I visited the village website for the first time in ages and noticed this shocker:

The document has been scanned and uploaded with unfortunate results – it’s far too wide for the page and makes the site look like a big, jumbled mess. Talk about an argument for previewing!

In the most recent Agency Update, Adwords released a couple of interesting updates:

Whereas before you bid to get your Ad shown and watched the resulting average position, you’ll now bid to get your Ad shown on the first page. Keywords that might have fallen foul of the Quality Score and become inactive will now show regardless, only they won’t make the first page of results.

This shake-up in the bidding system makes it easier for crappy adverts to show, but what I’m most concerned with is the fact that Google are making the first page a goal. Everyone wants to be on the first page, but before the bidding system meant that we had to work to get there. Under these changes advertisers will know from the start what they have to bid to get the best spots and I’d be willing to wager this will drive bids up.

I wonder just how Google will calculate the minimum bid – will it change every day? Will Quality Score still have something to do with it or will it simply become a matter of the ten richest companies snapping up the places?

Over on the Google Blog there’s a new post about how Map Maker helps users in rural India to map their local areas. People can add roads, buildings and create “…base maps where there were previously none”. Google’s vision is that by putting these places online “local commerce, tourism and investment” will all benefit.

By a wonderful coincidence, Squid has recently been using Open Streetmap to map Withernsea, a previously-unknown area of East Yorkshire.

Saw an interesting article about comScore’s “Ad Metrix Analysis” released a couple of months ago. It shows the biggest publishers and advertisers of online ads in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly MySpace are the biggest publisher (accounting for 51 billion of Fox’s 52):

Interestingly the University of Phoenix is the second-largest publisher:

Funny, I could’ve sworn it was Rackspace…

Google are soon making their quirky Suggest feature live. Much like your Firefox toolbar, it offers search suggestions to help you find new content on the web. The cool thing is that you get a competition figure (i.e. number of results):

The question however is how to use this data. Should I start targeting ‘piggy bank’ and ‘piggymoo’? After all, Google are suggesting ‘piggymoo’ so a lot of people must search for it, right? Should I disard ‘piggy bank’ because there’s so much competition?

It’s been speculated that Google’s suggestions direct you to Ad-filled pages, essentially increasing your chances of clicking on an Advert and making Google money. If that’s the case, why don’t Google go a step further and try and keep users on the Google network? (They could!)

If Google are that cynical this information is pretty useless. It doesn’t reflect what people search for but what Google want people to search for. On the other hand, if it really comes straight from Google’s database it’s a goldmine of information. I think some serious testing is in order to find Suggest’s true potential – let’s hope I find the time!

Many thanks to Frog for the new look! This somewhat ‘unique’ design pretty much sums me up (worrying I know), and I’m really pleased to have Piggynap finally looking like a real website

To see more of Frog’s work take a look at his portfolio.

Unlike Google’s unfortunate design change, I’m liking Yahoo’s effort:

It’s a lot cleaner than before and according to Yahoo’s search blog is making way for some new features. The new site summary section give statistics for ‘authenticated’ sites – just like Google’s webmaster tools. To be honest I like Yahoo’s interface better.

I got back to work only to discover Google have changed their Analytics login page. You now have to click a button to enter your login details:

I don’t see the point to be honest! Isn’t it even good website practice not to require too many clicks?

Patrick over at Blogstorm is holding a design contest for a new logo – there have already been a few entries but nothing that great.

I’m pretty impressed at Patrick’s tactic – this is a very clever way to access a lot of design talent. At about £200 the prize fund is a fraction of what you’d have to pay for a “real” service, but a lot of designers will be drawn in by the challenge and the opportunity to get their work in front of an industry audience. I’ll be watching with interest, especially since Frog might be tempted to enter!

I spent the end of this week in London and Scarborough, taking in some serious tourism in the capital before jetting back to catch the Beached Festival on Saturday night. Here’s a nice shot of the London Eye:

and one of Tower Bridge (me included):

I went to UCL for three years and never did any touristy things so it was nice to go back and see the city from a different point of view.

As for Scarborough, I saw One Night Only, got my shoes soaked on the beach, slept in a four-poster bed in the Rocquaine and ate a fantastic cooked breakfast on Sunday. It was the perfect end to a perfect holiday!