Microblogging is a huge craze at the moment e.g. the million tidbits of information posted of Twitter each day. However, blogging using a platform such as WordPress is important too – primarily because it can add value by creating useful content, but for many other reasons too. Blogging is a cheap way to create a huge impact; if you haven’t yet joined the all-mighty Blogosphere, read these five reasons why you should!
Business blogs are fantastic marketing tools. Blogging provides you with a platform to share news, useful articles and how-to guides with your clients, adding a dynamic dimension to your website above and beyond the usual list of products or services.
The information on you blog can then be syndicated to your clients and prospects using social media networks for greater exposure (you can learn more about finding and communicating with your clients online on our Social Media course).
Regularly updated blog content will not only keep people coming back to your site, but provides you with an opportunity to prove your experience and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Not all of us are born writers, and coming up with interesting blog content that people will want to read and bookmark regularly can sometimes be a real challenge.
Our blogging course is led by experienced blog copywriters, and by the end you’ll know how to write effectively for your audience, how to build up a bank of suitable material and be confident about the nuts and bolts of blogging like tags, links, categories and RSS feeds.
The 1-day course is just £225 + vat per delegate and runs on a regular basis here at our training centre in the heart of Brighton’s North Laines.
Location based services are not new, some, such as Loopt have been around since 2005 but 2010 is the year that they’re really taking off. Loopt has around 3 million users in the US (its not available anywhere else) but it differs greatly from the current trend in location based services, that of moving away from “always on” location to that of “checking in” at specific locations.
Foursquare and Gowalla are leading the charge of the ‘Geosocial‘ location based mobile services, with Foursquare having recently had 370k “check ins” in one day. With only 500k registered users the leader, Foursquare, is still relatively small compared to other, traditional, social networks (Facebook, with 400m users is by far the biggest social network but doesn’t yet have a Geosocial aspect) but it is growing fast.
Arguably 2010 will be the year of location based social and business networks, especially with services such as simpleGeo offering location infrastructure to startups. This lowers the barrier to entry significantly allowing start ups, such as stickybits, to provide geotagging in its unique offerings.
So is it all hype? From a business point of view are they worth engaging with like other social media?
It seems there’s always a technology or service threatening to revolutionize the internet. Promising to change the way we access information and how we use it.
In the past it was “web 2.0″, “web 3.0″, “crowd sourcing”; the list goes on!
Recently, “Real Time Web” has entered the arena, it sounds great but in practice, few people have a clue what it is. Simply put it means web resources are published and consumed in real time.
Real Time Web
As as soon as “stuff” is published, a blog post or any other user generated content, it is syndicated around the web and indexed immediately. The most obvious example is google search including up to the second results from twitter. Social media is all about real time, streams of information created constantly and consumed almost instantly (find out more with out social media course). Broadcasting your location in foursquare is pretty useless if people only find out a few hours/days later! Real time web can be thought of as another paradigm of the social web experience.
For a while only the big boys, Google, Facebook and Twitter and others have made use of these real time data streams, with us peons only able to use RSS and ATOM to get our content out there. Recent developments by both Google and Wordpress have put this real time power at the disposal of every blogger and content creator on the web. If you are thinking of using Wordpress and need help check out our Wordpress Training and our Customising Wordpress Templates courses.
You’re probably thinking how does this differ from RSS and ATOM? Well it doesn’t, its an extension to both those protocols to allow for real time publishing, but how exactly have they done this?
What is PuSH or PUbSubHub?
The very definition of “Real Time Web” is to have content consumed in real time. PuSH or PSHB (many names and acronyms have been used in discussions but from here on out I’ll only use PuSH as it best describes what it does) is a protocol that allows RSS and ATOM feeds to change something that you need to ask for into something that is given to you. Read the rest of "Real Time Web and the PubSubHubBub"
Wordpress has become one of the most popular blogging tools around. It’s simple to download and install and its user interface is straightforward and easy to use. Our Wordpress Training courses have been filling up fast!
