In his blog, Gambert claims that “I am helping the search engine marketing community establish an approved SEO process, which can be sold as an ‘SEO service.’” He goes on to explain that other industries have standards and guidelines and, as these industries are recognised as services, it means that there is a way for consumers to identify practitioners with credible offerings.

Now, although we can jump on the “fry Gambert” bandwagon and I think that his idea is nothing more than a revenue/copyright ploy, I’m going to leave that to the rest of cyberspace. Instead, Gambert’s comments do raise an age old question that I would like to discuss: Do we need SEO standards?

It’s true that other areas of web development have standards: HTML has validation; w3c produces reams of standards on CSS and XHTML; there are standards for ECMAScript (most commonly JavaScript); but do these really create security amongst web designers and developers?

The SEO industry really does have its share of cheats and con artists. We’ve all heard stories of small business owners getting hoodwinked by SEO scams. Shouldn’t we, as responsible professionals, do something to remove the black-hatters from our field?

Perhaps we should, but is a body of standards the best way to go about it? I’m not convinced that standards will separate the expert from the swindler. Indeed, SEO was effectively started by scam artists – how else would you describe someone distributing spam to a forum in order to increase their own SERP?
Whom would the community trust as members of a body that certifies a person or company is following SEO standards? Never mind that, who would we trust to create those standards in the first place?

Yes, there are respected SEO professionals, but as a whole the industry is young enough to still be a little rough around the edges. Some might argue that this is exactly why we need standards – but consider what would happen if someone tried to create them and enforce them. You’d more than likely get a mess that’s even worse than what Gambert is trying to pull.

Would a body of standards prevent people who don’t do due diligence from getting scammed? No. Will it prevent those who carry the SEO trademark from scamming others? No. Gambert’s trademark claim should be invalidated as the cheap swindle it is and the industry should promote the ideals of SEO experts and educate consumers on what to look for in them; something that I will cover now.

What to Look for in an SEO Expert
Here’s the paradox: Bad SEO works, and works quickly, but will ultimately get you banned from the search engines. So, from a consumer’s point of view, poor (or black hat) SEO appears to give them results that they need. They pay. Then the expert is gone, just in time for the customer’s rankings to start falling like a blind roofer.
Like all things in life, nothing worth having ever comes easy; and quality SEO is no different. When looking for an SEO expert, this is rule number one:

Always ensure that the expert is prepared to offer a medium-to-long term relationship.

SEO is not a one-stop shop. It is not an overnight fix. It requires time to follow your keywords; to establish links and drive traffic from forums, blogs and article sites; to manage on-the-page metatags, titles and internal links; and manage off-the-page anchor text optimisation.
All of this requires the expert to be on hand to compete and monitor the optimisation process. If they are unwilling to offer this, they may be a fly-by-night “expert”.

Does the expert know what they are doing?

This may seem like a very vague and expansive question, especially as consumers may not know what they are expecting of their expert. However, it is a pertinent question nonetheless. You and your SEO expert should look for three things before even attempting to optimise your site:

Are your customers searching for your products and/or services online?

This should be very easy for your expert to determine by putting the appropriate keywords in Wordtracker. It’s not just about whether people are searching for your kind of offerings online, though; it’s also about how many people are searching. If too few people are looking for you online, SEO on this area would be a waste of money – and your expert should advise you of this.

Are your competitors showing up for the terms that you want to target?

This could indicate that your competitors have found it worth their while to spend money on SEO. That doesn’t automatically mean that you will as well, however. Your expert should be able to advise you of the benefits that his/her services will offer.

What effect would an increase in targeted traffic to your web site have on my business?

This is really the most important question. If your web site effectively converts traffic into sales already, then you can expect SEO that increases your traffic to also increase your sales. If it doesn’t, more traffic is not going to translate into more sales.

If, between you and your expert, you can answer these questions positively, then it should be worth continuing with SEO.

What kind of SEO services do you want?

