According to the site, which is now owned by search engine giant Google, the quantity of video material it receives via upload each minute has risen exponentially from six hours per minute during its launch year of 2007, to 24 hours per minute in 2010; and to 60 hours per minute in the present day (or, of course, it is keen to point out, one hour of video material every second).

In the past six months alone, the company says, the volume in video uploads has increased by 30%.

Meanwhile, YouTube has also claimed a substantial increase in its viewing figures; boasting 800 million viewers per month. The company also claims that four billion video views take place on its site each day across the globe; a rise of 25% in the past eight months.

YouTube points out that this volume of viewing equates to one video being watched each day by half the population on the planet. Furthermore, the company insists, its viewing figures are still growing.

The growth in video material and viewing trends can of course only help to enhance YouTube’s reputation as one of the best sites for investing in pay per click (PPC) online advertising.

YouTube recently restyled its home page to try and reposition itself more as a social networking site, whilst promoting its capacity for supplying feature-length films.

Today proved no different, as the Guardian Secret Footballer tweeted photos of a letter sent by the Football Association in regards to its social media policy. Yes, just like your own workplace has rules in place to ensure the company is not brought into disrepute, so does the FA.

To take a leaf from the Letters of Note Twitter account, here’s a transcription:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Re: Social Networking websites

Further to my letter dated 20th January 2011, I am writing in relation to the use of social networking websites by Participants.

The FA has seen an increase in the number of complaints and referrals it has received in relation to postings on sites such as Twitter. You will appreciate that this is of concern to The FA and we would ask that you remind all Participants at your club, with particular reference to all players, of the following key points.

- All comments on social networking sites may be considered public comment by The FA

- Any comments which are improper, bring the game into disrepute or are threatening, abusive, indecent or insulting may lead to disciplinary action

- Comments about match officials which imply bias, attack the officials’ integrity or are overtly personal in nature are considered improper

- Comments which include a reference to a person’s ethnic origin, colour, race, nationality, faith, gender, sexual orientation or disability may be considered aggravated and attract a high disciplinary sanction

- Re-Tweeting another person’s post may lead to disciplinary action if the original comment was improper

- Deleting or apologising publicly for an improper posting, whilst advisable, does not prevent disciplinary action being taken

- An individual is strictly responsible for any posting on his/her account. Participants should take every care to ensure that others do not access their account, as the fact that a posting or comment may have been made by a third party will not prevent disciplinary action being taken against the account holder

Participants are required to act in the best interest of the game at all times and should be aware that theirs postings on social networking sites are likely to be subject to public and media scrutiny.

Whilst we are conscious that the use of social networking sites can be positive we must advise that Participants exercise caution with the content of any postings.

If you have any queries in relation to this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours faithfully,

Jenni Kennedy

Head of Off-Field Football Regulation

Those who follow football players on Twitter will no doubt be aware of the Joey Barton Twitter account, which has landed the temperamental star plenty of criticism in the past. The FA’s letter comes in the wake of Barton’s recent revelation he receives regular warnings to curb his Twitter behaviour, particularly when it comes to predicting match results.

He said: “According to the FA, I am not allowed to give my opinion of possible results in case that is seen as insider information. These people are so out of touch with reality it’s untrue.”

As you do (as an SEO) when a new popular site launches; I dug around a little bit to see what was working and what wasn’t, and came across the below.

They’ve migrated some of their URLs over to a new structure (news.bbc.co.uk/sport1 to www.bbc.co.uk/sport), but they’ve not redirected some of their old content pages – most noticibly the ones for the Olympic Games which are happening this year.

The above shows the URL for www.bbc.co.uk/olympics ranking for “Olympics” searches in Google. The URL shown redirects to another (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympic_games/default.stm), which was seemingly the main URL being used for the Olympics content prior to the website relaunch. When visited, the URL shows the following:

The relaunch has now moved the Olympics section to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/2012/ – however no redirects are currently in place to this.

They should probably look at sorting that, considering the Olympics is somewhat of an important news event this year.

The survey, carried out on Google’s behalf by the Ipsos Mori research company, revealed that usage in the UK rose from 30% to 45% during this ten-month period; whilst usage in the US and France rose from 31% to 38%, and 27% to 38% respectively; and usage in Japan and Germany rose from 6% to 17%, and from 18% to 23% respectively.

The survey found that among smartphone users, accessing the internet on a daily basis was a very common activity; with 54% doing so in the UK. The country with the highest percentage of smartphone users accessing the web on a daily basis was Japan with 88%.

