Posts

makes your blood boil

My card got cloned checking into a 5 star hotel

Unfortunately checkin staff, pizza staff etc are jobs that tend to attract younger people, pay lower wages and inevitably have a high attrition rate, making these roles good targets for scammers. Especially as they are normally customer facing roles.

As hdm's post says, be on your guard at all times. From experience it can be a complicated and frustrating process to sort out if you do get scammed and don't realise.

Come on someone else's turn. Any takers?

I think it is worrying, the more I look at it, the more you see some scary examples, like you have to start searching to find organic results.

What happened to the new kid on the block search engine that breathed life into search with it's uncluttered interface and made things easier to find...

Look at this example for a generic search "builders"



You have to keep scrolling to get to any organic results. Granted that's a very generic search, and more local searches normally bring up some organic results above the fold, but it's a worrying trend. Especially now with the Google Places listings migrated into Google+.

I think they just want us to live and search inside G+ without ever leaving

This is a static image. Can you see any of the flowers moving?



credit "I cant believe it"

Good article from site reference about how paid ads are pushing organic results below the fold.

• Organic results account for just 14.8% of the above-the-fold pixels
• On average, the top 3 spots (ads) take 41.1 % of the clicks on a specific page analyzed
• Sponsored ads on high commercial intent keywords take up 85.2% of the above-the-fold pixels.
• On average, the top organic listing gets just 8.9% of the clicks

http://site-reference.com/articles/google-news-why-your-position-1-rankings-may-not-be-enough/

"The stadium will be packed with 80,000 spectators, 16,000 athletes, 10,000 performers, 70 sheep, 12 horses, ten chickens, three cows, two goats and even dogs and geese"

London 2012 Opening Ceremony | Mail Online

Come on Danny Boyle, the whole world will be watching.... please let it be good...

Why do I think half the UK population will be watching it from behind the sofa

Great article:

7 Enemies Of Social Media Measurement

My favourite which a lot us are guilty of (or those that even try to monitor their stats!)

"Impatience
If you want to generate meaningless, highly questionable reports that are packed with pretty charts and graphs, then 30 days and a handful of metrics will work just fine...."

Right found the link

For those that don't have an iPhone or can't get the app to work, here's the

Google has added to the messages it uses in Webmaster Tools, to now include major side wide alerts:

"Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems
Site Errors represent an inability to connect to your site, and represent systemic issues rather than problems with specific pages. Here are some issues that might cause Site Errors:

• Your DNS server is down or misconfigured.
• Your web server itself is firewalled off.
• Your web server is refusing connections from Googlebot.
• Your web server is overloaded, or down.
• Your site

"Sir Richard Branson is considering buying back Virgin Records more than 40 years after founding the business that spawned his empire"

Sir Richard Branson eyes Virgin Records deal - Business News - Business - The Independent

Be interesting if does take it back. I wonder if he will reinvent the business, maybe moving it more online and taking on itunes?