Useful post from Steve Rubel claiming to show how Google’s algorithm ranks blogs.

Technorati Tags: blogs, GYM, search

A release from Google announcing “partnerships” with Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network which allows them to use Google Apps free of charge makes much of the deal.

Students in both African countries as well as Rwandan government officials will have access to free communications tools including email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under their institutions’ domain names.

…it says.
Rwandan Minister of State for Energy and Communications, The Hon Albert Butare, said: “This partnership will be a boost in terms of services offered to our Rwandan Academic Institutions, allowing them to collaborate in their learning activities. Furthermore, I believe communication between students and their lecturers will be enhanced as users throughout the country will now be using the same state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology that is available in other parts of the world.”

All well and good, but, as Google’s own Apps site makes clear, Google Apps Education Edition is free anyhow. I’m sure they are loosening their own rules a bit to round out the deal, but it does sounds a bit like the PR bandwagon rolling on….

Technorati Tags: GYM

Jeff Jarvis expounds on the (his) predicted explosion of internet video. The costs, he argues, are so much different than conventional TV that “new” TV cannot but help to become very prevalent.

All this comes at an astoundingly low price. Factual programming on US and UK networks costs about £150,000 per hour. A US network executive recently bragged that his digital studio had reduced his cost to £500 a minute. Dale runs the network with a one-year, £1m investment from YouGov founder Stephan Shakespeare and I asked him to estimate his production cost. Subtracting bandwidth and internet, he calculated £70 per hour. So expect more talk online, much more.

He quoted Sam Roake, head of David Cameron’s web strategy, speaking about what US presidential candidates could do to capitalise on “small TV”:

They should respond to voters by name: “See them as people who want to engage with you.” He recommends being “personal, open, spontaneous”. But most of all, he said, don’t script and spin your videos.

Technorati Tags: TV, video

Tom Loosemore, project leader of the BBC’s Web 2.0 project, told the AOP what the BBC’s 12-point-plan was back at an AOP meeting in December. I’ve just found a link to it. Here are the principle:

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards.
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly.
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site. Look at “One Big Weekend”.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in. Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page. Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”. She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10.Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11.Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12.Accessibility is not an optional extra. Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
13.Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes. Let users take nuggets of content with them, with links back to your site
14.Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them. Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
15.Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s their most personal data. Best respect it.

Technorati Tags: TV, video

eMarketer estimates that net US ad revenues at Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and Google represented 57.4% of the total Internet ad spend in 2006.

Technorati Tags: advertising, GYM

Matt Cutts, the Google SEO blogger, has a longish post on various dubious practices by the search engines – not including Google, obviously.

Technorati Tags: GYM, search

The New York Times is now on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: mobile

Ross Blake, the wunderkind who created Firefox, has a new company called Parakey which is believed to be working on a web operating system.

Technorati Tags: OS, web

Steve Rubel reports on research which claims to show that 40% of Americans are reading blogs now, while only 8% write them.

Technorati Tags: blogs

John Battelle recommends that MSN and Yahoo! should join forces to spin out a seach company which will concentrate on the monitisation of search.

Technorati Tags: GYM, search