Jamie Riddell's blog

Jamie Riddell

Jamie is a regular writer and commentator in the UK trade press. You can see a list of all his articles here. One of the most experienced and innovative digital media strategists in the UK, jamie runs Digital Tomorrow Today an over the horizon digital consultancy. 

Brands will struggle for standout as Twitter grows

Twitter by Jeff Turner

Recent news that Twitter has reached 20 billion tweets is a major milestone. However, for brands looking to harness this channel for business, the opportunity for standout will only get harder as the service grows.

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If 2.0 was surfing, 3.0 is swimming.

The rise of web 2.0 and the sheer volume of user generated content and outlets [Facebook, Youtube etc.] has been leapt upon by 'savvy' marketers looking to surf the wave of interest and opportunity. For many this has been successful, but, like surfing, it has meant skimming the surface of content missing out on the actual context or meaning of the content.

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Cuil and the heated debate

You will no doubt have seen the launch of Cuil last week, but have you seen the volume and intensity of [mainly negative] commentary surrounding it? I published an article on the Cheeze blog, outlining five reasons why Cuil could be the future of search. Within minutes we had many comments, all berating Cuil for its lack of size, its struggle with uptime and it's look and feel.

Other bloggers went as far as calling Cuil 'liars' [the bloggers' words not mine] whilst many articles covered the negatives.

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Google launches Knol, but sacrifices quality?

Knol, Google's Wikipedia beater has been in beta since December 2007. Last week we saw the wrapping come off and Knol opening up to accept new content entries. Knol, short for Knowledge, is on a steep slope to compete with Wikipedia. With 9.2 million UK users [according to Nielson], even with Google's size, trying to achieve over 8bn articles [and counting at Wikipedia] will take some time.

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Could BOSS be the saviour of Yahoo search?

Yahoo recently launched their open source search tools, under the name BOSS ( Build Your Own Search Service ). The published aim of BOSS is to grow the breadth of search offerings using the Yahoo technology. Use of the Yahoo technology is free in return for Yahoo selling ads against the search results. There are plans for Yahoo to start sharing [what little] revenue they achieve from these new search tools.

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Veni, vidi, cici - the online super-highway

Around 47 A.D, the then Roman Emperor, Claudius, invaded Britain. Without too much detail, this led to the Roman occupation of Britain, where, despite the misgivings of Monty Python, they did in fact do a great number of very good things, including build roads.

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Google launches free publisher adserver

On the day the Google Doubleclick deal goes ahead, we see the launch of Google Ad Manager. Their free ad management tool.

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Max Gogarty and the insincere blog?

Late last week, a 19 year old guy started to write his blog, the subject was on his travels to India and Thailand and as he says is will be a report on ‘partying’ and ‘finding himself’…

Normally a blog like this would have been dismissed but this blog was special as it was on the Guardian newspaper website and the man in question is Max Gogarty.

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How your brand can benefit from monitoring and connecting online

Paying attention to your brand can be easy and invaluable. Many larger brands employ tools or services to monitor offline mentions and communications, but how many are connecting this fully online?

At the most basic level, monitoring references to your product, brand or service can be achieved simply through Google Alerts. There are more advanced solutions that can track the importance of the content, the importance of the poster and the potential influence of a post, but we'll leave that for a later post.

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Google's Algorithm Update Favours Bloggers

Google has been working to increase the frequency of its indexing, so how does this affect your SEO?

We have seen Google indexing blog posts in under two hours over recent weeks which is fantastic news for fresh content like this. However, one of the cornerstones of the natural search algorithim has always been links to the page.

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Seesmic - Creating demand by holding back the goods

Everyone's talking about Seesmic this week. Well everyone that has managed to get the 'pre alpha' testing. Seesmic  is a new video messaging service (think video voicemail, but published to a website) which is quite cool, but not radically new.

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The SEO benefit of blog commentary.

Achieving quality inbound links is still an important element to SEO. The methods to achieve this include 'link baiting' with great content to achieve the best unsolicited links through to purchasing links on smaller directories which yields less benefit.

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