The survey also found however that, across the five countries, smartphone users had not abandoned their laptop or desktop computers; with general usage of the latter devices remaining more or less constant; and with approximately the same percentage of users accessing the internet via PCs as via smartphones.

Another interesting finding from the survey was the fact that, across all five countries, smartphone users were around 50% more likely than non-users to own a tablet.

Looking at actual tablet usage, the survey found that that this had grown among UK consumers from 4% to 6%; whilst in the US it stood at 11%.

According to the site, which is now owned by search engine giant Google, the quantity of video material it receives via upload each minute has risen exponentially from six hours per minute during its launch year of 2007, to 24 hours per minute in 2010; and to 60 hours per minute in the present day (or, of course, it is keen to point out, one hour of video material every second).

In the past six months alone, the company says, the volume in video uploads has increased by 30%.

Meanwhile, YouTube has also claimed a substantial increase in its viewing figures; boasting 800 million viewers per month. The company also claims that four billion video views take place on its site each day across the globe; a rise of 25% in the past eight months.

YouTube points out that this volume of viewing equates to one video being watched each day by half the population on the planet. Furthermore, the company insists, its viewing figures are still growing.

The growth in video material and viewing trends can of course only help to enhance YouTube’s reputation as one of the best sites for investing in pay per click (PPC) online advertising.

YouTube recently restyled its home page to try and reposition itself more as a social networking site, whilst promoting its capacity for supplying feature-length films.

Their relationship progresses sexually and emotionally – all online – until Montgomery’s wife gets wind of the situation and reveals the truth about ‘Tommy’ in a letter to Jessi. By this time, Jessi has struck up a friendship with 22-year-old Brian Barrett, a real-life co-worker of Montgomery. Brian comforts Jessi, who continues to speak to both men online, until one day Montgomery snaps and kills Brian in a vengeful, jealous rage with three gunshots.

It doesn’t end there. When the police arrive at Jessi’s house to alert her she may be in danger, it turns out Jessi’s mother Mary Shieler is actually talhotblond, and has been masquerading as her own daughter online – including sending them the real Jessi’s underwear and provocative photos taken without her knowledge – the whole time.

Firstly, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Tom Montgomery killed a man in cold blood. While Shieler’s actions were the catalyst for the incident, it would be naive to assume Montgomery could not have been provoked offline should another scenario had risen. However, the fact remains Shieler was the catalyst in this case; the ins-and-outs of which could only have unfolded in the way they did on the internet.

It’s long been said that people are a lot braver on the internet, and will act a certain way online because they believe they are not going to be held to account. These people, these ‘keyboard warriors’ – a group I’ve certainly been a part of – clearly still see the internet as a toy or a novelty, nastily typing past the fact that the internet is very much a part of the mainstream now and is something that isn’t going to go away.

And as the internet becomes a bigger part of everyday life, it makes perfect, unarguable sense that regulation surrounding it is brought in-line with offline law. This doesn’t mean taking away a person’s freedoms – or even their right to steal music and films – but to simply be responsible for how they behave.

Indeed, if people want to fight for freedoms in a place that doesn’t actually exist, let them, but the fact remains they should be held responsible for the way they behave.

Mary Shieler is not responsible for the death of Brian Barrett; Thomas Montgomery killed Brian Barrett. That doesn’t mean that Shieler’s role in the killing should be dismissed because it was virtual.

Brian Barrett’s parents have set up a petition calling for lawmakers to review the laws surrounding internet accountability.

In a blog published on the same day (18th January) as other leading information sites such as Wikipedia and Google were also carrying out their own protests against SOPA and PIPA, a statement on behalf of WordPress from one of its staff, Jane Wells, said:

“Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule: because there’s something going on in US politics that…affects us all”

The statement by Wells went on to ask:

“how would you feel if the web stopped being so free and independent?”

Whilst warning that in the view of WordPress, the SOPA and PIPA acts ‘threaten to do this’.

The proposed Acts are viewed by the film and music industry lobbies as a necessary measure to help stop the unauthorised use of copyrighted material on websites originating outside the US.

WordPress however, is not alone in its opposition to what it sees as the acts’ threat to ‘the democratisation of publishing and the independent web’.

In the US, Google altered its home page to read:

“Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!”

Meanwhile, Wikipedia completely shut itself down for the day in protest at the proposed acts.

One such occasion was last night waiting for my lift home, as I was faced a huge BT billboard advertising their broadband services. As BT have consistently done within their advertising over the past few years (the most popular being ‘Adam & Jane’), the ad refers to a fictional narrative that focuses around using BT’s services.

