Creating Community Conversations - Gallomanor

Google Love

Last Thursday I went back to school.  The teacher for the evening was Steve Johnston, Google Consultant.  He was giving a one-off presentation on how to make Google Love Your Website in order to raise money for St Laurence School (which his 3 kids attend, and mine probably will in a few years time).

Steve's a compelling and knowledgeable speaker who made the 3 hours fly by in a whirlwind of facts and tips about how Google provides search results.

Top Fact:   20 - 25% of search expressions on Google each day have never searched for before

Top Tip:   Title tags and Meta Description data is the most visible part of your site - it is what appears on Google.

I've started on this blog.  The page title is now Creating Community Conversations as opposed to gallomanor.

The only downside of sitting through the presentation was the length of the list of small little things that you could do to improve the Google performance of your site.  However the upside was remembering that the sites we produce are far more interesting than what your average retailer gets to deal with.

Phishy business

I received this email this morning from BusinessLink:

From: alerts@businesslink.gov.uk [mailto:alerts@businesslink.gov.uk]
Sent: 09 July 2007 11:07
To: shane@gallomanor.com
Subject: Business Link has an improved registration system - please upgrade

Dear registered user

As we add new interactive services to our website, we upgrade our security framework to ensure your information is always safe. We recently introduced a new registration system with increased security:

Please upgrade your account

The process will take under five minutes. Have a pen and paper ready to record your new details.

Thank you for using our website.
The Business Link team

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Other actions

Follow this link to log in
Follow this link to see our recently updated Privacy policy
Follow this link to cancel email alerts (unsubscribe)

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Do you think they tried especially hard to make it look like a phishing attack?

"Dear registered user"    -    If I am a registered user why don't you know my name?
"Please upgrade your account"    -    Why hide the link?  Let it be seen so we can trust it.
"The Business Link team"    -    No name.  Why not?  What are you hiding?

The irony is that it is a genuine attempt to get me to upgrade to the secure Government Gateway system, but it does look as though BusinessLink have based their email style on some rather dodgy emails.

What you thought you knew may be wrong

I've come across some recent research by Nielsen/Netratings about who's active online.

Contrary to lazy stereotypes about nerdy teenage boys, they find that now the most prevalent group online in the UK are women aged 18-34 (a group I sadly find myself no longer a member of). And in fact 25% of online Britons are 50 or over (there are 1.7 times as many 50+ as under 18s online) - my Dad is one of these silver surfers and he spends more time online than I do, so that rings true for me. They also find that overall there is a pretty even split (51.5% vs 48.5%) between men and women.

I think this gives the lie to the idea that e-services only connect with young males. And I do wonder if the explosion in social networking sites, etc, has contributed to (or is a symptom of?) this feminization of the internet. In a way these stats are not surprising at all - the internet is now obviously so much bigger than l33t-speak and usenet. However, this research doesn't say anything about socio-economic groups, levels of education or speakers of other languages.

As I say, e-services are no longer confined to the groups people might lazily think, but it doesn't mean they are available to all. Remember kids, e-democracy  can contribute to across-the-board civic engagement only as part of a balanced democratic diet.

Find your evil twin

Want to find blogs similar to the one you're reading?  Want to attract readers to a new blog?  BlogCode is a nifty endeavour by Tim Ireland and the makers of StoryCode (to find similar books) that allows you to code a blog using 27 variables.  Using a database of hundreds of blog codes the site then can give a score of similarity. 

I coded the Gallomanor site as part of the Alpha testing and already we've had people visiting through BlogCode.  A superb piece of work that should help people find sites and audiences of interest.

If you've got good matches (a score of over 80%) you may want to plant a piece of code on your blog that shows a live feed of similar blogs.  Of course you may find that you don't agree with the viewpoints of the most similar sites.  That's the bit about finding your evil twin.