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Kevin Rose, Digg’s co-founder previously warned “the new version of Digg, which would go live in the next few months, would represent the biggest change in the site’s history.
To learn more about Social Media then why not book onto one of our Social Media Courses. We have some great deals on at the moment especially if you book with a Blogging course or a Wordpress Course, other combinations of discounted courses available.
What’s New about Digg
Well it’s arrived and yesterday he blogged:
“This is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We’ll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often.”
“Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better.”
Digg is a new animal
We’re also on Digg – come and be our friends!
He said:
“When you see the new design, you’re going to go, ‘Wow, this is not the same site’.”
What makes Digg different from other social bookmarking sites is it’s strong user community who vote on how interesting stories are by “digging” the articles they like, and “burying” those they don’t. With 35 million unique users per month many bloggers and web developers feature Digg buttons on their site (like us) to allow readers to easily share articles.
Speed is a big factor as the new Digg is faster in every way: submitting articles, loading pages, and Digging content, great news for those using it as part of their social media routine.
Personalisation is even more key, the new design will makes it easier to view content and connect with friends, publishers, and influencers you care about. I think this will be key to Diggs ongoing success, whilst there has been a lot of speculation lately about the future of Digg, this could get them right back on track.
Digg had become a tool for “digg power users” and the company was both unhappy with the way that power users were influencing the natural and organic way in which Digg is supposed to work. Now the new features make the social and community aspects of Digg paramount, it has definitely made digg much more attractive to peopel like me who want to use it for social media. Read the rest of "I’m digging the new Digg?"
Posted by Heather Buckley in Business Skills, New Free Resources, News, Personal Development, SEO, Social Media on August 26th, 2010| 3 Comments »
learning to be assertive can set you free
Good assertiveness skills help build confidence and self esteem. They help avoid bullying and being bullied or feeling the victim.
We provide a two day Assertiveness training course providing practical guidance for anyone who needs to develop their assertiveness skills and build confidence for a range of situations.
Assertivness encourages mutual respect within relationships. It can save you from being/feeling/acting the martyr. It’s healthy, non aggressive and liberating…..so….
What causes people to avoid being assertive?
Many people are not assertive for fear of displeasing others or not being liked. However, in the long run although you may avoid some immediate unpleasantness by not being assertive, you can also create more tension and resentment in a relationship if you refuse to assert yourself and then feel that you are being taken advantage of over and over again. Remember for someone to have control over you, you have to give control to them. Yes, you are responsible, which is difficult to take on board at times, you do not need blame yourself, but you can take responsibility to make changes to the way that you think, behave and react to other people by learning and practising healthy assertiveness skills.
How Assertive Are You?
Ask yourself the following questions.
Do you find it easy to ask for help if you need it?
Can you express anger and annoyance appropriately?
Do you find it easy to ask questions when you don’t understand something?
Do you offer your opinion when you think or feel differently from someone else?
Are you able to say “no” when you don’t want to do something?
If you answered no to many of the questions above you would benefit from developing stronger assertiveness skills. We have provided a detailed, free assertiveness resource, or you could enroll onto our Assertiveness Training course. th next one is running on 14th and 15th October 2010.
Other personal development courses include time management training and stress management.
Posted by Heather Buckley in Business Skills, Human Resources, New Free Resources, News, Personal Development on August 23rd, 2010| No Comments »
Image adapted by original by @striatic on flickr http://striatic.net/
There has been a lot of bad press about social media, and the ’so called’ experts.
They are often portrayed as money grabbing opportunists wanting to make a quick buck out of unsuspecting business owners who don’t want to be left behind in the current torrent of social networking marketing opportunities.
If you need to know more about Social Media then why not book onto one of our Social Media Courses. We have summer deals on at the moment especially if you book with a Search Engine Optimisation course or a Google Analytics course, other combinations of discounted courses available.
In most cases, the social media ‘guru‘ is thought of as an opportunistic type who over promises and under delivers.
Read the rest of "Social Media Gurus – How to spot a scammer"
Posted by Heather Buckley in Facebook Tips and Tricks, New Free Resources, News, SEO, Social Media on August 18th, 2010| 3 Comments »
It’s a problem that affects all of us – especially if you’re a manager – there sometimes just aren’t enough hours in the day!
Our Time Management training course is one of our most popular programmes, and it’s always ways to make best use of time is always a lively discussion on our Management Skills Course.
Of course – not having enough time can often be indicative of other problems – perhaps you’re not being managed effectively by your own manager, or the business processes you’re working to aren’t as effecient as they could be (in which case you might think about arranging some Business Process Management training or Six Sigma training).
However – there are some small, useful, practical things that all of us can do to try to make the best use of the hours in our working day.
Here are 29 practical time management tips for coping with interruptions and obstacles which may get in the way of being a good time manager…
Read the rest of "Time Management – 29 Ways to Make More Time"
Posted by Colin Welch in Business Skills, Management & Leadership, New Free Resources, Personal Development on August 16th, 2010| No Comments »
To learn more about SEO and Social Media look at our SEO Training course and our Social Media Training course.
Considering YouTube’s size, traffic, and viral potential it should be treated as a major search engine itself.
SEO for YouTube
Image by Rafael Amado Deras
You Tube’s search algorithm includes the optimisation of the following:
- title
- description
- tags
- number of views
- rating
These can be manipulated by YouTube account holder, as well as the account/video viewers, to influence not only its placement in YouTube but also Google’s universal/blended search.