Do you want someone who specialises in on-the-page? Who specialises in content writing? Article submission? Do you want someone that knows all areas of SEO, or maybe someone who’s new to the field (and therefore cheaper)? Do you want to spend money on an AdWords or a PayPerClick campaign?

Fleshing out your requirements and their potential return on investment is the next step with your expert. There’s no hard and fast list of questions that you need to ask next, but there are a few that you should always check with your new hire, to paraphrase Jon Rognerud, writing for Entrepreneur.com:

What ranking guarantees do you provide? No honest, reputable SEO will make any kind of ranking guarantee. If you see anything like “#1 position for your keywords in six weeks!” run the other way.

Are you going to change my web site? The answer to this had better be “yes;” SEO is based on site content and structure.

How do you handle linking? Honest SEOs will explain their approach in great detail and let you see what they do. If they get evasive or claim that they use proprietary software or techniques, they might be engaging in black hat and/or spammy practices.

What are your other services and what is your pricing model? This should be clearly explained, not “sold.” Sure, SEO may be the company’s main service, but it may also do web analytics, pay-per-click, e-mail marketing, social media optimization, and more.

Who are some of your competitors? An honest firm will tell you who their competitors are and provide details.

What are your qualifications? Though no certifications are required for SEO, some things can help, like the Google Advertising Professional program. You may also want to consider time in business, though that’s no guarantee of expertise. Does the firm specialize in certain market segments? This would also be a good time to ask for customer references, just as you would for any contractor.

What kind of traffic results can I expect to see, how soon, and how much will they cost? Don’t judge them on price alone. Some scammy SEO companies will set up a pay-per-click campaign without their clients’ knowledge; the client pays fees every month, and the minute they stop paying, their traffic disappears.

Ideally, you and your SEO form a partnership. They should keep you apprised of what they’re doing and the effects, with weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. With patience, planning, cooperation, and a lot of research, getting an SEO for your site could be an excellent decision. Good luck!

DM

Anywho, that all changed recently when an advert caught my eye on the gogglebox:

Am I the only one that thinks this is cooler than a penguin’s bottom?DM

One of the nastier things about being a web developer, I’m told, is the existence of Internet Explorer. Massively popular, but full of “quirks,” coding around IE can be a real pain. When IE7 shipped, many web developers recoiled in horror as sites that worked fine in IE6 broke.

The problem, as is so often the case, is backwards compatibility. IE5.5 (and below) was decidedly nonstandard in its rendering behavior. Hundreds of millions of web pages were written to look “right” in IE5.5’s broken rendering. The result was something of a quandary for Microsoft when it came to release IE6. They wanted to improve the standards conformance in IE6, but couldn’t afford to break pages dependent on the older behavior.

The solution was the “doctype switch”. The doctype switch allowed IE6 to support both the old IE5.5 behavior—”quirks mode”—and new, more standards-conforming behavior—”standards mode.” Doctypes are an optional part of HTML pages, which specify which version of the HTML spec a page is using. In the olden days of the web, most web pages didn’t bother to specify—they barely heeded the mandatory parts of the standards, let alone optional parts. So the presence of the doctype could be used to pick between modes—if someone used a doctype, they probably knew what they were doing, and wanted “standards mode.” No doctype (or a doctype specifying an old version of HTML) and they were probably assuming nonstandard behavior, and “quirks mode” would be picked.

At least, that was the theory. The thing about IE6’s “standards mode” is that it wasn’t all that standard. Although it fixed some of the bigger issues IE5.5 had, it still had plenty of its own. With IE7, MS tried to fix a few more of the nonconformance problems. The intent was to keep “quirks mode” the same as it always had been, and to further improve “standards mode.” What the company discovered when it did this was that people using the doctype weren’t actually expecting “standard” behavior. Rather than writing pages to target the HTML specifications, these pages were written to work with IE6’s still-not-standard-but-better-than-before behavior. So, they didn’t work with full-blown “quirks mode” rendering—but they didn’t work with 100%-standard rendering either.

