We have become a nation of not only internet users, but also internet traders, so when our beloved toy is taken away from us, we understandably get a little upset.

So when Virgin Media experienced a nationwide broadband failure the other night, you can image the horrors of its users. The earth might have been knocked off its axis with the collective sighs.

Virgin Media is a very promotional cable broadband company which likes to boast that it provides some of the best services out there and many wouldn’t disagree. Yet at a time when boasting that it intends to boost its customer’s broadband speeds by turning up the power dials, it was a bit of an embarrassment to suffer a complete blackout for three hours in peak evening time.

A case of bad timing you might say: one minute a promise to double speeds over the next month, the next, nothing.

It has five million customers, although there are no figures as to how many were eventually affected. Virgin blamed routing hardware problems – yes, we’ve all used that excuse in the past – and the company felt a Tsunami of Tweets and telephone calls as it struggled to turn people back on.

We can only hope that they do indeed boost their broadband speeds, and at the same time keep everything switched on, because, to be fair, it’s quite a decent provider really.

The post No Virgin When It Comes to Off Button appeared first on Cayenne Red.

Social network giant Twitter is one conglomerate that has spoken out against SPYW. Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s legal counsel and former deputy general counsel for Google, tweeted on Monday: “Bad day for the Internet…Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.”

Speculation as to why Google introduced the service varies from gaining market share in the social network market to improving the quality of search results through trust and personalisation. Research by Nielsen says almost 90% of users trust recommendations from friends compared to just 42%, who favour search results.

However, there are several aspects of the search engine which prompt widespread critique that Google has become greedy, wanting to dominate the social networking world as well as the search engine market, it currently owns 65%.

SPYW favours Google plus listings above all others. For instance, when you type in your own name, your Google plus account will appear at the top of the page, even if your online activity is greater on other social outlets. This means that news feeds such as Twitter, a relevant and reliable source of real-time information with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets about varying topics daily, will no longer show at the top of the Google search engine. This makes the Google results less relevant – an obvious flaw.

Complaints have also been made that SPYW makes Google more cluttered and less user-friendly something that, along with the concept of page rank, made it so popular when it was launched. One user said: “It feels like a proprietary search box on a social network site”. This prompts the feeling that Google has lost track of what initially propelled its popularity, namely simplicity, accompanied with a sniff of ‘Sir’ patronising your incompetent schoolchild-self. Are we incapable of understanding what information we seek?

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported earlier today that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has expanded its antitrust investigation of Google, confirmed in June 2011, to include Google plus. This news followed an investigation by online watchdog, Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), based in Washington, D.C. of possible privacy violations.
EPIC said: “Google’s business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s consent order.” This referred to an agreement that the FTC established with Google setting out privacy safeguards for Google users and subjecting the search giant to regular privacy audits.

A Senate hearing was held recently to discuss Google increasing their dominance in the search market to suppress competition. And the FTC is currently investigating Google’s use of Youtube search ranking. It is accused of giving preferential treatment to its own video content over non-Google content

In SPYW’s launch announcement Google said the new service is: “Transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but people and relationships.” However, the backlash begs the questions, does SPYW really improve users search experience, and is it honestly a reflection of Google’s (dubious) understanding of people and relationships? Signs are not positive.

It feels like Google has gone a step too far. Whereas Google plus felt like a positive development, SPYW feels like an attempt to control our online experience. This, accompanied by Google’s aggressive marketing tactics, for instance there is an ‘opt-out’ button rather than an ‘opt-in’ button, are making people feel like ‘opt’ should be changed to obligatory. And no-one likes being told what to do.

So where will this dislike lead? Will people ‘opt-out’ of Google permanently choosing one of the search engines from the remaining 35% share of the market? Or will sites such as Facebook and Apple, companies that have capital and resources, launch a new search engine? Expensive and technologically difficult but a realistic possibility.

In an interview held on January 11th between Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Marketing Land & Search Engine Land and Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and former CEO; Sullivan asked Schmidt whether Google was favouring its own content over Twitter. Schmidt denied the allegation and responded: “I do hope when you speak to Facebook, you ask them analogous questions about opening up their index and all that content that’s behind there.”

by Becki Chester

The post Greedy Google? appeared first on Cayenne Red.

In a word, yes! We’re not yet at the precipice of when just a couple of media groups will dominate the world’s news content, but we’re getting close.

