I find myself spending more time than ever before watching or reading technology related news stories. I’d like to say it’s hardly susprising really, given the industry I’m involved in. But the truth lies more with the fact that I normally get given the remote for the channel hopper well close to midnight after ‘The Family’ have given up on the day and saunter off to lullaby mountain.

Then I’m free to catch-up on the latest news and happenings.

I thought I’d write a list of my fav shows / websites that I rely upon to keep me up-to-date. It is a personal taste and those featured on my list may not be the definitive tech news resource centre but sometimes it just comes down to the way the news is presented.

Anyway, enough flaffing, here’s my top sources for online related news – hope you find something which you may have overlooked.

Multilingual Search is a site that has its authors spanning the globe. Always good to read news stories from the four corners of the world that just doesn’t focus primarily on Google.

Multilingual also has sister forums focussing on seo & ppc although I haven’t tread this far down through the site.

I love the Times Technology and Web section, not just for the fact that you know you are going to be reading a well written article but they sometimes behave like a normal personal blog as well.

Publishing top lists, reviews etc… gives it more a personal read rather than hard edged which they also do well when needed.

Fox Personal technology news came about to myself after my late night tv channel surfing and becoming a fan of Bill O’Reilly – don’t ask me to explain that one.

Ok, I know their hooked up with Sky – but is that really so bad. They have a love-love relationship with Twitter, which is why I probably like surfing this site so frequently.

NDTV’s The Next Big Thing is an Indian technology show that normally airs around 1am UK time on the news channel feeds from Sky, you see a trend happening here.

The show is hosted by vibrant presenter, Rajiv Makhni, and does really well in presenting the latest technology news plus light hearted articles like the latest vids from youtube etc … this show is well worth the bleary eyed state in the morning.

BBC’s Click is the dogs dangly bits when it comes to tv technology news programmes. The presenters run through each episode flawlessly, its like what ‘Match Of the Day’ is to football as ‘Click’ is to technology news … it really is that good.

My only quibble is that the section called Webscape is a little thin on the ground with some of its featured sites … but I do understand it is trying to appease the broader nation instead of a nation of geeks.

OK I know another broadsheet newspaper but the Guardian Technology online supplement is a really good read. One thing I do like about the Guardian is their use of the Podcast – I have downloaded and listened to several and all completely interesting.

Jack Schofield is well worth a look, although from previous posts his knowledge of seo was a little off centre. Perhaps he’s brushed up now and ready to ascend into guru status.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. eConsultancy is one site that has its finger on the pulse of the online community. Of course I’m not in anyway biased because I was a published author on there but it is a site that is so much more than just a news portal.

Always at the top of my rss feed and righlty so, it has many layers that will see it become ‘the’ major player in online community news. Mark my words.

If your into advertising and online markeing then Brand Republic should be part of your daily browse. The site is rich in the latest ad news campaigns, press releases, in fact a whole plethora of marketing news.

Also check out the blog section to see what marketers have to say, not always rich in relevant content sometimes but essential to get a better understanding on those peeps who run the big buck campaigns.

If someone where to ask me to choose between the big online technology news channels, then I would have to go with ClickZ over Techcrunch or Wired.

Reason being is ClickZ has been in my news feed for as long as I can remember. And it has never let me down in delivering the news I crave.

Finally, and by no means least, I choose Search Engine Land to get a definitive view of what is happening within the search industry from those with their ear closest to the ground – the SEL authors.

My only gripe is the full-screen ads that SEL deliver to you after a cookie cache clearout. None of the above feel the need to do it and neither should SEL in my opinion.

I know I have left many others out from my list, however I’d love to hear your favourites, so I can expand my rss list even greater and make my online technology reading richer.

The Blogging world got struck with a backhander from Google a few weeks back when they announced that they had changed the way the dealt with the ‘nofollow’ attribute especially with the way pageRank flows through a site. I’m not getting into any debate here, as Google announced that their change was implemented over a year ago and no-one noticed, so coughing up some lame ‘right-back-atcha’ Google response ain’t going to hold anything worthwhile, so why even attempt it.

Now, for myself and North South Media is the time to implement some in-house administration where we have more control about who is sucking link juice from our site. I noticed earlier about the way certain Blogs accredited link juice to their users who offer the most in the terms of conversation. Dave Naylor, Blogstorm and Hobo Web have either had something in place or have been uber quick to address the problem. However, it is the readiness of Hobo that have impressed myself, not long after twittering about having the existence of a wordpress plugin have the boys from Hobo listened to our calls and released : Custom Link Love fae Hobo.

So for future readers and ongoing contributors I have set the bar at a generous 3 posts, reach this and you’ll get a link back from this site, complete with anchor text, I’m an easyossy guy, but I do admin this blog very tightly and if you think this is a licence to spam, think again.

Download Hobo Link Love here

I have been playing with Microsoft’s new search engine, ‘Bing.com‘ and you know what, I like what I see. Its fast, uncluttered and the results are none too shabby either. The left hand pane of the results shows ‘Related Searches’, which I always feel that the typical searcher will turn to more if they can’t find what they are looking for on the 1st or even 2nd page.

OK, its not ground breaking as both Yahoo! and Google have offered this for some time but it’s the positioning which is impressive : top left of the page under a nice eye catching orange header, Bada Bing, I feel Microsoft have created the first Teflon Don Search Engine by creating a spiffy, smart and unfearless appearance to display its results within.

