links for 2009-04-07

The definitive search engine analyst with a definitive and damning verdict on the sections of the newspaper and publishing industries blaming Google for all their woes.

Shane is at risk of making himself a hostage to fortune here - I don't know that he can be 100% guaranteed that an Exec at Telegraph Media Group won't come out with their own anti-Google tirade at some point in the near future. Nevertheless he makes some good points here that I agree with - not least of which is that if you are so unhappy about Google indexing your content, then do what Copiepress did, don't just moan about it. Although I'm sure in some quarters of the industry he looks like 1930's Chamberlain style white-flag waving Google appeaser...

"URL on Internet no longer points to original location" - is this really news? And the BBC hasn't exactly got a 100% clean record in preventing this kind of thing...in fact, didn't Rory Cellan-Jones direct his Twitter followers to Internet filth at the beginning of March via Twitpic? Glass houses, pots, kettles etc etc

"'Infiltrated by hackers'…? There was no infiltration. And for the last time; there were no hackers! And at no stage did anyone have private sexy-time with the Home Office website. But for some reason that’s not the impression that many Mail readers get from this article". The Mail was not the only offender when reporting this story, but it was the only one with a review of it that mentioned 'private sexy-time with the Home Office website' and that made me laugh. That, and the fact that the paper suffered a goatse attack earlier in the year which I had somehow missed.

Great overview of all the things that influence how easy it is to get content ranked on Google that go beyond "put your title in a H1 tag" and "stuff your keywords tag full of variations on the spelling of Britney Spears" school of thought.

"Like Black Lace reunions and charity wrist bands, Twitter is a tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on. News editors at the national newspapers have been desperate to keep up with the Joneses, i.e their proper broadcast media rivals, in offering up-to-the-minute G20 news. The result is an unwholesome mess - a garbled Babel of nonsense that leaves you screaming for a return to the times when we could read all about it the day afterwards over our Cornflakes on a page of newsprint."

So I suspect that Matthew Gwyther won't be interested in this Twitter-based site that Paul Carvill put together "A collection of people I work with [at The Guardian] who are using Twitter". It is your one-stop-Guardianista-stalking-shop. More than just an aggregation though, Paul's rigged it up so that with the simple act of 'favouriting' a tweet on Twitter, it becomes editorially highlighted on Twitian - very neat indeed.

I like any case study with precise figures, but it looks like this one could just has easily been called "Why all your Twitter promotion efforts are worthless unless Arrington re-tweets your content" ;-)