Sometimes this was deliberate—developers taking standard pages (that work properly in, say, Safari) and adding hacks to them in order to get an acceptable appearance in IE. Other times, it was accidental; developers added the doctype because it was fashionable to do so, or because their design tools added it automatically, without fully understanding the consequences of the switch. Whether by accident or by design, most pages using “standards mode” are expecting IE6’s own unique take on “standards mode”, and not true standard behavior.

The upshot of this is that IE7 broke pages that used to work in IE6. Both business-critical intranet apps and the Web in general stopped working—not normally fatally, but enough to throw out layouts and make pages look wrong. This undoubtedly hurt IE7’s uptake, and that has Microsoft concerned. IE7 is finally going to be put out as an automatic update in the next few weeks, and the reason it has taken so long is this reluctance from businesses. If the standardization changes were made to “standards mode,” using the doctype switch, all those pages demanding not-really-standards-mode will break. That’s a lot of pages, and they’ll break even more badly than they broke with IE7.

Which brings us to IE8. With IE8, Microsoft wants to further improve the standards conformance of the browser, to bring it up to a level that’s comparable to Firefox 3, Opera, and Safari. Experience with IE7 and the doctype switch leaves the software giant concerned that further fixes to “standards mode” will, in the company’s words, “break the Web.”
The IE8 solution: add another layer

When IE8 eventually ships, it will have three rendering modes, two of which are the already familiar “quirks mode” and “(not so) standards mode.” In an IE team blog entry, IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson revealed a third mode that can be invoked by developers:

1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element.

This third mode will use a <meta> tag to specify that a page should use the behavior of a specific browser version. To get IE8 really-standard-this-time-we-mean-it behavior, a page will include an element like <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />. That says that a page should use IE8’s behavior—and should use it even in IE9, IE10, or any future version. The first two modes will continue to use the doctype switch to choose between them.

This should solve the problem that so hurt IE7. The developer expectation that IE’s “standards mode” should remain the same indefinitely should be met. As long as a page works in IE7, it should continue to work in the same way in IE8.

The idea for this new tag was not developed by Microsoft in isolation. The company worked with the Web Standards Project (WaSP) to devise this mechanism, to allow the existing web to work, and the future web to be standards compliant. Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft task force who devised this scheme, published an article on A List Apart further detailing the specifics of the declaration.

The current owners, AOL (who bought Netscape back in 1998), have announced that they will not be providing support for the browser from 1st February 2008, due to, what appears to be, a couple of reasons.

Firstly, after a few years of running Netscape, they sacked the majority of development staff in 2003; many of whom then moved over to Mozilla and worked on the development of FireFox. In fact, 2002/2003 saw Microsoft attain their highest penetration of users at nearly 95%.

Secondly, the market share of Netscape (by users) has dropped consistently since 1995, when Microsoft released their browser, Internet Explorer, and started to bundle it with their operating system.

This has lead, in recent months, to the high profile case which saw Microsoft accused of anti-competitive behaviour.

Thirdly and possibly most crucially, AOL released a bag of cack in Netscape 6.0 back in 2000 following pressure from the Web Standards Project and have never recovered from it.

This core of Netscape had already not been updated since version 4.0 and IE was already catching up fast. IE had a better HTML engine – Netscape had a clever method of compressing images, text and Flash at the server-side, which meant faster browsing (but not faster downloads).

However, by 2001, Internet Explorer version 5.0 was available, bundled with the operating system, and could handle XML, Ajax (although it was called “XMLHttpRequest” at the time) and had a second release, 5.5, only a few months later that could support CSS, 128-bit encryption and had support for HTML standards.

From here, the only way is down for Netscape. AOL dropped developers, many of whom were already working on Gromit – the forerunner to FireFox – and kept only a small core of developers working on the Netscape project.

