Category: And finally

This is the typical pattern of events.

I’m looking at Google Analytics, and then all of a sudden a Tweet about running marathons pops up in the corner of my screen. I click on the link and end up on a website reading about a new marathon running technique.

Whilst I’m there I see an advert for a pair of lightweight trainers and click on it to visit the advertiser and check out the shoes.

Having read about them on the site, I then go looking for reviews to find what other runners thing of the shoes.

After reading a few reviews on different websites I then start searching for the best price of those trainers, until I’ve found a few different places to buy them.

For a final check I try eBay and Amazon just to make sure I’m not being ripped off

And then I think: “where did the last half an hour go? What was I doing?” It’s only at that point I see tab for Google Analytics and go back to the original job.

If that pattern of events chimes with you, then here’s a new idea that can save you a bit of time.

LeechBlock

The LeechBlock Firefox browser extension blocks time-wasting websites during the hours you specify. Just type in the website URLs you find hard to resist, and enter the maximum length of time you want to spend on them.

LeechBlock imposes self-discipline by closing your browser when you’ve reached your limit!

Take a look and let us know what you think!

In the next couple of weeks (16-20 May) there’s an event called Spring Online Silver Surfers Day.

This is a national campaign with the intention of getting older people to use computers and the Internet. There will be thousands of events across the UK.

Anyone including businesses, organisations and individuals have been invited to run ‘digital awareness sessions’, to help older people get to grips with the medium.

The events can be held anywhere, from people’s homes to school halls to boardrooms or libraries. There’s no fixed agenda for organisers, but each one will be supported with a marketing toolkit. This includes leaflets, appointment cards, and posters.

There’s also a cash prize of £1,000 to help with developing future computer learning activities!

Want to get involved? If you’d like to run an event, or find out more, follow this link.

Wikipedia, that online encyclopedia of unquestionable truth and veracity, ahem, has made it to 10 years. In Internet terms, that’s an ice age.

The ‘free content’ idea of Wikipedia.org was launched by Jimmy Wales in San Francisco back in 2001.

In his anniversary speech Mr Wales said to “I remember that first day. I clicked on edit and I wrote ‘Hello World’ and that was the beginning of Wikipedia and all the things that have come since then.”

Nupedia

The site concept originally came from online encyclopedia ‘Nupedia’ whose editors didn’t like the idea of letting users add or edit articles. Nupedia bit the dust back in 2003.

Web 2.0

Wikipedia was the very first ‘Web 2.0′ project in the sense that it allowed users to easily add content from their own web browser.

And how has it got on? Well Wikipedia now hosts over 3.5 million articles distributed over 23 million web pages in 270 languages. That’s a big website, and a fast growing one too – there are 1,100 new articles every day.

Despite my earlier comments Wikipedia is generally thought to be accurate, although the nature of user generated content is that some of it is bound – for a time at least – to be less than true.

Wikipedia itself warns: “Some articles on Wikipedia may contain significant factual inaccuracies, IE information that is verifiably wrong.”

Wikipedia has always been – and intends to stay – non-profit.

Do you use Wikipedia? Have you tried adding or editing any articles? Leave us a comment below.

A study by the Boston Consulting group has revealed that the Internet is more than £100bn to the UK economy. Commissioned by Google, the research indicates that the Internet accounts for around 7.2% of the UK’s GDP.

As a sector that makes the Internet the 5th largest in the UK, bigger than construction, transport and utilities.

Around 60% of this £100bn value comes from online shopping, and the price we all pay to connect ourselves – and our websites – to the Internet. The remainder is attributed to spending on IT by the Government, and net exports too.

Not only is this contribution huge, the reports indicate that it is set to grow too, forecast to increase by 10% annually for the next 5 years. The study also showed that the UK is world’s leading nation for e-commerce.

Other top Internet nations include:

• Denmark
• Republic of Korea
• Japan
• Sweden
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• Norway
• Finland
• Germany
• Iceland

This economic contribution also involves the generation of around 250,000 jobs.

And what does this show for small business?

Well the good news for WebEden website builders is that those small businesses that actively use the Internet show sales growth that outstrips their reclusive competitors by around four times.

