Notting Hill Internet services and The Pollen Shop last year announced the launch of spiritualcapital-cardiff.org.uk. The website, funded by the Department for Communities and Local Governments Community Development Foundation, explores the issue of how faith groups contribute to the work of Cardiff.

Spiritual Capital Cardiff was the first website produced jointly by The Pollen shop and Notting Hill Internet Services. It was designed to meet the needs of public sector clients that require flexibility and affordability as well as high standards of accessibility.

Fari Peyman, Managing Director, said:

This partnership will build on our core strengths and enable us to offer great value to new and existing clients. Notting Hill Internet Services already has a proven track record in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Producing sites to a high standard of accessibility uses very similar processes. By combining both practices we will now be able to bring a new dimension to our managed Internet services.

If you are interested in discussing an accessible website, at an affordable price, contact us today.

The BBC published a story revealing that many areas of Britain – and not just the rural backwaters – suffer from low levels of internet connectivity. While fewer than 1% of British homes are unable to get any internet connection whatsoever, the story focuses on the estimated three million households with a slow connection of under 2Mbps (megabits per second).

The result of connection speeds this slow is that websites relying on frequent page loads and applications such as the BBC i-Player simply aren’t practical. While the country’s media goes wild for Twitter, Facebook, movies on demand and online shopping, it’s important to remember that some users are being left behind.

For online businesses, it’s often good advice to cater for the lowest common denominator. If your customers are spread throughout the country, bear in mind that installing ‘heavy’ applications on your site may be the cause of immense frustration to some – especially if you require these applications to be used in order to make a sale. If you hope to sell internationally, it makes even more sense to bear in mind that many areas of the world still access the internet on basic dial-up connections, or by mobile phone only.

It’s easy to get carried away and build an all-singing, all dancing website which jumps on all the latest technological bandwagons, but your customers will thank you if you take the time to make a lightweight, basic website that performs as smoothly asyou can make it. The good news is, the government is committing to increasing the country’s access to faster broadband by 2012 – whereupon you can feel free to unveil your all-singing, all-dancing website at last.

Wolfram|Alpha was all over the newspapers recently, with many of them describing it as a ’search engine’, while others more carefully replicated its own description of itself as a ‘computational knowledge engine’. I guess ’search engine’ is a little easier for the general public to grasp, although it’s funny to think that even that term required some explanation to most of us only a few years ago

‘Search engine’ is, perhaps, easy shorthand for what is essentially a text box into which users can enter questions and receive knowledge in return. However, Wolfram|Alpha is, indeed, a quite different prospect to Google or Yahoo. It’s all about data and facts – it’ll answer mathematical formulae, it’ll tell you the weather on any date in the past, it’ll pull up statistics on gdp, exchange rates, mortality, and a vast range of other quantifiable data. For many of us, especially the non-academic, it’s a diverting toy; for others, including those needing quick answers for homework, it’s a very powerful tool.

When business people hear the words ’search engine’, they may be tempted to ask, if this is the next big thing, should I optimise my site or look at advertising possibilities? Well, no. In this first version, there are no sponsorship or advertising opportunities, nor are there ranked results – just a definitive display of factual information. It’s interesting when you think about it: looked at like this, one realises that Google doesn’t deal in definitives, but presents a number of alternatives, any one of which may be your answer.

Opportunities for your business may lie in the inclusion of a Wolfram|Alpha search box on your website, if it is helpful to your particular trade. It can deal with exchange rates, weather forecasts, and size conversions, for example, so if you deal with international customers, holidays, or clothing, you can see how these features would aid your customers at no cost to yourself. If you wish to get more advanced, there is a freely-available API, or in other words, you may write your own code to get the Wolfram|Alpha data doing clever things for your website.

Meanwhile, Wolfram|Alpha says there ‘may’ be opportunities for targeted advertisements at some point in the future, so if that is something you’d be interested in, watch this space. If you’d like some advice on placing the Wolfram|Alpha search box on your site, or any other such developments, why not make contact with us?

