Arcade Fire and Google in HTML 5 Experiment

Although The Wilderness Downtown can only be viewed with the Google Chrome browser, it is a stunning example of what can be done with HTML5.

The band Arcade Fire supply the music and the visuals include a 'mash-up' of animation and images of your house and street.

Friday Round-Up - Facebook "Friending" and Google Patents

Google published research this week showing what proportion of Facebook users follow or "friend" brands on the site and the reasons why.

The research suggests that for 25% of users, the biggest motivation for "friending" brands is to receive discounts on products.

The second most common reason given was "to show others I support the brand" (18%) and next with 10% were users who answered "it's fun and entertaining."

Why are SEO's Hated? - Paul Carpenter's blog post p gives a number of good reasons such as:

• People cannot tell the difference between spam and good SEO
• Sites which SEOs work on rank higher than others who think they should be in the top spot because they are superior and don't understand why Google cannot tell
• We make content writers speak the language of searchers
• We make web developers re-write their code and re-architect their sites.

Can Google change the content of your website?  A patent application by Google with the catchy title of "Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information" seems to suggest that when a website page is loaded, Google (possibly using the Google Toolbar) will insert links into the content on the page. 

It would be desirable to provide improved techniques for enhancing document browsing by providing automatically generated links to relevant information to the reader. 

Other documents submitted to the US Patent Office suggest that Google has been taking the idea seriously since 2006.  Read more here for a good overview

"We Guarantee you a Google Page One Listing!"

If all spam was this entertaining, clearing out my inbox wouldn't be so bad.

This is a screenshot of an email we received today. The company guarantee a page one listing in Google, or you get 50% of your money back. This should set alarm bells ringing immediately. What a fantastic business model, it reminds me of the websites which offer to correctly predict the sex of your unborn baby for £20 or your money back.

They claim to have achieved page one rankings for hundreds of websites, but if this is the best example they can come up with, then I dread to think what the others were.  And yes, they have also bought spaghetticarbonara [dot] net too!

(the childish highlighter pen is theirs)

 

The world's 20 billionth tweet

A Twitter user from Tokyo has been flooded with congratulations after posting the world's 20 billionth tweet.

Twitter took four years to reach it's 10 billionth tweet and only 5 months to reach the 20 billionth.