“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”
- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

The best part of it is that it’s free and open source so those of you that have Android mobile phones know what to look forward too!

All looks very exciting but it will mean that everything i do will be done in-line with Google, which freaks even me out!

Definitely worth a look - https://www.britishairways.com/travel/flights-hotels-car-rental/public/en_gb

(No I don’t work with BA)

Michael Jackson was an amazing musician and performer (i know a lot of people are discussing the other things but that is not what i will remember). To get the post on topic to the site I’m going to try to use his music videos as an example of how people should understand social media. MJ made the most amazing music videos i’ve ever seen and i can think of anyone else that has done anything like it. Like social media the videos don’t need to be so epic or long, most music videos show a song and end, his last 10 mins and had more special effects than most action films.

Why is this relevant to social media? - Well you could be basic and simple and get your point across but will that make people want to share it? It maybe difficult to justify the costs but i’m certainly going to watch Michael Jackson music videos for years to come and he hasn’t made one for a decade! Don’t know any other musician i can say that about! Think of that in social media terms and you get the idea of the impact!

Anyway back to my MJ tribute - I’ve made my own Spotify playlist -
http://open.spotify.com/user/alee171181/playlist/23w6jLhukS5QOka9Lnq3GF

and here are a few of my favourite videos - Ghost has to be my favourite - even if it is a bit of a Thriller ripe off. I remember watching it when it first came out and being blown away! Enjoy

Ghost Part 1

Ghost Part 2

Ghost Part 3

Ghost Part 4

Remember the Time

Smooth Criminal - Live

The Way You Make Me Feel with Britney Spears

RIP Michael Jackson

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8077369.stm

The new Xbox controller shows the ability to be part of the ‘game’ or more importantly the screen. One of the examples seen in the video on the BBC is a woman trying on different clothes - this is amazing and shows the possibility to interact directly with the website - try on clothes before you buy.

Really exciting look at the future!

I am planning on a complete site overhaul in the near future so watch this space.

I’ve just seen a message at the top of my iGoogle saying:

‘Students: Submit your photos for the Google Photography Prize’ with a link to this page - http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/photographyprize/

My first thought was with all the data Google collects about me I would have thought they could make this a bit more targeted - I haven’t been a student for some time.

After some consideration it was decided this probably wouldn’t be the best approach - I mean seeing an ad like this might scare the shit out of me!

Adam - we know you have bought a sony SLR camera and have been taking pictures on Brighton seafront. Submit your photos for the Google Photography Prize’

Interesting to see Google using iGoogle in this way, will be interesting to see if this is adapted into another advertising platform in future.

For those that don’t know what Google Suggests does it is a tool that offers suggestions as you type into the search box with the number of results appearing on the right. It is really useful for search term research for SEO.

However, now it is integrated into the search box will this affect current search term research? People will think less about what they have to type and rely more on Google’s suggestions. Will mean sites need to optimise for less terms but the terms they do optimise for will be far more competitive as everyone will be optimising the same terms.

Have to keep an eye on the analytics to see if the longer tail terms start to drop off for traffic flow.

The thing that is annoying me is everytime one has appeared it hasn’t been relevant to my search (so Google are going backwards on making the search results more relevant) and the ‘location’ is always showing ‘London’ results, which is probably because my ISP has their IP set up in London which will be the case with most users having IP addresses in different locations to where they live. Basically resulting in the Local results be irrelevant to my search as i live 60 miles from London!

It’s also annoying me for a work related reason - I have been working on Weatherseal for Double Glazing. They have been hovering around 5th or 6th for a while now (from 15th a few months ago) but now Google have added the local results to position 4 of the results for Double Glazing they are a lot lower down in the page, drastically affecting click through rates.

Hopefully Google will see the error of their ways and either remove the Local results for generic terms or implement a better system for geo-targeting the results.

This site has increased from a PR 0 to 1.