This time it’s focussed (from what I can gather from the billboard) on 3 young people that all successfully use the same internet connection for their various needs.

My first major gripe with the billboard is the call to action (if you can see it?!). “Search ‘flat 6′ online” is the smallest item on the billboard and I’m sure that the majority of passers by don’t see it, leaving the billboard rather aimless. That, however, isn’t the biggest issue I have with it; the biggest issue is the CTA itself.

Firstly, my research took me to Google:

As I have now come to expect with this type of nonchalant CTA within traditional media, the whole billboard campaign is resting on a single PPC advertisement, with no sign of BT within the organic search results. It would take very little effort indeed for a competitor to hijack the traffic driven from the campaign by building competing paid ads or organic listings around ‘flat 6′. Hat tip to Pete Young who spotted a similar case last year.

But wait. The CTA says “Search ‘Flat 6′ Online“. Maybe BT have focussed on Bing or Yahoo for their campaign? Sadly not.

Bing and Yahoo have not even been given a second’s thought. As with Google they don’t appear anywhere within the organic listings, but with Bing and Yahoo they have even failed to set up a paid campaign. This means of those passers by that:

1. See the ad
2. See the CTA
3. Are taken in enough to follow the CTA

The ICO cookie legislation will take effect in May, but we are still to see any credible solutions or strategy to combat the potential loss in tracked traffic via Google Analytics and other analytical packages. We are expecting to see a rise in cookie-free Analytics packages, along with an official annoucement from Google before too long.

It will also be interesting to see the stance that browsers such as Chrome take, with some expecting them to include an option to accept cookies at browser level.

Destination URL [tip]

You can look at specific landing pages, conversions and CPC in the dimensions tab within the Google AdWords interface.

.co.cc domians are now being indexed again

After 6 months of expulsion from Google’s search results, .co.cc domains are back. They were removed due to the majority of them being low quality or ‘spammy’ but Google now seems to have either changed it’s tune or has been hit by a bug. Either way, they’re back.

Read more

Google slaps itself on the wrist… again!

For the second time in a year Google have had punish one of their own sites after proof of sponsored listings for Google Chrome were found. This follows the furore that followed Beat That Quote’s punishment last year after being bought out by the search engine giant, which was consequently punished for a host of paid links.

Read more

SEO in other countries

Something that is sometimes overlooked by SEO’s is the value in optimising multilingual websites properly for their respective languages. This is much more than simply translating the English version of the website. Query Click have written a great post on ‘an introduction to multilingual seo’.

Read more

Google acquires more patents. This time from IBM.

Google has continued to acquire patents, this time from IBM. This is just another round in the war which is seemingly going on between Google and it’s main competitors Microsoft and Apple.

Read more

Video on rich snippets on Google Webmaster blog

Rich snippets can vastly improve CTR from Google so it’s vital that they are implemented correctly. Google have made it easier by providing an instructional video, showing you exactly how to do so.

Before reading this article, I automatically assumed I would disagree. Especially as people have paraphrased it by saying Jane thinks that “all men in the SEO industry treat women as sex objects”, and even “all men in SEO are rapists”.

I normally disagree with anything vaguely feminist, and this was looking like another extreme rant to ignore. I’ve ignored it for most of today in fact, and had no intention of airing my views on the matter.  But a colleague asked my opinion about it… a couple of times. So I read it.

I personally think this post has exploded as a sensation on Twitter because people have summarised within the constraints of 140 characters… And people have gone with a ‘News of the World’ style for that summary.

The post isn’t so much a generalisation of male SEO behaviour, but talks about a few examples bad eggs in the industry, and Jane feels that they perhaps felt their behaviour was acceptable in the context of the SEO conference.

In my experience, having been to a number of SEO conferences, and having worked for 5 years in SEO; I have always been treated with the same respect that my male colleagues receive.

I don’t have any strong feelings against women used as entertainment at conferences; in fact as a marketer, I think it makes good sense  – you sell more tickets, you get better photos, it helps promote the next event, etc. A woman is a better visual call to action than a table magician for example.

And men are always going to chat women up, in any industry/context, (and especially where alcohol is involved) – we’re human beings first and foremost.

But I do agree that the extreme incidents that Jane talks about should be tackled, and prevented.  Not by banning female entertainment at conferences, but by highlighting the individual bad behaviour, raising awareness and getting people talking about how it’s not acceptable.

I think Jane’s post is a good start…