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Time’s 50 Best Websites

Faye — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:51:58 +0000

Time unveiled its 50 Best Websites list this week. I love this stuff as there is always an unknown or two that creeps in there. Very surprised about the social media list though…no Foursquare in sight – totally gazumped by Gowalla.

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How do I find quality backlinks?

Carlos — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:25:35 +0000

Link generation is the primary method to increase both your search engine positioning and also your traffic.

When it comes to the inbound links themselves, they can be in various formats. Ideally, you should be obtaining different types of one-way links to your websites to increase the diversity. The following are a few examples of the different types of backlinks available.

Inbound links from blogs:

These come from posting blog comments. If you find a blog that is related to your industry/service/products, you can leave a useful and constructive comment (not spam e.g. ‘I like this’ or ‘excellent read I will come back here often’ or simply ‘well done’), including targeted keywords as your name and a URL to link back to your site.

One-way links from forums:

These are simply one-way links that come from your forum profiles themselves. The backlinks are dropped inside your BIO / signature with your own anchor text.

Inbound links from web 2.0 sites:

These are backlinks from websites such as squidoo and hubpages and these types of backlink can rank very well. You can take advantage of articles here that include your keywords in the ‘title’ and 2/3 time in the article body. You can insert URL inbound links with anchor and also RSS feeds.

Another important thing is to get these links indexed!

Ping your links to the top RPC directories

What pinging does is to inform the search engine that your new content is available on various sites via RPC. These sites have huge amounts of updates, thus are crawled frequently by the search engines.

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Is youtube down? – Http/1.1 Service Unavailable error for youtube

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:26:06 +0000

It seems that as of 25th March at 12pm (GMT) Youtube.com is down and is returning an “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error. Is the internet falling apart? wikipedia, google analytics, twitter and now youtube, which site is going to break next? Related posts:Youtube tries out flashless videos with HTML5 Thanks to the new HTML5 Standards you can [...] Related posts:

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Not all URL Shortening services are the same

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:53:39 +0000

WatchMouse a Dutch web-monitoring company, looked at popular URL shortening services for a period of one month and then analyzed the results. WatchMouse found that a large amount of variance in the quality of services with 100% uptime and low latency on one end and shaky uptime and long latency on the other.

Shortening service Snurl, for example, had the lowest uptime of any of the services. Only Goo.gl and Twt.tl had 100% uptime. Latency was an issue for many of the shorteners but none quite as bad as Facebook’s shortener Fb.me—nearly ten times as slow as the fastest shortener, Goo.gl.

Take a look at the full report here

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Pink Floyd Win Digital Battle!

David — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:28:15 +0000

Thanks to a High Court ruling that gave Pink Floyd a small victory over record label EMI in a battle over millions in royalties, individual tracks of the legendary rock band’s music could potentially leave the digital world at some point.

The High Court’s ruling was based on a clause in Pink Floyd’s contract with EMI that was designed to enable the band to “preserve the artistic integrity” of its music. According to judge Andrew Morritt, the implication of this was that EMI needed Pink Floyd’s explicit permission to “exploit recording by online distribution or by any other means other than the original album“.

As the BBC explains, Pink Floyd didn’t release many singles. Instead, the band’s songs were meant to ‘go together‘, meaning that fans needed to buy an entire album to experience the product the way Pink Floyd intended. In the digital age, of course, consumers more often than not opt to purchase songs à la carte, and up until now, to Pink Floyd’s dismay, they’ve been able to do that with Pink Floyd music….read more at Brand Republic

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10 years since The Dotcom Bubble

Faye — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:42:15 +0000

Wow, 10 years today since the bursting of the dotcom bubble! Great post here from Robin Goad from Hitwise about how the Internet landscape has changed over the last decade:

“Below is a list of the top 20 websites in the UK last week, with Google and Facebook topping the list. Back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble, Facebook wasn’t even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and Google was still in its infancy.

However, a number of the sites that were big back then remain so today: Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) and Yahoo! Mail still rank in the top 20, and both Microsoft and Yahoo! have other popular UK sites as well. eBay and Amazon remain the most visited retail websites in the UK, although they now face much stiffer competition from both online and multichannel retailers now.

But what about some of the names most closely associated with dotcom boom and bust?

Lastminute.com – one of the great survivors of the bubble; still a top 20 UK travel site.

Boo.com – given the success of fashion retailers like ASOS, which makes such good use of multimedia on its site, maybe the doomed clothing retailer was simply ahead of its time and would have survived in a broadband world?

Broadcast.com – the likes of Last.fm, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, Hulu and YouTube have proved that streaming media can be a success, but they all would have struggled over a dial up connection…..”

I wonder which of these sites will still be widely used in ten years time?

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Bigmouthmedia merger with LBi

Faye — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:58:19 +0000

Big news today folks…big news for the Bigmouths at Bigmouthmedia that is. I saw the tweets come flooding in this morning at about 9am, shortly followed by the official press release which reported the merger of LBi and Netherlands-based Obtineo (amalgamation of Bigmouthmedia plus €40m from capital investors) and I have to say it’s no big surprise. It has been on the cards since Phil Gripton came on board as MD and then Mark Bole, who replaced the the original Bigmouth, Steve Leach as CEO late last year.

I started my online career with Global Media back in 2004 and so was there through the merger of Global Media and Bigmouthmedia back in 2006, in a move engineered by the Carlyle Group, estimated to have been worth EU 60m. That was a fantastic move for bigmouthmedia and so I wait to see what happens to them going forward. Interesting times!

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China Busts it’s Biggest Hacker School

David — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:47:13 +0000

China can’t seem to keep out of the news about hacking and cyberwar can it? The country’s police have scored a positive news report, however: They’ve closed down the nation’s biggest hacker training school. It does raise some questions though.

The action went down in Hubei province in Central China, and three people were arrested and a pile of money and other assets were seized. The three were responsible for running the Black Hawk Safety Net, allegedly, and they’re facing charges of providing online hacking code to others–a new offense in China. It all stems back to a cyberattack in 2007, which revealed connections to Black Hawk when some of the suspects were caught….read the rest here.

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France Considers Tax for Search Giants

David — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:53:05 +0000

The BBC report that France are considering charging Tax for Google, Yahoo and Facebook. See below for a quote from the BBC website:

“Google and other net firms could be taxed under plans being considered by the French government.

A report, commissioned by the government, suggests firms such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook should pay a new tax on their online ad revenues.

The money could be used to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the internet.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a tough line on the increasing dominance of digital content….”

Related Links: BBC Article

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Amazon drop Â£25 Million Royal Mail Contract

David — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:48:43 +0000

Amazon have pulled its Â£25m contract with Royal Mail as strike action threatens deliveries in the run-up to Christmas. The online retailer has cancelled its long-term contract with Royal Mail for parcels over 500 grams, which will instead be delivered by rival service Home Delivery Network (HDN), currently used by Tesco and Argos…Read the rest at NMA.

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