Links to news coverage follow:

Escapist Magazine

Christmas Fury The Age - 14 hours ago One of the most ambitious games made in Australia has taken a heavy toll, with development staff at Brisbane’s Auran studio today losing their jobs. Auran development team in liquidation PALGN Auran Closes Up Shop Kotaku Australia Wired News - Escapist Magazine - Gamasutra - Develop all 32 news articles

An amazing photo, a long ugly URL

Del.icio-us linking
Not familiar with social media sites such as del.icio.us and the great resource and opportunity they represent your business or organisation?

This blog post explains what del.icio.us is and how it and other social media sites can be one of the most powerful resources for your link building efforts.
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/delicious-link-building

End of the captcha?

Have organised high tech criminals broken the captcha system? Captchas are the challenge - response questions used on web forms to try and ensure the form is being filled out by a human, not an automated bot or spamming tool. This article is a fascinating coverage of the issue, with some great examples of captchas:

It seems an awful lot of programmers subscribe to the “add some crazy patterns and/or colors to the text and pray for the best” school of CAPTCHA design. That’s not only sloppy, it just doesn’t work. The top of this chart is littered with their failed attempts. On some sites, this is OK. They don’t need the same world-class level of protection from bots and scripts that Ticketmaster does– there’s tremendous financial incentive for scalpers to break their system.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001001.html

Case candy

A beautiful computer case - stained glass, via boingboing.net I want one for Christmas.

Accidental Millionaire
Finally a story to gladden your entrepreneurial heart and restore hope. Yes the story of another accidental 10 something or 20 something year-old internet millionaire.

Most readers would be familiar with the concept of information overload (IO) and the impact IO can have on our ability to find, select and process only the essential data from the infosphere, and to filter out the background ‘noise’. Note we are not talking spam here, which is essentially attention theft.

There are other terms for IO too, like information pollution, digital distraction, and perhaps my favourite technostress. While technostress is probably more a symptom or result of IO, it likely lowers our tolerance of IO and forms a vicious feedback loop.

The phrase “information rich, attention poor” highlights the practical effects of IO quite well. IO is a serious challenge that besets lowly information workers and executive decision makers alike on a daily basis. At the macro or economy-wide level our aggregate struggle with IO has serious implications for our national productivity and continued economic well-being as well.

The great Amercian political scientist Herbert Simon knew a thing or two about information overload and its consequences, observing in 1971 in Computers, Communications and the Public Interest that:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

He wasn’t kidding. Wikipedia reports that a recent article in the New Scientist claimed exposing individuals to an information overloaded environment resulted in lower IQ scores than exposing individuals to marijuana, although these results are contested. The same article also notes that over-exposure to information can be as debilitating as a night without sleep. And we all know how that feels.

So what is the key to overcoming IO and its adverse effects on our attention span and ability to focus? According to a doctor part of the answer may lie in the fact that information work, particularly computer work, requires significant and often intensive levels of multi-tasking, day in day out.

Is it surprising that this same brain does not do well when forced to isolate down to one task? Listening in a meeting is a very isolated, very passive event. Coding, developing, debugging — these are not passive at all. The geek brain is just not trained to sit quietly and listen.

Can we break our modern addiction to multi-tasking, long considered a driver of productivity in our IT and information-intensive workplaces? I’m not sure, but I think I better leave it there lest I overtax your attention and you go find something else to read.

What are you doing right now?

That’s the tagline of Twitter, one of the profusion of social networking services to emerge lately.

So what is Twitter, and is it relevant to you? Twitter allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific, free of charge.

The second question is more difficult to pin down. At first glance Twitter seems like a simple way to prattle on about nothing at all, to nobody in particular, albeit in the space allowed by the 140 character limit per post.

This was my attitude also, until recently, when I came across a post titled The Tao of Twitter by Mike Mindel.

Actually to call what Mike has put together here a blog post is to fail to do justice to it. It’s also a very thorough guide and tutorial about everything you might want to know about Twitter, how it presents new opportunities and applications to business, all lashed together with interesting insights and quotes like this one:

To understand what makes Twitter so successful I have to go back to an amazing book by Paul Zane Pilzer called Unlimited Wealth.

When Paul was writing this book he had one rule: ‘a new technology will be accepted and used once it is better and easier to use than the preceding technology’.

