this space.

P.S – I know I said I wanted to read about Lindsay Lohan but come on, your The Times, you claim to be proud of the value of your journalism and you have Lindsay Lohan on your top headlines. Please, now that’s journalism.

So its over, finito, done. Am I disappointed? Of course, I’m English, I’m constantly disappointed by my countries lack of talent, excessive underachieving and sulky attitude. I am therefore very impressed that Spain have been crowned FIFA World Cup Champions – they are a pretty good-looking team,so I don’t mind them being on my TV/computer screen all the time.

I’m sure you are aware by now that I have recently entered into a exciting world of Internet marketing and social media, learning something new about the online environment that we live in every day. This week I have learnt how to customise a MySpace page and wrote some copy for as well as proofed a website expected to launch in the near future. Exciting stuff actually. I am finally getting the hang of twitter, although I’m finding that some people are tweeting every half an hour which can be quite annoying. I’m also getting my head around Twitter’s ‘Trending Topic’ which of course, as you would expect, over the last couple of weeks has been FIFA World Cup, FIFA and World Cup. After looking at a couple of blogs and articles I’ve learnt about some other popular trends of the week, Mick Jagger being one and Harry Potter being another. I found a clever database that actually took a stab at why these trends were so popular. Mick Jagger has been a spectator at numerous games during the World Cup and has apparently ‘jinxed’ these teams by appearing at the game. Happy Potter the movie has aired on Indonesian TV for the first time this week and a new trailer of the newest movie has also surfaced. The FIFA World Cup however is number 1 by a long while.

I’ve also managed to find out the most tweeted and mentioned teams of the World Cup:

1. Netherlands
2. Brazil
3. Spain
4. Germany
5. Uruguay

Those Europeans like to talk don’t they?

I have found a very useful graph-type-thing that shows what teams and what players have been the most populaly searched and mentioned on Facebook. I’m sure that tweet results would be much the same. As you can see from this, the most scandalous and/or hated players are the most mentioned.

Doesn’t that say something about trending?

To be honest, I haven’t said much about the World Cup, on Facebook or Twitter. What I have said are pretty much exactly what you would expect from a 20 year old woman. Here are some examples:

Ooofft the Spain team are looking goooo0-hood

How cute is Maradona his feet don’t even touch the ground!!!

@Maradona – how come you get to kiss and smack bums of football players – unfair

Get your goal line technology sorted out or I’ll come and referee myself @FIFA, be warned

Male footballers crying makes me well up, all I want to do is hug the screen, oops neighbours saw

photo credit: jmussuto

There are so many online news websites these days, some annoy me.

In my third year at university I wrote a essay on what constitutes as a good online newspaper website. I decided from my personal point of view, that a news website shouldn’t have a lot of flashy banners are titles, nothing to detract from the actual news. It shouldn’t have links to thousands of other websites and news stories, I’m already here it should be here too. It shouldn’t have flashy ‘New’ signs in brutish bold red next to every single bloody news story on the entire website (seriously if its not new don’t have it on the homepage – pet hate) and… it shouldn’t be clutters, it should be neat an organised, like a filing cabinet. Lastly, please don’t have a home page that takes about an hour to scroll down, that’s what links are for. Since conducting this study and evidently laying into several news websites that annoyed me, the most notorious of the lot hu humm, the daily mail, has actually updated its website (but lets face it, its still the daily mail and so still annoying).

So when I think about good online news websites I think of the two I use on a daily basis, BBC News – standard, and The Guardian (mostly for their online crosswords but shhhh). Why do I like these? They are the most up to date, most organised, most clutter free and most non-in-your-face. Isn’t it a sign when you website is the most successful and most viewed news website on the Internet that you are doing something right and probably shouldn’t change it? Apparently not.

BBC has decided to ‘modernize’ its website, focusing on ‘design and navigation’. But look, LOOK at what they going to do, I am not impressed. Here’s a screenshot of their new look:

Oh Whats that? Annoying big red ‘New’ signs everywhere? Great BBC, just great. According to BBC apparently by adding these new signs they are given their audiences a better indication of what are recent headlines. Really? Because I am pretty sure that ‘other top stories’ is a good indication of recent headlines but never mind.