Yahoo and ABC have just announced a new alliance which means in future they will share news stories across their websites. And to mark this union, they will jointly broadcast a live interview with US President Barak Obama.

The arrangement means that ABC News will publish Yahoo news stories. In turn, ABC will share its own video reports and feature them on the Yahoo’s website. This includes one of the country’s lead programmes, Good Morning America.

Whilst ABC is a major US broadcaster, Yahoo.com is the most popular news website in the country. Both their websites show a combined usage figure of around 100 unique users.

The downside is of course, that this sort of arrangement pleases the accountants first, and viewers second. And once you start to mix news staff in this sort of way, one of the organisations gets the upper hand and both teams start to look the same. This means that they share editorial views and decisions, and the content can become unrecognisable from each other.

And the fewer news organisations in existence, the less likelihood of real independence. This threatens the real objectivity of news gathering organisations and presents a danger to how news is presented and possibly exploited by the owners of media companies.

In other words, this sort of deal should worry news hounds.

Attribute to: Neil Martin, Cayenne Red.

Neil Martin is a digital marketing UK SEO consultant with Cayenne Red, Berkshire, and is a regular contributor to the media on how companies market themselves in the digital age.

The post Yahoo and ABC Alliance appeared first on Cayenne Red.

Google, like Microsoft and like Facebook, were once the groovy kids on the block. Okay, groovy might be going too far (geeks is a better word perhaps), but not that long ago these guys were the typical team sitting in their bedrooms, with their computers, figuring out how to tame the internet.

And for fellow geeks, the Google search engine soon turned out to be the best. It allowed speedy searches and returned accurate results. So much so, that the term, “…Google it…” has now entered the Lexicon.

But then they had to grow up. Once a technology company becomes the next big thing and begins to attract external investment, in a way the old pioneering days are over. And once Google became a public company quoted in world stock exchanges, then the sense of the new kids on the block was gone forever.

Now the team at Google is one of the world’s largest companies and investors continually look to the management to produce a good and viable return.

The pressure is on to produce significant increases in sales and profits on a yearly basis and to do that, the company has to keep growing and ‘land-grabbing’ all that it can. So, it has to enter new areas and sectors to achieve that level of growth.

So, Google might now be seen as the Evil Empire, but that’s just a result of its company public status and the need to expand.

The post Google – The Evil Empire! appeared first on Cayenne Red.

And to appreciate why this is so, remember the origins of who’s behind Google: mostly a bunch of geeks who discovered a great way to control the beast that is the internet.

Remember that the internet is a massive network of computerised databases and these have to be accessed efficiently and hyper quickly to ensure a meaningful service.

Google were the team that managed to make the internet most accessible by the general public. Don’t forget that no-one owns the Internet, neither Google, or Microsoft can make that claim. But what they do own, via their search engines and web browsers, is their version of the internet.

When Google make available results, it’s of the internet not as it exists precisely at this moment, but one which existed some days ago. Now, okay, Google will ensure that the latest news is always available (as it caches the super busy sites on a minute by minute basis), but you will have noticed the lag that often exists between you knowing that something has happened and finding it ranked on the search engines.

But the team behind Google are very clever mathematicians and statisticians who build algorithms that rank the internet and provide the search results.

And this is the pedigree of Google Ad Words. It’s built by experts for other experts – if that doesn’t light your fire; then rope someone else in to do it for you.

The post Google Ad Words – Maths Wranglers Wanted appeared first on Cayenne Red.

And to appreciate why this is so, remember the origins of who’s behind Google: mostly a bunch of geeks who discovered a great way to control the beast that is the internet.

Remember that the internet is a massive network of computerised databases and these have to be accessed efficiently and hyper quickly to ensure a meaningful service.

Google were the team that managed to make the internet most accessible by the general public. Don’t forget that no-one owns the Internet, neither Google, or Microsoft can make that claim. But what they do own, via their search engines and web browsers, is their version of the internet.

When Google make available results, it’s of the internet not as it exists precisely at this moment, but one which existed some days ago. Now, okay, Google will ensure that the latest news is always available (as it caches the super busy sites on a minute by minute basis), but you will have noticed the lag that often exists between you knowing that something has happened and finding it ranked on the search engines.

But the team behind Google are very clever mathematicians and statisticians who build algorithms that rank the internet and provide the search results.