Look at Twitter. It fulfills that rule beautifully. What does Twitter replace? Letting people know what you’re doing and letting them follow what you’re doing.

What used to fulfill that role? Group phone msgs, group email, bulletin boards, forums, and gossip…

Thanks Mike for a great effort.

Wither the Browser?
Forbes - 12 Oct 2007

Firefox firebrand Mitchell Baker says browsers are too important to be left to companies to build. Winifred Mitchell Baker has all the scars of the netscape-microsoft browser war of the late 1990s.

Google is global search gorilla
Sydney Morning Herald - 11 Oct 2007

Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August, according to a report released today.

Put your content in my pocket
A List Apart - Blog

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave with Osama bin Laden, you know that Apple is selling an iPhone and that it’s a hit. Apple is well on its way to selling ten million mobile Internet devices by the end of 2008. Besides being a great phone, the iPhone also includes a sophisticated new Safari browser. This version is touted as “the most advanced web browser on a portable device” and from what I’ve seen, it deserves this accolade.

So what does this mean for you? Millions of visitors accessing your content on a small display with very high resolution. At some point in the near future, you’re going to want to take a look at your current site design to make sure that it looks good and works well on this new device and its Mobile Safari browser.

!00 free Web 2.0 Design Generators and Resources
ifxplus

Here the list of online generators specifically for web 2.0 design: enjoy it!

My apologies for the lengthy delay between posts, life around here has been frenetic so the blog has unfortunately been neglected. And this despite my preaching that online marketing via regular updates of web site content is critical to your web site success and general attractiveness to the search engines.

But no more. Today we note recent intelligence from web metrics company Hitwise on why Australian customers do what they do online. It’s current and, since you’re reading this post, probably relevant to your business

Here’s the grab from their RSS feed:

Motivations of Online Retail Customers in Australia

According to Hitwise Australia, for the week ending 28/07/07, traffic to online shopping websites skews to two distinct age groups; 18-24 year-olds, and 35-44 year-olds.

Their motivations behind online retail are quite different with 18-24 year olds more likely to shop for entertainment, while 35-44 year olds are more budget-conscious visiting price-comparison and rewards websites such as Shopping.com.au, oo.com.au, FlyBuys and Myshopping.com.au.

Read more here

It’s clear from the list that Matt has shared a lot of valuable information with the SEO community in the time he’s been active in this role, both in the blogosphere and at SEO events. The tips cover a lot of ground, providing links to numerous of his posts about SEO best practice do’s and don’ts, from issues like user-friendly URLS, the use of Flash in sites, buying links (and using “link condoms” ), to the importance of using unique title tags and meta descriptions for each page.

Here’s a couple of examples, the first on buying/selling links:

15. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-link-follow-up/
Google’s is against selling/buying links, and Matt indicates they are good at spotting them - both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines. 2006.

and this one on the importance of URL canonicalization:

18. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages - www.example.com vs. example.com vs. www.example.com/index.html.  Since all these urls are different, a web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, it tries to pick the best one and eliminates the others. To help Google, link to resources on a site consistently, and use 301 redirects to enforce it. 2006.

These tips and others from Matt’s site are probably as authorative as you can find on how to optimise your site to achieve the best possible search results rankings in Google.

For many the game is all about gaining inbound links from authority web sites. For others the focus is on-page factors such as page title, meta tags and keyword density and placement. Many swear by trust factors, or domain and site age. Topic stability over time and other longevity factors. And so it goes.

The truth of course is there’s no one silver bullet or Secret. Yes these factors are all important elements in the collective mix, but unless you have very deep pockets it’s virtually impossible to focus on more than a couple of elements of search engine optimisation at a time.

The trick is to focus on the one which gives you most overall leverage and return for your limited resources.

So which one? For my money, the most reliable wisdom available on this question comes from two sources. The first is that to be found in the guidelines for webmasters published by the search engines themselves.

