Kids facebook – Moshi Monsters

If your children are too young for facebook, they may be using a kids site called moshi monsters.

Michael Acton Smith set up the social networking site for kids in 2004. Last week it reached 15 million members, and according to Hitwise is the quickest growing site online. It is now one of the biggest sites for children.

Welcome to Moshi Monsters

Children login to the site and adopt a monster which they create from 1 of 6 basic designs. Each monster has name and the children can choose the colour of their own little monster. The graphics are amazing as well, you can tell the founder was inspired by Pixar.

Parents do not have to worry about their children on this site as privacy is very important and users are unable to post photos and send messages. Conversations are also monitored and filtered. I was really impressed with the terms and conditions for the site. Everyone has to accept these before they are allowed to enter the site and play games.

Rules for Moshi

The monster has to be regularly fed and interacts with others in the virtual town. Users can also get virtual pets called “moshlings”. You can get your own moshling by planting the right combination of seeds. You can learn online, maths puzzels, spelling and play games, all for free. The site is educational, perhaps the 21st century edition of Sesame Street. The kids come from all over the world with a third coming from the UK and the US. It was originally aimed for 7 – 11 year olds but now there are players as young as 3 years old. The site is all about learning and where kids can be kids.

Last year the number of visits to the site grew by 424% and this year it is set to grow even more. Michael Acton Smith has signed a book deal for Christmas and has licensed the track “Hey Mickey” for “Hey Moshi”. 2010 is set to be the year for Moshi Monsters.

For more information, please read the feature from the Evening Standard.

How to optimise a video on YouTube

I often have clients who produce a video to promote their new product and ask for help to optimise it. This means the video has all the correct tags in place to make sure it is easily picked up in in universal search.

YouTube

Here are a few tips I recommend for those wanting to optimise their videos
1. Title & Description
The title should contain a good keyword phrase , it needs to be short as YouTube limits the length.
The description can be 2-3 sentences and should contain keywords and variations of keywords.
Include a URL link at the start of the description. By default, the description is almost hidden, but the link you create
will still be visible if it is at the beginning.

2. Tags

Include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video eg if you have a cake business and are advertising a new cake for Mother’s Day you may want to consider the following:

Mother’s day cake, bake cake for mother’s day, making cakes, cake for mum

It is important to use tags that will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags.
When people watch a different video, yours will be shown as a related video hence getting more views from people
who were originally watching other videos.

3. Provide transcripts of your videos

Write on page copy next to the video which will be indexed by the search engines and help you to rank higher. This will be in the description part. I would recommend you put this under the text

“http://www.bake-a-cake.co.uk Bake a cake shows you how easy it is to make a cake from scratch. Show your mother you care and bake the best cake for Mother’s Day.

4. Offer the option to embed your video

Links from other websites to your website or video, are very important in SEO

An embedded video is when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website. It works same way as an
inbound link. Promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.
Use the video as a portal with links to related content on your site

5. Keep the video to under 3 minutes. Make it short and concise and exciting to watch !! Make it relevant and
interesting.

6. Allow users to rate your video

The videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favourite and save.

7. Brand the video with the company logo

This way you are generating brand awareness with your site bake-a-cake.

8. Link to the videos using important keywords in the anchor text – eg bake a cake, mother’s day cake, mum’s cake. You need to make sure the keywords are the same ones you are using on your site.

So there you have it, a few simple ways to optimise your video for Universal Search.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Yahoo! turned 15 years old this week.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Yahoo! was started by David Filo and Jerry Yang both Ph.D students at Stanford University. It was originally a student hobby as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the internet; It started life in February 1994 in a student trailer and now is a global brand. Once called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” it is of course now know as Yahoo! which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

People from outside of Stanford began accessing their guide and by autumn 1994 it celebrated its first million hiy day which was almost 100 thousand unique visitors and by March 1995 the founding members incorporated the business. By the next month, Sequoia Capital, (who has invested in Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems) agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

As stated on Yahoo!’s webiste, it is now a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.
Yahoo! has its HQ in Sunnyvale, California with offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and other parts of the United States.

cake is from filckr

YouTube and auto-captioning

YouTube announced earlier this week that it will start giving all videos on the site access to its auto-captioning technology. There are two benefits to this:

1. Deaf viewers will now be view and understand YouTube videos
2. Better search and advertising opportunities on the site.

YouTube has allowed video creators to add captions to YouTube since 2006 but transcribing was expensive and time consuming. Creators of videos and users can now request video transcription

So what does this mean?
Having searchable text has huge potential for search capabilities in YouTube.
This is a beta launch and will continue to develop over the next few months, but it means that it will be easier to search for auto-caption videos. As you may be aware, YouTube is owned by Google and this is a step in the direction of improving its search technology.

This new feature will also mean it is more accessible to speakers of different languages. English subtitles can be added into any of the 50 languages supported by Google’s translation service.

This is great news for those hearing impaired who were previously unable to take advantage of YouTube. Now they can watch all the YouTube videos without having to download any additonal software.

The other benefit of having auto-captioning is for advertisers. it will help brands serve ads relevant to specific parts of YouTube videos.

How will it work?
When you upload a video to YouTube, you will be able to create an automatic caption of the clip’s soundtrack. You will then be able to download the subtitles file to the personal computer in a SUB or SRT file format. If you have already uploaded a video, then you will be prompted to add captions for existing content.

Interesting to see how this feature develops. Read more information about YouTube on Mashable

Who are the smartphone users?

According to Admob, there is a fifty-fifty split between male and females who use the iPhone, iPod Touch and WebOS. However, 73% of Android users are male. The iPod touch has the youngest demographic and is mostly popular with those 17 years old or younger.

