If you too think you can snap up a potential goldmine - think again. There’s more than 150,000,000 domains registered worldwide and the number is growing daily.

Beneath are a few domain names that have made a mint:

Business.com
Sold for £4,600,000

Vodka.com
Sold for £1,500,000

Recycle.co.uk
Sold for £150,000 (not a load of rubbish after all)

Fund.com
Sold for £4,800,000

Cruises.co.uk
Sold for £560,000 (record holder for a .co.uk)

Diamond.com
£3,700,000.

In the UK, we have traditionally used underground copper pipes that aid the transfer of internet-data and traffic, otherwise known as bandwidth. Recently, a huge rise in bandwidth from websites such as YouTube and other streaming-media websites means that we are putting an immense amount of pressure on our pipes. The internet is doubling in size every two years. 2007 saw YouTube using the same amount of bandwidth that was used for the entire internet in 2000 - thats a lot of bandwidth.

Bill Thompson of City University said “I think we’re in trouble. If you’ve got kids on YouTube and parents on iPlayer, it all starts to go very slow”. But fear not - help is on the way thanks to recent discoveries that are set to revolutionise the web.

Cern are a nuclear reasearch organisation, they have created servers that are linked by fibre optic cables that work upto 10,000 times faster than the broadband we know. Here’s the part that isn’t quite as cheerful - BT are estimating that to install a national fibre optic network the costs could mount to the £20bn mark. Ouch.

It has now become apparent that with a multitude of infantile and ever-so-irritating applications facebook’s once-tidy profile pages have now become a mess. Users are forced to trawl through application upon application to get to what they finally want. All I wanted to do was to write on a friends wall - not to buy him a virtual glass of beer, not to let him know what my Celebrity name is and certainly not to tell him that “I’m interested” in him.

With that said, I do admire Facebook’s constant awareness of usability. They’ve seen what’s happening and have decided to tidy up facebook profiles once and for all. What a nice bunch of people they are.

As you can see the profiles are a lot less cluttered. Facebook look to be restoring a key aspect of their website that was pivotal in gaining one of the fastest growing online communities in the world - usability.

For more information, checkout Facebook’s blog here.

Was I disappointed? I was about as disappointed as a kid who’s family won the lottery the week before Christmas. Was I amazed? I was more than amazed. These guys have talent which unfortunately these days we aren’t exposed to enough.

Sad as it seems, record labels are signing lots of vocally incapable kids who’s talent does not lie in music but in their image and markability potential so it’s great to see some real music is still being produced. However this is not your average busking group.

Back to this video I was directed to, Naturally 7 deliver an acapella-style performance whilst travelling on public transport in France. What starts as a couple of people looking over their shoulder results in the whole train absorbed by their musical abilities. I could sing their praises for hours on end, however I’ll let you be the judge of their skills.

But what on earth has this got to do with the internet, web-design, web-development or anything technical for that matter? Well its simple. These guys, before they did this acapella on the train were relatively unknown. Since posting that video up on youtube, the video has received 1,303,687 plays at the time of writing this article. Quite impressive. So through viral marketing, and people passing on this link, it would appear they have gained international fame signing to EMI one of the biggest record labels in the music industry. With the help from websites such as myspace and youtube, real musicians have managed to claw to the top, regardless of their image or personas.

Naturally 7, we salute you.

Through photo-manipulation and hours of hard-work they have digitally altered images, to recreate biblical scenes such as:

• Moses and the parting of the Red Sea
• Noah’s Ark
• Christ’s Crucifiction
• Garden of Eden

The ‘satellite pictures’ are currently on show at an art fair in Miami. However, these pieces of art do not come at a small price with each set setting you back $36,000 USD.

Although some may see this as religious controversy, co-founder Jonathan Kneebone would argue otherwise. He said “it was a way to play with the whole idea that if you can capture something from a satellite it must exist”. He further explains that the images were put together like digital “jigsaw puzzles” made from collated images of Niagara Falls to create an illusion of the Red Sea parting.