Here’s the comment:

Paul Zwillenberg, partner with BCG commented: “The internet is pervasive in the UK economy today, more so than in most advanced countries.”

“Several industries – including media, travel, insurance and fashion – are being transformed by it.”

Matt Brittin, of Google UK added: “The internet is a central pillar of the UK’s economy.

“The sector has come of age, and with great prospects for further growth the UK internet economy will be vital to the UK’s future prosperity”.

Well then WebEdeners

Give yourself a pat on the back. In part due to your efforts in building and running a website, you’re helping to add to the UK economy and transform it into one that leads the way in online.

Have you seen the benefit from turning to online? What ways has having a website helped your business? Leave us a comment below.

So, let me see, a list. Search engine. Operating system. Browser. Navigation. Instant Messenger. Voice calls. Email. Advertising. Mobile phones.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to products made by Google. Lots of products, but there’s a theme: the web, information, communication.

So where do ‘driverless cars’, Google’s newest project, fit into all that?! Eric Schmidt, Google CEO confirmed the plans at a recent TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco, adding more colour to the previous announcement by Google’s director of the Standford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Sebastian Thrun.

The idea – apparently – is to free drivers up to do more with the time they would have spent driving. Like searching for products on Google, no doubt.

And this is no pipedream either. Google cars have already covered over 140,000 miles with almost no human control.

“They’ve crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe”, said Thrun.

The cars are kitted up with video cameras, radar sensors and laser range finders – helping them ‘see’ the road and detect other vehicles. And of course they use the maps created by Google’s own Streetview project.

Pipe-dream, pointless, or a great idea by Google? Leave us a comment below.

Yahoo have just published their ‘Year in Review’ showing what we were all searching for on Yahoo.co.uk in 2010. And it’s not the kind of stuff you would necessarily expect. Sure there’s some celebrity focus, but there’s some more serious stuff too.

Here’s the top 10 (#last year’s position)

1. Lottery (new entry)
2. Job Centre (#3)
3. Weather (new entry)
4. Big Brother (#1)
5. Cheryl Cole (#9)
6. TV guide (new entry)
7. World Cup (new entry)
8. Train times ( #10)
9. Katie Price (#8)
10. Horoscopes (new entry)

Richard Evans, Yahoo! News Editor commented: ‘Looking at the billions of searches made on yahoo.co.uk over the last year, two things jump out, One is that we are a worried nation, concerned about our futures as we enter an ‘age of austerity’. The second is that we find our escape from this worry through reality TV, entertainment and celebrity’

No doubt next year is going to feature some attention on the Royal Wedding.

When it comes to the celebrity top 10, here’s the order:

1. Cheryl Cole (#4)
2. Katie Price (#3)
3. Lady Gaga (#6)
4. John Terry (new entry)
5. Angelina Jolie (new entry)
6. Victoria Beckham (new entry)
7. Megan Fox (#10)
8. Justin Bieber (new entry)
9. Peter Andre (new entry)
10. Katy Perry (new entry)

Is there anything that we can learn as website builders? Well the main one is that if you write about the kind of things people talk about, you have a much better chance to appear in the Google search results and get traffic. Of course, it has to be relevant to your website – there’s not much point in attracting traffic from people looking for Cheryl Cole if you sell bathroom cabinets!

For more SEO advice take a look at our SEO Services.

Were these your top searches too, or have none of your common searches made it into the top 10?

Any frequent visitor to the WebEden blog knows that we’re big fans of Google. As we discussed last year, Google innovates at a hectic pace, bringing out – and evolving – products at a pace unmatched by other businesses. In the last year alone Google launched 278 fully fledged products or services, each of which would have been a big launch for any other company.

To help keep up with all the new and exciting stuff going on Google have launched a new website called Google New.

They’re using this website to publish news about their latest products and services.

It includes an aggregation of all their blogs and pulls in their latest posts. You can also search Google products, and there’s a product of the day too.

The site also includes a directory every product, advert, developer tools and blogs.

Take a look google.com/newproducts. Or watch a video all about it below.

