Unintentionally Blank

Master of search and advertising, Google certainly doesn’t waste time in it’s business ventures! On Friday, I was surprised to read the unsubstantiated, and self proclaimed 40% likely, rumour that Google was to buy YouTube. Now I see that they have paid $1.65 billion for the social video site.

So what of Google Video? What does this tell us about Google’s current strategies? First search and advertising on Myspace now they buy up another popular social site, have they run out of ideas or did they miss the web 2.0 boat and decided to throw their money into catching up? What do you think?

Then again, $1.65 billion… if only I had that much to spend.

Google announced the Google Blog Search Pinging Service today. If you want to make sure your latest posts appear in Google’s Blog Search then, like other services including Technorati or Weblogs.com, you will want to ping them when you update. This can be done in two ways:

Continue reading “Pinging Google Blog Search With Wordpress” »

Thanks to Roger Johansson’s post on false accessibility claims on public sector websites I came across Bruce Lawson and Dan Champion’s campaign to find out what went wrong in the recent £200,000 redesign of the DTI website. The short story is that after redesigning, the DTI displayed a message on the accessibility area of their site, claiming to conform to AA-level standard of the WCAG 1.0. Bruce and Dan’s problem was that it didn’t, quite, quite obviously.

What’s This About Alt Attributes Then?

I only just found out about this awful use of taxpayers money, especially as I am about to start paying taxes myself, I decided to have a look at the DTI website to see what was wrong. To start with, I noted a table based, tag soup layout (a automatic failure of WCAG 1.0 guidelines 3.3 [use CSS for layout] and 5.3 [Do not use tables for layout]) and 69 errors (on the front page) when run through the W3C’s validator. Then I disabled images and almost fell off my chair.

Continue reading “Learning By Mistakes - The ALT Attribute” »

Over the last couple of days, Akismet racked up the 1000th attempt at spamming this site in just 3 months. Only one of those was a false positive (sorry Hans).

Over the time I have spent deleting spam from the Akismet section I have come to wonder what the spammers get out of it. Some comments are gibberish and the majority (on this site anyway) are trying to sell either fake drugs or sex. How is this going to help anyone who reads this blog? Wordpress now includes rel="nofollow" in all comment URLs which means that Google will not give any credit to those URLs in it’s site rankings. So comment spam doesn’t affect their hallowed PageRank. What is in it for them?

Continue reading “Spam - Some Inspiration” »