Tweetmeme struggling against follower spam

I really like Tweetmeme. It works like this - a button on your blog encourages visitors to tweet your posts, it displays how many people do this and that has the effect of encouraging more people to do the same.

While all this tweeting is going on Tweetmeme monitors which are the popular blog posts and once a certain threshold has been reached the @tweetmeme Twitter profile tweets out a general link to the popular post. It's a good way of surfacing interesting posts.

Over the last few hours, though, Tweetmeme seems to have been successfully gamed by annoying follower spam.

BBC’s Psychoville emulates Google’s AdWords

I spent a little bit of the weekend on the BBC’s iPlayer catching up with Pyschoville (but I’m still behind so no spoilers!) in the second episode we catch sight of the side of Mr Jolly’s van. For the background; Mr Jolly is apparently arch rival to the rather sinister Mr Jelly.

So it was Mr Jolly’s site I checked out first – just by typing in the domain.

I couldn’t but help notice the AdWords like ad. Clever. It does look to me that the BBC designers think comparison engines dominate these things as we’ve a spoof ad for clown comparison engine ala "Clowns Compare Prices".


Clicking on Mr Jelly’s ad takes us to the disturbed clown’s site! Both sites do have links to BBC disclaimers, though.

Apnoti to launch world's first real time search engine

Apnoti.com is a shopping search engine with a real time focus. The site is live and established. What separates it from other shopping search engines is that it keeps close track of the price of items and allows you to sign up for price drop alerts.

So if you’re planning on buying a certain Linksys by Cisco Wireless Range Expander you can plug the details into the system and get an alert when Apnoti notices a tracked retailer has dropped the price to a range you can afford.

TheWeirdOne noticed Smart Apnoti crawling her site after she made some tweaks. Pretty quick reactions there from Apnoti.

According to the German company’s holding page not only are they launching on Monday August the 3rd but they’re making the claim to be the world’s first real-time search engine.

Google Reader and a costly mistake

When you sign into Google Reader you'll notice that most of the sign in screen is devoted to a Google picked collection of RSS discoveries. The default one is "cool" and shows popular shares from around the web.

Right now there's an awfully cute panda checking out a rather impressive cake. There's also a rookie learning about AdWords the hard way.



Jezebel, I think, is a popular Gawker blog too. Let's hope this isn't a site targeting match and somehow the test AdWord is being matched the panda photos by content algorithm.

Predicting a super digg: 123456789

Image by Sascha Grant via Flickr

This is the second time I've found myself trying to guess a Google logo. A so-called "super digg" is when Google's logo changes to mark and event or date, links through to the search results and you're lucky enough be among the ranking sites.

The last time I (correctly, briefly) predicted a 1234567890 Google logo was to match the unix clock.

This time the prediction is based on the 'British calendar'. Here in Blighty we tend to write dates differently than in the US. We put the shortest of the chronological elements in order and so it is: day / month / year. I was born in 10/5/76. I was born on May the 10th and not the 5th of October.

What does this mean? This means August the 7th, 2009 will look good. That already gives us 7/8/9.

We can extend that by putting 12:34:56 beside it. That's 34 minutes and 56 seconds past 12.

Yup; 12:34:56 7/8/9 or, if you want, 123456789!

Chef Kate tells me that this won't happen again for another four thousand years! (I'll do the maths on that later, promise).

So will Google UK's logo change to mark the second? Maybe. I'll be an optimist and give it 23.45% chance of it happening!

118 800 down, opt-out takes site offline

Here in the UK a new directory inquiries company is about to go live. What's 'special' about 118800.co.uk is that they'll include mobile numbers on their directory.

They've said they'll try not to include mobile numbers associated with children. The rest of us have to opt-out online. I tried to do this last night but couldn't as the site was down. The site's still down.

I would imagine that 118 800 are on the cusp of another round of PR issues. If the website is still like this by tonight I would imagine they'll have to extend the opt-out period at the very least.

Adobe - doing it right

TheWeirdOne has been testing Windows 7 ever since Bing kindly gave us a copy of the RC. It's good to see that sites like Abode.com are already detecting and reacting to Windows 7 users.

Our experience has been good so far. Programs like Spore run without any fuss what-so-ever. I'm not sure how far away I'm from getting a netbook; I might have a Chrome OS vs Windows 7 debate. I don't have a PC right now (just laptops!) but getting Windows 7 makes sense in a way that Vista never did.

