Friday Feeling Five
Our 5th Friday Feeling shares some of the things that have given us pause for thought this last week.
So you’d have to have been living on Mars not to have known that Michael Jackson died recently. As with Elvis, John Lennon and Princess Diana, the world has gone crazy with news, gossip, rumour and outright lies. The difference this time is the 24 hour news channels and Social Media-effect. #MichaelJackson content has been widely published on various internet platforms including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to name but three. Watching Sky News and BBC News Channel stumble through their various “Breaking News” items around his death has been equally uncomfortable. It seems Google were also made to feel uncomfortable with the speed of the spreading of the news around the Internet. Indeed, they saw the sudden queries for Michael Jackson as a possible attack on their extensive infrastructure.
Charlie Hamilton, a fellow regular at the Isle of Man Social Media Club, shared a link she found on Google regarding how a web site may be unwittingly the victim of “black hat SEO”. Search Engine Optimisation is an inexact science and respectable web development companies will always recommend you create well designed, written and promoted web sites as being the best way to achieve a high Page Rank in Google. So-called “black hat” optimisation is where a web site employs tricks and cheats to try and circumvent Google’s checks and balances. It turns out that if a site linking to your site has traits of being “black hat”, your own site may be penalised as being an accessory-to-the-fact. Always a good reason to check people who want to link to your site.
Finally, if you’ve ever wondered what Web 2.0 actually means … or meant, an article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle might just clarify it for you. Tim and John look back over the last 5 years of “Web 2.0″ to see how the web recovered from the dotcom-crash to become an essential marketing and networking platform. New data providers such as SmartPhones combine with “crowdsourcing” to produce highly accurate data such as virtual state outlines within Flickr, Google can predict the flu-epidemic within the United States and Microsoft can create 3-dimensional imagery based on users’ photographs of common landmarks.
That last article is a long one, but well worth the read. Will keep you entertained for the weekend.
