We have undergone another rebrand here at NSM HQ. It is the first part of a total restucture of the site as we look to consolidate ourselves as one of the leading online promotional companies within Scotland.
We have many visual changes ready to be unleashed over the up-and-coming months which we hope will drive even more traffic to NSM.
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Nobody can denounce the success of Twestival last year. An online global success where cities around this big planet of ours get together and help host events in support of a local cause. Well, Glasgow is no different and this year the event will be held at The Living Room on the 10th of September 2009. The charity that has been chosen is No Strings Attached Scotland (NSA) that offer help to young people in Scotland that suffer with asthma.
I may be a bit late about posting this, seeing as I took a 6 week break from blogging up until a couple of days ago but anybody that knows me, understands I’m a BIG comic fan, so guess my excitement levels when I noticed that iGoogle is now doing custom comic themes. Awesome! Having quickly flicked through the available comic themes, my favourites so far are : Captain America, Dilbert, Batman, Blackest Night (Green Lantern), Iron Man, Superman, Hulk and Hellboy.
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Always one for being at the front of the queue to light the touchpaper, Edward Lewis of SEO Consultants ran an interesting test on a wide and varied selection of sites involved within the SEO and SMM industry and reported how those stood-up to being validated.
I’m glad to say that North South Media passed and got in the 
SEO Green Team.
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Protx has finally rebranded to Sage Pay. Following on from the initial announcement on the 16th of April, the Protx brand is being deconstructed to the new Sage Pay. The payment gateway pages have all now been madeover to the new Sage Pay look and feel.
Ask.com has brought back their popular man-servant ‘Jeeves’ as part of a UK facelift to entice more searchers to use their search engine instead of Google et al.
Jeeves, himself looks confident in his new look, displaying the thumbs in his jacket lapels displays a very assured look, indeed. Not only, has Ask brought out Jeeves from a 3 year retirement, they’ve also let him loose with their Twitter account (although, their pushing everything through the Hootsuite Toolbar, so expect ads very soon) and also bundled a Facebook profile with him as well, which should be fun.
Ask are hoping the new look will help bump up the numbers of the search engine : they claim it has 15 million monthly UK users.
Google has recently begun serving up local results for generic terms. I first noticed the change on Sunday the 5th of April, but plenty have witnessed the change earlier on different datacentres. So, what does it all mean? Well generic terms are one or two word search queries such as ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, which are semantic noun searches. Now when I type into Google, ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, I am given a local business map result along with my organic and paid search placements.
I just signed up for the Think Visibility conference at Leeds in March 2009. I’m really looking forward to this, as some of the guest speakers include Tim Nash, Patrick Altoft, Tom Critchlow and Dave Naylor. Of course there are a whole host of other names that I’ll also be checking out. But the best thing about this conference is the price … £30.00 … that’s right, thirty smackeroos to hear some of the best names in search talk … it dosen’t get much better than that.
A great new social bookmarking and voting site has been launched just for Scottish news and happenings : My Scottish Stuff : it looks cool and has already started to make waves.
You can also win an Ipod Shuffle, 1 of 5 available, if you become an active user, getting 20 home page newsworthy stories. We here at North South Media give myScottishStuff the big thumbs up and know where we’ll be submitting our stories from now on.
In a recent Google Blog post, Search experiments, large and small by Google engineer, Ben Gomes, in which he stated that at any one time Google are running anywhere between 50 – 200 experiments on their search engine results. From slight eye-test white space adjustments for a number 1 search result helping with better click throughs, to complex algorithm changes. Its interesting to get an insight into how Google, continues to manage its results.
