“The Nudge lets you exchange and manage brief reviews with people you know on everything that’s happening in your City, and beyond.

Let your starting point in choosing anything (from a hotel in San Francisco or a restaurant in London, to a new book or a concert in New York) be the reviews of people you know, whose opinion you trust.

The Nudge is also launching weekly City Editions for London and New York. These can be accessed through the site or subscribed to via email and will combine our favourite member recommendations with some insider knowledge of what’s new and happening in your City each week.

The Nudge will launch over the summer of 2010. If you’d like to be involved as one of the first to have access to the beta version of the site, please let us know by subscribing below.”

Rapid Web is proud to be working with The Nudge, to create a new social networking abstraction, which focuses on the recommendation of consumer products and services, dependant upon a well defined and focused network of local social knowledge.

The Nudge teaser site is now live and contains a custom made web design, a themed blog system and other dynamic contact, such as a form to allow users to sign up for the up and coming beta.

If you are interested in what The Nudge will have to offer in the future, take a look at the new blog post on The Nudge Blog, ‘Why Subscribe to Join the Nudge?‘.

To apply for The Nudge beta, just head to thenudge.com and fill in the ‘Apply for the beta’ form.

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On a related note, we’re deliciously happy to announce the launch of the ‘Love at First Bite Cakes’ website.

Here’s a quick snippet from the website describing the personal history of Love at First Bite Cakes.

A lot of people ask me if I’ve been to college to learn my skills, but my training was more traditional… I’ve learnt them through the family business! Just before I was born my parents opened Parkside Bakery, which they owned until about 5 years ago. Most of my happiest childhood memories are being there, cleaning and helping make the cakes. When I finished school I began working at their shop in Stafford hospital making all the shop cakes (flapjack, shortbreads etc) and got creative by changing recipes and design. Eventually I moved to their main bakery as head of confectionary, helping with all food production and started making birthday cakes, with help from my dad.

Seeing how interested I was in celebration cakes, and once showing me everything he knew, he sent me around the country for a year, working for the countries top cake decorators and chocolatiers. Therefore my training was informal and experienced based. In 2006, they opened a cafe in Stafford town which I became manager of. The shop before used to sell a lot of birthday cakes, so I had a small base of customers asking me to make cakes for them, and from there my cake business grew. Within a year I had enough customers to call cake decorating a full time job!

In recent years, I have been looking for the perfect shop to move my business into, and start on my own officially, and I got the keys last week. I open ‘Love at first Bite’ in two weeks time and I can’t wait! I’ll let you know the rest as it happens…

The Love at First Bite Cakes website is a fully custom web design and template based on a provided logo which was well integrated into the desired colour theme and style. The website promotes some fantastic celebration style cakes primarily and the custom web design reflects this target audience.

We also gave Love at First Bite Cakes business specific advice in the web presence promotional fields of social networking and social media, meaning you can now follow them on Twitter, Facebook and soon flickr.

If you’re interested in putting together a fantastic website to promote your business or if you just want some advice on how to promote your existing website, feel free to get in touch. There is a lot we can help you with - take a look at our portfolio.

Rapid Web – turning cake into code.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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350 million people use Facebook so I guess the odds of re-kindling old ties are quite strong. Does this suggest an increase in boredom? Why are these people not injecting some extra pizazz into their current relationships? Surely if you’re prepared to marry your partner you must see good qualities in them? So is it boredom or just plain laziness? All good question sadly with no answers.

“The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.” Mark Keenan Added. So does this mean it’s the ‘thrill of the chase’ feeling? It’s very puzzling to me. Turn your PC’s off people and go out for a nice meal or get away for the weekend, heck it’s even the season to go for an awesome snowy walk!

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A psychologist named James Brook said; “…These people know that, the modern world waits for no one and that taking a break from technology means potentially missing out…”

Hhmmm I thought sounds a little fantastic but then when you actually think about it, he’s got a point. Like I said when was the last time you actually turned your phone off? What with the advent of aeroplane mode and now being able to put your phone on silent why would you turn it off? If you come out of the cinema or step off a plane for most of us the first thing we do is check if we have any texts or Emails.

The same can be said about the internet. With social networking growing by the day it was a natural progression to integrate them into phones, Bebo on the move or MySpace on the train without need of a laptop, do we just love to chat or is it a compulsion? I’m sure there are lots of us who prefer to send 20 txt messages as opposed to just calling and chatting for a while, it’s possibly even cheaper to call after all if you work it out most texts are 10p so if you send 20 that’s £2 and it’s also 10p a minute average to call so you could have a 20 min chat. I know kids who live next door to each other but still prefer to sit at home on MSN chatting to each other. So should the question be does it cause anxiety not being able to use these social portals or would it suggest that we’re actually becoming less social because we think a short Email is a good way to communicate once a week?

“…As many as 85 per cent of full-time mothers always have the internet turned on at home, while a third of people said they no longer felt any sense of guilt about always being “connected” either by having their mobile phone or computer turned on…”

Now this is an interesting statement. Potentially 85% of full time mothers continually have the internet on? What are they doing? Does this suggest that the internet gives the majority of single mums a gateway to a social life in the day?

James Brook continues; “…At any time we might miss an important email or a phone call, an old friend may try to get in touch via Facebook or breaking news may come in. If they feel that they cannot keep up with these things because they are not connected, it will naturally have a negative impact on their emotional wellbeing and peace of mind…” – we sure do live in interesting times…

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