Malcolm Colmes pointed out yesterday the slight update to Google Instant which allowed the use of keyboard shortcuts. After hitting return, a user can navigate the results by pressing the up and down keys. With the PPC ads at the top and highlighted first, this means many more users may click through on the paid for ad rather than the organic listings.
This could prove a problem for many advertisers who bid on their own brand terms. While the benefits of this strategy included reiterating the message from the organic listing …

I think it’s a bit early to speculate how Google Instant will affect user behaviour, and there’s certainly a lot of buzz that it could fall out of favour like so many other recent Google endeavours, but could Google Instant stupefy search? I don’t mean in the same sense as auto-spelling corrections, but couldn’t users decide to just settle for semi-relevant results instead of seeing their actual search query all the way through?
Take for example the VisitCalifornia.co.uk PPC ads. In the past, users searching purely for ‘California’ were served a …

During the last 50 years of the Twentieth century as TVs began to be adopted as the primary source of entertainment in the home, the world suddenly got a whole lot smaller. Stories were no longer shared with only a few dozen people, but were now shared with millions. This meant the volume of stories shrunk rapidly, and everyone started to know the same ones. Suddenly the process reversed, and thousands of new outlets began producing thousands of new bits of content. Obviously developments in travel and international markets were …

So Foursquare has been in Edinburgh for a little over 7 months now (since mid November 2009), and since then if I had to sum up the user experience I’ve had with it I’d say that overall i’m actually a little disappointed. The only thing stopping me packing it in is that I believe in it’s potential, and I want to run it out and be there for it when it finds what it’s meant to be, but after just over half a year of use, I can’t keep on …

After enduring a recent customer services relationship which can only be described as a saga equivalent in comparison to that of the Star Wars or LOTR trilogies, it got me really thinking about how a business model like that would work. I’ll leave out the company in question because I’m not wanting to have a rant I just want to examine the business model, but they’re a telecommunications company offering line rental and broadband. If you really want to know click here.
When you switch phone line and broadband providers, they …

Miley Cyrus is one of many celebrities taking social-networking and even internet abstinence. Her logic is sound and I agree that for her, it probably was a good idea she stopped using them so much. Her announcement though suggested that the way she used these tools were more the problem, and her ignorance of her problem could have a knock on effect for the industry.
All the internet is, is a tool, and you can do whatever you want with the tool and it’s your choice what you do with it. …