I completely understand the need to modernize the audio and video side of the website however as I have previously had problems watching and listening to things to the website but again I have an argument for this one too. What is the point of putting the video of the news story from the TV, along with the written story and radio story all together? Surely if I wanted to watch the news I would use the TV, aren’t people that use BBC News online people who are at work? Supposedly doing their job and not looking at the news? It would be a bit suspicious if you started hearing  ‘Peter Andre’s latest miming blunder’ or ‘How the World Cup needs goal-line technology’ coming from one of your colleagues computers? I just don’t see the real need for it really. I think I am just a cynical grump.

What do you think about their new layout?

Its all just a bit frustrating really. Right, now back to my crossword.

Controversial Internet retailer Woot.com has recently announced that they have been bought for an undisclosed sum by Internet giants Amazon. Technology blog TechCrunch has suggested that the fee was £73 million but no official details can be confirmed.

photo credit: Foto al paso

Let me tell you why this is interesting. Everybody knows that Amazon is the leading Internet retailer for….Well everything. It’s therefore quite clear that anybody and everybody with a unique selling point will potentially be competition for the company. Amazon therefore has the grueling task of weeding out and exterminating these potentials, or in other words, buy them out. Amazon has previously bought out retailers such as Zappos, a clothing, shoes and accessories-selling website in July 2009. Looking at the two competitors Woot and Zappos it is unclear why these small, relatively unrecognisable companies might threaten beastly Amazon. Amazon must know something I don’t know about potential trends. What I do know is that in an increasingly vocal online environment, people might enjoy the slapstick and honest approach adopted by Woot. For those of you who are not familiar with woot, or haven’t bothered to pop it into Google before getting to this sentence, here are a couple of things to help introduce the two of you.

Woot.com is an American online retailer and community out of Dallas, Texas  ‘that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap’. It sells quality products at a discounted fee frequently selling computer and electronic equipment but have previously been known to sell everything from a DVD box set to groceries. The company has expanded its reign since its creation date in 2004 to sell one original T-shirt per day, one children’s item per day and two different selections of wine per week. Now, this all sounds relatively normal.. Haven’t you noticed that they only sell one product (in each catagory) per day? Weird because apparently this means they are major competitors for Amazon. Weird. It gets better, this is the same online retailer that has previously sold ‘goodie bags’ of random junk to stress-test their servers. But wait, what would a company like Woot call a ‘goodie bag’ such as this, well of course they would call it ‘Bag ‘O’ Crap’, of course. Again, this is the same retailer to have proclaimed that they will not provide customer service, not really. If you don’t like it just sell it on eBay, someone will buy it, its cool stuff cheap after all.

An analyst at Forrester Research has said that ‘amazon have a habit of buying out smaller rivals whose business models could, eventually be a threat: “They have an acquisition strategy of keeping their friends close and their enemies closer.” According to this then, future customers want to buy bags of crap, want to have tech teams too busy to talk to them, want to have the choice of only one item and don’t want customer service, not really.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been looking at keywords and their relevance in the world of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click. I have a couple of interesting facts for you.

Did you know that something like 40% of keywords or key phrases plugged into a search engine are unique, meaning that they have never been searched for before. Obviously the majority of these searches will be linked or related to News stories and therefore unique in a sense that the information is breaking news and therefore the keyword/phrase would not exist before the news existed. There are a lot of unique searches for music lyrics, bands as I am sure you are aware that there is  often uniqueness in their titles, names and lyrics. The reason I find this so interesting is because of things like robot unicorn. What possesses someone to entitle, let alone create a computer game (with the theme tune Erasure – I wanna be with you I might add)? Now, searching something as random as ‘robot unicorn’ is far from unique with over 1,000,000 results yet searching for ‘can somebody please shut up the world cup vuvazalas’ before the world cup would be considered unique.

Also! its absolutely hilarious (mostly because I do it too) how many people spell things wrong when they are searching for things in a search engine. Nowadays google automatically corrects your bad (sometimes very bad) spelling anyway so you don’t even have to bother. I don’t even pretend like I can spell anymore, what’s the point? However, I have suspicions (and I do realise I am being cheeky) that the world’s illiteracy rates are so staggeringly high because of tools such as this (or just google, ba-ha), obviously spell check (which I will promptly use as soon as this post is ready to publish without the bat of an eyelid at the incredible amount of spelling mistakes in my post) is the most obvious cheat.

