links for 2008-04-23

The focus of this kind of article always seems to be on Google - but these rules hold good for making your own site search an easier experience for users. [via journalism.co.uk]

Also of interest in the same article: "Ofcom bosses also came under fire from some MPs for conducting research into the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace".

Uh-huh, the kind of 3,000 word report I do summed up in one diagram. D'oh!

Argues that Google's knowledge of things like preferred crawl-rate and geo-domain targeting give it a competitive advantage over any potential rivals. I am far from convinced myself, to be honest.

"Over the past 6 months Google has been rolling out sitelinks to almost every website under the sun and suddenly the fact a site has sitelinks is no longer an indication they are a trusted site". Even currybetdotnet gets the magic extra links these days.

Tom Critchlow calls out The Times for having a bad re-direct strategy in place across their domains, which is stopping 270,000 backlinks adding to the ranking of the main domain.

"How about number of searches versus market share? Google: 4.8 billion, Yahoo: 1.5 billion, Microsoft: 1 billion, AOL: 334 million, Ask: 200 million". That is a *lot* of searches

"The UK is the most active blogging country in Europe, from a reading (17.8m Brit's read blogs) and writing point of view (4.3m Brits write blogs)". It is just a fad though, isn't it ;-)

"Senior Whitehall figures are to be held personally responsible if their department loses or mishandles personal information". I've never understood how you can be the 'big cheese' in a public organisation, yet NOT be responsible when it goes wrong...

Nice idea to explain a sometimes painful process simply, but formatting the page as one long stream-of-consciousness paragraph that includes Windows filepaths isn't terribly easy on the eye.

All the SlideShare versions of the IA Summit neatly gathered into one place. Trust IAs to be this organised :-)

"I suggest we look around the newsroom and start noticing how people manage their files. How they open programs. Whether they use intelligent file names and have a usable folder system on their hard drive".

Interesting poll results about national identity. Not entirely sure why the bikini shot is necessary in the related items though, especially as it doesn't then feature in the photo gallery it links to?