In a recent government report, it has been announced that every home in the UK will have broadband (or faster) by 2012. Astonishingly, there is still a high percentage of homes (around 25-30%) that don’t have a PC to date. So what does this mean for the internet? Basically it means that websites can be more media rich, with videos, larger / higher quality images etc as well as a much greater level of interactivity.
However the government opposition has announced that it is very disappointed with the report. The report does not highlight any new actions, and compared to the likes of France which is current laying optic fibres for increased broadband speeds (Japan already has it), the speeds predicted for the UK homes is less than the current average of 3.6Mbps at 2Mbps.
Firefox is an internet web browser created by Mozilla. Firefox has always been particularly popular with web developers and designers due to the way in which it renders HTML, compared to the dual rendering engine of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The latest version of Firefox available is currently version 3.
Popularity of Firefox has increased over the years, and although Internet Explorer (IE) is still the primary web browser with approximately 76% of all users browsing the web with IE, it’s popularity is on the rise. The latest version of Firefox has seen increased performance, and a whole host of additional functionality to enhance the users experience.
An important aspect of Firefox is also the ability to install and even create your own plugins / tools to help with your day to day tasks. This is great for webmasters, programmers & developers and SEO programmers, helping to make day to day tasks more efficient.
It seems not even Google are impervious to the recession as they have started tightening their grip on their free Apps. Google’s income growth has slowed considerably, and this is another method of trying to increase revenue following the 100 job cuts and the recent demise of some popular Google products such as Google video and Google Notebook.
Basically there are over a million businesses that use the free version of Google Apps that supports advertising. Google is now reducing the functionality of these accounts, such as lowering the number of user accounts allowed to almost force users into purchasing the premium versions of the applications.
When Google Apps was first launched in 2006, it was completely free. The description of the suite was:
A service available at no cost to organisations of all shapes and sizes
Since then, Google brought out a premier version early in 2007 with additional extras such as additional storage space as the selling point. Eventually the future of Google Apps is that it will become a premium service.
When discussing this with my colleagues, the initial reaction was that they would stop using Google Apps and just use i.e. Microsoft. However, the beauty of Google Apps is the collabarative element that allows multiple users to work from the same document. As Google further tightens it’s grip, perhaps we will look onto other free online applications?
There has been a lot of interest surrounding the release of a potential new blogging platform called ‘Oxite’. So what is Oxite, and why is there so much interest surrounding it? Well here’s the description:
Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and extensible content management sample that can run anything from blogs to big websites.
Oxite uses an asp.net platform which will please many webmasters with Microsoft hosted sites, that had to install PHP in order to use Wordpress. It will also enable them to make alterations to the code much easier. Secondly, the code output on the page is supposed to be super-clean which has caught the attention of a lot of SEO consultants that often have to battle with the code of any content managed site.
The developers of Oxite stress that they are not trying to compete with the likes of Wordpress, Drupal etc, but are just providing sample code that you can use to create your own blog or content management system.
Unfortunately, tests so far have shown that Oxite is very much still in the alpha stages and many have suggested keeping a wide birth, at least for now. In the future this could be an exciting additional option to what is already out there, but further development is needed until it’s ready for managing large sites.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the appearance of Adwords links appearing in Google Image Search Engine Results pages. For example, we entered the key phase ‘Audi R8′ into the Google image search and we were presented with adverts for Audi dealerships as well as the image results (see image above).
Personally I thought this was unusual. When I use the Google image search I’m often just looking for a particular photograph or image that I can use for design work. When I entered the term for Audi R8 I wanted a nice image of the car that I could manipulate, and I have no intention of buying one in the near future! So are these adverts completely wasted on me? Is this the case for everyone that’s searching Google images?
The sponsored links that appear are in the four line advert format, and there are three adverts in total that are side by side at the top of the page, just above the organic search results. Google has apparently been testing this for a number of months now, and it seems that more and people are now seeing the results. There may be a special criteria that needs to be fulfilled before your advert appears in the image results, and I’m interested in finding out more about it. If it’s not advantageous for your advert to be displayed in Google images, it could effect your PPC quality score if your advert makes a lot of page impressions but has few clicks.