No doubt, by now all you techno buffs out there have heard of Bing, the new search engine by Microsoft, which went live on June 1, 2009.

While Bing’s core index is the same as Microsoft Live Search, Bing comes with some notable additions including:

§         the listing of search suggestions in real time as queries are entered

§         a list of related searches, called ‘Explorer pane’ which display on the left side of search results

§         instant previews of websites and videos

§         automatic categorisation of search results

§         ‘Best Match’ results with deep links

§         Save & Share’ search histories via Windows Live SkyDrive, Facebook and e-mail

There has been much debate in the media and online about how Bing compares with Google and other search engines and if Google now has competition for the top spot.  A quantifiable way to measure this is being worked on by Michael Kordahi of Microsoft.  He has developed and is refining a blind search engine that displays results in three columns with identical formatting representing actual results from Bing, Google and Yahoo where users can vote for the best results. 

Even if Bing turns out to be the better search engine, the question still remains if Googles’ brand loyal followers can be lured away.  Not to mention that Google’s search tools are commonly pre-installed in new PC’s and that Google is the default search engine for Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.  Bing certainly has an uphill climb but perhaps it has anticipated the ever increasing wants and needs of today’s sophisticated Internet user.

When I heard that Aaron Sorkin – writer of several hit films, Broadway plays and television including some episodes of the West Wing – had been commissioned to write a movie about Facebook, my first thought was that it’d be a romantic comedy, much in the vein of Sleepless in Seattle. Maybe I was swayed by the recent news story which reported that a mother was reunited, via Facebook, with her long-lost son after 27 years this week. The story does seem to underline the personal power of the connections that social media make, and I can quite see Facebook playing a major part in a film plot.

But no, a quick look at Sorkin’s page reveals that the movie will tell the story of Facebook’s inception – a biopic of a phenomenon, if you will. Rather endearingly, Sorkin reveals that he knows nothing at all about Facebook, but we’d have to agree that he’s doing the right thing to find out: he’s started up a group and he’s engaging with his fans. In no time at all he’ll be able to write about it with the complete authority of one who spends all his time poring over old photos of friends and reconnecting with people he thought he’d never see again – not to mention trying to beat his personal best at Scrabble and wasting time filling in endless personality questionnaires, like the rest of us.

It’s been a week that also saw the announcement of a Twitter-based TV programme, so I think we can say with assurance that social media and mainstream media are converging. Whatever next? LinkedIn: the novel? Now that would be a challenge.

Those who fear that they are too old to understand the new technologies that are sweeping the marketing world may perhaps be sobered to hear of María Amelia López, the “world’s oldest blogger” who died at the age of 97. She took up blogging on her 95th birthday. She presumably got many of the same benefits from it as younger bloggers do: companionship, support, and new horizons – all of which are that much more valuable, one can only assume, to the elderly.

For business people, there are two lessons here. Number one: you are never too old to get a grip on social media. Number two, López could be said to epitomise the marketing concept of the ’silver surfer’ demographic. If your business caters in any way to an older market sector, the internet is your ideal forum.

As social media becomes more established, and as the current younger generation inevitably age, my belief is that 97-year-old bloggers will become a norm, not an exception. Now might be the time to make sure you’re up to speed, before you experience the intense embarrasment of realising there are folks in the old people’s home who know more about Facebook and Twitter than you do!

Those concerned with Search Engine Optimisation need to keep abreast of the latest innovations in the Search world, and that means keeping a particularly close eye on what Google is up to.

Google’s always up to something, it has to be said. But when important innovations come along, they do at least try to make sure everyone knows about them.  This week saw them using their own vehicle – YouTube, which they acquired in 2006 – to show us the latest additions to their Search product. Many folk learn more easily when they see something demonstrated, so this approach does make sense.

