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Guardian Crowdsource the Sarah Palin emails

By Andrew Redfern @ 16th July 2011 10:13 am Internet News

The Guardian, faced with a huge mountain of data has turned to crowdsourcing in order to aid it’s research. 24,000 emails have been declassified by the US state of Alaska and enthusiastic users can clycle through them randomly and rate them as to how interesting they are.

It’s a useful way of engaging readership and a energising them as your research workforce…the sheer volume of the messages would surely make any revalations old news by the time the entire batch were read and evaluated. This way you give out the and democratise the information whilst moving the project along at the fastest possible pace.

The Guardian say “How do you get through 24,000 documents? Well, you enlist an army of readers to help us assess the document dump of the year.

They’ve been released as printed pages – yes, printouts of emails – in six boxes for each news organisation that requested them. We think it’s important to get the documents out into the world as soon as possible and see what you think about them – just like we did with MPs’ expenses.”

and whilst they have received complaints that some of the emails reveal personal details they re-iterate that it is the Alaskan State government who have released documents rather than a wikileak style leak.

Whatever the reaction and whatever is found in the emails it represents an impressive undertaking by both the newspaper and it’s readership

Is News Internationals Bad Week About to Get Worse As MySpace Bring Onboard Justin Timberlake

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th July 2011 2:55 pm Internet News

Not only have News International been forced to close Britains biggest selling Sunday newspaper , The News of the World, but they have sold MySpace for a massive loss with MySpace now seeing a rosier future outside of Rupert Murdoch’s control.

News International has not only been dealing with the fallout from this week’s phone hacking scandal but has also announced the sale of the once mighty MySpace for a measly $35million. Bear in mind that back in 2005 News International paid $580million for the social media giant and have now sold it for around 6% of the original purchase price.

MySpace, once the worlds’ number one social media site, has seen an astonishing decline in the past 6 years. Back when News international paid $580million it had 300million active users and the world was only just on the cusp of the social media revolution. Now MySpace has 90million users, many dormant, and this figure has been in decline for years.

The reason for this is not just the rise of Facebook and Twitter but a lack of innovation within MySpace after the takeover by News International. Facebook sought to make their site as simple to use as possible to increase signups and made social contact the very essence of the site to keep people engaged.

MySpace unquestionably allowed its users to personalise their pages more than Facebook, however in the long term this can be seen as a mistake as pages became slow to load, cluttered and engagement with other users was not placed at the heart of the site.

The uniformity of Facebook was not a handicap but a positive as all users had to do to set up a page was add a few personal details, a picture and simply find a few friends on the network. MySpace on the other hand was populated by hardcore users with highly developed individual pages which seemed to put off the casual browser from joining up. Once a newer, easier to use Social Network appeared MySpace simply faded into the background.

There was little in the way of innovation from News International, they pulled a few strings from their movie subsidiary companies to place references in films such as Iron Man and most notably Kick-Ass however nothing in the way of true innovation that would attract users, the lifeblood of any social network.

In essence News International never understood the medium they had bought into and were out manoeuvred by a smaller company that was able to revolutionise social media.

However now MySpace has been freed from its corporate straightjacket it has signalled its intent to fight back and seems to have made a smart move by signing up singer/dancer/actor/all round good guy Justin Timberlake as a partner.

MySpace was initially conceived as a way for bands, musicians, performers and artists to communicate with each other and their fans and it seems as though bringing onboard Justin Timberlake they are going back to their roots. They could hardly have picked a better figurehead as Justin Timberlake has an immense international, cross-generational and cross genre appeal.

Could this be the first move in the renaissance of MySpace? If it is News International could end up with even more egg on their face for selling the company for $35million to go with the half a billion loss on their balance sheet, the loss of the Britain’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper and a hurricane of truly awful publicity to cap a nightmare week for Rupert Murdoch.

The last domain name landgrab?

By Andrew Redfern @ 21st June 2011 10:59 am Internet News

Yesterday it was announced that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or Icann has voted to release who new myriad of options for domain names. It means that companies can pay to have their brand as a top level domain. This obviously is an attractive option so expect to see .pepsi trying to outrank .coke and the big internet destinations moving to domains like .apple .google or .bbc.

This option doesn’t come cheap and it is being reported that it will cost over £100k for apply for one of these new domains and Icann have stated that a company will have to be able to demonstrate that they have the right of fair usage for this extension. This will doubtlessly open a can of worms in certain areas, expect howls of derision from Newcastle and Leeds when the application for the .utd extension is applied for by a certain Manchester based organisaiton.

At present there is 22 geneic domain extensions avaiable after the industry specific ones were added to the list with the last round of expansions. They are :

.aero : air transport industry
.arpa : special legacy domain for technical use
.asia: Asian websites and organisations
.biz : business (Primarily as alternative/expansion to .com)
.cat : Websites in the Catalan language
.com : companies
.coop : co-operatives
.edu : educational institutions
.gov : government institutions
.info : informational websites
.int : international organisations
.jobs : employment & recruitment websites
.mil : military organisations
.mobi : mobile based sites
.museum : museums
.name : personal names for resumes etc
.net : Orignally networking technologies now has broader use
.org : non-profit organisations
.post : postal services
.pro : professionals
.tel : telecoms
.travel : travel

And these are augmented on a country by country basis with the national domains such as .uk, .de .ie. This new expansion opens up limitless possibilities at a price. The race will now be one to formulate effective switchover policies for big companies so that a switch from www.????.com to www.home.???? doesn’t come with a huge plunge in rankings.

Perhaps more likely is that these new domains will exist alongside the old tried and test traditional domain and act as almost a walled garden to keep specific marketing campaigns under the corporate umbrella. Effectively this will mean a much more flexible and customisable alternative to a sub-domain. Our pay per click department might for example dispense with their traditional http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/pay.php page and run their own macro-level “microsite” with the domain http://www.payperclick.hitsearch.