Content ideas for good SEO (linkbait)
Just like Blog posts ‘How to’ Videos are a sure way to get traffic and links to your video, embed your video in your blog post and get an SEO double whammy. You could set up a dedicated ‘how to’ channel and collect your ‘How to’s’ all in one channel for extra effect.
Competitor Research for SEO
Community and social network linking can play a big part in determining ranking on many video search engines. This may include Ratings, Favorites, Playlists, Comments, Honors, Views, Embedding, Response Videos, and Linking. You can check out your competitors video watch page – click on the “Statistics & Data” tab and work out what factors make this video so popular and work out a strategy that will help you achieve the same or better.
Read the rest of "Youtube SEO – How to optimise your Youtube Video"
Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, SEO, Social Media, Web Design on August 11th, 2010| 4 Comments »
Brighton SEO was a half-day conference followed by some drinks and networking in the evening, held at Community Base on Friday 23rd July, a brilliant and educational event organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility.
saving this image for my bad photoshopping post!
I videoed almost all of the content and I’m sorry I haven’t posted it up sooner but I haven’t had the time. Never the less I will be uploading snippets bit by bit over the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled. The first part features Kevin Gibbons and his wonderfully useful wordpress plugins, Cedric Wooding with an enlightening presentation on facebook advertising and Annabel Hodges thinks out of the box when it comes to search.
Silicon Beach Training offer a full range of SEO and Social Media courses Search Engine Optimisation Training as well as HTML5 training, Social Media Courses, Blogging Courses, WordPress Training, and Photoshop Training
Read the rest of "Brighton SEO – Part One"
Posted by Heather Buckley in Brighton, Facebook Tips and Tricks, New Free Resources, News, SEO, Sales & Marketing, Social Media on August 10th, 2010| No Comments »
Is HTML Dead?
Silicon Beach Training offer a great range of web development courses including CSS training, XHTML Training and the latest HTML5 training. See the end of this post to learn about an incredible deal on all three courses.
There are many articles out there that say HTML is dead, many will suggest that you should learn XML instead. Is this true? Should you learn XML before you learn HTML if you want to be a web developer?
In a Nutshell
The answer is no – HTML is not dead! It has just needs a little X.
Sites are being built every day using HTML. The majority of companies still use HTML for their Web sites. Those that use XML, still need HTML output so that Web browsers can view the pages.
So for Web Development – HTML is still a basic requirement.
However:
HTML 4.0 is obsolete. The latest version of HTML is in fact XHTML.
XHTML 1.0 is very similar to HTML 4.0, it is basically HTML rewritten to be compliant with XML rules.
If you want to train to be a professional Web developer, you should start by learning and writing XHTML you can do this on our HTML Training Course.
Writing XHTML means that you should close all your tags, including tags like <option>, <p>, and <li>. For single tags you will need to include a trailing slash in the tag, for example <img src=”" />. You will need to follow all the rules for writing good XML.
XHTML forms the basis for learning other XML languages, such as WML, XSLT and CDF. All of these languages are all based on XML, and will continue to be used for some years to come.
XML is not a language – HTML is a language.
XML is more like a set of rules that can be applied to many different languages. XML rules also allow you to create all new languages.
HTML lives on as XHTML. However, HTML5 will be the new standard replacing XHTML. This marks a return to HTML rather than XML as the basis for the web.
What training do I need for a great foundation in web development?
In this order:
HTML Training – 2 days – This HTML course will teach you both HTML language and XHTML
CSS Training – 1 days – This CSS course will enable you to understand CSS and create style sheets for web or XML projects
HTML5 Training – 2 days – This HTML5 course will teach you how to implement HTML5 to provide alternatives for features unsupported by XHTML (embedded video and audio for example)
These web development training courses add up to 5 days in total and would normally cost £1160 + vat in total. We are currently offering the whole web development package for only £760 + vat = a saving of £400!
You do not have to take the courses all at once you can give yourself a break to practise and consolidate what you have learned. This offer will only be available on bookings made before September 30th 2010. So what are you waiting for?
Posted by Heather Buckley in Brighton, New Free Resources, Offers, Programming, Web Design on August 4th, 2010| 1 Comment »
Find and replace links in Wordpress
If you’d like to learn how to build a professional blog or site using Wordpress, we run regular Wordpress Training and Advanced Wordpress Training courses. We also run a great 1-day Blogging Workshop.
OK – so you’ve built a killer blog using Wordpress, and there’s loads of great articles and tips on there that link back to your site, driving loads of useful traffic.
And then – BLAM – one of your web developers changes your site structure, the URLs change and all of your links are broken. Aaaaargh!
OK – so you can solve it with a 301 redirect – but the best link juice comes from direct links to the correct URL – so you need to find and replace all the links in your Wordpress site.
Suprisingly, Wordpress doesn’t have a built in Find and Replace feature – so finding and reaplacing all of the links in your post is going to take aaaaaages – right?!
Wrong! All Wordpress sites use a MySQL database as their back-end. So – if you can get at that database via phpMyAdmin (if you ask your web host they’ll tell you how), you can update all of the URLs in the whole blog (or any other text for that matter) using a simple command.
Here’s how…
Read the rest of "How to Find & Replace Links in a Wordpress Site"
Posted by Colin Welch in New Free Resources, Social Media, Web Design on August 2nd, 2010| 2 Comments »
