via youtube.com
Interesting video apparently shown by Microsoft at their Global Exchange Sales Conference recently. Its cheesey but so true!
Link courtesy of John Gruber at Daring Fireball
My Online Thoughts & Pontifications
Hi, I'm a Husband, Father and IT Manager based near Cambridge in the UK. I have been delivering web solutions for over 15 years and in my spare time enjoy all things tech, photography, mountain sports and am busy training for my first triathlon.
This is my blog in which I post links & random thoughts from my travels across the web, primarily focussing on web apps, web development and all things Apple. I hope you enjoy it!
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Subscribe via RSS »Google Gmail and Calendar get a new fresh look
via techradar.com
A welcome and long overdue update from Google. Both Gmail and Google Calendar were starting to look a little dated and getting left behind in terms of UI by other web apps, including other Google Products.
Google+ for instance looks pretty swish with its drag and drop functionality to create circles of friends. Here's hoping they roll out these UI changes to Google Reader shortly.
Google's Answer to Facebook has arrived and its called Google+
We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:
via googleblog.blogspot.com
There has been talk of Google developing its own social network to take on the might of Facebook for over a year now and today they unveiled it. Its name? Google+
Strange choice of name but I bet they have spent millions on it. While the search engine giant is keen not to badge it as a competitor to Facebook, we all know that is the market they are aiming for. Their choice of categorising it as a project rather than a product also shows how difficult they realise the challenge will be and it gives them the option to drop it "quietly" in the future if they wish. Think Google Wave if you want another example of this.
Their focus is clearly on making the discovery of content more social and the sharing of content between networks of friends online. Other functionality such as sparks (chats) and hangouts (looks like chat rooms to me) mean they are trying to generate some kind of community but I think its the link to their search that will give them the best hope of pulling it off.
So what does the Google 'Panda' update mean for your website?
A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially after the search engine rolled out its "Panda" update, intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.
via guardian.co.uk
Well if your site is one that scraps a lot of content then I'm afraid its bad news for you, with your site plummeting in the rankings or disappearing altogether.
There are notable exceptions to this with a number of technology news websites, like UK based Tech Radar for example being affected and seeing their rankings drop. Interestingly Microsoft owned Ciao has also seen their site drop in the rankings as a result, with some speculating that this may have more to do with the fact they logged a complaint with the EC about Google using their monopoly unfairly. Highly unlikely but fun all the same!
The good news is that if you have been following standard SEO advice, of generating good readable content which your users enjoy, then you should see your rankings increase. This is because the new algorithm takes into consideration the amount of time a user spends on your site.
All in all a good upgrade I think, with sites with good original content getting a boost and the sites clogged full of scrapped content disappearing from the top of the search results.
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