Category: And finally

These are the words of that, ahem, forward looking music artist, formerly known as a squiggle, Prince. Apparently, it thinks that the Internet is a poor way to distribute music.

“The Internet’s completely over,” he said in an interview for the Mirror. “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

It’s not the first time Prince has railed against the web. It all kicked off back in 2007 when decided to file lawsuits against Pirate Bay, eBay and YouTube for ‘appropriating’ his music. He has placed a total Ban on any of these sites using his music, and has also refused to deal with others such as iTunes and eMusic.

What about his own website though? If that’s the only place people can get his music, it must be huge?

Not a bit of it – it’s been shut down!

“The internet’s like MTV,” the star said to the Mirror’s correspondent. “At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

Has Prince read it correctly? Is this the beginning of the end of the Internet? Leave us a comment below…

Last year we ran a story that talked about the possibility of websites getting an age rating. This year ISP Tibboh has teamed up with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to turn that idea into a reality.

The ISP is using web filtering technology in order to automatically rate websites. Parents using the ISP can then set their Internet connection to only view websites above a particular rating: U, PG, 12, 15 or 18.

Got a Dongle?

At the moment the service is only available using a 3G dongle, charged at £20 a month. And if there are different members of the family requiring different levels of filter, those can be set by registering alternative user profiles.

So what classification do websites end up having?

Here are a few of the more well know ones

Facebook:12
Twitter:    12
Google:    12
Bing:        12
BBC:         U
telegraph.co.uk    U
Guardian.co.uk     U
Microsoft.com      U
Sky.com               PG
Wordpress:          15

So far Tibboh reckons they have rated around 3 billion websites.

MD Phil Dawson said that “91%t of parents said they wanted BBFC classifications online. This really helps because parents instinctively understand what the U, PG, 12, 15 and 18 levels mean,”

Do you think its a good idea? Are you making a website? What age rating would your website get? Leave us a comment below.

No, its not April the 1st.

In a similar stunt to last year, Google have brought in goats to their Mountain View headquarters  – to cut the grass.

This is what a goat looks like…

Despite several eco-commentators saying that it cost more CO2 emissions to bus ‘em in than they saved in lawnmower petrol, it seems that Google has a genuine affection for the furry nutters.

I don’t have any grass here. Just a pot plant. Now where did I put my caterpillar…

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If you want to offset the carbon emissions from your website, and get a little badge that shows how eco you are, take a look at coco2.org.  Or not. Up to you.

I was just trying to put another Video Tutorial on YouTube and I got this:

It seems that even the mighty YouTube fails sometimes!

According to the message a “team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation”.

Glad to know someone’s on the case…

On this blog we’ve talked quite a bit about the market share of each search engine. Despite their best efforts to launch new search engines such as Bing; or to combine their search engines; neither Microsoft nor Yahoo appear able to challenge the dominance of Google.

But may be the challenger is coming from a different direction. Last year we ran with a story that said that Facebook was the fastest growing search engine. And Facebook is growing in all other areas too.

Facebook is good for News Websites

For example, according to Hitwise traffic from Facebook to US news sites has tripled over the last year, whilst Google’s share has remained static.

This has emboldened news publishers such as Rupert Murdoch to demand money from Google for their content, or face being locked out of it.

Now that Facebook has passed the 400m user milestone, it might be Facebook that is the biggest threat to the way Google wants to run things.

Google on the Run

Is Google scared? Well for the first time ever they splashed out $5m on a TV ad during the Superbowl a few weeks ago. Is that a proactive move or a reactive one?

Facebook already has a cosier relationship with news providers, who often choose to publish their content on Facebook.

Of course Google claim that actually they are helping news publishers, sending them an estimated 4bn visits every year.

With Facebook and Twitter of course the content is entirely at the publishers’ discretion, and they get to see who is reading it; both features that Google does not let them have.

Some have speculated that were Facebook to launch a comprehensive web-wide search engine, Google would lose huge traffic overnight.

Google Buzz Fail?

Then too there is the launch of Google Buzz – a defensive move surely, as Google tries to muscle in on the social media landscape.

Do you think the Google Empire may be having a wobble? Or have Google got nothing to worry about; Facebook is no threat to them? Leave us a comment below.

According to a survey published in Psychopathology journal, evidence has been found for a strong link between depression and the length of time spent surfing the web.

Researchers are saying that the longer people spend online, the less likely they are to be happy.

The survey – carried out by the Institute of Psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds said that some of those spending the longest online were found to be not just depressed but addicted too.

What is not clear however is whether spending a lot of time online leads to mental health issues, or whether it is symptomatic of those who already have some kind of problem.

Study leader Catriona Morrison said: “If you look at how dependent people feel they are on the internet that is likely to correspond with how happy or sad they feel.”

Those her team found to be seriously ‘Internet addicted’ spent more time browsing porn, gaming and online community sites. They were young too, with an average age of just 21.

Dr Morrison said that for the users the Internet was interfering “with their daily activities”.

“This study reinforces the public speculation that over-engaging in websites that serve to replace normal social function might be linked to psychological disorders like depression and addiction.

“We now need to consider the wider societal implications of this relationship and establish clearly the effects of excessive internet use on mental health,” she added

Has building a website got in the way of the rest of your life? Or is it the rest of life that gets in the way of your website building?! Can I tempt you to switch off, get up, and get outside! Leave us a comment below.

Google – a word that few of us had heard of ten years ago – is now so deeply embedded in our lives that there are some conversations that can’t take place without it.

It’s impossible to talk about the Internet without mentioning ‘Google’.

It’s hard to talk about finding stuff without mentioning Google

And any type of information reference has trouble slipping by without someone mentioning Google…

Word of the Decade

So perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the American Dialect Society has picked the verb as the most important word of the last 10 years.

