The website has the provocative title of www.pleaserobme.com and it cleverly aggregates feeds from sites like Google Buzz and FourSquare where users are encouraged to make their precise whereabouts public. By doing this, they are effectively telling the world that their home is empty - a point that is made particularly poignant by the name of the site. The founders did not set this up to aid wannabe burglars, instead it was created to make the point that websites are holding ever more confidential and sensitive information and that this information can be used for both good and evil depending on the end-users motives.

Mashable do a really good review of the site and what it is capable of here: http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/pleaserobme/. Well worth a look. 

However, we have recently discovered a little known secret - that having a fully search engine optimised video on your homepage can make your site 53 times more likely of getting a Page 1 Google ranking (according to Forrester Research 2009).

This does not mean simply uploading a video onto a video hosting platform, such as Youtube, and embredding it onto your website; it means utilising a video that has been specifically optimised for the web. These videos are then submitted to video search engines, such as Google Video, Yahoo Video or Blinkx, where they can link back to your website and in turn, increase your page ranking.

There are many ways in which to optimise video for the web. Outlined below are the most important:

• Create unique and worth-watching video in order to capture an audience.
• Create your video in as many formats and qualities as possible to make it available to the widest audiences.
• The use off keywords. This includes naming your video using the keywords you wish it to be found by, as well as the webpage where it is hosted.
• Video metadata properties. The properties available will vary by file type and the authoring software you use, but the premise is the same as html file metadata. Include keywords, as well as the word ‘video’ within the titles, tags and description fields.
• Watermark or brand your video.
• Create RSS and Atom feeds for any video content on your website.

Search engines are increasingly becoming more filtered with their results: a keyword can bring back a combination of search, news, image, social networking and video results. There are less multimedia rich results than normal html search results, so you will always have a better chance of your video, and therefore your website, being picked up by search engines and allowing that elusive ‘top of page 1’ rank to be reached.

At ScoreComms we highly recommend that the use of video be considered whenever possible, especially on the homepage of a website. We work with an excellent video production company who specilaise in web-related content so get in contact if you’d like to consider adding video to your website.

For more information, Blinkx has also created a Guide to Video SEO and it proves a fascinating read. 

We’ve already posted a couple of entries on Google Wave, what it is, how it works etc… This video shows in glorious colour exactly what the system is about, how it can integrate various mediums and channels and connect everything together under one central theme.

...oh, and it’s pretty funny too.

1. Don’t implement new technology like Twitter just for the sake of it.
2. Put clear actions and contact details above the fold of the page.
3. Ensure that set actions are something the viewer will actually do.
4. Provide localised information - how can a potential supporter get involved on a local level and where.

Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/18/thomas-gensemer-online-election-campaign

Posterous is the dead simple place to post everything.

Requiring no set up or sign up, Posterous allows users to enter the world of online blogging through the use of email, having all the tools of a normal online blog or website including all types of media, comments, social networking tools and a fully customisable layout. One simply writes an email and Posterous does the rest.

Therefore, it is advantageous for someone who doesn’t really have the time or patience to blog in a number of ways.

It is quite simple to use and its capabilities are quite amazing. Once a user has sent their first email post to Posterous, an account is created using that email address where a user can then create their profile, choose a theme or use the default. You can then choose from various settings which include adding password protection to a blog for privacy or allowing Posterous to update a person’s social networking accounts with the emailed blog post at the same time as Posterous is updated. A user can also attach files to the email including images, music and video which Posterous will style into an image gallery or video channel as appropriate.

The service can be of great benefit to large organisations in many ways. We live in the age of email movers, where many people own Blackberrys or iPhones and use them to access their email on the move. Posterous allows for blogging on the move and is great for people who live by their emails and don’t get a chance to go onto any websites while at work or home. Multiple employees within businesses can write their own posts to the same blog with Posterous’ Group Posts feature and if a company wishes to use their own domain name (for example, instead of http://www.scorecomms.posterous.com, we could have http://www.scorecomms.com/blog) this is easily set up. The look and feel of the blog can also be customised to match a company’s corporate identity. The advantages of a company having any form of blog is huge, especially from a search engine perspective, making Posterous a great asset.

