Three easy predictions for 2011

   ...All of which will look delightfully naïve by late December 2011.

(1) People will consider Microsoft Windows Phones worth having
    Windows-toting mobile phones have never been cool, have they. Everyone's got at least one friend who's got one, but they're always the friend that has to enthuse a little too much about their mobile because it doesn't quite deliver. I remember being quite

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Worthless by degree

    In the wake of the recent student protests over tuition fees, I have heard more than one conversation recently on the subject of students, their resources and the courses they are taking at university. Most of these conversations have passed me by, there was little point in my participating as the scale of the ensuing argument would be out of proportion to the scale of the points I might make

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Strabismus

   This morning I stumbled on a site that made me think a little. It's a site promoting an ebook by the parents of a child with a strabismus, detailing their child's treatment. I left the following comment on this page.
I have to admit to reading this site with mixed emotions. I’m a 40 year old British bloke with a significant strabismus, something I’ve had since birth. I don’t have hardware

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Report from OpenMIC9

     So I spent yesterday at the Jam Factory in the company of about fifty geeks talking about everything mobile at Open Mobile Innovation Camp 9. These type of events are a good place to meet others of like mind and learn about emerging trends and technologies in a particular field. Sometimes the geek level is higher than others and at times one can be left behind by people far further ahead of

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Google locks me out, then apologises

    This morning I was probing some of the more obscure sites linking to the Oxford Dictionaries Online web site by running a Google link: query. I was paging through the results ten at a time. Very monotonous and repetitive.
    Suddenly, this happened.
    It seems I was mistaken for an automated search engine scraper, probably because I was making regular queries without clicking on any

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Testing an HTML placement for third party sites

    Writing an HTML placement for third party sites used to be so easy. Back in the bad old days of tables and frames, you simply created a little table with all those nasty width, height, cellpadding and cellspacing attributes and called it good. You knew you had a pretty good chance of it working as you intended it to on pretty much any site it would be placed on.
    CSS has changed all that.

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DIY successful linkbait guide

    Reblogging other people's stuff rather than writing your own content is not the way to a healthy blog, but every now and then something comes along so elegantly done that you can't help yourself. Such it is with Voltier Creative's beautifully self-referencing DIY guide to a successful linkbait infographic. Everybody who creates content for web sites should read it.
    Top marks for the idea

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Identifying your mobile visitors from web stats

    As mobile browsers have moved from gimmick to the mainstream over the last few years the job of a web developer has had to evolve to service their needs. With full-featured mobile browsers replacing the cut-down early offerings we might have to worry less about our mobile users than we used to but we still have to ensure that they can use our sites with few problems.
    The problem with

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A company: "Them", or "It"?

Consider the following phrase: 
"Since it is the market leader it can be assumed that what works in relation to Google will also work for its competitors"      Google, like any other company, is an entity. "It". But Google is also a collection of offices full of people. "Them". 
     "Google are writing software that..." or "Google is writing software that..."? My inbuilt English language parser

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Is there a relationship between content volume and traffic?

    My exercise in future web traffic prediction last month must have caused some interest among its target audience, because I've been asked for more. This time with a twist.
    The question: "If we add a load of extra pages to a web site, what effect will that have on the traffic?". How long was that piece of string again?
    An impossible question to answer. It depends on factors too

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A little experiment in hiding words in plain sight

    Yesterday at work I decided to try a little experiment. My desk is next to a busy thoroughfare, with a lot of people who I'd rate as fitting my target audience passing me every day. I printed out a QR code encoded with the phrase "Does anyone respond to QR codes? Email me if you're one of them" and my work email address on a piece of A4 and stuck it on to the office partition facing my

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RSS feed keyword analysis for the fun of it

    What do you do when the recession hits and you are made redundant?

    When it happened to me last year, I wrote an RSS feed keyword trend analyser in my new-found free time. Over a year and several million keywords and phrases later I can find associated keywords and phrases and plot graphs for almost anything that's been in the UK mainstream news. Like this one, showing the fortunes of

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Predicting future web site traffic

    Recently I had the unenviable task of making an attempt to predict the traffic levels likely to be seen on a web site in the few months following a piece of search engine marketing work. Unenviable because it's a "how long is a piece of string?" question, impossible to answer with the certainty usually demanded by those who ask it. I gave it my best shot and thought it worth recording here

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My compliments to the cook: SEO vs. SEM

    When I was a small child I attended a primary school in an English village. Summers were long and hot, there were jumpers for goalposts and our school meals were awful. They were the creations of the school cook, a rather nice lady whose culinary output was probably stunted by a poor budget and the dead hand of Ministry of Education dieticians. It was with great surprise then when I moved to

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All blogs have to start somewhere

Keyword
a word which acts as the key to a cipher or code
a word or concept of great significance
Geek
an unfashionable or socially inept person
[usually with modifier] a knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast
    This is obviously one of those cases when you wish you hadn't looked a word up in the dictionary. I'm a search engine specialist by trade, so "A knowledgable and obsessive enthusiast for

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