The second source is the collected thoughts and insights of seasoned veterans who’ve been in the game for many years and understand that being successful at it requires long term strategy, not quick fixes and short term tricks. Here’s just three sage examples:

The Keys to Online Success in Simple Equations and Links (SEOMoz)

Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 REVEALED: The Ultimate Guide (Andy Hagans)

SEO Advice: Writing Useful Articles That Readers Will Love (Matt Cutts)

And the common theme that emerges from these oracles is indisputably that Quality is King. As Google has famously urged:

Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Quality equals link-worthiness. Link-worthiness equals trust and popularity. Trust and popularity equals better search engine rankings, which equals better targeted and qualified traffic. Better targeted traffic served with high quality content should equal both better conversion rates and repeat visits. It’s a kind of virtuous circle.

Yes the other stuff is important, but when you boil it down a lot of those factors flow from taking care and paying attention when developing your content in the first place. For example, great keyword density and placement techniques are fine but are ultimately pointless unless the content built around them is compelling and persuausive to the end user.

It’s very hard to anticipate today how the search engines will evolve, how their algorithms will change, and what the impact will be on your rankings. What we can expect is that the evolution of search will continue to be in the direction of returning ever more relevant, trusted and refined search results to users.

That means webmasters need to take a long term view, focus on what they can influence, and optimize always for the user experience. Make sure what you publish now works for you in the search engine results for years to come. Play the game without resorting to shortcuts and educated guesses.

Take greater joy and pride in the web sites you build. In other words play to your strengths and focus on what you can influence, rather than on second-guessing what the search engines might or might not do.

And get started today.

Most small to medium business operators opt to outsource their web site hosting and management requirements because they find outsourcing a more cost-effective alternative to the capital outlay, staffing and overheads involved in running a web hosting operation in-house.

If you decide a managed web hosting solution is the way to go, how do you go about choosing the right hosting provider for your needs? What should you expect a web host to actually do for your business anyway?

Let’s answer that second question first. Put simply, the key function of a web host is to operate and manage Web servers which distribute data (like your web pages) over the Internet. Looking a little deeper, you want a host who excels at the key roles of:

* providing and managing essential high-speed network connectivity and bandwidth to the Internet;

* managing and troubleshooting high-end web server hardware and software;

* securing and backing up all systems and data;

* providing constant network performance monitoring and management, and;

* providing the all-important customer management and support

But first things first. Before looking at potential web hosts, you should have a fairly accurate idea of what your own hosting requirements are, including:

* how much disk space you need to store your site, remembering to allow for room to grow over time;

* how much bandwidth per month you need - this will be determined by how much traffic you expect your site will receive;

* server features you need for your web site, like preferred operating system (Windows or Linux-based), languages/scripts (PHP, ASP, CGI etc), databases, control panels, email accounts, webmail, and statistics packages;

* how critical server reliability and up-time are to your business - if you run an e-commerce / e-business site then clearly your site’s maximum availability will be very important to you;

* the likely level of support you’ll need; and

* last but not least, available budget.

With this list checked and the results in hand, you now have a set of criteria that’ll help you narrow your list of potential hosts. That done, you can focus on asking your chosen candidates some questions about their operations. Some key areas to ask about are:

* the backup regime and disaster recovery policy and practices in place to protect against loss of your data - do they backup daily, nightly, weekly, to an offsite location, ask how much control you get over your own backup regime?

* the extent to which their network, servers and connectivity points are security-hardened against hackers and attacks;

* server up-time and performance: look for servers with fast CPU’s, lots of premium memory (RAM), make sure servers are built from only server-grade components, and ask about hardware and network redundancy measures - like RAID systems for protection against disk failure, backup power supplies, and multiple redundant bandwidth providers;

* look for verified service up-time stats from reputable third-party monitors such as Alertra;

* check terms of service, acceptable use and similar end-user policies, especially the anti-spamming policy - you don’t want to find your site and its IP address blacklisted and banned because someone else on your server is sending out spam (unsolicited bulk email), due to lax enforcement practices on the host’s part - this is a serious consideration;

* customer support systems provided, including helpdesk availability, knowledge bases, support forums, tutorials and how-to guides; and

* availability of a suitable upgrade path, so as your site and its traffic grow you can scale your account and upgrade your disk space, bandwidth allocation and other features easily and affordably.

While all that homework might seem like a lot of ….. well, work, it is important. It is always better and more cost-effective to get it right first time. Armed with the knowledge you’ve just collected, you’ll be a much better educated shopper and more likely to find a reliable web host with the right technology, know-how and support for your needs.