Category search: Think tank
According to a recent study by Rutgers University, women make up 58% of all social media users, incentivising networking sites to reach out to a more male audience.
There are new social networking platforms popping up every day which are geared towards the male population, focusing on sports and other stereotypical ‘male’ activities rather than personal feelings.
Lead author of the report, Keith Hampton, believes that because women are the networkers in relationships, they are much more likely to use social media as a form of expression.
But does it really all come down to emotions? Is the answer really as simple as saying women are more in touch with their feelings than men?
From the spoof photograph of the Spaghetti harvest back in 1957 to Richard Branson’s UFO in 1989, April Fools has been celebrated in many countries across the world for many years.
It’s no surprise that the hoax hilarity has spread forth onto the digital sphere and this year we have had some real corkers. From tech bloggers to search moguls, it seems everyone has been at it!
Here are few examples of April Fool’s jokes that caught our eye at Branded3.
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, you must have spent the last month in a cave. Pinterest is the latest big thing to take the social media world by storm, collecting over 13 million users in just 10 months.
With a simple interface, Pinterest allows users to ‘pin’ interesting images or videos you find on the web straight onto ‘pin-boards’. The social element comes from being able to follow other pinners, and comment on their pins, and ‘re-pin’ their pins onto your own boards. That’s a whole lot of ‘pinning’.
Picture credit: Apple Inc.
With Apple’s highly anticipated keynote last night concerning the release of its new iPhone model, it is arguable whether the technology giant pleased or disappointed the vast crowds watching with bated breath.
Announcing the iPhone 4S, a new iPod Nano and a new iPod Touch; the keynote was surprisingly lacking in an announcement of the iPhone 5. However, even with the absence of a new design the iPhone 4S is still crammed with useful features.
The keynote began with Apple’s usual highlight of how they’re dominating the music industry, the smartphone industry, and now the tablet industry.
Amazon has unveiled its new colour tablet, the Kindle Fire, which hits the market at less than half the price of the iPad; automatically creating a huge fuss over the future of Apple’s popular tablet.
But whilst the inevitable comparisons are being made, it’s worth noting that the Kindle Fire shouldn’t be seen as a competitor for the iPad, but rather as an addition.
It has a simple, easy-to-use interface which makes it a perfect device for reading books, surfing the web, getting email, and of course, shopping at Amazon.
With a 7-inch IPS colour touch screen and 8GB of internal memory, the Kindle Fire combines the essential elements of a tablet computer, with a colour e-reader.
Greeted by stacks and stacks of bacon sandwiches when I arrived at the Think Vis conference at Leeds’ swanky Alea casino, all my expectations were instantly surpassed. What can I say? I’m easily pleased (and was horribly hungover). So after chowing down on some much-needed grease and plying myself with three cups of tea (and, er, a couple of naughty biscuits), we were called into the top room by our convivial host, Dom Hodgson.
In an interesting article posted this week, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin, posted his theories about a possible new feature to Google’s algorithm which measures the authenticity and passion in the content of a page.
Rand believes this new algorithm – however it might work – is ranking the more personal and passionate pages higher than the much bigger, commercial sites.
Although purely a theory, Rand’s thoughts have sparked much talk in the SEO world about what it is that Google is gauging, and what elements of a site are picked out for being more relevant than others.
One of the interesting things I saw on Techmeme this morning was the news that Google is to retire the Blogger and Picasa brands in a bigger Google+ push which will happen for the public release in around six weeks time.
Though it’s not uncommon for Google to rebrand the products it has bought, it doesn’t usually happen this long after the product was acquired (2003 for Blogger and 2004 for Picasa), or for products as popular as these.
Over the next eight weeks, Twitter users will begin to see promoted Tweets show up in their timeline; in a risky move by the social networking giant to increase its advertising revenue.
But with an already failed attempt at pushing ads at its users; this could be a dangerous step for Twitter to make, which could see brands suffer and users go elsewhere.
The Semantic Web is a new technology/specification that attempts to read into the meaning of content on the web, providing more useful and relevant search results, and creating a specific content model which fits your business needs.
Google, Bing and Yahoo are already beginning to support the Semantic Web in their applications, most notably the Search Indexes. Using vocabularies such as schema.org; search engines index your website, looking for Semantic tags which allows them to understand the meaning of the content on the web page.
Typically associated with design, crowdsourcing has industry opinion divided; with the perpetrators seeing it as a fast and cheap option; and the majority of designers brandishing the method unethical.
But now it seems the approach is branching out into other areas of the digital industry; challenging agencies and professionals to ‘win’ work. It’s a concept which traditionally splits agencies from clients; but in an increasingly competitive environment, it’s beginning to divide those within the agencies too.
We know the importance of keeping up with all the latest SEO developments here at Branded3, because it’s one of those things where if you don’t move with the times, you get left behind. We’re constantly experimenting with new techniques and ways in which we can help our clients achieve better results and gain more traffic share.
As such, each year we pay close attention when one of the biggest SEO resources in the world; SEOmoz; ask all of their friends, followers, and subscribers to contribute to their ‘ranking factors.’ These ‘ranking factors’ are effectively a straw poll of some of the best SEO’s in the world (including our very own Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice – who have been asked for input this year) on what factors they believe are the most important reasons why websites might rank highly in the search results. And this year we’ve seen some pretty interesting results…