Don’t forget about local search

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

There’s a good article posted by Nine by Blue’s Vanessa Fox (who, when working for google was responsible for google’s webmaster central), about why restaurants should care about local search. Amongst the key points that it makes is that your business needs to take on a holistic approach to its online presence, not concentrating solely […]

Marketing Pullman’s ‘The good man Jesus, the scoundrel Christ’ online – some lessons

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

There’s a interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without […]

But does your brand ‘need’ to be on facebook?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

There’s a good article in Mashable magazine entitled ‘Why Your Brand Needs to be on Facebook Now’, which goes back over the fact that Facebook hit a milestone recently when it became a more visited site than google in the US – that’s their main reasoning behind why your brand needs to be up there: […]

Alice Hoffman blasts reviewer on Twitter

Monday, June 29th, 2009

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel. There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so […]

Twitter trashes skewed Daily Mail poll

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter. The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ‘should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as […]

Self-Publishing? What should you pay for your website.

Friday, June 19th, 2009

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make. They presume that, […]

#wossybookclub teaches some twitter lessons for authors online

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

The power of twitter (and social networking / online presence in general) to shift books has been forcefully demonstrated by the almost impromptu launch of the #wossybookclub. Jonathan Ross, the tv celebrity who tweets using @wossy and has over 250,000 followers, decided last week to set up a book club on twitter. Browse over to […]

Twitter users target Twitter with their anger

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

It’s a web 2.0 irony, that the biggest social networking platforms find their biggest pr nightmares occuring through the use of their very own structure. It happened recently with Facebook when users started setting up facebook groups demanding a return to the old design, after Facebook changed the layout of user profiles (to give public […]

Learning a lesson from Facebook’s localisation into Hindi

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Localisation is the over-technical term used by software developers to describe the translation of their programs into other languages. It serves a purpose, though, to stress that translation is far more than simply substituting words from one language to another. For a program to work in different markets different cultures need to be taken into […]

Google combat spam with change in ranking algorithm

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

There’s an interesting article in today’s Web Pro News, where Jason Lee Millar suggests that Google are being forced by increasingly embarassing high-ranking spam results to change their ranking algorithm.  The crux of the article is that the web, and the way it’s linked up, is changing rapidly. Things are speeding up, and it seems […]