Late last year, Google released another great tool in Beta.

It’s called Blogger Web Comments. It’s currently only availableas an extension for those of us who have migrated from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Firefox (in fact, if you haven’t done so already, you should seriously consider looking at Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/).

Blogger Web Comments, pops up and shows you comments about the current website you are viewing when you load a page. All the comments are written by Bloggers around the globe. What’s more, yuo can add your own comments if you want to.

Although its early days, this could become a really useful tool. For example, when you want to do a bit of research about a particular website, the comments section pops up with its ready made research. Or maybe you are looking for a hard to find product, you find it on an unknown eCommerce site, the comments yo ufind may just give you enough confidence to make the purchase.

As I said, its early days yet, but if you have been using the tool, please let me have your feedback.

Download the tool here Blogger Web Comments

It’s been heavily documented recently, about the British student who created an online concept 5-6 months back. Its been picked up by the National and International press. The BBC give a nice rounded article on it here: BBC article

I’m not about to add my opinion about this site, the million dollar question for me is, how the student managed to sell all the ad space.

It seems that after a few initial sales to friends and families, the money gained was ploughed into PR. Then it was all due to word of mouth.

It will be interesting to see how many copycat sites make a success of the concept. I think that now the novelty of the idea has been so well publicised, copycat sites will struggle to gain the sort of coverage this student has managed to gain.

But what it has highlighted, is the power of PR!

We all know that first impressions count, but this study claims that web visitors can make a judgement within 50 milliseconds. It takes them that long to decide whether they like the look of your website or not!

The research was carried out in Canada by Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology.

view the article here