I’m worried about Google’s Webmaster product poll

Image via Wikipedia

Google opened up a Moderator powered public vote for what the Webmaster Central team could do to help webmasters. This is the team who supports the Webmaster Tool section and products like the Webmaster Console.

There are loads of changes that I think Google could make to make the GWC better and a few I think they’d actually do.

I’m just not confident that the crowd will vote for them though. Why not? The crowd doesn’t seem to understand what they’re being asked to vote on.

Here’s some real suggestions to Google on how the Webmaster Console could be made better.

"Create one account, where all adsense revenue can go and be used as part of our adwords budget. Helps us re-use the cash for our own advertising. Good for Google also as there might be fewer payments."

"GOOGLE the greatest search engine ever created! And Yet....I cannot navigate back to google's home page from my gmail or many other pages within the google environment. Every single page should have this link. We don't all have a google tool bar."

"If Google could add a thesaurus and synonyms tool to gmail, that would be easier than having to resource to other product and step outside my email to get the right word."

"books.google.com needs a bookmark function!"

"I have a domain hosted with Google. I want to be able to add my company's logo and contact info as a picture to my email signature. This is something that is available in MS and Yahoo products :("

"make google adsense ads code safe, no one copy the ads code. if something put adsense code to other site . then account is block .. please work on this issue."

My concern is that these people – and more like them – are voting for what they want and yet they clearly don’t understand the question. Are these people voting against improvements to the Webmaster Console and tool set because they want changes made to Gmail or AdSense?

There’s more. It looks like there are suggestions from people who don’t even seem to know how to use the tools. Let’s look at this one:

"Let Webmasters know whether any of their domains is being punished for violating guidelines, but do not tell why to avoid helping spammers"

I’m not the only one concerned. I found this ‘Webmaster Console’ suggestion among the list of ideas from John in Rochester, MN.

"When someone submits an idea for gmail, maps, analytics, adsense, adwords or any other nonsense in the Product Ideas for Webmaster Central everyone should flag it as inappropriate."

Google Analytics not compatible with IE8?

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

I've not bothered to grab IE8 yet (nor Firefox 3.5, for that matter) but this question on Google's AdWords help forum caught my attention.

RolandV writes,

When I try to access my Analytics account through the Analytics tab under "Reporting" in AdWords, I consistently (on various accounts) get "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". However, this works fine when I do the same in Chrome.

Is this a bug in AdWords, IE8, both? What do I have to do when I want to use IE8, not Chrome?

RolandV, I suspect, will be writing about the AdWords version of Google Analytics rather than trying to access Google Analytics directly (it's the same thing; just a different colour).

Does anyone else suffer from this issue?

Like the Bing logo? Microsoft puts the company that designed it up for sale

Back when Microsoft bought aQuantive in order to get its hands on Atlas and other technologies the software giant also picked up the ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish.

Image by erokCom™ via Flickr

Yup; Avenue A/Razorfish was created through the merger of the ad agencies Avenue A and Razorfish. Names like that don’t to last long and rather than being called AA/R the agency was rebranded as Razorfish.

Microsoft are hoping for as much as $700m for Razorfish. The aQuantive deal was huge and set Microsoft back a staggering $6b but nevertheless, getting a full $700m back for the advertising agency bit isn’t bad.

That’s if they manage to get that much. The sale of Razorfish has been long rumoured. Back in October 08 we saw headlines like Razorfish buys Wysiwyg – WPP denies it’s buying Razorfish.

In fact, back in 2007 we saw the Tribbble Ad Agency run articles like Avenue A | Razorfish employees get screwed by Microsoft. That article had the brilliant quote from an anonymous employee.

“If they are not going to treat us like Microsoft Employees, then what’s the point of working for Microsoft”

Razorfish has huge clients. People like Kraft, Coca-Cola and Disney. People are talking up either WPP or Publicis as buyers. Heck; people are even discussing Omnicom as a potential buyer but as PepsiCo is an important client for Omnicom I suspect there may be an issue there.

My money is currently on Publicis simply because they recently announced a partnership/joint venture with Microsoft last week (which sparked thoughts of a Razorfish sale in my mind then; as I’m sure it did for other people too).

Razorfish didn’t simply design the Bing logo. It is a healthy part of the impressive advertising campaign for Microsoft’s decision engine.

I doubt the sale of Razorfish will impact Bing at all. If anything it removes conflict of interest concerns. People didn’t like Google owning the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick but I suspect too few people in the Search Industry knew to trace Razorfish back to Microsoft.

Who bought the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick from Google? It was Publicis.