Vaguely related to this, did you know that if you keep the beginning and ending letter of a word correct but muddle the letters inbetween it will still be legable and you will be able to read it.

for emxmplae, eevn thguoh tihs paprgraah mhigt look lkie it deons’t mkae any snese you suolhd sitll be albe to raed it if you konw waht you are lnokoig for. Unortnatfeuly it is not bceasue you are emxteelry cleveer or taentled, it is bucaese the biran is a wneordful tnhig. I had a gggile at this ealrier tdoay. Fun right!?

It was a busy day at Attacat yesterday. I attempted to give Jon a hand crunching some numbers and tried to get my head around terminology and wording. Although I might need some time with the terminology I did grasp the idea of it and found it incredibly interesting the amount of money companies spend on Internet marketing and advertising. I can only imagine the amount bigger companies such as Topshop and Apple spend, god I wish I could get my hands on that information! It was also really interesting to find out about some of the restrictions and regulations in place for advertising and marketing for tobacco and alcohol based advertising and marketing – I think I will touch on this in a later post when I do some more research on it.

I also had the pleasure of sitting in on Jon creating some Google Adwords and found the process very entertaining indeed. The majority of this entertainment came from keyword search for particular products and the popularity of these keywords as well as the simplicity required when creating them. I can’t tell you how funny it is to see what some people search for. Actually, I can tell you, Attacat has created a logbook of some of the most humorous and bizarre keywords and results they have found whilst conducting their research and kindly found it for me to giggle at. 

Here are some of my favourites:

• When searching for ‘Air Hose’ a popular result has been ‘air stewardess panty hose’ - OK, I think I get this one. I’m pretty sure air stewardesses could be considered a ’fantasy’ to some, the same way Policewoman and Secretaries are. So this one is pretty self explanatory… At least I think it is.  
• When simply searching ‘Party’ there were 2448 searches for ‘swingers party’ – Love it.
• Even better, when searching for the same thing there were 1791 searches for ‘adult toy party’ – now this is interesting, what would one do at this party? One can only presume? Hmmm
• Last but not least, I enjoy this one because of the varity and sheer volume of results. When searching for ‘Partner Duvets’ search results including ‘my partner steals the duvet’ – innocent, ‘sexist tog duvet’ – not entirely sure how you can get a sexist duvet but ok, and ‘my daughter gets hot and sweaty in bed’ – I don’t really understand why this person would know this kind of information and yes, creepy comes to mind but equally intriguing.   

I guess there are over 6 billion people in the world, everyone will have searched for something considered taboo or just plain weird at some point in their lives (or maybe they were just under the influence of the infamous Le Booze).

I have also been having a lot of fun with search engines – a topic that is constantly ticking the feet of the Attacat team. Most people I know won’t search on anything else other than google, yahoo if they are really behind the times. In actual fact there are over 50 different search engines, obviously Google is the main player. Recently I’ve been playing with Wolfram Alpha which calls itself a computational knowledge engine and as you can tell from it’s title it probably won’t tell you what time My Super Sweet 16 is on but you could try. This one can do your maths homework, history homework, french homework and on and on and on. Put in an equation, Wolfram will answer it for you. Better yet, ask Wolfram if you are drunk, Wolfram will tell you. Better again, Wolfram will tell you if you are fat (a little harsh but vital information I am sure).

Go on, ask it if you are fat… You know you want to.

Just a quick one.

I am quite excited and proud as several blogs from the Attacat website that I have been working on (ok so I added some pictures and presentation slides but whatever) have been mentioned on Search Engine Land. This was the first thing I had any input in so its quite cool! Big up to Tim for writing them!

Check out our mentions and other updates from the Search Market Expo London 2010 or just go straight to the Attacat Brain to check them out.

Coffee break is a complex, wide reaching and integral part of the Attacat philosophy, first established early in the summer of 2008.

Rules are as follows:

Ben, one of the director’s at Attacat likened my name to the popular 70′s cartoon series charley says (get it? My names Charlie, Charlie-says, Charley says….Ahhh smart one you are). I am clearly too young (20) to have a clue what this is but thought I would share a clip with you.

Enjoy