Archive for May, 2008

The government has proposed a new law, which would require phone and internet companies to log all their data.

The Communications Data Bill will extend the requirement for companies to retain information, such as customer’s internet usage, email usage and Voice over Internet Protocol calls.

A Home Office spokeswoman said it would allow "public authorities to undertake their lawful activities to investigate, detect and prosecute crime and to protect the public".

The law will require service providers to keep data, which shows a log of communications, although they are not required to retain the content of each message.

In proposing the bill, the government said communications data plays a key role in counter-terrorism investigations and noted a move in communications towards internet protocol core networks.

It warned: "Unless the legislation is updated to reflect these changes, the ability of public authorities to carry out their crime prevention and public safety duties and to counter these threats will be undermined."

The definition of search engine optimisation (SEO) has been reviewed, following a call by one digital marketing blog for comments from across the industry.

The shoemoney blog received new definitions from some of the industry’s big names including Danny Sullivan, who it referred to as the ‘godfather of SEO‘.

Mr Sullivan said, as an individual "an SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided".

Other contributors provided varied interpretations. Rand Fishkin said it is "the combination of tactics and strategies" and Neil Patel referred to it as "the art of understanding search engines and using that knowledge to make a website rank high".

Replies were overwhelmingly positive despite one respondent, who preferred to be known as Black Hat, saying it "is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their website shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up".

A recent report by Netcraft has suggested there are approximately 165 million websites, 3.1 million more than in March.

Google has taken almost 68 per cent of the US search market, a new study has found.

The search company has extended its dominance and increased its rating, up four per cent year-on-year.

Analysts, Hitwise, compiled data on the most popular US search engines and revealed: "Search engines continue to be the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories."

The company’s nearest competitor was Yahoo! search, which attracted 20 per cent of the market, followed by MSN (six per cent) and Ask.com (4.7 per cent).

In the last 12 months search traffic has increased by double digit figures, Hitwise says, with business and finance, sports, online video and social networking categories seeing strong growth.

The European Union is keen to widen participation in the web - in 2007 nearly 40 million new users logged on, the European Commission’s ICT report revealed.

Social networking site, MySpace, has been awarded millions of dollars after a campaign of spam targeted its users.

A US court awarded it $230 million (£118 million) after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, the men behind the junk mail, failed to attend the hearing.

Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, told Associated Press the verdict would deter other spammers.

"Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say ‘Wow, I better not go there,’" he said.

Mr Wallace was formerly head of Cyber Promotions, a company that sent out 30 million junk emails each day.

He operated phishing scams to use the network’s sites to distribute his messages, some of which, MySpace said, were linked to pornographic content.

The figure decided by the court was calculated under the 2003 US CAN Spam law, which entitles MySpace $100 (£50) for each violation and triple when spam is proved to be sent deliberately.

Web designers and marketers should draw on a range of tools to help them decide on keywords for their sites.

The advice came for Search Engine Journal’s, Ann Smarty, who suggested they looked to the web for assistance.

"Recently there appeared a number of useful tools that can help you find more key terms to focus on," Ms Smarty noted and recommended Google Sets, MSN clustering tools, Keyword Map, Search Radar and Urban Dictionary.

Google Sets tells you what the search engine thinks are relevant, while MSN’s helper links search results into semantically related groups.

Search Radar, she noted displays a keyword tag cloud and demonstrates the usage of this keyword and its synonyms in short context, while keyword map shows variations in order, or as a map.

Urban Dictionary takes a different approach in listing slang and urban words. It is "helpful at giving you a full picture of your main term associations as well as jargon, memes, and neologisms", she said.

The UK search market is dominated by Google - it handled 73 per cent of search requests in March, tech advisor, e-consultancy has found.

Google’s search business will become the most profitable monopoly in history, it has been claimed.

Seasoned blogger, Henry Blodget, writing on the respected Search Valley Insider blog, has predicted Google’s revenue from search alone will surpass even the profits of Microsoft’s Windows software.

"Google’s search business should be bigger than Microsoft’s Windows business by early next year," he claimed.

In his estimation, the search company’s share of its market will grow to exceed 90 per cent and match that of Bill Gates’ software firm.

He later observed that Microsoft Office, which he also concluded was a monopoly, would need to watch out for Google’s competing software encroaching on its market share.

A number of free web-based tools are available that offer word processing facilities, including AjaxWrite, Zoho and Google Docs.

There are also alternatives to Google, such as Ask.com, which allow users to easily erase their web histories.

Yahoo! is under attack from a sole shareholder, keen to oust its board, it has been reported.

Carl Icahn, billionaire investor, has decided to go ahead with plans to fight the current board, led by Jerry Yang, according to the New York Times.

The move could bring Microsoft back into negotiations after its recent failed attempt to buy the company.

"When Microsoft backed off there was a lot of investor anger and now Carl Icahn is sabre rattling there will now be more pressure on Yahoo to renegotiate with Microsoft," Shirley Westcott, managing director of policy at Proxy Governance, an independent proxy advisory firm, told the BBC.

News reports have said Mr Icahn has prepared at least 12 potential candidates for the new board, before today’s nomination deadline.

Microsoft had hoped it would gain access to the social firm’s huge number of users and increase its advertising revenue.

Almost half of workers are unconcerned their bosses might look them up on social networking sites, a new study has found.

Zinc Research and Dufferin Research revealed two out of five questioned said they would happily show bosses their page, onrec.com has reported.

"Companies that grasp this reality and develop a Facebook-related attraction and retention strategy will better connect to their workforce and get the upper hand in business," Brian Singh, managing director of Zinc Research, advised.

Job applicants have been warned to take care what they reveal of themselves, as potential employers may search for their profile online.

In separate research, financial services recruiter, Joslin Rowe, discovered 20 per cent of employees use the sites to run searches on job applicants and 68 per cent use search engines.

Internet compliant phones are attracting investment in more localised search functions, which seek to update users with results based on their location.

Google has introduced Friends Connect, which it hopes will encourage websites to integrate social networking tools.

The technology allows users on any site that is signed up to view, see and interact with their friends on several social networking sites.

Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut and Plaxo, are among the networks that can join, using an increasing list of social standards currently emerging on the web.

"Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks," explained Google director of engineering, David Glazer, "but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other."

MySpace members can now share their profiles across the web. Chris DeWolfe, chief executive officer and co-founder, said the implementation of this portability "injects a new layer of social activity and creates a more dynamic internet".

The new internet protocol (IPv6) will be in-place by 2011, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has said.

It warned businesses to stay current or lose out when others move to the new system.

Paul Twomey, ICANN chief executive, explained that many companies were compatible but needed to "wake up" and demand interoperability, ZDNet has reported.

"The users using the network will want to interact with other users. There are still implementation issues that people need to work through. Wake up and plan now," he said.

IP addresses are used to identify websites and members of the internet. Domain Name Systems help people find their way around, by replacing the list of IP numbers with names.

The Internet Services Providers’ Association said some ISPs had already put IPv6-compatible systems in place.
"We are aware of ISPs who have already deployed IPv6; it’s not strictly true that nothing is happening," said a spokesperson.