What does this mean?
Well not really a great deal but may have a small affect on rankings, but more importantly if you are like me and need an ego boast any sign from Google that i’m doing something right is a big moment in my life to finally getting some PageRank is a happy day for me!!

More examples on webmasterworld

He told me that he is working on developing a new search engine which is very close to release that uses social media sites within their algorithm. The project has been kept top secret until they can get the rankings and engine working correctly but they are now happy with it and ready to make an official announcement pretty soon

He told me it was codenamed ’sloof’ but won’t tell me the official name and it will have web spiders specifically designed to crawl social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg. The spiders will look for site mentions and number of links, as well as positive sentiment and number of comments made around a website. The search engine will then use other, on-site algorithms, (assumed to be similar to current search engines) to distinguish keyword relevance and use semantics to create relevance within the results.

This sounds like quite an exciting search engine and I look forward to hearing more about it. I going to hound him to see if i can have a play with it before it goes live, but he’s not giving too much away!

UPDATE

OK now the day is over i can reveal this is an April Fools, although i think the search engine idea is a really good one! Feel free to build it and send some credit my way!

I was wrapped up in the whole skittles.com, (i refuse to link to it, don’t want to give them the link benefit!) debate today on twitter and within about 2 mins i worked out a massive floor in the approach to the new skittles website.

For those of you who don’t know, (and can’t be arsed to look) what they have done is create a ‘new’ website (although this is a copy of Modernista) that pulls all it’s content in from Twitter whenever someone mentions ’skittles’. I wouldn’t consider myself a genius but i spotted a similar thing to what i’m sure many of you have already thought about. Within in 2 mins of looking at the site i posted on Twitter something about the very simple possibility to spam the site and slate Skittles who had not built any control into their plan.

What was the objectives of this project? This was something i mentioned within twitter, it could be a brand exercise and the brand got a huge amount of mentions, spidered out across the net at a tremendous rate and more than likely generating a generous amount of links to the site. However with no content on the site it is unlikely to rank in the search engines for anything outside the brand terms.
It will more than likely be mentioned in a large percentage of the newspapers tomorrow resulting in free publicity for Skittles, but probably more so for Twitter which will benefit with a number of new users to ‘have some fun at Skittles expense’.

Will it sell more Skittles? Well the chances are people will remember the brand and when in the local news agent may just turn towards Skittles over M & M’s because they remember the press around this campaign. However they may also remember comments like:

‘You wouldn’t believe it, but skittles are remarkably healthy, if your goal is to get diabetes & possibly aids… #skittles‘

‘skittles CUNT!’

This isn’t actually social media participation because Skittles aren’t actually interacting with the users on ‘their’ site. Skittles have no history of being a site that has participated in social media so this step is just a way to use social media to get people talking about them with absolutely no control over it or moderation. I would say the major target market of Skittles is the young children to early teen age group (correct me if i’m wrong) and they now have on their site things like ‘Skittles CUNT’ which i think is a very wrong thing to be showing a kid. I appreciate you have to put your age in when the site loads but any muppet can make up an age and i just went on it at 8.30 GMT and it didn’t ask me for my age so they’ve either turned that off or they are using specific hours to have it on. Which I’m sure could be an issues with website watchdogs.

This is another example of someone trying to get on the buzz of social media and failing. Yes it has received a lot of ‘buzz’ but it demeans the Skittles brand and will ultimately give them a bad reputation in future, especially with parents who don’t want their children to go onto a site plastered with spam and swearing.

What would i do if i were Skittles - I would change the site to an official Skittles site by the morning with content and sales messages on it. Possibly games and activities that meet their target market’s needs and then all the traffic they are currently benefiting from, and all the press they will get tomorrow will come to the ‘new’ site see how ‘cool’ and useful it is and continue to use it. Maybe this is the strategy, we’ll have to wait and see but if it isn’t then if I were Skittles i would be looking for a new agency preferably someone who knows what they are doing - Soup are a good agency