Search Sense

Christmas is upon us all, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell it from the rate that various Spannerworkers are cranking out blog entries.

On Wednesday, Arjo Ghosh heralded the arrival of Spannerworks’ very own spider, as ‘Spiderman’ Alain Robert scaled the outside of our 27-floor London building. The weekend before, however, he was wondering whether the Knol project meant he would be forced to take sides between Wikipedia and Google in a battle for the world’s information.

“Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn its place in natural results fairly,” he concluded, “but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks.”

Such thoughts haven’t been troubling Antony Mayfield, who many of us in Content & Media suspect of knowing the world’s information in the first place. As if to underline the point, he’s produced a impressive 11 posts on Open in the last fortnight, covering topics as diverse as Channel 4’s education programming, a military influence on the language of marketing, and, er, dining in Didcot.

Nilhan Jayasinghe has been a little quieter than Antony, but he notes a subtle but important change to the way Google regards subdomains, now treating them in the same way as subfolders on the main domain.

Antony’s also been covering a topic dear to the hearts of Spannerworks’ journalists: the ongoing rumblings at the NUJ as it struggles to keep pace with the changes in the trade. He explains that, in his lecture to a post-graduate class at the Cardiff School of Journalism:

“One of the things I hope I got across was the amazing opportunities that the web presents for doing things differently and for going direct to (attention) market with interesting ideas and approaches.

“Makes me wonder what the role of a union is in this age for journalists. Should it be to focus on employers and policies or ways of encouraging journalistic enterprise?”

Still on the subject of journalism, Charlie Peverett has been taking corporations to task for hijacking the language of environmentalism. He wonders on Hackbash whether it’s time that journalists got a little “strict with the terminology”:

“Organisations are falling over themselves to say that they’re ‘going green’. They may mean that they’re carbon-offsetting their transatlantic travel or sourcing their food locally or have recently insulated their loft space.

“But when organisations that have taken a few small steps to modify their own profoundly unsustainable behaviour are labelled ‘green’, by themselves or others, we should put our feet down.”

So, with many Spannerworkers looking forward to a week off after an amazing year, we bid you a happy Christmas - at least Dax Hammond has entered into the festive spirit, although we’re not sure Raymond Briggs would approve of IRN-BRU’s take on his Snowman classic.

We finally have the ultimate tool in the search marketing industry…

Yesterday our London office was scaled by the internationally famous human spiderman, Alain Robert. Robert defied the cold to climb the 27 storeys of Victoria’s most ugly office tower, sans cordes, in protest at climate change.

Insane videos galore at http://www.alainrobert.com/en/video.htm.

Spiders, search engines, world-wide-web… forget it!  ‘Tis the season to be silly.

Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.

It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.

Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.

Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?

The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.

Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…

The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.

We did it! On the 7th of September 2007, 8 Spannerworker’s successfully reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the worlds tallest free standing mountain. We have been raising money for a Children’s Home in Moshi, Tanzania, The Amani Kids Home, which is run on donations.

So, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way - our clients, our colleagues, and our friends and family. You have all been absolutely wonderful and we could not have done this without you, so thank you again. Notes and from the team and pictures of our journey are here.

The total amount raised currently stands at £12,402.72. Our target was £10,000.00.

Valerie Todd, Director of the Amani Home, says:

“Spannerworks’ dedicated support of Amani Children’s Home over the years is unparalleled.

The Spannerworks’ team’s climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro will make it possible for Amani to build a playground. For children who had been living on the streets, the chance to play and explore will be a wonderful gift for them, and an important part of how Amani restores hope and joy to their lives.”

In summary, we are totally chuffed that we all managed to climb Kilimanjaro, nobody got hurt or really ill, and we raised a shedload of money for a dedicated charity. Being able to visit the Amani Home and see how the money will help was really important to us, and we are even more pleased that we smashed our fundraising target.

Asanta sana!

Another busy month in the Spannerworks blogosphere: Dax Hamman has been coveting the iPod Touch, Antony Mayfield has been buying an iPod touch, and Nilhan Jayasinghe has been keeping us up to date with the latest from Google.

Last month, Nilhan blogged about the Google update penalising those who have been paying for links rather than earning them – the latest is that there seems to have been a cleanup of AdWords listings for link sellers. Nilhan says:

“Now all Google has to do is to stop bought links from working and we should see them out of the organic results”

Meanwhile, Dax has been to the ABTA travel convention, where he saw a preview of Microsoft’s new Photosynth software.

The software “allows hugely complex 3D, dynamic environments to be created automatically from a set of simple rules.”

There’s a preview of Photosynth on YouTube which Dax urges everybody to take a look at. The preview was created in part by using images sourced from Flickr, and Dax talks about the impact the software may have on social media:

“Social media has changed the way users interact and communicate with each other, tools such as Photosynth are taking this to a whole new level, and add a layer of applications that generate solutions from simple components.”

Antony Mayfield has been to a few conferences too. He spoke at the IAB’s annual Engage conference, and attended the Marketing Society conference where he overheard someone asking “Why does everyone keep pussyfooting around and not just tell us what brands should do?” – So that’s exactly what he’s done, with a list of things he thinks brands should be doing now.

Antony’s also been interviewed by Daryl Willcox Publishing. In the first of two videos, Antony talks about why he chose to ‘ditch’ a successful PR career to join Spannerworks, while in the second he is “banging on again about things PR people might do to take advantage of the digital revolution,” ending with a “nice rallying call to arms for PR people to take over the marketing world”.

Antony has also been busy putting together an update to Spannerworks’ What is Social Media? eBook, with which Chris Eden and journalists Charlie Peverett and Simon Handby were also involved.

Antony also comments on Arjo Ghosh’s recent Search Sense post on integrated media planning and connected thinking. Arjo’s been:

“Thinking a lot lately about whether we are developing into an integrated agency and about the implications of this for innovation in digital marketing, and how this addresses the challenges of how brands communicate going forwards.”