Age by platform

The report also shows the differences and similarities between the Android and iPhone platforms. Despite the fact that Android and iPhone users download a similar number of apps every month and spend a similar amount of time using the apps, there is a difference in the purchasing patterns between the two smartphones.

As the table below illustrates, only 21% of Android users buy at least 1 paid app per month. The fact that are larger percentage of the Android apps are free (57%) compared to Apple (25%) affects this percentage.

Average App Downloads per Month

In terms of recommendations, more people with iPhones would recommend their handset (91%) compared with 84% of Android users. Perhaps this may be due to the fact the iPhone entered the market in 2007 and Android still has some catching up to do, launching its first handset in 2008.

Find out more about the January 2010 mobile metrics report from Admob

Mobile site vs Mobile app debate

E consultancy wrote an interesting article this week about mobile commerce and whether retailers should have a mobile app or a mobile site. Graham Charlton who wrote the article came up with arguments for having a mobile site or mobile app.

I think the mobile app market is going to become very saturated soon. Companies develop a mobile app, without really thinking what they want from a mobile app. One very good example highlighting this issue is Zara. They built the app, but there was no useful information on it and customers were unable to buy through it. Both Next and Net-A-Porter have the app, but not the mobile site. As I mentioned in my previous post, you can either build a mobile app or a mobile site.

Reasons to have a mobile app

1. Graham said that as smartphones and iPhone dominate the mobile internet, then an app is more likely to appear to users.

2. Graham said that smartphone users are more affluent. Therefore, apps will appeal to an audience with more disposable income. I disagree with this. Smartphone users are not more affluent. There are a high proportion of young people who use Blackberry and iPhones.

3. Better functionality on smartphones means retailers can offer a richer experience and therefore choose to build an app which will deliver this service.

4. The fourth point is that your app will get more visibility due to the popularity of the App store.

5. Customers have smartphones and therefore if a large number of mobile visitors are using Android and iPhones, an app may be better than a mobile site.

Reasons to have a mobile site.

1. A mobile site allows you to target a larger number of people as not everyone has a smartphone or has downloaded your app.

2. Those using their phone to search as they do on a desktop can easily find your site. The app store has thousands of apps, it is hard to find and if you do not have one, they cannot download it.

3. Unlike apps, you will not need approval of your site before it is released. It can also be updated as you update your website.

4. If you want an iPhone app, you will have to design one for the iPhone and a separate one for the Android. The mobile site can be seen on many handsets.

5. According to recent Taptu research, the browser-based mobile web market will grow much faster than the app market, so a mobile site will be necessary long term.

I agree with Graham on these issue for a mobile site. I believe companies should at least have a site optimised for all mobiles. Then if they want to and have extra budget, they can build a mobile app.

Oliver Newton at i-level wrote an article about the 7 deadly sins of marketing which I thought summed up well the mistakes companies have when trying to jump of the mobile bandwagon.

Nexus one with Vodafone

According to the Telegraph , The Nexus one will be sold in the Vodafone shops in April, soon after TMobile get their hands on it.

Changing the mobile landscape

To get hold of one for yourself, you will need to go directly to Google, google.com/phone.

What’s so good about this smartphone?

1. The Nexus One was the first phone to come with Google’s Android 2.1 and comes powerful features like a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 800×480 multi touch screen.
2. The Nexus one is the company’s first own-brand mobile phone. There is not yet any information about tariffs, but people expect it to be about the same as the iPhone.
3. This is Google’s attempt to push through Android as one of the best smart phones to have in the market place.

The Nexus One has already launched in the US in January this year. Vodafone are not giving much away as to when exactly the phone will be available. I just went onto their blog and they still say it will be available “early spring”.

The photo is PhotosEcosse’s on flickr.

Google Caffeine – When is it coming?

Well according to Google, it may not happen for months. But Matt Cutts said it would happen after the holidays. Maybe he was talking about after Easter?

Waiting for the caffeine to kick in

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr

Google in more trouble with Buzz

Buzz is less than a month old and has already got itself into trouble regarding privacy issues. The controversial “auto-follow” which Google called “auto-suggest” means that Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. This is great if you email people who are your friends, but you don’t want to follow work colleagues or your boss, who you also have to email on a regular basis.

However, Google are now serving its ads with other people’s content. This means that Buzz republishes the content, the full article, not just parts of it, in Gmail without asking permission. Apparently it also strips advertising from that content serving Google ads so this means people are losing money. There was an interesting post on Econsultancy’s website which goes into greater detail according to one blogger’s experience.

So it seems that Google’s attempt to try and spread itself into social media has not got off to a good start. On the plus side though, the location-based features in Google Buzz for mobile seems great. Buzz updates is not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

I will be monitoring Google Buzz over the coming months and will update this post to reflect the news.

SES London

I went to SES London on Thursday and attended the seminar on duplicate content.

It was very interesting, so I thought I would share a few points on this topic. The easiest way to avoid having any duplicate content on the site is to not put any on the site.

1. The URL should not be accessed through more than one domain. If you have a test domain, make sure you exclude it in the robots.txt file.

2. www vs non www
Major search engines can deal with this, but if you have both versions available then make sure there is a redirect from one to the other. The same applies to secure and non secure page. http vs https.

3. Breadcrumb navigation that reflects in the URL is another area that can cause duplicate content issues

4. Session IDs
IDs are tabbed at the end of the URL for users who don’t support cookies. This is a big problem because every time the spider comes back to the site, it gets a different URL and then indexes a lot of pages. Google apparently have an answer on how to exclude session IDs for spiders. When I find this information, I will post it here.