Mister Toast (foreground) looks particularly dapper this morning – perhaps Mister Snoot is feeling jealous?

It’s been 5 days since a4uExpo (a long time on the internet!) but I’ve only just had time to sit down and write my review My excuse? Well, I moved house just before a4u, and then didn’t have internet for a week! Anyway, I made LOADS of notes when I was there and while they’re not going into my review, they’ll make quite a few blog posts in their own right.

It was the first conference I’d ever been to outside of Leeds – obviously I’d attended/spoken at Think Visibility but London conferences seemed pretty out of reach. I need to say thanks to Patrick for taking me – I know that other companies wouldn’t stump up the attendance fee so it just goes to show how lucky I am to work at Branded3

For a first-timer then, I was pretty impressed by how the whole conference was run. Firstly, the venue was amazing. I’d been to the Expo Centre before when I was at university, but I never realised just how prepared they are for conferences. There’s a huge row of hotels right outside and good transport links to the City. During the day, there’s tea when you need it, food when you need it, and the conference rooms are brilliant with all the high-tech stuff you need. Despite there being hundreds of delegates, I never saw any rubbish around nor heard any grumbling about the lack of tea/food – that’s down to the excellent staff who made the whole thing run smoothly.

What about the talks? Well, they were all run incredibly well. A huge mention has to go to Jon Myers who seemed to be moderating/introducing every single talk I went to. Most of the speakers seemed to be conference pros, including SEOMoz co-founder Gillian Muessig, who gave a particularly assured and interesting talk on turning your ’stuff’ into new products and finding new audiences.

My favourite talk of the two days might come as a surprise to some people – it was actually marked ‘basic’ in the timetable. It was the first talk of the day by Angela Greenwood and Joshna Patel from Red Letter Days. They talked about building a successful affiliate programme from the ground up, from a merchant’s point of view. I knew nothing whatsoever about this side of affiliate marketing so it taught me a lot. It was nice to actually hear from someone like Joshna who works within a company (like myself) and not just the MD.

You can tell just how big a deal a4u is by 3 things. 1) Google send delegates. 2) All the affiliate networks are there. 3) Even though it’s an affiliate conference, the top SEO’s go.

Okay so I only chose that title because it rhymes – Google Suggest of the Day has actually done pretty well in the couple of weeks since it launched. I’ve been on holiday the past week so only really got to take a look at stats and things yesterday and I was really surprised at how many people visited the site and more importantly, the level of interaction it’s experienced.

I was a bit disappointed that not many people have commented – I sort of envisaged immense philosophical debates taking place, or at least some bitching, but I guess people don’t want to invest that much effort in what is, after all, a blog you can read at a glance.

What totally delights me though is that we’ve had loads of suggestions sent in via the contact form – from real people leaving real names and URLS! This is great, so any suggestions that we use I’ve decided to credit with a link to whoever sent it in. If more than one person suggests the same thing they’ll all get credit!

I’m really looking forward to giving out some link love to people who support the site, so if you have a suggestion just send it in

Recently the Reuters blog reported on a Twitter campaign started by some ‘My Name Is Earl’ fans to try and save the axed show. I think this made the news firstly because it’s about Twitter (and when is that ever out of the news at the moment?) and secondly because the campaign has attracted over a million followers.

The ridiculous bit comes at the end of the article:

And whether it succeeds or not in bringing the show back to a TV screen somewhere, the petition has notched up a new entry into the English language – the first known use of the word “Twitition.”

Erm….what about, you know, Twitition?

The silly thing is, they could have just googled it:

Branded3 have just launched Wiki Alarm, a FREE service that lets you monitor updates to your Wikipedia page.

Why would you want to?

Journalists and bloggers use Wikipedia to source information about companies, places and everything else under the sun. Gone are the days of strict fact-checking when the internet makes it so easy to find information in just a few clicks. Whether that information is correct or not is another matter. Imagine someone has written a Wikipedia page about you and it gives your age as 35 – you’re actually 34 but when a journalist writes about you, they put 35 because they trust Wikipedia to be right.

Wiki Alarm lets you monitor these changes and be the first to know about updates to your page. It takes a few seconds to sign up and you’ve got instant control over your online reputation.

Happy days here at Branded3 – we’ve been made Internet World’s official ’social media partner’. Internet World is a huge 3-day event held down in London and it’s attended by some massive agencies, so for us to be chosen to help the organisers tell everyone about the power of blogging, twitter etc is pretty special.

