Whilst i understand that a lot of people don’t trust Wikipedia all that much, i have to say that i can spend hours upon hours reading article after article. Whilst i can appreciate that not all articles are 100% accurate i think that Wikipedia is one of the best things to ever happen to the Internet. It allows you to quickly find out information on a subject that would require many hours of searching around the net and piecing things together.

So anyway since i adore Wikipedia i thought i would go an check out the latest Wikimedia annual report which can be found at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report

Everything you want to know can be found in there but basically Wikimedia cost about $5m to run, and made about $7m. This is quite amazing considering they have a little more than 20 full time staff and the rest of Wiki is run by you or I The pdf also lists the total number of pages in the English version (over 2.6m) along with information about the financial breakdown.

So here’s to Wiki, may you live long and prosper.

Back in July (when the weather was a little sunny and not bitterly cold) i wrote a blog post about using your Facebook profile on Digg. Just to recap, it was regarding the rather great ability to use your Facebook profile to login to Digg without registering an entire new Digg account, on top of that it also allows Digg to post information back to your wall as a news feed to let all your friends know what you have been Digging.

Well after allowing websites like Digg, and Stumbleupon to use Facebook connect it seems that the big FB are set to allow any website to use Facebook Connect on November the 30th and you should be quickly scurrying to work out how you are going to incorporate it into your site. Here’s why and how…

Firstly. The Why?

There are really three major reasons why you should be using Facebook connect on your website, and i am sure that as the platform progresses, there will become many many more.

1. Users can use their existing Facebook profiles to login to your site:
   Whilst many people may think that not having users register with you could damage your site, this probably will not be the case at all. I am sure there has been many a time that you or I have come to a website for some information only to find that you have to go through a long registration process to get the information you want. I can certainly say that i have hit the back button and got the info from elsewhere. With Facebook connect your users can simply hit the Facebook login button, find the information they want, and stay on your site.
2. You get information back about the user:
   Amongst other things, Facebook can tell you how many of the user’s friends are already members of your site. You can put a link somewhere that says, “Three of your friends already use the site – invite them to connect.” This can dramatically increase engagement of your existing users by drawing them back to your site. Not only this you can show the friends activity on a page within your site, so that users have yet another reason to return.
   Facebook also let you pull certain information about the user such as basic profile info, avatar image etc, this can save you space on your server by hosting everything in a centralised location.
3. You get to advertise on Facebook for free:
   Whenever a user on your site does an action, you can post this information onto their wall. Obviously i don’t need to tell you how valuable this is, as not only does it appear in the news feed it also encourages their friends to click through onto your site and then we are back to point number 1.

Stumble reviews posting back to Facebook

You can see a great example of how Facebook Connect is working on the Facebook Example Site

Secondly. The How?

The first thing to do is go and check out the Facebook Wiki on The Anatomy of a Facebook Connect Site then bring yourself back here, and we’ll go through a few steps incase your still unsure of how to implement it.

Back already? Gee you are a fast reader, ok now take a look at the image below to get an idea about how Facebook Connect works in the background…

So the image above explains how it all works, but how do you put it into your site?

1. Download the sample code that is provided by Facebook – This is the code used for their example site and will be a great help.
2. The code above will show you all the little neat tricks of Facebook, such as the friends selector, group links, events links, that you can implement to allow users to effectively share your site on Facebook
3. You need to go into Facebook and enable the Developers application, if you can’t find it simply do a search for Developers on the Facebook search bar.
4. Set up your application using the instructions found in the Facebook wiki
5. Insert your application API key into the test code that you downloaded above and visit your demo site. You should now see the Facebook connect login button which will allow you to login using your details.

Finally, just go and read everything on the developers wiki to get yourself up to speed with other features, and then you can start to look to implement the sections of code into your site. Start of by getting the login button working, then by getting some information back from FB about the user. Once you have mastered that you can then get onto the good stuff like writing back to users walls, and allowing them to invite friends to your site.

There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook connect will be a massive step forwarding in bringing around a centralised way of logging into websites and getting meaningful information about your users. From a search marketing perspective you can gain literally hundreds of new visitors a day to your site. If you have a login form then you should be looking at this now.

