Somewhat unsurprisingly - it is Dave Naylor after all - this search engine ranks number one for ‘uk search engine’ above Altavista, Yahoo!, Ask and Excite.
There are no results within the search engine at the moment (not very relevant then is it Google?) but adverts show on some pages. These seem to follow the same format as Google Ads but redirect through a ukwizz URL so I’m not sure where they’re coming from.
What are Bronco up to? Answers on a postcard please…!
Just like when Google bought Urchin, Yahoo! have acquired IndexTools and created Yahoo! Web Analytics. I’m very excited to get my hands on it and try it out, not least because unlike Google Analytics, Yahoo! has a proper API key so you can query the data and create custom reports. For all you agency people, that means raw data branded any way you want - hooray!
Since Google and Yahoo increasingly look like each other I’m sure useability won’t be a problem. Can’t wait to have a play with it!
Enough of the creepy photos!
Yahoo’s Site Explorer had a redesign a little while ago, and sometime in the past couple of days Google Analytics has followed suit. Is it just me or is there an uncanny resemblance?
P.S. That was me holding an axe 
Take the magic of Stardust…
And the otherworldliness of Pan’s Labyrinth…
To get this dreamlike image of a country lane:
Taken this afternoon on the Fly Line, Aberford, this photo is from the camera of The Floating Frog.
The BBC reported recently that Oxford and Cambridge are going to make some of their lectures available on iTunes. My old university UCL have a good history of making their lectures accessible - their free-for-all Lunch Hour Lectures were on when I was a student there and they’ve already got a lot of content on iTunes U.
One of my favourite things about studying at UCL was the ‘intercollegiate’ nature of the lectures. In the Philosophy department we shared our lectures with Kings College and Birkbeck so had access their staff, could go along to Heythrop’s philosophy club and we had access to all the University of London’s libraries including Senate House. There was also the Aristotelian Society whose lectures were attended by my own lecturers - there’s literally no better place in the world to study Philosophy because London’s huge resources are shared.
In the same spirit, my favourite academic moment was attending a lecture given by Roger Penrose at Senate House. It wasn’t associated with any university and I think it was free - the auditorium was only 2/3 full though and I thought it a bit of a shame because Penrose was fantastic. He talked about black holes and pointed at cone-shaped diagrams and glossed over the maths behind it all and I came out feeling like I’d been let into a little corner of Physics - a discipline I’d never be able to study normally.
That’s why I’m so excited about Oxbridge finally putting their lectures online. A lot of us haven’t been to university, or if we have we never studied everything we’d have liked to. Books like Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion are best-sellers but that’s the only insight we ever get into the real Academia behind it all - the conversations and debates that give rise to the theories we’re all so familiar with. Until now!
We’ve now got access to the minds behind ‘common knowledge’ and we can join in with their debates. You don’t need thousands of pounds to go to university any more, and learning doesn’t stop just because you’ve left. Hooray for iTunes U!
I’ve long wanted to do a post on Diamond Geezer of Dragon’s Den fame - a critique of their website. It’s certainly old - I was browsing through some stock photography cd’s a while ago and happened across the old man on their homepage - alongside some pictures of bbc computers and brick-sized mobile phones. Quite frankly it surprises me that a company so set on being an internet business has such a dated design.
Anyway, a few days ago I came across their Adwords campaign in the search results and I couldn’t resist posting it up here. It certainly matches in with the personality of the company!
I don’t know who does their Adwords - perhaps they do it themselves. There are a few things wrong with this advert though, not least the lack of capitals and the really, really clunky text. Not very compelling you’ll agree, and does “seen on Dragon’s Den” really make you think high quality?
