“Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter”.

This was the last in a list of rules issued to employees of the Wall Street Journal last week, as reported by The Guardian’s Emily Bell. Her interpretation? “Journalists [...must keep]  private and professional completely separate when using these platforms”.

Now, I am the first to advocate that any company would benefit from having a presence on social media platforms such as Twitter, and my advice is generally that the more “personal” you can be, the better.

In other words, the more your customers are able to see you as a real person, the more engaged they are going to be with your product, and the more belief they will have in your message. This kind of approach works particularly well with small businesses: your Twitter stream might record how excited you are with a new product, how tired you are after staying up all night working, or how grateful you are to each and every one of your loyal customers – and with each tweet, you’re increasing their stake in your success.

But journalists? Journalists are another story, and I agree that the WSJ is right to be wary. Even in these days when columnists such as Jon Ronson seem to write as much about themselves as their subject, it seems prudent to draw the line between professional and private. Do I want to read that a journalist is off to meet a famous celebrity? Yes, quite possibly I do. Do I want to know that he’s feeling a little queasy because he sank twelve pints the night before? Ah – suddenly, we see some of the WSJ’s concerns.

There’s a question, too, about how much we want to see the mechanics behind the artifice. Do we want to know HOW a fantastic piece of journalism was put together, or would we rather just read the finished article? There have always been interviews with celebrities that begin with an account of how difficult it was to agree a date, or how many times the journo was stood up, or how rude the interview’s subject was, but that’s different. The completed feature is still a contained piece of work, not a sprawling series of tweets with no discernible beginning or end, an episode that spills out of a ‘lifestream’ of many others.

However much they may pretend otherwise, the ‘personality’ journalists are presenting a considered image, in any case. If we see them as fallible, as risible even, it is because they want us to. Mixing the truly personal with the professional on a Twitter stream would potentially show us their truly weak moments, and in an industry as polished as the print media, that must never be allowed to happen.

Still, if the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian are debating Twitter etiquette, that points to the medium’s current power. I’d still urge you to take up tweeting in the name of your business, and while I’d encourage you to be personable, I’d expect you to know where to draw the line when it comes to the personal. A good concrete piece of advice is to keep separate Twitter accounts for your business and your personal lives – and I guess the WSJ would agree with me.

My English teacher wouldn’t have liked it, but Google has a new word for a ‘unit of knowledge’ – the Knol. Come to think of it, ‘Google’ wasn’t exactly an everyday term back when I was at school, but they certainly seem to have turned that one around. It’s eminently possible that given a couple of months, we’ll all be casually sharing our Knols.

So, what exactly are they, these Knols? The idea is this: most of us are experts at something or other, whether it’s an important skill like how to save lives, or something trivial like getting a high score on Dance Dance Revolution.

Wikipedia has shown us the benefit of sharing our individual insights in order to build a greater whole. About.com has found success by publishing articles by a large number of experts.  Knol is a cross between the two, allowing authors to publish their own work in a finished state, or to invite collaboration with others.

I was surprised to learn that the project has been running since December 2007. By January of 2009, Google announced that it contained more than 100,000 articles – and yet, I can’t say I have ever come across one in the course of running an everyday search. Possibly that’s because it began with articles mainly in the fields of health and medicine, which, praise be, I haven’t had much need of in the last few years.

For those in our business, after any initial interest in a new Google project, the question has to be whether any benefit might be gained from it. Well, you can forget straight away any idea you might have of writing hundreds of articles and linking back to your own website. Google is on to you. Its guidelines clearly state:

We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website.

After all, Knol is primarily a project for the public good, not for the good of your business, sad though that might be. That given, there is scope for the genuinely knowledgable to benefit. If you write about your area of specialisation, there is no rule against naming your business, and indeed, Google also says:

Use your bio to tell readers why they should trust your opinion on a given topic [...]. If you know of good resources on your topic, you can link to them from within your article to make it easy for readers to learn more.

So in short, if your own business website is genuinely an excellent resource for people wishing to know more, it makes sense to link to it. And if it isn’t, then you now have every reason to make it so. By adding your specialist knowledge to your own website, you’ll find far greater benefits than just being able to link from Knol, though: you will find, in time, that you get all sorts of inbound links, all of which will do your search egnine ranking the power of good.

There you go, that’s my little nugget of insight – I hardly dare call it an actual Knol – for today. check out the real Knols at knol.google.com.

Website design: it’s a fine art these days. You can study it at degree level. There are awards for it. The man on the street has opinions about it – and we all pretty much agree what makes a good website design, and what doesn’t.

Don’t we?

Screenshot of the Havenworks homepage

Hmmm. Looking at the Havenworks website,  it seems just possible that there’s one small corner of the world where the niceties of web design have not yet been fully thrashed out. White space, for example: these days, many of the websites we visit most often – Google, Flickr, Facebook – recognise that blank space is just as important as text. It’s restful; it allows the user to concentrate on what really matters (in the case of Google, that means the search box, of course).
 

Then there’s ease of navigation. The very best websites let you navigate through their pages and hardly realise you are doing so. The moment you have to stop and think, or search for the link you need, is the moment the navigation has scored – in the modern online parlance – a big, fat fail.
 

Web designers seem to be coming, en masse, towards the conclusion that Less is More. Havenworks is a great indictment of this, showing quite clearly that the opposite is also true: More is Less. Indeed, More is Utterly Confusing.
 

The question is, with so many talented web designers around, why would you publish out a site that looks like this? I can’t say I know, but I do notice that there is a little wink after the site’s name in the top browser bar. Might it be that the site’s owner knows exactly what he is doing? Think of it this way: I’ve just written a blog post and linked back to the site: one valuable inbound link for him. You’re reading this and maybe you’ll be amused enough to pass the link on to a friend. One more visitor to the site. It’s just possible that this is a complex ploy.
 

On the other hand, I don’t think many visitors would stay long, nor would they return, so from that point of view there’s little to gain. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you think – but meanwhile, let me just mention that if your own site is looking a little more Havenworks than you’d prefer, we can help. From off-the-peg templates to bespoke designs, we have a number of website design solutions that will get you linked to for all the right reasons.

No, I am not talking about British politicians… I am talking about Google.

Yesterday, Google managed to direct a small proportion of its web traffic through Asia, as you do, resulting in 14% of Google users finding the service slow or interrupted. Aparently even Google’s home page was inaccessible for a time.

Google promptly apologised and explained the error away in a fairly humorous way on their blog site. Citing something to do with re-routing planes…. right… ok then….

However, this is not the first problem to befall Google this year.  A few months ago there was quite a large disruption to their service, which went on for many hours. This caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Net and the media were all over the story like a rash.

So even the best of us make mistakes but we will always forgive Google as they provide such a good service.

Unlike British politicians….

This question was posed to us in respect of our free website offer to local start-ups and charities/projects. We were proposing a new website for a small business in the W11 area and had been trying to stress that our offer had no strings attached and, that once the website was complete, they were not beholden to us in any way.  

So how do we make our money from this offer?  

Simple answer is – we don’t.

This brought about the next question – “So why do you do it?”

Well….

1. We genuinely want to give back something to the local community – honestly!!

2. We belive that if we provide an excellent service now, then when the local business or charity project expands in the future, we hope that we will be called upon to help with their online needs.

3. We have a valuable link-back to our website on each of the sites we produce.

That’s it. 

Nothing more.