And this is the pedigree of Google Ad Words. It’s built by experts for other experts – if that doesn’t light your fire; then rope someone else in to do it for you.

The post Google Ad Words – Maths Wranglers Wanted appeared first on Cayenne Red.

It’s all part of laying claim to content and in the SEO consultancy environment, its further evidence that Google is throwing its full weight behind original and relevant content.

Google provides the example of an author at the New York Times who has written a large number of individual articles. It says that a webmaster can connect this content with an author page at the New York Times author page. The link is public and connects directly the content with the author.

An author page is built to let a user know the pertinent facts about that writer, including a description, image, biography, articles and relevant links.

Google recommends that if you own, or operate a website which includes authored content, you should get to know the basics and learn how to exploit the new authorship markup.

The markup basically enables search engines to recognise an author’s work across the internet. It’s based on existing code instructions such as HTML5 and XFN.

To help webmasters and the SEO consultancy operations, Google has already completed a lot of prep work with a number of news media sites, including CNET, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

The markup will also be supported on YouTube and Blogger.

Google are also trying to rank authors and their content, and this will go some way in giving that process meaning.

The post Google Supports Authorship Markup appeared first on Cayenne Red.

It’s basically made up of a number of websites that have partnered with Google and become display partners. These display partners work with Google, YouTube and other Google entities that display what’s known as Ad Words ads.

Targeted automatically, the ads can consist of either text, video files, images, or a variety of rich media formats. They are targeted by spotting themes in a user’s keyword list. These are either created manually, when a user matches specific placements, or are created by focussing on defined audiences that the user needs to reach.

For the advertiser, they have the choice of running their promotion pieces across parts of Google, or the complete Google network, which means that a high degree of penetration can be achieved.

Google also insists on a high standard of ad, which means that standards are rigorously controlled and in turn, they agree to place the ad only on websites of a certain quality and within other products that are regarded as solid platforms.

What makes the network stand out for advertisers, is that they can fully target their audience with penetrative ads that work.

But the key for any advertiser is the format of the ad. It still comes down to the central message contained within the text, image, or file. So Google’s system will allow that ad to be properly placed, but it’s essential that the key message is precise and powerful. And that comes down to the skill of the creative.

The post Google Display Network appeared first on Cayenne Red.

The actual documents are familiar to any regular user of Microsoft Office and are based on five main elements: Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings and Forms.

They are not overly sophisticated applications and will seem a little ‘lite’ to many on first use, but, crucially, they are stored in a ‘cloud system’. This effectively means that they are stored in a hard drive not on the individual’s computer, but in a vast storage depository run by the provider.

It’s a simple enough idea and will eventually change how computers are configured. In future, the machine location will focus on processing power and minimum storage to run basic application frameworks, but the actual application will run at the provider’s facility. The great advantage is that desktops and laptops will no longer need to be restricted as to the size of the hard drive: all the heavy applications will be stored away in the facility.

This means that Google docs, and other systems like it, will offer a full store of applications and these will not sit on the user’s computer, but up in the sky. This concept relies on fast and regular broadband connections, so it is held back to some degree by access to the cloud, but over the years, as speeds increase, more applications will revert to a cloud location.

Google Docs is great way to manage all your documents online. Easily share with others Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings and Forms.

The post Google Docs – Cloud Computing appeared first on Cayenne Red.

They are masters at taking the position of net guardians; the gate keepers who’ll never sleep until the internet is almost hallowed ground, and where ecommerce is conducted under a banner of trust and comradeship.

And whereas some might call Google’s constant fiddling (enhancing they would say) with the search dynamics of users is a good thing, others would argue that every change is always with their own business model in mind.

Perhaps that’s a little unfair, but when the recent Panda update came out, you could hear the stricken cries of website owners and webmasters throughout the land.

The ambition behind Instant Pages is commendable; almost instantaneous downloading of sites using something called pre-rendering which the computer games industry has relied on for years. It basically means something already downloaded and set to go.

It will speed up download times for websites and it will make the user happy, especially with those sites – beloved by the newspapers – which see every bit of website real estate as a chance to fill it with videos, adverts and any other device they can think of, in order to keep the ether busy with the tittle tattle of the day.

But, how will Instants Pages effect overall search dynamics, and are the rules about to be tweaked again, in Google’s favour? Let’s wait and see.

The post Instant Pages appeared first on Cayenne Red.