We were recently instructed to create a customised Posterous account for a UK Government Department. It was the first time that we had heard of the service but our experience in creating their account was a very positive one. Easy to set-up and use with a simple admin panel to customise the features required and anyone with HTML and CSS skills can easily customise a theme layout. All functions are documented and already laid out in the correct places and all it takes a a few tweaks. Personally, I think it is a great platform to use and although it may well be an unknown quantity at the moment, we expect to see it up there with the other key blogging and social media platforms before too long.

The true task for Google on this one is centred on how far/successful the organisation will be at changing the mindset of the public from their existing mail-inbox-centic working practices to this much more fluid way of working. Well, if there’s one company on the planet that can claim to have a pretty strong track record with regards to changing daily work practices and agendas - Google would be the ones.

We’re having a play with this as a team over the next few months and will report back our experience for those who are interested. 

“Facebook: The Movie” tells the story of the creation and evolution of the popular website from 2004 to the present. The filmmakers are hunting for a suitable male lead to play Mark Zuckerberg, who created the site and turned his idea into a $16 billion company.

This short clip from movie website http://www.makingof.com shows Sorkin explaining why he signed up to this movie without any hesitation…

Essentially, yellowBird has developed technology to top this feat: 3D video footage is captured and in the production room this footage is stitched together to enable a viewer to immerse himself and move around in a similar environment, but with real footage as the backdrop.

Popular technology website TechCrunch recently featured the news as a headline story a few days ago and as a direct result yellowBird’s server ‘experienced unprecedented user activity’.  However, we don’t need this fact to appreciate that this is an exciting technological development and the implications are enormous (listen out to the collective sound of the gaming and entertainment industry bods all sitting up and taking note).

Unfortunately, the extra traffic to the site has meant yellowBird has since removed its demo version. However, TechCrunch has embedded a version along with its excellent article and I suggest you go there now and take a look.

Treasury Minister, Stephen Timms has just been given the brief of carrying through the proposals of the Govt’s Digital Britain report as he takes up the role about to be vacated by the outgoing Minister - Lord Carter.

The Guardian spells out the details in this report: http://tinyurl.com/digtimms

His main task will be to push through some very controversial plans including:

1. a £6-a-year levy on all phone lines to pay for the next generation of super-fast broadband networks
2. a Digital Economy bill to be brought before parliament in the autumn.

It will therefore be his ultimate responsibility to ensure that all British homes have access to fast broadband internet by 2012, before switching off the analogue radio signal three years later.

Things are far from on-track on this at the moment as the independent body supposed to ensure that fast broadband is available to all by 2012 was meant to be set up last month, but it will not have a chief executive until October. Consultation on the tax levy was due to be completed early next month but does not appear to have even started yet.

The report also pledged that the government will reduce online piracy by 70% through a system of warning letters to persistent offenders, backed up by the threat of reducing their broadband speeds but this has gone nowhere to date.

So, why has Timms been given this near impossible task? Is it because of his background as a former e-commerce Minister or perhaps his time spent as a technology analyst? Maybe its just because he looks geeky enough to blend in with technology elite? Perhaps. More likely however is that Timms has strong experience of apologising on behalf of the Government for broken promises and generally under-delivering.

In his previous role, Timms was also responsible for delivering another key Government pledge…

In 1997, the new Blair Government made a bold promise to halve child poverty by 2010 and then eradicate it completely by 2020. With more than 4 million children still under the poverty line and the economic climate blowing all chances of this pledge being met by next year totally out of the water, this is one promise that the Government has fallen way short on.  We have worked on the digital aspect of End Child Poverty’s campaign for the last 2 years and as part of this work I attended their AGM earlier this year where, to his credit, the Minister accepted an invitation to come and explain to a relatively hostile audience, why the Government had failed on this pledge and what they were planning on doing about it.

I suspect that in selecting Lord Carter’s replacement, the Prime Minister was not only looking for someone who understood the digital brief, but also, a Minister that has had the experience of saying sorry. If this is the case, Timms may therefore be a wise choice.