Either way, we at Score think they’ve definately pulled these ones off! True modern day masterpeices expressing real originality through art and technology.

For more information, visit Glue Society

When the announcement came that the new Government were going back on their manifesto pledge (Namely: “We have no plans to introduce University top-up fees, and have legislated to prevent their introduction") our response was weak, almost to the point of embarrassing. A few protests and a couple of demonstrations, but other than that, a pretty easy time for the Govt.

This always left me feeling a little ashamed of myself for not having done more. I loved my Uni days and would not have swapped them for anything. I was one of those rare students that really enjoyed my course (Politics and Contemporary History) and really enjoyed my lectures and seminars. The fact that Uni was being whipped away from so many people as a result of this measure is one that really concerned me.

I can’t help feeling that if this had happened in the 60’s or 70’s there would have been a massive student revolt with slightly more militant action forcing the Govt to back-down.

It was therefore with great interest that I read about the way in which HSBC were forced to back down on their plan to charge graduate accounts following a viral campaign on Facebook which brought with it a very real threat of chaos in its branches.

Using emails, text messages and social networking sites, the students wanted a legal way of showing dissatisfaction of HSBC’s adding to their existing debts and planned a series of flash-mob type queues in city centre branches which would have effectively brought them to a halt.

Thousands of students signed up to condemn the bank’s new charge and facing the prospect of massive disruption, the bank’s executives decided that it would be sensible to freeze the charging scheme and provide refunds on interest already taken.

NUS vice-president Wes Streeting, who set up the Facebook protest, said: “Using Facebook made a world of difference to our campaign. By setting up a group on a site that is incredibly popular with students, it enabled us to contact students during the summer vacation far more easily than would otherwise have been possible. It also meant that we could involve former members - graduates who were going to be most affected by this policy.”

Read more about the HSBC case study.

With a platform such as Facebook, the possibilities for creating an organized protest and mobilizing large numbers of people to take action is much more viable. I wonder if this would have made a difference had it been around a few years back?

In the 90’s politicians wooed the MTV generation in a bid to win the vote of Generation X. Now, the battleground has moved on: it’s all about social networks and garnering as much support as possible using the least expensive method.

The early stages of the US Presidentials have shown us the way things are going. The 2009/10 UK General Election will see a shift in advertising spends from the main parties from mainstream media to digital media with a marked increase on social networking sites like Facebook. The appeal of building a presence on these platforms is not difficult to get to grips with. One user can reach thousands of “friends” within their network by adding an application that allows supporters to display their party allegiance, receive party updates and election briefings.

No serious US presidential candidate would be without these tools and in the UK both main parties already have their own Facebook applications. At present these have very few active users compared to their US counterparts; however, this will no doubt change over the next 12 months as we gear up to an election.

The London Mayoral race in May should be an interesting UK case study for this trend with Boris already having added his “Back Boris” application to Facebook. A well designed and well executed little app that pushes users towards his campaign website, the developers have used e-bay colours to package their candidate:

The key to all of this, as with any campaign is money. For the cost of one TV or Newspaper ad, you could develop thousands of these apps and the likelihood that they will engage with the viewer is much higher than it would be in a newspaper as the viewer is one click away from becoming a supporter or campaign contributor.

One of the most extreme examples of the political power that these platforms now possess is the recent spoof campaign by Stephen Colbert to run for President. The star of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has somehow managed to gather over a million supporters via networking sites like Facebook. One recent poll, (taken by Rasmussen Reports October 19–21) had Colbert receiving 13% as an independent running against Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Results were particularly high among respondents aged 18–29, where Colbert received 28% of the vote among likely voters in a Giuliani–Clinton contest. One reporter commented that if Colbert continues “gaining over 10% a week”, he should be leading the field before November is out.

