For Google size is everything

You probably didn’t notice the subtle change that occured on the Google homepage yesterday. I’m guessing that at a glance you still wouldn’t know if I held up before and after shots of the page.
As reported by Mashable, Google have said they have increased the size of their search box to remind us that their [...]

Space for hire

Would you pay a guy $1 (or £0.60p at today’s exchange rate) to wear your branded t-shirt for a day?
Seems an odd question, but hundred’s of companies are apparently doing it.
Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com has made $70,000 this year by selling ad space on the tshirts he wears, according to Mashable. Prices start at $1 [...]

Local Links appearing in PPC ads

Updated 12:52 pm 23/07/09: Apparently the mysterious link is a ‘Adwords Local PlusBox‘. Yeah, I’d never heard to them either. Well apparently they were launched in December 2007, but as none of the search team had seen them before, I’m guess they’re a little under utilised.
Reading the blurb on them, they only appear for companies [...]

Twitter killed the blogging star

Has Twitter killed long form blog writing?
Is ‘traditional’ blogging already redundant in this micro-blog world?

Is it convenience that makes us tweet rather than blog or is it lack of something to say?
Has today’s bite sized dumbed down media reduced our attention span to the point we can’t focus beyond 140 characters anymore?
Do you spend more [...]

Building an App for Twitter

On Monday 15th June 2009, Jobsite launched it’s Jobs by Twitter service – a simple but innovative service to help jobseekers find a new job by providing personalised job tweets via Twitter.

The key component of that sentence is the word personalised. The fact that you can specify the jobs you receive makes it different to the majority of the Twitter based job services available today.

Jobs by Twitter has been a bit of a pet project for me over the last couple of months. This is how it came about…

Twitter statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in year

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ‘08) in the UK to 38th (May ‘09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

Google Profiles in UK Search Results

Today I noticed the new Google Profiles section inserted into the UK search results. When the new plans for Google Profiles were announced last month, it was mentioned that they would insert up to four matching results in a Profiles section at the foot of the first page of the SERPs (for a search on a name). The roll out was due to start in the U.S., but with no announced timetable for the rest of the world. Well, it seems the UK is ready.

Top 10 Brands Account for 45% of UK Internet Time

According to figures released by Nielsen Online this week, the 10 most heavily used brands accounted for 45% of total UK Internet time in April.  The top two brands – Facebook and MSN / Windows Live (Hotmail) – accounted for 11 billion of the 48 billion minutes that us Britons spent online.
The Top 10 brands [...]

Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?

Depending on your Twitter Follow list, you may have already seen the buzz over changes to Google Profiles recently. Whilst the product has been around for a while (in relative obscurity), two recent announcements have fixed the spotlight firmly upon it.

First off was a relatively low key announcement a few weeks ago, revealing that you could personalize your Google Profile URL to include your name (nicely termed a vanity URL). Then followed an announcement that Profiles are to start appearing in the Google search listings.

Cue a whole bunch of savvy people flocking to Google to ensure they could secure their ideal vanity url before someone sharing their name (or a cybersquatter) grabbed it. The news from Danny Sullivan that Google Profiles pass PageRank might just have contributed to the rush.

Since then there has been a lot of speculation regarding Google’s intent with its Profiles. A popular theory is that it is the start of a manoeuvre to take on the social network giants, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are many arguments for and against such theories, but it would certainly be quite a feat to unseat either colossus when you consider their size and integration into their users’ lives.

So what else could Google Profiles become?

Jobsite win double at Onrec Awards

Jobsite.co.uk came home a double winner last night, winning both the Best Technical Innovation and the Innovative Offline Marketing awards at Onrec.com’s annual online recruitment awards bash.

Jobsite (the company I work for), won the Offline award for our recent branding campaign, which including heavyweight TV advertising starring Max Beesley. The other finalists were Fish4Jobs, TheLadders.co.uk and Graduate Yorkshire.

Perhaps more interesting for this blog is the Best Technical Innovation award we won for ‘BeMyInterviewer’.

If you’re not familiar with the product, it’s an interactive video-based service that enables you to practise your interview technique with a panel of some of the UK’s most successful businesspeople. Topping the bill is Duncan Bannatyne from the Dragons’ Den, along with interviewers from Ernst & Young, Virgin Atlantic, ITV, BSkyB and O2.

Other finalists for the Onrec award included Monster.co.uk, Guardianjobs.co.uk, s1jobs.co.uk and Workhound.co.uk.

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