The implmentations of these domain extensions and the sites that organisations develop using them throw up numerous case studies. Some good, some bad and whilst the price tag that comes with one of these suffixes means that the rank and file are excluded from the devlopment it will be extremely interesting to watch how they are implemented.

Google launch their new Operating System, the Google Chrome OS

By Andrew Redfern @ 16th June 2011 9:37 am Internet News

Google have signalled their intent to revolutionise the world of operating systems with the launch in the UK and 6 other countries on the 15^th June of the first computers that will use the new Google operating system.

The new operating system on these new hardware devices is Google’s Chrome OS which has been developed as the next step on from Google’s Chrome web browser.

Google are hoping the Chrome Operating System will see the start of a new generation of operating systems that are purely web based. The marketing buzz for the new system is “nothing but the web” and Google are hoping it provides a new model whereby the features of an operating system are mobile and can be used across a number of different devices.

The idea of a computer based almost entirely around web based applications and storage is not unique to Google with Apple launching the iCloud where all your music, applications, documents are all stored off your hardware. However Google’s very own cloud operating system is the most fully realised of all those that have yet been brought to market.

Combining its dominant position in Search with Googles growing strength in the browser market with Chrome means Google seems to believe it has the foundations to even challenge the dominance of Microsoft in the Operating System market.

With the number of searches from Mobile devices predicted to overtake those from computers by 2015 in many countries it is likely that more and more people will choose to access the web from systems and devices that do not have the requirement of a traditional operating system.

It may be that in the future most people will be able dispense with computers that are run via non web based operating systems and access everything they need from the new web based systems.

The new computers using Google’s system are being manufactured by Samsung and Acer with Samsungs Series 5 Notebook leading the way

WikiLeaks Battle to Stay Online

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th December 2010 1:14 pm Internet News

WikiLeaks, the website which has been leaking 250,000 damaging and embarrassing US Diplomatic secrets since the 29th November 2010 has had to move its domain name twice since Friday after cyber attacks. On Friday, US host EveryDNS.net terminated services, it said the attacks threatened “the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites”.

After being forced off the Everydns.net server, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, described the decision as “privatisation of state censorship” in the US.

Online retailer Amazon which had previously hosted WikiLeaks ended its agreement to host the site on Wednesday after it broke its terms of service by publishing classified content which it did not have the rights to. It has since moved its servers to France and Switzerland taking the wkikileaks.ch domain name.

It has since published a list of mirror sites containing the exact same information as the WikiLeaks site, which it hopes will provide continuous access to the domain. PayPal, the online payment processor has cut access for donations to WikiLeaks as its services cannot be used for activities “that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity” thus violating the acceptable use policy.

During the weekend the French Government took WikiLeaks’ main servers based in France offline it warned it was unacceptable that the country host sites which “violate the secret of diplomatic relations.”The Swiss registrar Switch, on Saturday said there was no reason for it to be taken off line. The Swiss Pirate Party has since started work moving the servers to Sweden to keep the domain online.

The site is not available in most parts of the UAE and China, although through the increasing number of mirror sites, access is becoming easier. Assenge Tweeted that there are now 355 mirror sites, this number is believed to be growing, WikiLeaks has asked users to create mirror sites using their hosting resources.

It is not the first time that WikiLeaks has had its domain disabled, in 2008 after releasing confidential information on a smaller scale, a group of Swiss bankers filed a law suit against the site, resulting in a court order for the domain to be disabled. Similar to the recent developments, it also used mirroring to stay online.

Ryanair Takes ihateryanair.co.uk Domain Name

By Andrew Redfern @ 14th October 2010 1:52 pm Internet News

It’s the airline we all love to hate but Ryanair have won a dispute to take the ihateryanair.co.uk domain name. It was ruled that Robert Tyler, the unhappy Ryanair passenger who set up the website that criticises the airline had to handover the domain name as he had made £322 from commercial links. By accepting money from advertisers and affiliates on the back on Ryanair’s trademarked name, Tyler broke the company that registers domain names – Nominet’s terms of policy upon registration of the website. The adjudicator said that Tyler made the money through increased traffic to the site, generated through the use of Ryanair in the domain name and the airline’s reputation; was the only reason for the handover.

This means it was not down to the highly critical content about Ryanair, an expert said the .uk domain should be able to host sites criticising companies and are “essential in a democratic society”.

Tyler has not been deterred from his cause and has since moved his site to ihateryanair.org and will continue to provide the latest news on – in his words – the world’s most hated airline, without the use of paid for adverts.

TAL-HS-141010

Hit Search Online Marketing: Digital Marketing Budgets to Increase by 17 Per Cent

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 2:19 pm Internet News

A number of businesses are set to increase their digital marketing budgets by around 17 per cent this year.

That’s the findings of a recent survey carried out amongst firms in both Britain and the US.

Online marketing network site Econsultancy found that digital marketing would account for almost a quarter of total marketing budgets in 2010.

Of all the firms that participated in the study, 46 per cent said they were planning to increase their overall marketing budget for 2010, while over 50 per cent of companies are planning to increase their mobile marketing budgets.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are set to come into their own in 2010, with 70 per cent of businesses looking to increase their spending on these areas of marketing in the next 12 months.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said: “Digital evangelists have long been trying to get the big brands to spend more on online marketing (especially display advertising), and social media is now helping to give impetus to a second wave of marketers who are moving budgets online.

“Why? Because they see digital as crucial to brand reputation, and they’re right.”

Meanwhile, another survey released this week claimed that online spending on business to business marketing will grow by 8 per cent during the coming year, followed by a 14 per cent rise in 2012.

Ref: HSLP0101AA207

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