With Microsoft gaining ground, Netscape developers moving to Mozilla and AOL condoning the use of an antiquated browser core, it was only a matter of time before NS would be phased out.

Additionally, the lack of development work going on at Netscape has meant that the browser is a long way behind with security updates, too.

As it stands, less than 0.6% of web users have Netscape. So the death of the icon should be a quiet affair, with very few people at the funeral.

On the one hand, I feel sorry for the demise of such a great browser. I have fond memories of Netscape and detest IE, too.

However, on the other hand, I’m glad that the torch was passed over to Mozilla and the God that is FireFox. Open Source projects work and have proven to give even monopolies a good run for their money – with FireFox currently having a 16% market share, and many other smaller browsers eating into IE’s piece of the pie.

So, like a grandfather passing on pearls of wisdom to the next generation, it seems that Netscape too has had learnings for other browsers. It was a marvel in its youth, then it started to get a bit paunchy and bald, and now is destined for the great retirement home in the sky.

However, I’d like to remember Netscape as the underdog wonder of its youth,  and I, for one, will be shedding a quiet tear for the loss of a great icon.

A 51-year old man has admitted to simulating sex in his hostel bedroom with his pushbike. He was caught riding (no punn intended) the cycle in a sexual simulation by cleaners at his hostel, where Robert Stewart had been living since October 2006.

The cleaners observed Mr Stewart wearing only a t-shirt (and presumably a smile) dry-humping his bike after he failed to respond to their calls at the door to clean the room.

The local sheriff has been quoted as saying “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist’.”

The original excuse given was that Mr Stewart had been drinking and was a “misunderstanding”.

Personally, I have gotten into some seriously inebriated states in the past and even had one or two experiences that could be classed as drunken misunderstandings. However,  I am yet to find a single friend, colleague, co-worker or seemingly any other human that has ended up after a night on the pop fancying a bit of back-wheel-rubber-action with my Raleigh.

On a plus note, I’m sure that if the news becomes a little more famous, we can look forward to plenty of lame jokes sent via your mobiles involving the words “Chopper”, “rubber” and “rear suspension system”…

We can only hope.

In this world of comic mateiness, the 17-year old is accused of pinching nearly £3,000 ($6,000) of furniture from other users by creating “fake” HabboHotel sites and obtaining passwords from other users. 
Unlike previous virtual thefts, the police have been involved in this instance because the furniture is purchased with real money. Several other teenagers have also been contacted and questioned by the police with regards to the alleged crime.

Thefts of this sort are a growing issue in virtual worlds; in 2005 a Chinese gamer was stabbed to death in a row over a sword in a game. Shanghai gamer Qiu Chengwei killed player Zhu Caoyuan when he discovered he had sold a “dragon sabre” he had been loaned.  
The line between real and virtual worlds seems to be blurring all the time. We’ve already seen news reports on the Chinese “slaves” working 18-hour days in World of Warcraft to earn gold for players in other countries. Now we have murder and theft to be added to the list of activities available in both worlds.

However, the thing that most interested me about this story is the fact that these “criminals” have signed up for websites with their real names; their real account details. If I were going to commit a crime which included phishing, scamming and stealing, I’d be pretty sure to try and minimise the e-paper trail left behind me. 
All of this seems like another blow for the online gaming community. With complaints about lost efficiency at work equivalent to the GDP of Jamaica to these new alleged crimes, it seems that the anti-gaming squad have plenty to be working with for their next batch of reports.

But they shouldn’t underestimate the gamers. When you realise the immense impact that a place like Jamaica has you must also realize the impact that virtual worlds have too. 
And some of the larger sites (Habbo is about the 16th largest by user base) such as Lineage with circa 4.5 million subscribers could probably already equal the GDP of a smaller nation all by themselves.