This is the press release, taken from the Internet World site:

Branded3, the Leeds based digital agency, has just been appointed by Internet World as the official Social Media Partner for 2009.

Branded 3, based in Aberford North Leeds, is one of the most successful ethical SEO & social media companies in the UK, boasting high profile clients such as Interflora, Dial-a-phone and Abel & Cole.

Today over at the Google blog Ms Wojcicki (I have no idea how to spell that so I copied & pasted it) talked about Google’s commitment to make ads ‘more interesting’. Reading the post it actually became clear that’s another way of saying ‘more relevant to you’:

Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view.

I’m sort of waiting for the backlash on this one, but I haven’t really seen any ‘oh my god, Google are watching us in the shower’ reactions. Basically, Google are taking all the data they accumulate from your browsing and showing you relevant content network ads based on your online interests. So if you keep visiting Lolcat pages (and who doesn’t?) you’ll get shown adverts for kitty food and little clothes to dress Muffin up in.

The thing is, Google are gathering all this data by default. If you’re logged into your Google account they knows what you’re searching for and what pages you’re visiting from that search page. They could use that data for all sorts of things – working out what pages to put at the top of the results for example, and choosing what adverts to show a user is just one possibility. I for one don’t mind – if it means I see more adverts for shoes and less adverts for weight loss and baby products (I’m looking at you Facebook!) then that’s a good thing.

According to the Google blog, users can even set their preferences (sort of like Stumbleupon I guess) so you can set your preferred adverts right from the start. The only thing you might lose through all this is that one in a million product that you didn’t know you needed until you saw it. Most of us I think won’t miss the variety.

What about advertisers? Well, this could wind up helping them too. After all, you can already pick content network websites to advertise on, so if users themselves are opting into (or out of) your adverts your market is pretty much selecting themselves. Hooray!

I signed up with CreditExpert several months ago, mainly because Frog freaked me out over my credit score. I had no idea if I had one or what it was like, so I signed up to their reasonably-priced service to find out. As it turns out, my credit score was near perfect so I was pleasantly surprised – especially since Halfords turned me down for a £300 bike loan earlier in the year (wtf?). Anyhoo, the other day I noticed CreditExpert were still charging me for their service so I thought I’d log in and see what was what.

I went to their site – notice how the login button is really, really small.

Now, here I realised that in all the emails CreditExpert sent me when I signed up, my username and password weren’t mentioned. I can only assume my username was:

a) My name
b) My email address
c) A mix of the two

My password could be one of approximately half a dozen words/numbers I use to sign up to stuff, so I tried all the combinations I could think of.

Oh Noes!

Nope, not that then.

Obviously I have no idea what my password is, and since I never received it in an email I’ll have to get a new one. I clicked the “retrieve a new password” button. You’re taken to a screen where you type in your name and your email address – fantastic, email me my details please!

Foiled!

What?! You want what now? A password for my password?!

I can handle my mother’s maiden name, but what about the other box? Obviously in the sign up process I had to give some sort of answer, and type in a security question – but come on, it’s me, of course I typed in the name of an animal. But what animal? I don’t know – it was months ago! You overestimate the power of my memory CreditExpert!

Bumsticks

Damn you CreditExpert!

I’m currently reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (available for free from Project Gutenberg here). I’m about to start the chapter entitled “Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard” which is quite possibly the best title of any chapter, ever, but unfortunately it’s got nothing to do with what I’d like to say here.

So far Mackay has covered the ’south sea bubble’, ‘tulipomania’ and various alchemists – he’ll go on to talk about witch mania, haunted houses and the proliferation of duelling. In all of these chapters there is one conspicuous absence – religion. Now Mackay published his book in 1841, some 18 years before Darwin’s Origin of Species (which he apparently held back for about 20 years because he was afraid it would receive a poor reception from what we’d call Creationists). It still annoys me that someone like Mackay, who shows contempt for all the alchemists (even if some of them did discover useful chemical properties) says things like:

“God himself, for his own wise purposes, has more than once undrawn the impenetrable veil which shrouds those awful secrets; and, for purposes just as wise, he has decreed that, except in these instances, ignorance shall be out lot for ever.”

There’s such a massive elephant in the room I keep expecting it to start performing circus tricks.