Archive for January, 2008

The rising age of the UK web population

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

The UK’s online population is getting older as people gravitate towards the online offerings of their trusted high street retail brands. This was the message from Nielsen this week, which reported that the age of an average UK Web user rose from 35.7 to 37.9 between October 2006 and October 2007.

The study was limited to the 100 most popular UK internet properties and reported that Marks & Spencer has the oldest audience, with an average age of 46. The youngest site, with a mean age of 28 was the gaming portal Miniclip. This distinction in purpose - between entertainment destinations and sites which provide goods and services – is by far the best indicator of the age of a site’s likely audience.

The complete Nielsen report can be read here.

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From blog to search - how quickly can a blog post be indexed?

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

We have been watching our blog posts to see how quickly they can be indexed by Google. This is an important little test as we can start to see the immediacy of content being fed into Google, which adds to the importance of having regular, relevant content published on a website. The last post we made took 7 minutes from publishing to appearing in Google, but we have seen varying time delays of up to, and slightly over an hour. However, even with these timings, it is very quick.

If you add in a quick bit of manual dissemination (we Twitter as soon as we blog, post to Delicious and post to Jamie’s Facebook Profile) you can rapidly harness views to the post as soon as it is delivered.

The days of waiting a month for Google to update your content are long gone, we are heading to almost real time indexing. The continual refreshing of new and interesting content has never been more paramount.

(Oh, and we can help you with such strategies, if you need!)

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How to use blogs in enterprise

Monday, January 7th, 2008

I saw this picture today which made me smile and I think it is worth sharing. The attribution goes to Geek & Poke.

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Potential Aquisition Targets for 2008

Friday, January 4th, 2008

I wanted to share an interesting post from Centrenetworks.com, with 5 potential aquisition targets for 2008. Take some time to read the article over here. The five potential targets outlined in this post range from the mighty (AOL could be acquired by Yahoo) to the smaller (Clicky could be aquired by Webtrends.)

What is interesting from this post, is they name Yahoo as the potential acquirer in two cases - Netvibes/Page Flakes which is a ‘neutral’ personalised homepage (like iGoogle, but not aligned to any major engine) and AOL. Both of these are interesting potentials but my opinion is Yahoo has no shortage of great sites already aquired, from Flickr to upcoming.org which have yet to be fully integrated and realised, so more aquisitions couls be great but may not help them this year.

The other interesting element of this overview is that two of the acquisitions are tracking tools, Clicky and Crazy Egg both small reporting tools in their own right that could make useful additions to larger businesses Webtrends and Omniture respectively which have become a little heavy and slow of late and are losing ground to Google Analytics which already has elements of the tools offered by Clicky and Crazy Egg. Aquiring these smaller elements to offer an ever broader range of service may kick start some competition in the web analytics marketplace which will be good to see.
Read the post, you’ll find it interesting.

Now, as is Friday, you might be thinking ‘how can I can get a Gordon Gecko phone’? (Well I was anyway) so check out this page to turn a modern day mobile into an ’80’s brick…

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Scoble’s Facebook Account is Re-Opened

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Within 24 hours, Scoble is back on Facebook. and as you would expect he is talking about it here.

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