Category: News

According to United Nations statistics, almost a third of the world’s population will be online by the end of 2010. The number connected to the Internet has doubled in the last 5 years alone.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said that 226m new users have come online this year alone, bringing the total number up to 2 billion. Of those new connections, as much as 70% are from developing countries.

(Here’s a picture of the Internet, by the way)

Lots in the Developed World

Of course there are more people connected to the web in the developed countries. Latest figures indicate that 71% of westerners are connected to the Internet, compared to just 21% in developing ones.

It’s about Broadband

Hamadoun Toure, Secretary-General of the ITU said that broadband was a  ”transformational technology” to be used to catalyse development.

“It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness”.

Broadband prices in developing countries remain high compared to low average incomes there. In the Central African Republic for example, it costs 40 times the average monthly income.

The cheapest place for broadband is Macao in China where it costs just 0.3% of average monthly income.

And it’s about Mobile

Broadband use is of course outstripped by mobile connections. 90% of the world’s population has access to a mobile network.

By the end of 2010 the ITU estimate that there will be 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions of which 3.8 billion will be in the developing world.

What does this mean for you?

So as a website builder do you feel like you have an audience big enough for your website?! Where does your traffic come from – is it mostly UK or do you get visitors from other countries too? You can find out that kind of information from Google analytics – let us know if you need a hand setting up Google Analytics.

The results are in, the numbers have been counted and verified. And the news? Well don’t hold your breath: according to online measurement firm ComScore, Facebook is where we all hang out. It racks up more time-spent than any other site, including all Google’s sites.

In August we spent 41.1m minutes on Facebook. which is 9.9% of total time online. That compares to 39.8m minutes on Google sites (which of course include YouTube).

Yahoo sites got up to 37.7m minutes of dwell time, which is down 12% on August 2009.

Both Facebook and Google are up massively -the pair received just 5% each in Auust 2009.

Both Google and Facebook have made a big effort to boost user time in the last year. Lots of businesses now use Facebook pages as a key way to interact with customers. It’s also a lot easier to share content on Facebook than a year ago.

Google for its part has broker deals with film studios, record labels, sporting bodies and broadcasters to show more long-form content on YouTube.

So is this a victory for great, engaging websites? Or a poor sign for the diversity of our interests in the web? are you using Facebook and YouTube more than you were a year ago? Leave us a comment below.

A couple of months ago we told you about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge access to The Times websites. With the newspaper group losing more money each day than most of us earn in a lifetime, he needed to make a big and bold change.

Traffic plunge

Following the change, the inevitable happened: Traffic to The Times plummeted. Although Murdoch himself claims the service is doing alright, the fact of the matter is that visitor numbers are just a fraction of what they used to be.

Content should be free!

The problem of course is that in the Internet age most people think that content – information – should be free. Newspapers have lost their paid gateway to what’s going on in the world. Much of the traffic to the Times came from Google, as it indexed The Times news stories and reproduced them in the Search Results.

But with a paywall blocking their access, Google can no longer see that content, so they can’t list The Times in the search results. So not only is no-one willing to subscribe to the content, none of us knows what they’re writing about anyway!

Here comes ‘Newspass’

Now it’s time for a drumroll. Google are riding to the rescue of The Times – and other newspapers who want to charge users for access to content – with a new micropayment platform called Newspass.

Based on Google checkout, this would allow users to make small payments to websites in order to access specific stories or content. The really great feature of Newspass is that it would allow Google to continue to index all of the newspapers content that would normally sit behind the paywall. This means they could continue to show up in the Search Results, and would therefore continue to get traffic. Google would indicate that the content would be paid-for with a small paywall icon beside the snippet in the search results.

Google say that they are “uniquely positioned to help publishers create a scalable ecommerce system via our Checkout product and also enable users to find this content via search, even if it’s behind a paywall”.

So Google is the Newspaper Saviour

So might Google rescue The Times in the end? Would you be willing to pay to access news stories? Is this also good news for website builders, who might be able to charg in future for access to their content?

Leave us a comment below.

