Dax Hamman comments on Glastonbury’s decision to sell more tickets by phone next year, in light of this year’s festival being ‘too middle-aged’. Why? Because older internet users are more likely to have broadband, and therefore stand a better chance of getting through online. On the other hand, Dax wonders if broadband might be one way to tempt more teenagers into libraries.
The issue of spam blog comments manipulating link equity is highlighted by Nilhan Jayasinghe at Kocchi Kade. Google have reportedly fixed the problem whereby dodgy links were still passing on some value to the spamming site, in spite of the introduction of the ‘no=follow’ tag.
“Hope this time it’s for real. The real impact won’t be immediately seen, but as the effects propagate across the net, I’m sure there’ll be many sites in link networks affected by the knock-on effects of this fix.”
Search engines’ attempts to defuse the mounting row over privacy of search data is also under the spotlight. Google has announced that it will anonymise IP addresses and cookie IDs after 18 months, while Ask will launch ‘AskEraser’, whereby users can disallow Ask from retaining their search history. Nilhan comments that while these measures may not provide the privacy he’d want, they are ‘going in the right direction’.
Responding in kind to whispers of the “death of blogging”, Antony Mayfield has written posts about Bebo, authenticity, Alan Rusbridger, and the virtues of lo-fi production values (amongst several other topics) over the last week. Anyone with access to his calendar might wonder where on earth he finds the time.
Among the interesting items is the news that the advertising model pioneered by Adify in the US looks set to be adopted over here. It’s a way for major publishers to plug in to the networks around different topic areas, through niche publications and blogs. Antony says:
“The intelligent thing about mainstream publishers doing this is recognising that they are prominent players in broader networks, communities of interest. They can be useful in the networks not just by supplying useful content but with business models that support other players.
It moves them away from viewing bloggers and niche publishers as competitors and toward seeing them as valuable bits of a rich ecosystem of information, knowledge and conversations.”
Meanwhile there’s a very new SEO blog that aims to ‘name and shame’ poor practice in the industry. Its author Joe Davis mentions Spannerworks as one of only two firms he knows about that deliver superb services. Immediately we’re reassured that he knows what he’s talking about.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Re: Dax wonders if broadband might be one way to tempt more teenagers into libraries - My girlfriend who works in Sussex Uni Library probably thinks there are enough teenagers in them already!