Monday 27 September 2010

Just a test

I’m just playing around with the Tweet Meme button. Mission accomplished- it works!

Diaspora

Diaspora (pronounced die-ass-pora) is the project of four New York geeks that I came across just recently. Their vision of a social network without the problems of giving away your personal data to big corporations, is something we should all really aspire to. But the only thing now is that Facebook is so huge now (over 400 million users and counting) that it might be difficult to encourage users to switch. But if it does stimulate a mass following, then it should bring change to an industry that really needs to take social networking privacy controls seriously.

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Google Instant Search – A to Z

The somewhat anticipated launch of Google’s latest enhancement has gone live today.  Google Instant Search is basically a progression on from the keyword suggestions which have been shown for some time to users as they type into the Google search box.  Instant Search takes this a  significant step further and actually updates the search results themselves as the user types.  Google say that this should reduce the average time taken to perform a search by between 2-5 seconds and thereby save Google/The World more than 3.5 billion seconds every day!

There have already been inevitable criticisms of this by those who decry the additional bandwidth this service requires (miniscule when compared with watching a Youtube rant on the same subject) and those who find the whole idea of change just too bewildering – how long before Time moans about it tomorrow?  For me, this is a very interesting development and makes the deep understanding of a particular target audience even more important in terms of optimising a website for search.

If you haven’t seen it already you should head over to Google to try it out or read a more detailed description (and watch a video) direct from the horse’s mouth.

Oh, and the A to Z?  Well an interesting exercise in vanity/brand awareness is looking at which websites are shown for each single letter of the alphabet.  I’ve seen a USA version but for your interest here is how it breaks down for the UK (for me at least, today).

A is for Argos N is for Next
B is for BBC O is for O2
C is for Currys P is for PayPal
D is for Debenhams Q is for QVC
E is for eBay R is for Rightmove
F is for Facebook S is for Sky
G is for Google Maps T is for Tesco
H is for Live.com (Hotmail) U is for Youtube
I is for ITV V is for Virgin Atlantic
J is for John Lewis W is for BBC Weather
K is for KLM X is for Xbox
L is for National Lottery Y is for Youtube
M is for MSN Z is for Zara

Tuesday 7 September 2010

Just a quick note…

Paul from The Drawing Board Team!Hello, this is just a quick post to show how very simple it is to upload a picture to a blog via your computer or phone. This post only took a couple of minutes, if that…

Friday 3 September 2010

Virus writers target smart phones.

android-logo It wasn’t that long ago I was having a discussion with friends about the future of computer viruses, and the general consensus was that the next big frontier in virus development would be smart phones. Back then we had phones like the Nokia 3310, but we’ve all moved on from small ‘block’ phones with few applications to ‘wafer thin’ smart phones that are in essence, small computers with sophisticated applications.

On the one hand its great for the companies that write software programs to remove and protect against this malicious software (or malware for short), but not so good for the millions of users who just purchased their new smart phone. This has got to be a concern for Google, with a fresh wave of virus writers targeting the popular Android OS. Check out this link to read more http://bit.ly/aoSzhz