digg and myspace out of time 50 best websites 2009

Filed under: Blogs,online-marketing,social networking — Tags: , , , — Felipe @ 27 Aug,09

Every year time.com, the Time Magazine website, releases a list of the top 50 best websites and this year there are some suprises, at least in my opinion.

Time’s criteria to choose these sites is quite simple, they pick websites that help users improve their internet experience like yelp.com and its UK version yelp.co.uk – Yelp helps you find the best restaurant, pubs and other local services in your area.

Or another site that meets the selection criteria is Fora.tv; a site with a wide variety of videos in a variety of subjects that are piped in from the top leading conferences from around the world. Its a great site to visit when you are tired of watching cat videos on YouTube and you feel that your brain needs some intellectual stimulation.

Within Time’s 50 best websites for 2009 you will find a list of sites to help you surf the web better, enjoy yourself, shop or just kill time on the Web.

But the big surprise is that sites like Digg and MySpace were left out of this year’s list.

Digg, as most of you already know, is a leading social news site famous for driving tons of traffic when content is promoted to its front page.

MySpace needs no introduction, the second biggest social networking site on the web which over the past year or so lost its top spot to Facebook.

Over the past year both sites have encountered ups and downs which might explain why they were not included in this year’s list.

Do you know any site that should’ve been on that list, or do you not agree with some of sites you saw on it? Please leave your opinions in our comments section and maybe we can make our own top 50 websites list!

Prescott Uses Social Media & Blogging to Promote Climate Change

Filed under: Blogs,hedgehog digital,social media optimisation,social networking — admin @ 26 Aug,09

John Prescott, who is an unlikely fan of blogging, recently raised his profile through the use of twitter using it to post news about the Tories and NHS.

The politician is also planning to use social networking sites to try to get people involved in a global deal on climate change.

In his new role, Prescott is responsible for finding out the opinion of the public and reporting back to the Council before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Copenhagen meeting will bring together more than 90 countries to find a way to keep global warming below two degrees C by 2050.

Mr Prescott is also launching a new website, New Earth Deal, designed to promote the idea of a fairer settlement on climate change by requiring bigger cuts in emissions by rich countries and financial help for developing countries.

Online Marketing is fast becoming the most effective way of promoting any kind of business or event and with the help of blogs and social media yours can now be found easier.

For more information on all of our online marketing services including blogging, website development and search engine optimisation please visit the Hedgehog Digital website.

Google Caffeine Update

Filed under: SEO,search engine news — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 19 Aug,09

A week ago Google announced that a large team of its search engineers have been working on a secret project, a new infrastructure that will improve indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and not yet confirmed ranking changes, named Caffeine.

According to Matt Cutts the changes are in how Google finds and indexes pages. Based on the blog post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the new Caffeine infrastructure will be able to crawl the web more comprehensively, which may include other ways of determining sites authority and reputation and off course return more relevant and quicker results with perhaps a better understanding of related words and synonyms.

We suspect that the Caffeine update may allow Google to improve its algorithms, as the faster infrastructure might allow the use of algorithms that are currently not practical with its current set up. This is similar to how bigger and faster computers allow ever better and cheaper computer models in films and TV shows.

Caffeine will be the next generation of Google’s search infrastructure and will gradually replace the existing one. In an interview to Web Pro News during last week’s SMX San Jose, Matt Cutts said Caffeine will represent a major in search and compared it to the 2005/2006 BigDaddy update.

Major changes like that one can not be done over night and Google knows that very well, that is the reason why they’re providing a “developer preview” for power searchers and developers to try it out, compare with the current search results and send them your feedback. You can try the Caffeine structure here.

As usual, these upcoming changes have already generated tons of questions and theories in the search engine optimisation industry; some say Caffeine could make SEO more challenging others believe impacts will be minimal and that fundamental elements like site structure and good content will still reign.

From an SEO standpoint what you have to say, will Caffeine have major impacts in the way we do SEO today?