When you put it in context, one theft and one stabbing in a network of users this large and profitable is not a huge deal. The difference is that this has happened because of environments and situations that do not physically exist – and we don’t have the ability, laws or experience to enforce such contraventions. 
Hopefully, this isolated crime will not deter others from enjoying online gaming. I, for one, will still continue to encourage others to try everything at least once, especially interacting in an online world. Everything that is except incest and country dancing.

A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi. The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousands times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The smaller head can read greater densities of data stored on the disk.

Hitachi said the advance would fuel the “terabyte era”, with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs.

Why? Why would anyone need this much storage space?

1,000,000 songs is around 50,000 hours of listening time. That’s nearly 6 years of 24/7 listening; and that’s only if you like 3-minute dance tracks. If your genre of choice is more towards Bohemian Rhapsody, you can comfortably push past the 10-year mark without breaking a sweat.

Also, if we put aside the amount of storage space and concentrate on the amount of time it would take to actually fill it, you can see that there is a separate issue that is being missed here.

In September, Computeractive magazine conducted a study of UK broadband speeds. Circa 3000 readers took part in the study, which revealed some huge discrepancies between advertised speed and actual speed.

The average speed for an 8mbps consumer is actually far closer to 2.7mbps. 

At this rate, it takes around 3 seconds to download 1mb. To fill your 4tb harddrive with a decade of tunes would take another 4-years; and that’s not allowing for the dragging force of wireless or webserver speed at your purchasing site.

So if your home PC takes 4 years to download and 10 years to listen to, why would anyone download a million tracks? Or want to spend £800,000 ($1.6million) on iTunes?

Perhaps it may be better to invest in improving the current web infrastructure – and, in particular, download speeds – before pushing for petrabyte hard drive…?

I for one would be far happier if my internet and wireless connections ran at the advertised speeds (or above the advertised speeds) than if I had a huge amount of storage available.

Also, with the push towards more and more web-based applications, it seems that the race for local storage could be a thing of the past in the very near future.

So, I ask again, why? Why bother with the development of this level of storage if you don’t have a) the data to store, b) the time to use the data that you did store, c) the functionality to write the data fast enough or d) a small fortune to invest in Sony/EMI?

Hitachi predicts it could release a hard disk for desktops with 4TB of storage and a laptop with a 1TB drive by 2011; so we have a bit of time to find ways of reading the data faster in the interim.

In the meantime, I’m off to listen to some music…

DM

One is to release news on days when there is something that will be deemed as more important. For example, when Bill Clinton ordered the single biggest bombing campaign in Kosovo it was announced on the same day as the Colombine school shootings.

The second is to release the story on a Friday. By the time the weekend has passed, it’s a distant memory and we’ll have some other story about Ono the panda’s birthday to report on.

However, this piece of news from Friday has sat consistently in the top 5 most e-mailed news stories on the BBC News website for the last 48 hours; and rightly so.

British firm BAE are responsible for the Eurofighter and last week announced that it had secured sales to Saudi Arabia worth over $4 billion, and potentially up to $20 billion for 72 planes.

However, the US have been investigating BAE for some time about corruption claims. It is claimed that BAE kept a secret fund that helped it to win contracts from Saudi Arabia and other countries. The US are particularly interested in a $43billion deal in 1985, in which BAE supplied Hawk and Tornado jets plus other military equipment to Al-Yamamah.

The US have now asked the Home Office to assist in the investigation into alleged bribes to Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan in 1985.

Now this smacks a little of hypocrisy to me, I’m afraid. Ignore the fact that over twenty years have elapsed since the event. Ignore the fact that the shareholders have brought a separate action against BAE for failing to carry out their duties in 1985. What’s the real reason for the US’s interest here?

I mean, Lockhead Martin wouldn’t have anything to gain from BAE’s loss of business or even demise. They reported sales of $11.4 billion in 2006. An additional $20 billion from Saudi Arabia for their F22 Raptor or F16 Fighting Falcon would make a slight improvement on their budget.

