This week the developer of Trackur asked their users to suggest new functions and features for the on-line buzz monitoring service and their has been various cool ideas put forward including “Manual Sentiment Tracking” and an “Unseen Filter” to make viewing of many buzz lines easier to manage your on-line reputation. See what the buzz is about here

There’s a change in the way more and more people decide to holiday!

Its no surprise that the big package holiday firms are playing down the importance of this new trend and keeping quiet whilst they try to evolve themselves as they see their traditional package holidays losing favour with customers !! Even Premier Inns is moving over to self catering apartments within cities and Coastal resorts.

How many times has Thomson Holidays, Thomas Cook and First Choice been featured on the BBC’s Watchdog for poor hotel standards? and dumping holiday makers in airports for hours due to plane delays even though they knew well before of the delays but choose not to tell their customers !!!

It is no surprise to see a rising tide of holiday makers choosing to rent private accommodation. The quality of many apartments and villas available to rent through websites such as RentInNerja.com, Meon Villas and VillasPlus are the equivalent of 5 star luxury on a self catering basis. The properties are essentially home from home, I recently booked a villa with one of them on the northern end of Corfu for the same price as a 3 star package holiday for two. The villa even came with an introduction food hamper in the fridge plus detergent for the dishwasher !! The book collection and DVD’s in the lounge were a treat too, as was the private pool where I was able to strip off completely and get an all over tan

I was teaching the core skills of good Search Engine Optimisation to my new apprentice when I coined a phrase which in my experience perfectly explains the two halves of SEO:
  ”Half of SEO is understanding what is possible and
  how things work…
  ….The other half is investigative out maneuvering”
    ©2008 Martin Sansone

FeedBurner certainly has its uses and its a very popular service, however those who use FeedBurner to help publicize their websites certainly don’t need to give feedburner half of the link juice credited by top search engines such as Google !!

Thankfully FeedBurner understand this and have included a setting within the control panel allowing you to set your article links to 301 Permanent Redirects - ensuring the actual articles’ URL gets the full link value instead of sharing the value with Feedburner as per the default setting. The only downside to this is a slight reduction in follow through stats provided within the FeedBurner account itself… no great concerns for those focussed on PR values and search result positions…. Unfortunately, many folk don’t realise this is even happening.

As Microsoft roles out the new Internet Explorer 8 with its InPrivate button, the advertising world holds it breath in fear! Why? The button clearly marked in the browser, when clicked, allows the web surfer to visit websites without the advertising tracking cookies catching any browser behaviour. Such information is used by Google, Yahoo and MSN to serve up targeted advertisements. Session cookies etc are clearly still used and Googles data gathering systems do not rely on just browser side cookies - but targeting ads InPrivate mode is a problem.

This clearly poses a problem for the search engines and advertisers alike. Privacy campaigners will undoubtedly be happy…but I can’t help wonder why such a move by Microsoft has been adopted for “Privacy” and yet the international child protection agencies such as CEOP have been pushing for a “Report Button” for unsuitable content/behaviour in all browsers and nothing has happened !!! How about re prioritising civil responsibility ahead of financial positioning for a change?