Black hat SEOs give us all a bad name – it is the responsibility of the SEOs to make sure that they don’t put their client in a position where black hat activity is going on but simply for the fact that it will destroy search rankings for the client but because it is the client who has their name plastered all over the New York Times and eConsultancy.

I think that the SEOs who were involved in this should be named and shamed… If we find out who they are I’ll be sure to let you know!

Hi all – just a quick note to let you guys know that the website Precision Laser Processing has changed. In the coming weeks we will be giving the company a complete redesign but in the meantime here is the link to the current website.

Great post about fixing images uploads if they don’t work in WordPress. I had this problem recently when I tried to upload some images for a blog post and all I got was the broken image link. I looked at the media section of the setting to no avail.

The trick is to make sure that you have the right location in the miscellaneous section and that that folder is set to 777 permissions (can be done through FTP).

Check out the full post here: http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/how-to-fix-unable-to-create-directory-error-when-uploading-image-into-wordpress-557

Techcrunch and the Guardian exposed a flaw in Twitter’s web interface – the Twitter that you access through a web browser, not third party tools like Tweet Deck. The flaw is that Javascript code is being enabled through the updates. So instead of simply adding text content to an update you can add Javascript. The particular bit of code that is causing so much havoc at the moment is the onmouseover function which basically tells the web browser to do something when a user hovers over a link.

This onmouseover function has been used for fun, in the case of @carlospf (). When you hover over his links you get a message saying hello!

There are less reputable people using it for redirecting users to other sites. In the case of Sarah Brown the link was redirecting users to a Japanese porn site:

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/09/21/twitter-onmouseover-security-flaw-widely-exploited/

Then I did something a little bit naughty, but hay, you only live once. This onmouseover can be used with Twitter and their modal class meaning that all the links on the page are disabled so that can’t click on them. This is then added to be a retweet command. This means that anyone who links on the page will retweet to the message from that user.

UPDATE: The hole has now been fixed.

new digg interface looks good but they want me to add this <!–3f7a81b89cd843138efdd7217e64ad5a–>

SEO click through rates have come from SEOmoz.

SEO is a difficult thing at the best of times. It’s even more difficult when you can’t actually guarantee that there will be any results from the work that you do. Clients are obviously very interested in the bottom line of search. If I spend x I will receive y in return.

New Liberty SEO have given the risk out of some of this by offering a results based seo (link) approach but even with that promise we still can’t guarantee traffic and orders.

The following is recent click through rates (2010) for Google as an average across their search engine:

What about position 9 and 10, I thought it was interesting that position 10 resulted in a higher CTR than position 9. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

What if the future of the internet was virtual reality used as a test bed for every activity that we do. Imagine that you wanted to setup a business and you told the computer to fast forward virtual reality for 2 years to see whether the business would be a success. Imagine that you were about to take a drive and your phone told you not to because you would crash – your history of driving, your activities during that day that had made you angry, your previous conversations to make you upset all adding to by the sudden rain forecast at your destination – “don’t drive right now, you will crash!”

Through a computer learning engine all these variables can be moulded together and produce a near perfect logic for the activity you are about to do – why have choice when you can be assured of something by following the logic and recommendations of a computer?

This isn’t as out of this world as you might think – looking back does anyone really feel surprised that the computer Deep Blue beat the chess master Garry Kasparov at his own game. For me it is quite obvious that the computer would win. The chess board, as any other game, is governed by rules. As soon as you programme those rules into the computer and explain the computation required by moves/combination of moves the computer can move from 1,000,000,000+ moves to filter every combination that the human makes until the computer reducing the possible combinations down to 1.

Through computer learning and human processing signals it isn’t a huge jump to compute the rules of the world and reduce them down based of the individual human processing signals – are they happy, sad/are they happy, sad compared to normal (i.e. 50% of the time)?

But what is the piece of hardware or software that will be best placed to control this activity. A mobile phone maybe, a browser or logging into services using your Facebook account? That uniform transfer of data is actually the most difficult element to this concept – eventually the technology will become available, it’s really just a case of enough processor power – the real difficulty is changing the hearts and minds of people to actually allow a computer to monitor their every activity. I don’t really want a computer knowing every move I make, every search I do, every website I visit, every emotion I feel!

Not only don’t I want a computer knowing this information, I don’t want that information to be stored in databases controlled by companies who would try to monetise that data. But maybe that’s just me – I’ve never been thought of as an open book. I don’t use Social Networking for exactly that reason.

I think that a computer could be used to virtually fast forward through life – but whether individuals would want their life on the internet is another question. Maybe I’m not best placed to say – let’s ask the millions of people uploading to Facebook and Twitter right now.

What do you think – is it possible technically, is it possible socially?

Here’s a question for you – what happens to your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you die?

Mashable has the answer.

It does bare the question though – can you have their account address after they’ve gone or should it go to the children?

Tesco is getting into the movie business, producing a series of movies that are designed on purpose to go straight to the DVD shelves in Tesco. The company is working with some well known authors (the first movie is an adaptation of a Jackie Collins novel) and a small studio set up specifically for this kind of thing.

With Tesco planning straight to DVD movies they can control the entire process – similar to when a supermarket sells their own brand products. When I first heard about this move a thought it was very strange, but why not create own brand movies – yes they will probably be through away, yes they will probably be low quality but they will be controlled by Tesco and they have a chance of igniting public interest – imagine if Tesco produced another Blair Witch Project?

What is interested about Tesco’s move is that it follows a very similar business model as they currently have – sell a range of other people’s products and try to promote your own brand stuff right alongside them – but they have jumped into a completely different industry giving the chance to use their current business model and mould that industry’s best practises around it.

Read More: Brand Strategy

We’ve found this great little website that automatically changes new CSS properties available within CSS3: http://css3.mikeplate.com/.

CSS 3 is the latest version of the code that styles and positions elements on a webpage. Without CSS you wouldn’t get the nice websites that people are coming on with everyday. CSS2 had limitation – there was no native code to handle rounded corners of boxes, to native code to handle drop shadows and no native code to handle text shadows.

Now what this meant was that designers would have to create these effects in an image editor and then embed them into the HTML. This wasn’t great for usability or for SEO and it wasn’t great for page load speeds – being that websites take longer to load when they have extra images that need to load.

CSS3 has fixed these problems – now with a couple of extra lines of code you can have drop shadows, you can have rounded corners and you can have text shadows.

The benefit of testing this out in the above website is that you can see how different browsers react to different CSS3 elements. This is a great breakdown of browser compatibility { http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/#target-selector}.

If you’ve got any examples of cool CSS3 techniques leave your comments below.