However, with the War on Terror waging and Bush looking at countries all over the Middle East, would the US want Saudi Arabia to be strengthening their airforce? Especially with a plane like the Eurofighter, which is more superior (air-to-air) than anything that the US currently produces.

If the US want to investigate corruption claims, they should start with some companies closer to home. Halliburton, Searle, Lockheed and many others might need a looksee – but that’s a whole new thread and news story.

Now that the Home Office are considering their involvement, maybe we’ll start to see more of this story. But one thing is for sure; publishing on a Friday has made no difference to the popularity of the story. Maybe next time we hear about the issue, it’ll be released to the media when OJ is in court.

DM

Three staff at Neath Port Talbot Council have lost their jobs after spending too long on the internet auction site. It seems that “too long” was actually in excess of 2 hours per day.

What is there to shop for for 2 hours a day on what is essentially a second hand store?

In the recent news, there have been stories about businesses losing hundreds of man-hours to internet usage through Facebook, MySpace, eBay and a plethora of other sites.

This puts me in mind of a series of attacks by dogs in the early nineties. The actual number of incidents of dogs biting people had not actually increased (in fact it had decreased since 1985). However, a child was mauled by a Pit Bull Terrier and unfortunately died. Then it was open season on any pooch – especially the ones that didn’t have sad eyes.

In came the Dangerous Dogs Act and it seemed their was a daily story in the news about yet another mastiff pulling limbs off a granny, or a “staffy” chewing its way through an unfortunate postman.

So now we have a new evil insofar as staff slacking off and costing the economy billions (apparently) in lost time. Managers across this green and pleasant land have their time and motion studies are at the ready. Fiona Bruce is busy preemptively practicing pronouncing Welsh company and staff names for the Beebs’ name and shame news coverage (bought to you 24-hours a day).

Then we’ll probably have a bill passed to form the basis of the “Dangerous Social Networking and E-Communications Portal Act”.

Hello and OK magazines will be outlawed. Peter and Jordan, Jade, Posh, Chanelle – they’ll have no one left to talk about them in offices across the country. Maybe they’ll have to start working at their local ASDA or KFC?

It’s not all bad news, then…

DM

A lesser read story from this week came from a statement from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has offered incentives to firms and individuals who create “innovative and disruptive programs” These “incentives” could mean payments of up to $250,000 for the right application.

The purpose of this investment, according to Zuckerberg, is to “support the ecosystem [of Facebook] and help it grow.”

Currently, there are around 4,000 existing Facebook applications already out there (and half of them seem to be on my profile!). I believe that encouraging further application development will simply encourage developers to quickly build and publish their apps. And quick built apps mean a degredation of the service.

The apps out there now are, on the most part, annoying. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they take up space on your profile, increase the length of your webpage exponentially – and all because someone wants to dress as a pirate and steal your coins.

Granted, there are some applications that are worthwhile – scrabble is enjoyable and simple to use – but these are the exception rather than the rule.

There is also a caveat in the application process that states that developers must not have accepted any venture capital money plowed into their business or plans. This will exclude financially-backed companies from hogging the review panel’s time. It also means that the bedroom-coders (whom are usually a little more imaginative) will have a fair crack at the investment available.

Certainly I’ve seen the job requests for FB applications shoot up on sites like RentACoder and GetACoder. So it seems that the wave has already started, and the one-man developers are already cashing in and creating some bespoke products.

This may be the saving grace for the whole process; though there is still a risk that we’ll end up with more applications that are a case of same meat, different gravy. The last thing that FB needs is a flood of second-rate new applications that annoy and confuse users (and by users, I, of course, mean me) . Still, the announcement has been made and we’ll have to see how much drivvel permeates through to the end user. Potentially, it could be a lot.

I hope not. Facebook is a great social networking site and the small annoyances of vampire bites, superpokes, hot potato tosses and being rated as “not hot” don’t detract from the overall benefit and usability of the site.

Time will tell, I guess. So, I’m off to turn someone into a werewolf.

DM