50 ways to improve your website

I've just finished reading 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website, a recently published primer on how to organise your website so that Googlebots spot it more easily and that other websites realise they want to link to it, all in the name of getting fabulous page-ranking recognition when your killer keywords get typed into Google's search engine. If you run a website, market stuff over the web or engage in e-commerce, buy this book: it will change your understanding of what it takes to build a successful online presence.

I should declare a tangential interest. I am largely aware of the book as one of its authors, Steve Johnston, is a friend of mine; and I edited an early eBook version of the project hosted on Steve's company website. Many months down the line, the published edition has evolved out of all recognition from the early PDF format to the absolute benefit of the book.


50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website lets digital media professionals and enthusiastic in on SEO secrets in seamless everyday language; the book must have been through several drafts and has profited from careful editing from Random House and various peer review critiques. It's an impressive achievement and deserves to clean up the competition within its niche.


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Stepford spies

What could be more American than motherhood and Pavlova cake?

Richard and Cynthia Murphy, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley (and six others) seemed to be regular citizens until busted by their incompetence days after an official visit to the US by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

It appears that the ten Russian spies were unmasked by the FBI finding a 27-letter password next to a computer disk belonging to one of the group during a secret raid. The FBI then sat back for years listening in to threads of emails and mountains of documents, detailing expense claims that would have given British MPs a run for their money.

And then the American authorities reeled them in, way before any damage was done. The SVR is no KGB.


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Play nice with Synthia

Dr J Craig Venter is at it again. Ten years ago he was trying the trademark the human genome like the antithesis of Tim Berners-Lee. Now he has 'created' the world's first organism not created by natural selection.

Synthia is a synthetic single-celled creature, a new kind of bug. Like any stride into the scientific future, the good side can be contrasted with the bad: is this a road humankind wishes to rush down, or a dangerous cul-de-sac.

The achievement is startling, but the conversation has just begun.


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BNP goes 404

Talk about taking your ball home with you before the end of the match.

Simon Bennett, the British National Party's head of online operations resigned spectacularly on the eve of the general election and took the website with him.

Visitors to the party's site were treated to a personal message about why people shouldn't vote for the BNP: an acronym that perhaps should now stand for Barely aNy Policies.


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How to ruin your own reputation in a fortnight

Orlando Figes will now have to work hard not to be remembered as the academic who set fire to his own career. Years of building a reputation can be destroyed in an instant.

Posing as 'Historian' when reviewing works of history on Amazon, he raved about his own books and trashed his rivals' work, including Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky.

This may be seen initially as trivial, as playground antics, but when his rivals smelt a rat, Mr Figes instructed his lawyers to sue for libel in an attempt to smother their reaction. This tactic backfired when he was forced after a fortnight of posturing to admit his authorship of the caustic reviews.

Such behaviour goes down like Agent Orange in the academic world. Mr Figes is unfortunate in that the extremes of his behaviour will serve as a warning and a case study to other authors similarly tempted to bash competitors' books.

In an increasingly wired world, online reviews can matter: as Mr Service has said, 'there is such a thing as negative publicity' as sales of his book did not benefit from a 'dead-cat bounce' from curious readers wondering if the criticism was over the top. In other words, during the two-week siege, sales of Mr Service's book tanked.

Hmm. If wonder if the lawyers will now pursue Mr Figes, who is now on compassionate leave of ill-health grounds from his post at Birkbeck University?


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Politics in a parallel universe

The latest poll after the debate, albeit a survey of mobile texters: Conservatives 33 per cent (248 seats); Liberal Democrats 30 per cent (101 seats); Labour 28 per cent (272 seats); Others 9 per cent (29 seats).

Nick Clegg may say, in a future debate [delete as applicable]: 'David/Gordon, I served with Charles Kennedy, I knew Charles Kennedy, Charles Kennedy was a friend of mine. David/Gordon, you're no Charles Kennedy.'

But this is, for the moment, heady froth after a successful Clegg debate performance. The interesting test will be what the polls say in a few days' time, the next official sample being published on Sunday.

Whatever happens next, it's all a far cry from the early days of Nick Clegg's leadership of the LibDems ...


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Celebrity culture: next steps?

What will be the impact of the new CelebAround iPhone application? Created by MatrixPhotos.com, a paparazzi agency, for a gossip-hungry crowd at £1.79 a throw, fans will be able to track their heroes footsteps 12 hours after the famous soles have trod London's hallowed sod.