The Society looks at the use of English in North America.

The Society’s members voted the verb ‘Google’ – meaning to search the internet – to the number 1 spot. Other technology runner ups were ‘blog’, ‘wi-fi’, and ‘text’.

Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Societ” said “I really thought ‘blog’ would take the honours in the word of the decade category, but more people Google than blog, don’t they?”

“Plus, many people think ‘blog’ just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway,” he added.

Word of 2009

The society also voted on the word of 2009. This time it was the chance for Twitter to shine, with ‘tweet’ nabbing number 1.

2nd place in the 2009 vote was ‘fail’, a “noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful” according to the society.

Word of the 90s

Technology words frequently dominated the ‘words of the 90s’ with annual winners including ‘web’, ‘Y2K’, ‘cyber’, ‘information superhighway’, and ‘e’. But it’s been 10 years since a technology word has won.

In 1995 the society showed its forward thinking by saying that ‘World Wide Web’ would be the one “most likely to succeed”.

Does Google take top spot for you?  Or do you have a favourite you’d like to put forward? Is WebEden your favourite, just like it is mine ;-) Leave us a comment below.

In a blog post titled ‘It was the Internet wot won it‘ last year we included the news that Barack Obama’s use of the Internet was a crucial factor in winning votes in the 2008 US General Election.

And as the UK turns towards the ballot boxes again the Internet will be a key battle ground to be fought out.

So who is doing well at the moment?

A review published last week reckons that both parties are making mistakes in the use of search engines and social media.

On Search Engines

When it comes to Google, unofficial websites often with negative comments dominate the first page of results when searching for either party leader. These include both gordonbrown.com and davidcameron.com.

And lets not forget mydavidcameron.com, who have generated huge volumes of traffic over the last few weeks by capitalising on the Conservative’s poster campaign featuring an airbrushed David Cameron.

Since there are 400,000 searches per month for ‘gordon brown’ thats a lot of eye balls that are getting exposed to content that describes the PM in a less than positive way.

On Social Media

And as for Twitter, neither leader owns their own username on Twitter. The @gordonbrown account is clearly an imposter; and the @davidcameron account was recently paused, and includes a message asking visitors to follow @conservatives instead.

At the moment official PM Twittering comes from the @DowningStreet account, which has done pretty well to rack up 1.7 million followers. Of course, the PM’s wife Sarah Brown also has more than a million followers of her @SarahBrown10 account.

These numbers stack up quite well even compared to @Barackobama’s 3million followers.

By contrast, the @conservatives account has a measly 18,421 followers. To be fair that’s in the same ball park as the @UKLabour account which has 8,979 followers.

The conservatives are at least trying to work the Twitter channel with a very active Twitter account. At time of writing Labour had Tweeted just a handful of times in 2010.

Social media profile in the Search Engines

When searching on Google for ‘Gordon Brown Twitter’, the @DowningStreet account is the first one to come up. On the other hand, I couldn’t find the @conservatives account when searching for ‘David Cameron Twitter’.

In the US, Barack Obama used Twitter and his official website to distribute campaign packs, give people material to win debates, distribute tickets to events and get feedback from potential voters.

In the UK it looks as if both parties have a lot of work to do in order to make effective use of search engines and social media to promote their views and garner public support.

Do you think that effective online campaigning can boost either leader’s chance of being elected? Leave us a comment below.

Its been a busy year on the WebEden blog!

I’ve just been looking through some of the blog statistics and I thought you’d be interested in a few of them.

To start with, there have been 239 posts in all, comprising of 121,233 words. We’ve added 647 links and 4,787 images.

You’ve participated quite a bit too! The blog has received 841 comments. Perhaps the most incredible statistic is the number of ‘spam’ comments we’ve had: a whopping 12,268.

We’ve also had some great guest blogs which have been some of the most popular posts.

Its been a strong year for visitors too. The blog has been visited by 18,562 people, who spent an average of 1 minute 58 seconds reading. They looked at 53,679 pages.

Here’s the graph of page views from Google Analytics:

Those spikes that you can see are from when we send a newsletter out.

The most popular categories have been video tutorials and search engine advertising.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, either though writing, commenting, tweeting or reading.

Have a great Christmas!

You just finished a hard bit of work so you fancy some down time.  You saw a film last week, who was that actress in it? Oh yeah, it was Jessica Biel. You want to find a bit more about her. Since you’re sitting at your computer, you open up a Google and search for ‘Jessica Biel’.

You get a whole page full of results – nothing unusual about that, she’s a big celebrity. You scan past the first one (who clicks just the top link? – not you, you’re an Internet pro!) until you find a link that seems to offer what you’re looking for.

You click the link. And your PC falls into a hackers hands.

How did that happen?

Well according to some research published by McAfee last week, Hackers will build a website with the purpose of infecting your PC with a virus. They will then optimise that website around popular search terms, to try and boost it high in the rankings for that search term. Celebrity names are very popular to do this with, since they have a very high search volume and they are also used by less discerning searchers. And the celebrity that this year tops the list of most exploited search terms is Jessica Biel.

Apparently there is a 20% chance that a search for Jessica Biel will result in you landing on a website that has been set up by a hacker for this very purpose.

The hacker will charge the website up with every kind of virus, including spyware, trojans, spam and phishing tools, in the hope of infecting your PC.

Each year, the celebrity most exploited changes. Last year it was Brad Pitt. Other celebrities in the list this year include Beyonce, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Brady, Jessica Simpson, Gisele Bundchen, Miley Cyrus, Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie, and Ashley Tisdale.

Still interested in those celebrities? Leave us a comment below.