Rapid Web News

While promoting your website via search engine optimisation techniques and Internet advertising campaigns, it is important not to forget the power of the social web for website promotion. The social web consists of blogs (or ‘web logs’), social networking, social bookmarking websites and micro-blogging services.

So, what are all of these social web elements? Let me explain.

• Blog – A blog, also called a ‘web log’ is a series of articles called posts, which are written and published over a period of time to the web. Most blogs are provided in the format of many pages in which the posts are displayed in reverse chronological order, and are categorised and tagging by the topic or topics of the individual posts. Blogs can be informative, such as tips and ‘how-to’ guides, personal, in the format of a journal/diary, or corporate, giving information and news around a specific topic or range of topics. What you are reading now is an example of informational, corporate blog post.
• Social Networking – You may already be using a social networking website already without realising it. Examples of very popular social networking websites are Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Social networking websites allow you to keep it contact with your friends, family, acquittance and colleagues. Many are open to various advertising and marketing campaigns, commonly targeted to users via their age range, gender, location or interests.
• Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking websites, or social news websites, allow users to post links to other web content and share it with other users of the website. Examples of social bookmarking websites include Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon. These social bookmarking websites are the perfect opportunity to promote engaging and viral content includes articles, images and videos to a large number of users at once.
• Micro Blogging – Just like social networking, you may already be using a micro blogging website but not have heard of the social media terminology. Examples of micro blogging websites include Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca. Micro blogging is the same general idea as a blog, a reverse chronological listing of posts. The difference with micro blogging is in the name – the posts are deliberately small in size, generally under 140 characters. Micro blogging sites are used frequently, like social bookmarking websites, to share content via links to webpages or video clips, so are, again, a great social media website promotion tool.

If you want some help promoting your website via search engine optimisation techniques or social media, we offer quite a few great services to promote your website. Feel free to contact us about them!

Google has tried social networking in the past, with ventures such as Orkut and Google Friend Connect, however neither have really become very popular. In fact, I imagine many of you reading this article may not have heard of Orkut at all. Google Friend Connect on the other hand is a API for web developers to put Google hosted social networking features directly into their websites via a iframes, JavaScript and AJAX.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about Google Buzz, which is a new social network that Google are releasing to all Gmail users. It combines elements of Twitter and Facebook and is integrated directly into the user interface of Gmail. Google started the launch of Google Buzz to a small selection of Gmail users yesterday (9th February 2010) and is continuing to release Google Buzz to more and more people over the next few days.

Take a look at this Google Buzz demonstration video. It is obvious from Google Buzz, that many elements of the service are inspired heavily by existing microblogging and social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter and identi.ca.

Google Buzz on Google Apps?

Google has stated that Google Buzz is not yet available for users of Google Apps for Domains yet, but it is being worked on. Based on this, it can be anticipated that Google Buzz for Google Apps will probably be released within a couple of weeks, towards to end of the Google Buzz launch for regular Gmail users.

Google Buzz and Search Engine Optimisation

I may be discussing Google Buzz more as this service develops and is released to more and more users. As Google Buzz listing will appear alongside Twitter results in Google search engine results pages (SERPs), Google Buzz may also create a buzz in the search engine optimisation community.

If you’re interested in search engine optimisation for your website from a team who really know what they’re doing, take at look some of the search engine optimisation work we do and see examples on our live SEO results page. If you just want some more about this intriguing new product from Google, take a look at the official Google Buzz pages.

Facebook, one of the largest and most well known PHP powered social networking websites has made significant changes to its web design. Facebook have taken a more minimalistic web design approach in many respects, removing most of the bottom application and instant messaging bar, and moving to a left hand side bar. From a technical perspective, Facebook have increased their use of many web technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX in an effort to increase the speed of website loading and make improve the overall user experience. This certainly increases speed but can cause issues on intermittent or unreliable Internet connections, or on browsers with no or poor JavaScript support. However, Facebook has full support for Internet Explorer 7, 8, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

The left sidebar of the new web design now features links to the news feed, friends, messages, friends and Facebook applications. These applications include both built-in Facebook applications such as Photos and custom made applications such as Rapid Wish List (in the Facebook screenshot above). The sidebar also includes direct links to the top online friends in your Facebook instant messaging, providing you are signed into Facebook’s chat system, which is not the case in the screenshot shown above.

Hopefully you enjoy the new web design Facebook has adopted, but as always there are many Facebook groups which heavily dislike the new changes to the Facebook web design. This is always the case with Facebook design changes it seems. What do you think? Do you like the changes or find that they make the website more difficult to use?

If you’re interested in a new web design for your website, whether minimalist like Facebook’s new design, or much bigger and bolder, please feel free to contact us. We do web design, web development, the creation of dynamic PHP-powered web applications and search engine optimisation and much more. Take a look at some of our other work.

Lo ruok? Bin 2 town 2day 2 meet sum m8s wot u up to?

Nufn much, wru? Wot u doin l8tr?

At home, Nufn till the wknd tbh n e way cu 2moro

Need the above translating? Then I guess you’re not ‘down with the kids’. Experts claim that using this abbreviated texting style can actually help the development of reading and writing skills. Research has shown that children who use ‘textism’ will also have less difficulty regarding spelling skills. A bit of a head scratcher really seeing how none of the above text is anything like the English language. The study was carried out on 8-12 year-olds over the space of a year. Older children appeared to use more abbreviations which require more sophisticated literary skills – again hard to believe.

The research was carried out by Dr Clare Wood of Coventry University on behalf of the British Academy “We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children,”

So what is this Phonological Awareness; ‘Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure, or phonological structure, of a spoken word. It includes the ability to auditorily distinguish units of speech, such as a word’s syllables and a syllable’s individual phonemes.’ – Phew! Thanks Wiki…

Join me on a little flight of fancy. So you manage to break out of prison, evade capture from the police and go virtually unnoticed for quite some time, would you think yourself lucky and keep your head down? Maybe head somewhere remote for a while to allow things to cool off? Or would you plaster yourself all over one of the biggest social networking sites on the web? Well I guess it comes down to; what would the smart guy do? Surely not the latter…

You’d think not but Craig Lynch seems to actually be enjoying taunting the police. ‘You’ll have a laugh with me, but it will end in tears. It always does.” As his Facebook profile describes. Along with other comments such as: “Just nearly wrote my motor off again, ice everywhere I went round the corner and ended up halfway on someone’s driveway!!”, “Sticking the sunbed on as an extra heater . . . felt like the Caribbean in the bedroom ha ha” and one of my personal favourites “Enjoying a 12lb venison steak mmm roasted veg and chips, bangin meal” (although I feel he may mean a 12oz as 12lb is like eating your own thigh) well as long as things aren’t too uncomfortable for you Craig.

Craig Lynch is an escaped burglar doing a 7 year stretch (which, apparently he was almost at the end of) in Hollesley Bay open prison until he escaped in September last year. Since then he has enjoyed freedom and has openly bragged about various different things he’s been up to. Making himself famous is going to cut his winter holiday short I feel and give him a somewhat longer visit At Her Majesty’s Pleasure.