Search Sense

A busy month - not only did the Spannerworks brand gently sail into the horizon, but an IKEA’s-worth of timber crashed onto Brighton beach. It was an event nimbly recorded by a number of iCrossing photographers, including Dean Harvey, who took this striking shot of the ‘wood slick’ near the pier.

As usual, there were diverse insights from the company’s regular bloggers. On Open, Antony Mayfield considered the fog of revolution in which we find ourselves, and how hard it is to imagine our way into the future even as we understand the technological advances of the past.

Revolutions are sudden changes, but they are also things which take place over time and the effect of which increase as time passes. The web is a revolution that will continue to bring incredible undreamt of changes to our lives for as long as we live and for some time afterwards, I expect.

However, for those wanting to try and understand the current media revolution through those of the past, Antony suggests some good starting points.

Should we be judged on our link networks? Nilhan Jayasinghe hopes not, after a school cop was put under investigation for linking to a MySpace profile that in turn linked to a porn site.

Nilhan wonders whether lawmakers and employers will be able to interpret proximity in networks, given that virtually anything is a mere click away from Google. Although he may of course just have been winding up to the punchline:

After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.

Nilhan’s also been enthusing about lijit, a form of social search engine that pulls in content that you or your blog network has posted elsewhere.

The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles….. And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.

Meanwhile, at Hackbash, Simon Handby noted an Experian report that predicts the rise of the ’super-advocate’ this year. Simon applauded the way that it described “how companies are losing the power to dictate how they’re represented online”, and how they will increasingly have to earn good relationships within their networks. However, he also noted that the accompanying press release apparently failed to run with the report’s insight.

The language of the release itself is an interesting contrast. It talks of the importance of super advocates and their “huge online following”, and gushes that they represent “citizen journalism at its most powerful”, yet it also says that they can be among a company’s harshest critics “if handled badly” - a jarring, old-school PR phrase if ever there was one.

IMAGE: Brighton Daily Photo

Even if Spannerworks’ bloggers took a few days off over Christmas, the festive season wasn’t short of news on the subjects dear to our hearts.

Silly season set in not long after the last roundup, with a rash of Christmas-themed stories around search and the internet. Search queries after the big day revealed a lack of appetite for leftovers, but our favourite was the Google Maps mashup that let kids of all ages track Santa on his rounds. The fun was over in the new year, though, with Yahoo! announcing the demise of its 12-year internet veteran Yahoo! Picks.

Computing Which? announced that Bebo is the best-performing social networking site, with the magazine narrowly rating its security above arch-rival Facebook. As if to prove the point, Facebook users have since been warned about an application that may be a ’social worm’.

Potentially the most important story of the last couple of weeks is the much-anticipated launch of the Wikia Search alpha, though it caused widespread disappointment. Writing on Kocchi Kade after some of the dust had settled, Nilhan Jayasinghe explained that his feelings had turned to apathy.

“I’m no longer angry at the crappy results or the fact that their crawler had managed to completely miss my site,” he wrote, going on to explain how the infant search engine lacked sophistication when it came to attempts to manipulate results that other search engines had kicked out years ago: “On a search for ‘cheap flights’ it even pulls in a picture of some bloke, just cos he said he’s interested in cheap space flights,” he lamented.

However, there may be light on the horizon for Wikia, as Nilhan explains: “The clever bit comes once the user base start to provide their expertise.

“This may yet do something useful or at least vaguely interesting… I love the idea of using social signals to drive search, but this is not going to fly anytime soon and I’m guessing never.”

Open source

Antony Mayfield took a break over Christmas, and managed to hold out for 17 days between 2007’s last post to Open and the first of 2008. He’s back bigger than ever, though, racking up ten posts in the five days to 9 January.

Picking up on the Facebook social worm scare, Antony says that for most users this is likely to be far more important than Facebook’s newfound enthusiasm for data portability. He warns: “It’s… confirmation of every IT department’s fears / warnings about why people shouldn’t be using FB at work (any by extension, any other social media applications). A setback, then, for advocates of giving employees access to social computing tools freely in the workplace…”

Antony also discusses the use of Twitter as a peer-reviewing platform. In a follow up post on the Tweet Scan search tool for Twitter, he reflects: “Have to say that if you’re working with an entertainment brand especially, searching Twitter for reviews / mentions must be one of the best most instant ways of getting feedback…”

Feedback was all the rage on Hackbash, after student journalist Dave Lee picked up on the wording used in Spannerworks’ advertisements for its current journalist vacancy: “I have no problem with people wanting to enter the world of PR,” he wrote. “What I have a problem with is when jobs such as this are advertised as journalism. Journalism it is certainly not.”

We agreed with Dave’s assessment: the wording didn’t sound like journalism to us either, so we pulled the advert and rewrote it to better describe what we do.

The position is still open, so please get in touch if you’re interested.

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.

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.”

Over at Open, Antony Mayfield has been discussing ‘facebooksofting’, a term dropped into a recent conference to describe mucking about on Facebook – apparently “softing” means relaxing in Norwegian. Antony says he quite likes the term and may start using it to irritate people.

He’s also been relating the discussion from the blogosphere, about whether the social networking site is:

about to connect the world and become the new Google or [an] inflating bubble of hype that will soon burst.

Antony also mentions a BBC Trust event he attended. Apparently the conversation immediately turned to points relating to the BBC that the Trust had not intended to address, but which were dominating conversation about the BBC in the blogosphere. In short, the Trust found itself unable to define the conversation, an observation that led Antony to talk about the new challenge facing all organisations:

You can’t set the agenda in a network. You can encourage, initiate, influence and invite, but you can’t ignore what’s there or you will disqualify yourself from the most important conversations, discount your usefulness, mark down your relevance and even your legitimacy, ultimately.

Antony has also been wondering what the National Union of Journalists is thinking, as some of the Union’s most respected members express their dissatisfaction by leaving.

One of Spannerworks’ own journalists Simon Handby has written for the Press Gazette on the subject of being noticed on the web having been, well, noticed on the web, via Hackbash.

Over at Experiences in Online Marketing, Dax Hamman has been talking about the way in which Google has become like the Hoover of search engines, as well as reviewing the new Guinness advert.

Meanwhile, Nilhan Jayasinghe has been keeping us all updated on the latest news from Google, after the Google PageRank update penalised those who have been paying for links rather than earning them.

More work for those of us in content creation, perhaps?