Last year we excitedly brought you news of the latest Google product, Wave. Google aficionados and industry experts agreed: Google wave was set to revolutionise the way we communicated online.

Email is Outmoded

The basic idea – according to Google – was that email was outmoded. It was inefficient, Google said, to send emails from person to person and to cc other interested parties.

Ride the Wave

Far better – they reckoned – to have an opening, rolling real-time conversation which anyone could contribute to: a stream of thoughts that ran down a web page in a never ending… Wave?

Use was initially by invitation only – and people were desperate to make it in. But less than a year into the project, Google has decided to put the stoppers on Wave, with it likely to disappear next year.

No Adoption

Google is knocking it on the head because it has “not seen the user adoption we would have liked”. On the blog they expanded with “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through to the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

With typical Google-like stoicism, they’re saying that the project hasn’t been wasted effort, and are making much of the source code available to external developers.

It may be that Google are clearing the way for their latest social experiment ‘Google me‘.

I for one quite liked wave, but never really found a reason to use it, and certainly never made use of the range of apps developed to enhance each wave.

Did you try Wave as a website builder? Like it? No? Leave us a comment below.

A Twitter user experienced Twitter meltdown last month as a result of being followed by rap star Kanye West.

Kanye only decided to join Twitter last month, and has already amassed over a million followers. Getting to grips with the service, he posted a Twitpic of his diamond tooth. In response, Coventry Based Steven Holmes – who tweets as ste_101 – asked him whether he used Colgate or polish to clean them.

Kanye immediately followed Steven back – the only person at that point that Kanye decided to follow.

From that point, Mr Holmes has been swamped with messages to such an extent that his Twitter account went into ‘melt down’.

Commenting on how he had managed to catch the attention of Kanye, Mr Holmes tweeted

“I just told a joke. Humour is the key” and “I guess a witty joke was all it took”.

Apparently Holmes has had a lot of abuse from others, which he has then tweeted about. Kanye urged him to “Tweet strong young man, tweet strong”.

For his part Kanye described Holmes as “the chosen one”.

And what is Kanye up to on Twitter? Well here’s something he posted last Saturday:  “Being nice is the s**t … working on being a doper person #ITSAPROCESS”.

Pearls of wisdom there.

So now you. Forget all the advice we give you about marketing your site online. All you need to do to boost your follower numbers is to catch the attention of a celebrity…

Had any success hob-nobbing with the stars? Leave us a comment below.

Well the votes are in and counted, and the judges can reveal that…of course Ed Miliband is the new Labour leader. It was a hotly fought battle, with the two brothers Ed and David  dominating the race to the line.

Commentators, bookies and speculators found it a hard one to call. But they would have done well to look at who was the most searched for online.

Research from online traffic measurement service Hitwise has revealed that there were almost twice as many searches for Ed Miliband than for David during the final stages of the Labour leadership race.

In the two weeks prior to the election around 33% of all ‘miliband’ related searches included ‘Ed’ compared to just 17% for David.

And then in the week before, searches for ‘Ed Miliband’ spiked 785%, compared to just 233% for ‘David Miliband’.

As an amusing aside, the search term ‘David Miliband banana’ was 7th most popular, refering to David’s photo holding a banana.

The data also revealed a spike in visits to political blogs, although surprisingly the conservative party’s homepage jumped to no.3, whilst Labour was languishing in 15th.

Are you a fan of Ed or David? Did you search for information about either online? As a website builder did you write about the contest, and gain extra visitors as a result of interest from users? Leave us a comment below

A few weeks ago Twitter saw its 20 billionth Tweet. The micro blogging service took almost four years to reach its 10 billionth – in March this year – and just 5 months to double it.

Twitter marked the occasion by highlighting the 20 billionth tweet to the world. It was sent at 3.45pm on Saturday the 31st by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a graphic designer for an advertising agency in Tokyo.

The tweet was apparently part of a larger conversation which, roughly translated means “So that means the barrage might come back later all at once.”

Having been highlighted by Twitter, the user was then swamped by a Twitterverse of congratulations.

He responded with “Looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I’m getting replies from people all over the world. It’s scary. What are the chances? Maybe I’m going to die.

“Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke.”

Japan is the second biggest market for Twitter (behind just the US), representing 12% of all Tweets.

So, anyone want to lay bets on how fast the next 10bn will be racked up? Are you following WebEden on Twitter (shameless plug…).

We’ve talked a lot before about the effect that outside events have on what people search for online. From the summer to erupting volcanoes and the world cup, the first reaction to news for many is a search online for more information.

Emergency Budget

Now it’s the turn of George Osborne’s Emergency Budget to drive people onto Google seeking clarification. On 22nd July his announcements including a raft of measures aimed at reducing the deficit. Some taxes – such as VAT and Capital Gains – went up, whilst many benefits – such as child benefit -were frozen or cut.

Research from online monitoring firm Hitwise has revealed that even on the day of Osborne’s speech, 1 in every 179 searches was budget related.

Benefits

There was a twofold increase in the number of searches for ‘government benefits’. Hitwise do note however that compare to last year benefit searches are in fact at a much lower background level.

And Taxes

As for taxes, these were up by nearly 12% for the quarter, ending June 2010, which is in fact a full 28% up over the same period last year. ‘Capital gains tax’ topped the tax related search counter, followed by ‘Council Tax’, ‘VAT, ‘income tax’ and ‘national insurance’.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re a website builder who has content related to the budget, this was a potential opportunity to get more visitors to your website. If you rank highly for ‘tax’ and ‘benefits’ then people may well have arrived on your site looking for information.

Writing about stuff that users are searching for is a strategy used by many website builders – not least the national press – to grab traffic to their site. Are there upcoming events that are already relevant to your website that might help you get more visitors?

Google Instant went live on Wednesday evening. The search engine fraternity are buzzing – and for the rest of us its still quite a big change. Google’s Marissa Mayer says its a “fundamental shift in search.”

Wow, that’s exciting. So what is it?

Google Instant uses auto-complete technology to predict what you’re searching for. The results show up as you type, and change as your query gets longer. Here’s a screen grab:

So why have Google done this?

They reckon it makes search up to 5 seconds faster. And they also say that it makes the users’ experience a bit easier, and a bit less hassle (you don’t have to use up energy pressing ‘search’)!

Local & Personal
The other interesting feature is that the Google instant results are personalised to you, and tailored to your location.

It’s not available to everyone

1. It only works if you’re logged into a Google account

2. Not Safe For Work content is filtered – queries considered lewd don’t work.

3. It doesn’t work if you search:

*from your browser’s search box
*from the Google Toolbar
*from iGoogle
*from other places that access a Google search
*if you’ve previously disabled Google’s autocomplete feature
*if you’re using Google SSL search

If you don’t yet see it, you can try enabling it via this URL:

http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy

Google also say Instant is disabled if they can detect that a searcher has a slow internet connection.

Have you tried Google Instant? What do you think? Leave us a comment below.

A few of weeks ago we trailed the story that The Times was planning to start charging users to access its site.This is Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to plug the financial leaks in his news organisation. It goes against all the received wisdom that on the Internet everything – especially news – is free.

So how’s it getting on?

Figures just published by online research company Experian Hitwise suggest that traffic to The Times website has dropped by nearly 70% since the paywalls were set up.

Interestingly, the drop in traffic came before the point where people were asked to start paying. A few weeks before the paywall was erected on the 2nd of July, The Times started asking people to register on the site. From this point, traffic dropped by 58%. Never mind paying, it seems that people don’t even want to get free news in exchange for their name and email address.

What happened after the launch of the paywall is also interesting: the rate of decline became less. From the 3rd of July to the 10th of July, traffic dropped to just 33% of the pre-registration level. As to how many of these people actually signed up, it’s unclear. It might be that people were interested to see what the paywall was all about.

News International and Rupert Murdoch are keeping quiet on the registration numbers too – the Great Times Paywall Experiment continues.

Can we learn anything from this?

What does this mean if you’re a website builder? Well the most obvious is to not force your visitors to register on your site in order to get access to information. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s not worth setting up membership, but don’t make it a prerequisite of using the site.