• It will simply advertise expensive haunts to ever more people. Just because Madonna may eat at the Ivy doesn't mean Jo Bloggs can afford it.
• Expect a massive increase in mobile video 'journalism'.
• The paparazzi agency may either be shooting itself in the foot or encouraging a new source of material: I can't decide, and it's probably a close run thing.
• Celebrity venues will get even more exclusive in an attempt to keep out the 'civilians'.
• Stars will still be able to wander the street incognito if they dress down sufficiently and don't court publicity.
• Stalking has just met Google Maps.
• Agents will try to get the application banned, as business may get more difficult to negotiate without sufficient camflouge.
• Private members' clubs will thrive.
• Ordinary people may often get mistaken for celebrities causing many false sightings that clog up the site.

In short, a dangerous, dog's breakfast of an idea that may drown under the volume its own shrill publicity.

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Don't be evil, or at least don't be caught

'Don't be evil' is Google's informal mantra, but it's getting more difficult to avoid criminal litigation when you are the size of the corporate giant.

In Italy, after a video showing bullying of a disabled boy was briefly uploaded on to YouTube, three senior Google executives have been given suspended sentences on the grounds of violating privacy laws.

Given that 20 hours of new material is uploaded on to YouTube every minute, this seems a tad over-zealous, especially as Google removed the offending material quickly. And YouTube does operate a level of censorship. anyway.

So, what's the motivation? Jealous rival media owners spoiling for a fight?

This is the latest example of culture clash between 'internet as a space for free speech and free information' and 'internet as global marketplace'. Corporations fear losing control, and this trial signals the start of potential censorship of the internet, which may lead in dangerous directions.

Dick Francis's sure thing

Fame can be fossilized for ever in an instant, but t'was ever thus. Dick Francis CBE, who has died in the Cayman Islands, is a pre-internet example of this phenomenon.

Mr Francis rode over 350 racehorse winners, held the title of champion jockey and, on retirement from the saddle, wrote 40-odd novels on racing intrigue (creating a new thriller genre in the process). But he will mostly be remembered for posterity for his spectacular failure to win the 1956 Grand National on Devon Loch, the Queen Mother's horse. He could never shake off this moment: riding a sure thing that lost.

The Virtual Revolution's latest episode dealt with issues of online privacy. It seems web users are currently happy that their browsing habits and personal details are collected in return for free access to websites like Google, so that advertising can be honed to individual's search behaviour. And social networking captures every message and photo ever posted -- for ever.

The danger of this is that no one knows whether personal data will always be in benign owners' hands. Dutch surveys of religious groupings in the 1920s fell into the lap of the Nazis during their occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, with disastrous consequences.

Where Devon Loch will always define Dick Francis, web browsing behaviour will come to define us. Facebook indiscretions (e.g. drunkenness and worse) are being given as much weight as CVs when considering candidates for jobs and for sacking staff: they may even give blackmail opportunities to shady future rights holders of embarrassing information.

This is the thought police of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four by the back door: secret files are being kept on everyone.

Database lessons from Flight 253

Homeland security is just another area where database information is difficult to track. We all have an irrational hope that computers are magic devices that tell us all the answers, but information is only as good as the people who enter it on to the system, and databases are not good at reflecting nuance or individual workers' meanings.

The scuppered terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit was not foiled because of computer efficiency, as Umar Faroukh Abdulmutallab managed to get close to morbid success having passed through customs in Nigeria and Amsterdam. He featured on lists of suspected activists, was denied a Visa to the UK, and was shopped by his own father to the US Authorities.

Intelligence is only as good as the foresight of the people receiving it. Even the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack that brought the USA into World War II might have been averted if intelligence officers had picked up the correct message in among the white noise.

Databases do not predict, they only hold information about what has passed. The security services need to work out new forecasting strategies for second-guessing enemy groups next moves without killing off the general public's ability to use planes, boats and trains with too many counter-terrorism moves.

Databases are useful, however, for finding out the 'current situation'. When databases go wrong, where staff shortages force time-poor workers to rush updating records, any time savings are a false economy as information decreases in accuracy and value. In any organisation, database work is a frontline service.

Me and Mrs Janes

Jacqui Janes, I feel your pain. Or at least a tiny sliver of it.

The media world has moved on since Gordon Brown penned his heartfelt, misspelt letter of condolence, with The Sun getting the larger portion of egg on its face for neglecting to remind readers of the PM's partial blindness and for its own website blunder expressing dearest sympathy for "Mrs Jones".

But today I'm encouraged by my Alma Mater to tithe my modest income to help fund budding academic boy geniuses, which might be understandable if they'd sent the begging letter to the right person. The sheen of alumni status pales somewhat if the school can't get your name right. I clearly made so great an impression on the esteemed establishment that, when some years back I pointed out out their mistake, they insisted there were two of us by the same name in the same year and told me my middle name was Andrew.

So I'll leave the philanthropy to the Phils and Annes until someone cleanses their database, or probably later on the parallel logic that charity begins at home (at least, it does on my meagre annual crust).