The Facebook group “1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert” claims to be the fastest growing Facebook group in the site’s history, having averaged 78 new members per minute surpassing one million members on October 26, less than ten days after its creation. Colbert’s group grew at such a rapid rate that it led one Facebook representative to tell the New York Times that the group had begun “overloading one of our servers.” The achievement has been given as an example of the networking site’s “uncanny ability to mashup the serious and the silly aspects of everything it touches.” As of October 25, 2007, the group was the most popular political group on the site, outnumbering the 380,000 of Obama’s “1 Million Strong Group”, the 500,000 of “Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)” and the 615,000 of “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!”.

UK party strategists take note, the next election will be a whole new ball game.

Musicians, video directors, bloggers and comedians - we have a new big-kid joining myspace!

They go by the name of Network Rail and these guys are using a whole different approach to myspace - raising awareness for road safety.

After seeing a little advert on myspace for a new track entitled “Rush” by “DJ Riskee” which featured Lucy Pinder (one of my personal favourites), I thought I had to give it a whirl! The video starts with a young man driving his car through the city at a fast-pace passing by beautiful women, waving to them as they pass and engaging in a little banter with other female drivers on the road. While all this is going on, a trendy house-style track is being played in the background, appealing to myself and many other people my age. All the while, I’ve got my eyes open ready to see when Lucy Pinder makes an appearance. The video goes on a little more and the driver has now left the city at night and now finds himself driving down a country road. The whole video has been sped up to add to the effect.

The driver finally comes to a level crossing - where he then realises its too late to slow down. You hear the crash but don’t actually see it. The video finishes with the message “Level Crossings - Don’t run the risk!”.

I thought the concept and the way that this whole campaign has been carried out was excellent and extremely effective. I like many others was lured into watching this video, and I’m sure that this message has reached its target audience.

They also have a custom-style myspace layout. Unlike the many similar myspace profiles that we see day-to-day - this profile has got a very trendy unique design to it, once again appealing to people of my age group (21-30).

All in all… i take my hat off to these guys. They’ve put together an extremley serious message here and delivered it in a modern way using one of the biggest social platforms in the world today - myspace.

How many hours have I wasted on Facebook? Who knows? Of all the applications that should be developed for the site, the one that I should really have added is a timer that keeps track of the amont of time I’ve spent on the Social Networking site. For some people it has become a genuine addiction and what started out as keeping in touch with a few friends and checking out what they’ve been up to has turned into an obsession that borders on the ridiculous.

One blogger has come up with an excellent exit strategy for anyone who (like me) finds themselves in this position. Take a look at their 5 step guide to leaving Facebook.

Huge news from Google as the much anticipated presentation application has now been launched and added to their Google Docs portfolio. This is a massive step for Google and has been about two years in the making. It now means that Google can compete with Microsoft with each of their main applications with the added benefit of allowing simple and easy online collaboration for teams who are jointly working on documents at the same time. With a full audit history of who changed what and when + the ability to allow multiple changes to the same document at the same time, this is an extremely powerful set of tools.

We have had a little play with this already and it definitely hits the mark in terms of our expectations. It is really simple and easy to use. It lacks many of the more detailed functions that PowerPoint offers, for example, transitions and animations are not available yet, but the way we would use this tool is to prepare all content and info on the slides as a group and then export it to PowerPoint for one person to tidy up and finish off by sorting out the transitions and effects. Another useful benefit is that you will always have a copy of your presentation saved online somewhere so this can act as your back up instead of taking a bunch of paper copies to your big pitch.

Part of our role here at Score is to help our clients harness the newest and most powerful web-based technologies so we will definitely be introducing some of our clients to this new tool straight away. 

Thumbalizr is a new online image tool that allows users to take screen shots of web pages. It’s helpful for people (like us) who are constantly taking screenshots of pages, editing them in Photoshop and then sending them on to clients to review.

The site is still very much in its embryonic stages and they seem to be victims of their own marketing success as it appears that their site is unable to cope with the large volume of traffic that they are currently experiencing.

Still, handy little tool if they can get their server to perform well enough.