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on Facebook Connect, and if you think you will be implementing it on your site.

…or so a (tsk) .net development blog would have you believe.

I have just read the above linked post on reddit which is from a .net development blog. At first i was very frustrated about how someone could be so ignorant about an industry that they obviously don’t understand, but then at the same time i started to think about how people do view the SEO/SEM industry in a negative light. I know it has been discussed to death about how some SEO’s come across as snake oil salesmen but i feel that this post deserves some attention, especially due to the negativity of some of the reddit comments that people have left. Before i even get started on my views though i will present you with the opening paragraph of the enlightened post…

Let’s face it: SEO is a joke, not a job.
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strength of contents or services offered. A little bit of social bookmarking, a little bit of fuss on major social or professional networks, a little bit of impression exchange, a little bit of back-links here and there: it doesn’t seem to me as a big deal.

Pretty convincing stuff huh? Well not entirely. It seem like this guy has absolutely no idea what real SEO involves. In fact he seems to think that if you just develop a website to standards then you are going to automatically rank for your chosen terms. He even goes on to say that “getting noticed on the web is extremely easy, just with a little reading and even less intelligence.”

Now anyone who has tried to create a site and get it to rank for anything which is remotely competitive will certainly find that getting noticed on the web is far from easy. You obviously have to get the site architecture right, get your pages linking to each other correctly, make sure that you title tags and meta descriptions line up with the page content, ensure that there is no duplication of content, actually right decent content and get it up and indexed by the big G. Now that’s just the on page side of things, we all know how hard it can be to get free links hence why linkbait and creative viral is so effective, and usually not cheap. Lets not even get into link buying which can cost a lot of money for a small site to break into a competitive area.

So its quite obvious that SEO is a job, because if not it wouldnt be a multi million pound industry. However i do see why people look at us so bad. There are so many stories of companies ripping people off and saying how they will submit your site to a gazillion search engines, but it is so frustrating when uneducated fools make comments and posts like the one above. I know some people have bounced around the ideas of having academic standards in the world of SEO, and whilst i am against it, it could help solve some of the negativity that surrounds us all?

Oh, and don’t even get me started about the post author disabling the right click on his website! 1999 called, it wants its javascript back

I have just come across a story which tells us of a feature that YouTube implemented after it was ‘joked’ about on the popular webcomic XKCD.

XKCD originally ‘joked’ about YouTube commenter’s realising they are morons after having the comments they type read back to them before they posts. It seems Google have noticed this and implemented it into YouTube as a sort of homage to the popular comic.

A snippet of the comic from http://xkcd.com/481/

Ok, so you probably knew/have seen that already? Maybe your a speed Digger though and didn’t realise that the Digg submission actually linked to Matt Cutt’s blog post about the subject, a nice bit of link juice passing through to your site right? Well the man at the head of spam… (team) decided to take his blog down and just leave a link to the original XKCD post.

It’s such a nice thing to do… whilst linkbaiters and viral marketers dream of getting links from the front page of Digg, Matt Cutts does the exact opposite and just stops short of 301′n his entire blog to the original story (we wouldn’t want to pass any authority now would we ). He is probably the only person on this earth who would do such a thing.

I just thought it was a rare sight to see someone not take the juice, then again this is the emperor of spam fighting, and just goes to show that he seriously does practise what he preaches… or perhaps he just couldn’t handle the traffic? I’d like to think it is the first

Turns out he couldn’t handle the traffic, dammit.

I just read about the new Google mail labs ‘invention’ that aims to stop you sending emails that you will later regret, more than likely under the influence of our good friend alcohol.

The cleverly named ‘mail goggles’ becomes active at certain times during the weekend, of course you can set the times that you wish this to be active. Lets say your an alcoholic and you’ve just polished off that first bottle of Vodka on the way to work, you might want the mail Goggles to stop you sending that rant to your ex girlfriend after she left you for your brother last week. *I want my cd’s back by the way*

So as you can see from the image above, you have to answer a set of maths questions within a certain time limit or Gmail wont let you send it. I guess that they are also hoping that you’re too intoxicated to make your way to the settings page and disable the whole thing if you do get it wrong.

