In a first, the England football match against Ukraine is to only be available on the web only. Hearing on the radio how upset everyone is about it, I have to agree as much as this is the future I am not sure that it is a good thing this time.
First off the main reason for non of the the big TV companies to buy the game was the fact that there is a ratings war between BBC and ITV on Saturday nights and no one wants to point potential viewers to away.
For now though, with quality suffering who wants to sit round a compter to watch a match? Maybe with the greater integration between the internet and tv like services like iplayer this will become a more normal way of watching programmes but for now most people who want to watch it would have to watch a computer screen, which would be more time staring at a screen.
I have today been playing around with the Google insights website, which lets you see the trends for keywords that you put in.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
Here is google’s post on it http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/on-predictability-of-search-trends.html
One of the statements from the research is that over half of the most popular terms were found predictable in a 12 forcast. There are also more predictable categories such as health, food and drink and travel. The least pradicatble categories are for the more rapidaly changing entertainment and online communities and social networks. So I guess they cannot predict who will be the next facebook yet.
A good way to use this tool is to look at how search trends change, an example is the terms, Buy movies online and Buy DVD online which cross as people become to consume movies by different methods.
I have been working for a while on www.orthopaedicnursing.org which is an online resource for orthopaedic nursing around the world. For the project we used modx a cms that allows easy editing of the website. The admin can edit, post news, events and documents.
Further to my local search post, I am working with a website that has 2 practices, in different areas. The challenge is to get them both to rank for there own area.
At the moment they are both ranking ok, both the showing the homepage but picking out the area that the user has searched for. This shows how google picks the part of a site that is relevant to the search keyphrase that has been searched for.
The keywords are: Chiropodist Hednesford and Chiropodist Shrewsbury so far the Hedsnesford one is doing the best, showing both the homepage and the area specific page.
I have just been involved in the re-launch of a website for Options for Life a chairty that brings day to day activities to people with learning disabilites in the West Midlands.
For the project our team used the Silverstripe content management system, as we have for a few projects now. The project has taken bit of work, but the results are pleasing and now allow the team over there to update the website and add news and are now in control of keeping the website up-to-date.