Are you a big mobile texter? Do you make use of predictive text? The feature -which guesses what word you’re trying to type saving you the effort of actually doing so – has made texting much quicker and more nimble.

With ‘Scribe’ Google have decided to bring that idea to documents, Scribe lays out possible endings to each word or phrase based on what you’ve already typed. As you type you can choose the auto-complete suggestion that best fits your sentence.

The suggestions also include what is ‘normally’ or popularly used to end each sentence.

There’s no doubt – as with predictive text – that this sort of thing takes a bit of getting used to. Having tried it myself it went from intriguing to annoying and then finally useful in about 20 minutes.

You can try out Google scribe online here.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

A study by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk has focused on which logos are the ones that get viewed the most. And the winner? I’m afraid there’s no prizes for guessing that one: its Google.

According to the study the average person views the Google logo once every nine minutes every day. And the reason? Its because we all set Google as our homepage (or at least 47% of do).

50 times a day!

Amazingly, this means that the majority of respondents saw the logo more than 50 times every working day. 52% in the study said they used Google to search for something between 10 and 20 times a day.

The second most-viewed logo was Microsoft, followed by Facebook in third, and Apple fourth. Coca Cola led the charge for non-media technology, being the 5th most viewed logo.

It’s ALL about Search Engines

This is of passing interest – hence why we decided to feature the story here. But what is of more interest is the fact as so many of us have set Google as our homepage. We all recognise that the most important online activity is searhing for something. And as a website builder, that’s an opportunity to use Google to get your website in front of people.

To help boost your website higher in the Search Engine Results Page, we have beta launched our own SEO and Pay Per Click services to help your website rank higher on Google.  Drop us a line or give us a call if that suits you.

A few weeks ago we brought you new of Google’s decision to shelve Google Wave. For a highly successful company Google actually fails quite frequently. It’s a testament to their sheer pace of development – they’ve launched 264 new products in the last year alone – that they can shut down so many and still continue to grow.

To remind us all that even the mighty Google makes mistakes, here’s a list of Google’s recent failures.

Google SearchWiki (closed March 2010)

The SearchWiki let you reorder the search results manually, pushing some sites higher and even deleting certain ones.

Google Audio Ads (Closed February 2009)

Google planned to allow AdWords advertisers to bid for placements on radio. In reality, they couldn’t give advertisers any measurability of the results, nor could they boost the revenues of radio stations.

Google Video (closed January 2009)

Google Video was what Google came up with before they bought YouTube. To start with, it just re-broadcast TV shows and made them searchable. Google then started to allow users to upload. And then the TV-show bit was dropped. They then bought YouTube and turned Google Video into an online video rental service, which they shut a few months later.

Dodgeball (closed January 2009)

This was Google’s early location check-in service, similar to what Foursquare is today. It was perhaps ahead of its time – there were far fewer smartphone users out there.

Jaiku (closed January 2009)

Jaiku is a microblogging service that Google bought in 2007 and for some reason has done nothing with since. It still exists, but is unsupported.

Google Notebook (Closed January 2009)

This was a tool that allowed you to cut and paste images, text and search results and paste them into an online notebook that you could share with others.

Google Catalogs (Closed January 2009)

This was supposed to be a smart way that you could search through consumer catalogues.

Google Print Ads (Closed January 2009)

As with Google Audio, Google print ads failed because it couldn’t give advertisers the measurability that search and online ads were good at.

Google Page Creator (Closed August 2008)

This was Google’s very own WYSIWYG website builder. It was always a bit clunky, and shut up shop two years ago…

Google Answers (Closed November 2006)

Never quite up to the other Q&A offerings out there – particularly Yahoo Answers – this service closed down in 2006. And that might have been due to cost – Google paid people to answer questions, rather than relying on crowd-sourced input like other services.

That’s it for now

Google launches so many new products that some of them are bound to fail. We’ve all tried out website ideas, only to lose enthusiasm as the project continues. But Google is a good role model – it doesn’t cry over spilt milk, but tries to learn something and use that information in the next idea.

Have you tried and failed, and learned something new? Leave us a comment below.