Anyway, its a nice little fun idea, lets get this developed for drunken text message’s and phone calls and we are onto a winner.

Whilst i am still working on my ‘other’ blog post i thought i would just throw something out there, this post is supposed to be a little in jest so please don’t take it to seriously ok? Good!

I have had the fortune of having a couple of articles from this blog submitted, and then subsequently ‘go hot’ on Sphinn. The stories have usually been submitted on the same day that i released them to the blog but generally take 2 days until they go hot.

Once the story has gone hot then i tend to get a couple of hundred referrals from Sphinn which is nice targeted traffic, so what’s the problem?

Well the problem is that even though I published the story on my blog first, the Sphinn article has less text, and the Sphinn article is linking to me as the source, i often rank below the Sphinn page in the Google SERPS

Lets look at exhibit A shall we?

As we can see from the image above, i wrote a post about the Pligg Auto Submitter which was actually published on the 29th July. However Google’s crawl date says 2nd of August, the same day as the Sphinn post. The titles are pretty much the same, and my URL is (arguably) better. Plus i have more content on my page.

Now if i could direct your attention to exhibit B

This one is even worse! I am 10th whilst the damn Sphinn post is 5th! Not only that, the sphinn post doesn’t even have a crawl date next to it. Oh Google you try my patience at times.

Now i am fully aware that the Sphinn domain has waaaaaay more authority than Chewie.co.uk, i am also aware that the Sphinn pages have more internal links pointing to them than my post. However in the world of relevant rankings, i do think that I should be ranking higher (who doesn’t ) when Site B (Sphinn) is effectively republishing the work of Site A (Me) and also linking to the source… c’mon Google sort it out

Don’t let this stop people submitting my stories to Sphinn though

Ok so this isn’t an SEO related post, but tonight i’ll be working on something good for tomorrow so thought i would just quickly let everyone know that the header on the site has changed and i have a new mascot/avatar/favicon/whatever who is now appearing in the spanky new header on this website.

The new header reflects the blog a little better and was designed by my friend Jay who owns Blooming Gorgeous flowers

By now you have probably seen the Diesel XXX advert (it’s a SFW porn film) which has been front pages on both Reddit and Digg, you’ll have probably even seen it arrive in your inbox. What you probably didn’t know is that Diesel pretty much ripped the idea from an internet thread on Something Awful. I can’t link to the actual thread because it has been archived and you need upgraded memebership to view it.

Now as i said, Diesel ripped the idea from the thread and made a pretty cool movie from it, but here is the cool part. Instead of just taking all the credit, Diesel actually contacted Something Awful and basically said ‘Hey thanks for the ideas’ on top of that they are paying for each forum member who contributed to have their account upgraded!

I think its pretty cool when a big company like that takes the time to thank the people for their ideas, and it also goes to show the power that internet communities still have. We have all seen meme’s such as LolCats and Fail come from the likes of 4Chan, so it’s worth remembering that a lot of internet marketers can generate good idea’s based off user content. There are a ton of goldmines out there, you just need to be creative to turn it into a way which will work for you or your clients… just remember to thank the people who gave you those ideas or you might go the way of Sarah Palin and get your email hacked

Quick posts but thought it was rather interesting.

Google maps have just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York.

This means that people in New York have a much easier time in trying to find thier routes around NYC. If we check the Google Transit page we can see that the UK is still lagging behind. I can’t wait for this to come to London, will make life so much easier.

This is certainly going to be one of my favourite adverts of all time..

Nintendo have obviously done some sort of deal with YouTube to get this add to interact with the page so well. In this advert we see the video play whilst the page around it starts to shake and crumble. As the video progresses the page is completely destroyed and you can even play with the rubble afterwards.

This is a great example of taking advertising to the next level, admittedly Nintendo have a massive advertising budget but this is surely going to stick in people’s minds for a long time, and end up in a ton of inboxes around the world.
Watch youtube crumble and fall as Warioland Shakes It about…
Watch the Warioland Advert