The official website of Number 10 Downing Street has been redesigned and relaunched as a Wordpress blog. The PM was once accused of being an "analog politician in a digital age" and he seems determined to combat that by embracing anything web 2.0. Number 10 already has channels on Youtube, Flickr and Twitter and its own website follows a familiar blog format, complete with social bookmarking buttons.

How long before Gordo tries to control spiralling Goverment borrowing by installing the Mighty Adsense plugin?

Amazon allows the creation of 100 tracking IDs on its Associate program. I like the Associate program and use it across a lot of sites and have actually run out of tracking IDs, but the thing is I don't use them all so wanted to delete some I have never used to create new ones in their place. If you're in the same boat, then you might have asked the same question as me:

"Can I Delete An Amazon Tracking ID?"

Well, in case you're wondering, the answer is no, you can't. I asked Amazon Associate support staff and they said this wasn't possible and the only solution would be to delete my account and start again. Yikes, a tad extreme me thinks. So think carefully before you create that next tracking ID - when they're gone, they're gone.

Labels: amazon

It's always interesting looking at what people search for online. Ask.com released details of some of the most popular questions asked by its UK users. They don't have a press release live on their website but here's the report on the Sky News website.

Their most popular questions include:

• 'Am I Pregnant?'
• 'How do I work out how many weeks pregnant I am?'
• 'What does morning sickness feel like?'

"Am I Pregnant?" seems a very strange question to ask a computer. I know there's a plethora of USB gadgets out there, but maybe this is a new gap in the market? But since it's a popular term, I just registered amipregnant.org.uk, so if you do come up with such a USB device, let me know and I'll put it on the site :-)

Almost a year ago exactly, I mused outloud here, "Wouldn't it be nice if trendy green grocers, Abel & Cole had an affiliate program ?", or as Alex from Big Brother might put it "Remember I told ya!"

Well, I was pleased to note when I logged into Affiliate Window that Abel & Cole have indeed gone and got an affiliate program. I haven't actually shopped with them myself, but their card came through my door and it just looked so good and of a sudden, vegetables seemed exciting to me (for at least five mintues). They are offering affiliates 5% of the basket value.

Possibly at these times of rising food prices, people are tending towards budget food items rather than organic, but I'm sure the Yummy Mummies can't get enough of this stuff. Coincidentally, I just bought a nice new domain name (more of that soon) which will sit with this quite nicely so it looks like the beginning of a plan coming together.

Labels: affiliate window

I got a letter today from the European City Guide in Valencia asking me to confirm my company details for inclusion in their business listings CD-Rom. My bullshit-ometer is pretty good so I immediately decided I wanted no place in their business listings but I think it's worth flagging up in case you also hear from them.

The letter says "in order to positively represent your company and your city, we would be grateful if you would fill in and return this form... as soon as possible." Below that are spaces to fill in or confirm your company details.

But then down at the bottom, there's some text which states, in slightly more legalese text than the opening paragraph, that by filling in the details and returning it, you are actually committing yourself to paying €987 per annual listings, and it automatically renews.

Now, on the one hand, if you properly read the thing all the way through, you will understand what this is all about, but if you just go by the three quarters of the page that just give this impression you are just confirming your details not booking an advert, you may find yourself ordering something you didn't want.

Find out more about the European City Guide at this protest site and see what the Daily Mirror had to say about it. Apparently they are quite litigious, so all I will say is, I won't be bothering with it and I suggest you don't either.

I did decide to look at their website to see which of my local businesses had found themselves in this guide, and was pleased to see someone from Kent having inserted quite an amusing entry into the directory:

Company name: Tisacon
Address: Gullable House, Gravesend

I was looking for nice brandable domain names and of course, the .es TLD of Spain provides the opportunity to create some nice one word domains, separated only by a ".". I've not seen them much in the SERPs but I do like the aesthetics of creative domain registrations so picked out a name I wanted to register.

123-Reg had a fairly prominent notice on its site saying that they now register .es domains for £14.99. I know lots of people have had problems with them before, but I've never had any real difficulties that I can think of with 123-reg, so went ahead and registered the domain. It was all very painless and went through like a normal domain registration.

A few hours later - probably because I've been spoilt by recent ultra quick domain setups - I tried the domain and it wasn't resolving. Then I went over to www.nic.es to check, and it was still saying the domain I registered was available. I kept an eye on it throughout the day and this didn't change. By this morning, I was getting a bit miffed. When I decide I want a domain, I find I want it under my control ASAP just in case someone else buys it before you have a chance. So I started looking for other registrars and found Nameroute. I tried to register the same domain as the original, but with a hyphen in it which I had planned to buy anyway. It went through, they sent me a username and password that didn't work and several hours later, the domain was still showing as available on nic.es

I was definitely fed up at this point, so I headed on over to EuroDNS where everything went smoothly and within 40 minutes both the domains were registered and listed as belong to me with nic.es.

I have no idea if the problems I had with 123reg and Nameroute were one offs, or maybe they are just a bit slow with .es domains, but from the three companies I have used in the last day or so, the only one I would recommend to you for registering .es domains is EuroDNS. They are affiliate links by the way - I wasn't going to bother signing up but when I think a company does a genuinly great job, I like to promote them.

Labels: domain names

I was reading this interesting article about the power of Google and its near monopoly over internet search and it got me to thinking about how the big G's increasing desire to do everything is having a detrimental effect on smaller publishers, like little ol' me.

I have a website which is a directory of computer support companies. It has high rankings on Google for a number of terms like "computer support" and "computer support + location". This high ranking then enables me to sell premium listing space to companies that want a guaranteed top listing on my pages.

Recently I have noticed that Google has been extending its "local business search" into the area of computer support and on many of the listings at which I was number one in the organic results, I am still number one but below a whole load of Google's own results for computer support companies in that area. This immediately means I will get less traffic and damages my site as a business because my premium listings are a less attractive proposition to advertisers.



I don't say that my site has some automatic right to be found first. It's Google's search engine after all, and I'm sure they and many others would say it's a good thing if they can help people get the information they want quickly and without fuss - and they may be right - but from a publisher's point of view, it's still pretty galling to see this giant extending itself ever further and at a stroke demoting competitor data providers. As the article I highlighted earlier says, if one company is to be some kind of universal gateway to information, that isn't a healthy thing.

But are there any obvious threats to Google's position? Well, there's still Yahoo!, MSN and Ask of course but despite their efforts (even resorting to paying people), they seem incapable of being really serious challengers. Perhaps the most interesting player could be Wikia search from the people behind Wikipedia. It's still early days with that project and the results are nothing to write home about yet, but imagine for a second that they managed to get it right. And then say that one day, at the top of every Wikipedia page appeared a new form to search the wikipedia and to "search the web". They could very well get a nice little slice of the search market at a stroke, and people may sit back and wonder of Google, "how do you like them apples?"

It's May 19th. The weather is great outside. And yet, I've just had an order come through one of my websites for a christmas tree decoration. I'm all for forward planning, but that's a little bizarre!