Businesses most often want to seamlessly insert their blog in to their existing website (like this one) rather than sending their clients to a seperate URL, and we’re increasingly being asked “how can I customise Wordpress to fit in my existing site?”
To do this, you need to learn how to create custom Wordpress themes. So – we’ve launched a comprehensive 1-day Advanced Wordpress Training Coursethat covers everything you need to know.
Our Custom Wordpress Themes Training is delivered to small groups, and delegates are invited to bring their own HTML templates and stylesheets with them to the course to use as live examples.
You’ll leave the training having started to develop your custom theme, and with the skills to complete and modify it as required. You’ll have your Wordpress blog integrated in to your site in no time – just like ours!!
Google handles 80% of European web searches, according to ComScore, compared to 65% in the US. Does this give Google a Monopoly over search and more importantly the advertising revenue that search engines attract?
This week there has been a enquiry by the European Commission into three separate allegations that Google’s ‘so called’ democratic style seach is being adapted by Google who they claim are demoting competing websites in faouvour of their own services in the search results. Google will sometimes insert links into results offering its own own specialist services – news, price comparison, maps or book search. Competitors claim this diverts traffic away from rival services.
The commission has sent out questionnaires seeking information about complaints from a British vertical search company called Foundem, a French legal search engine called eJustice and the shopping site, Ciao, which is owned by Microsoft.
Many SEO and Search companies will be rejoicing in the fact that the commission is taking the issue seriously. This enquiry should shake up Google who will be aware that the commission has previously levied huge financial penalties on Microsoft and Intel in recent years for using tactics to squash competing software.
Google is claiming that the attack has been orchestrated by Microsoft, which recently merged its search business with Yahoo’s in an effort to challenge Google. They have pointed out Microsofts interest in Foundem which is part of a trade grouping sponsored by Microsoft called the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, and their ownership of Ciao. Read the rest of "Google Monopoly questioned by the European Commission"
If you haven’t already heard, Google released a new Social Media offering called Buzz, a hybrid love child of Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.
Buzz is still in its infancy, one of the easiest ways of jumping on the Buzz wagon is to have your tweets buzzed automatically, which is fairly straightforward. Buzz supports all the same# tags and @ mentions, so your twitter tweets work the same in Buzz.
But in my opinion this is a total waste of time. Buzz is many different things and it may seem similar to twitter but its not! Buzz should be used in a way that plays to its different strengths. I see it as a new tool in the social media armory of the local business (find out how your business can benefit from Social Media training here).
Buzz is many things to a small business, read on and find out what…
You can read Peter Handley’s review of BrightonSEO here – and we’ll be posting more from the event on this blog later in the week. Silicon Beach Training offer a complete range of Web Design Training and Social Media Training courses.
Here’s our summary of what Cookies are – along with a clip of Nikki’s demonstration.
What is a Cookie?
A cookie is a small text file sent to your computer via your web browser when you visit some websites. They store information about you like where you went and what you clicked on, which is used when you revisit the site.
What do Cookies do?
Cookies can do many things – for example:
Remembering purchasing information
Recording your viewing preferences
Storing results of online quizzes
Once downloaded by your browser, a cookie will sit on your hard drive until the next time you visit the same website.
Without the cookies the web server would have no way of knowing that you had been to the site before unless you logged in with a username and password.
* Cookies allow web servers to remember you.
How do cookies work?
Here Nikki from Fresh Egg explains how Cookies work at BrightonSEO with a little help from her friends.
5 Top Tips for why your business should be blogging
Location based services are not new, some, such as 
Google handles 80% of European web searches, according to ComScore, compared to 65% in the US. Does this give Google a Monopoly over search and more importantly the advertising revenue that search engines attract?
If you haven’t already heard, Google released a new Social Media offering called Buzz, a hybrid love child of 