These new additions to the basic Google Search premise must present the Google team with interesting problems. Google is well-known for its sparse front page, and its intuitive ease of use. So how they manage to make these new features prominent, while also keeping that cut-down look, is always going to be highly instructive to the rest of us.

We can’t criticise Google for complicating their product in this way – one of their major strengths is keeping ahead of the pack, if not actually steering the pack themselves – and these moves must come in recognition of the fact that the internet is becoming ever more sophisticated. The more content is uploaded, the harder it becomes to navigate to the content that matters, and this is Google’s attempt to address that.

Personally, I still find it fascinating that ten years ago, many of us didn’t know what a search engine was – and now, so savvy are we that we are demanding more and more precision from them.

With these new functionalities which allow the user to search on a timeline, search for releated topics via the ‘wonder wheel’ (hmm, is that term going to catch on?), and search for specific content such as videos (watch the clip above to see examples of all of these) SEO experts need to be asking themselves whether there are new ways to optimise our websites so that they perform well in all relevant searches.

If that sounds like a little too much to wrap your head around, then you might want to look at our managed SEO services. We make it our business to understand new Search innovations, so all you have to do is sit back and rest assured that we’re optimising your site to the newest and most challenging of strictures.

We’re always talking about how Twitter can help small businesses, so I thought I’d give a couple of concrete examples. Sometimes it’s easier to understand when you see social media in action like this, although I still stand by my usual advice that the quickest and best way to understand is to enrol yourself, and start using it.

Iydea is a small vegetarian restaurant in Brighton, whose Twitterfeed can be seen here. Take a look at some of their recent tweets:

• Thought I’d let you know about our Minestrone soup, given the weather is so grey today!
• Our lovely laptop users, just want to let you know the power sockets on your side of the bar are *not* working. We’ll get them fixed ASAP
• NEW Spicy Lentil Stuffed Potato also, NEW Leek & Stilton Stuffed Potatoes… the hot food is arriving from the kitchen… nom nom nom!

As you can see, it’s a great mix of marketing and informing: managing expectations about broken laptop plugs, but also introducing the new dishes and perhaps whipping up an appetite amongst their local followers.

However, the feed has not been updated since April, which also reminds us of an important truth: engagement in social media does take ongoing time and commitment. If it’s to bring proper benefits, it needs to be looked at like any other regular business task, and resources dedicated to it. Since time is the one thing so many businesses can’t spare, it pays to look at outsourcing to a company such as us. Contact us – we’d be delighted to talk to you.

A Twitterfeed that is still going strong is that of the independent cinema, the Duke of Yorks. It takes a certain effort of will to remember to check print media such as their monthly programmes or the local paper: in fact, you first have to decide to watch a film before you’d think to find out what was on. But by integrating into Twitter, which users are checking regularly in the course of a normal day anyway, the Duke of Yorks must be gaining a lot more impulse custom. Also in the mix is the chance to engage thoroughly with their customer base. Here are some sample tweets. The first two are in reply to specific users, the last a general tweet:

• All morning shows on Wednesdays are for parents and babies only. Apologies it isn’t clearer in the website
• Enjoy your film – maybe have some coffee beforehand
• The fear of rain will hopefully bring customers in today…Synecdoche and Cheri playing

Notice how the first tweet has picked up on what was presumably a complaint in a recent customer’s Twitterfeed, and shown concern. It’s an easy way both to monitor customer feedback, and make things right. And wouldn’t you feel special if your cinema took the time to tell you they hoped you enjoyed your film?

Many local businesses are experimenting with Twitter and finding remarkable benefits. If you have employees who are in front of computers or behind counters for long stretches of the day, it could be an ideal add-on to their job description: equally, if your workforce are out and about, you can feed into the Twitterstream via mobile phones. You’d be surprised, too, what your loyal customers would find interesting to hear about. It doesn’t all have to be marketing – sometimes the human face of your business adds a whole new dimension.