I also played around with bing.com/webmaster tools last night, and while it does try to be its own model you get the feeling that its just Google webmaster tools laced up in a strait jacket. However, back to the Bada Bing Search Engine. Will it be a serious contender to Google? Probably not. Will it help gain more searchers to its engine? Yep, it’s got me for starters, that’s 1 more at least than Live had last week.

Microsoft’s marketing arm is at full pelt at this moment in time, reminding us all it’s a ‘descision engine’ and not a ‘search engine’, their even rumours that their about to throw $80m to $100m to hook people on that term. You say ‘Tomato Sauce’, I’ll say, ‘Red Sauce’ please.

I’m not 100% sold on the little descriptive box that appears to the right of a vertical result, its a tad annoying but interesting at the same time, much like a 6 year old hyped on fizzy juice. To end, I’m liking this new fresh look from MS, I only hope the public like it too.

Update : Thanks to Joe Hall of Search Engine Journal fame, who brought to everyone’s attention the manners of Bing in changing its SERP title tags to adequate the search query to help increase click through rates. Seemingly, it is taking the most specific anchor text to a domain as a semantic relational query. My initial analogy of Bing in a friendly mobster manner is holding true. This is one search engine who ain’t happy with its current territory grounds and will play hard to increase its reach. Bing is no mild mannered crooner, it’s a serious approach by Microsoft to eventually take a decent share of the search engine market and yes, I still like it, even more so now.

Leading Up To Think Visibility

Over the weekend I travelled down to Leeds to attend the Think Visibility one-day conference hosted by Dominic ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and the Think Visibility team. It has to be stated, days prior to my departure, I was not in the best of health, in fact my wife and family were in heavy persuasion mode to get me to just stay at home and recuperate. Despite, their attention (2 yr olds can be so persuasive when telling Daddy to stay at home) I climbed into the car and decided that Leeds should at least share in the ‘Tropical Disease‘ that was coursing through my brittle bones. And off to Think Visibility I went!

Think Visibility Eve

After picking up James (Partner with North South Media) in Doncaster, we swung the car around and headed back North for Leeds and Bewelys Hotel. After arriving in Leeds and driving past Leeds Football Ground (Elland Road) 3 times we eventually took the right turn-off and arrived just in time to head-off to the Hogs Head for a Friday night get-together with the pre-Think-Visibility crowd. I’m glad I brought James along, he is a genuine people person and not being of the shy-type was soon mingling with the guest speakers while I sweated out the dreaded lurgy at the bar, clinging onto a cool pint of Heinekin like an alcholics blankie, James drifted in and out of converstions between Dave Naylor, Tim Nash, Chris Garret etc … like anyone outside of Search Marketing would. I did bump into Shaun from Hobo Web, Andy and Mrs Burnett from AndrewBurnett, Alistair McDermott of Website Doctor and Chris Clarkson from Pfft.co.uk …

4 beers later (wimp, yes I know, but James was pished) and I’m sleeping in the hotel room when James (remember, I just mentioned he’s pished) starts phoning and accepting calls at 4 am in the morning from his Facebook friends and starts explaining to them what Twitter and SEO is all about, I crashed when he tried to explain Page Rank to his Facebook phone friend using buckets as an anology, I mean how can you explain something like that using buckets…

Think Visibility Day

After waking at 7am, shower, shave and on my way for 8am, we get lost en-route to Think Visibility and turn a straight-forward 30 minutes walk into a 70 minute hike. Eventually, we arrive! And we’re off, first Guest Speaker is …

Tim Nash
Tim, adds a large injection of humour into a bleary eyed crowd. He explains how search engines came to being and demonstates with the help of some red dye, 4 buckets and some corks how Google came up with PageRank and also how NoFollow works. It has to be one of the best demonstrations and anologies I have ever seen / heard. Tim, was a bit dissapointed that his buckets didn’t explode as expected, Tim on behalf of my wife – thank-you for not ruining my new shirt with red dye

Chris Garret
One of the most influential bloggers on the UK scene today. Chris highlighted 25 ways to promote a blog. A number of ways I was aware of, but there were things within Chris’ presentation that made me do a slap-to-the-head motion and think ‘Why haven’t I tried that …’ Guess, that’s why Chris is so inspirational at what he does and I’m left writing about how inspirational Chris is.

Guy Redwood
Guy is some guy, when it comes to Eye Tracking and Simple Usability needs. His talk was really insightful about using Eye Tracking services to help work out why a user makes the clicks and descisions they do on your website. I liked the way Guy broke from the mould and stated that their was no data on the much flouted F-Figure of how a user reads a web page.

I mentioned this to Guy the night before during some drinks and he quickly doused the flames on this theory – I had said to Guy that I used the F-figure to help explain user movements to a client to which he quickly reassured me there was no data to back-up this claim. To hear him, once again proclaim it to the audience was inspiring to myself. Here’s a man, who trusts his data and if you don’t believe me then view the video below …

Tom Smith
Tom’s speech was bubbly and enthralling … it was just sheer brilliance and his energy and excitiment levels about speaking about Social Media was out there for all to get hooked on … I entered late into Tom’s speech, not that he noticed, and ended up being dumped uncerimoniously on the concrete floor to listen. No matter how much I fidgeted, shuffled and twisted my body into a more comfortable mode, I was hanging all the time on Tom’s words … his slides were awesome, they looked like contemporary social media art pieces.

After Tom, it was time for lunch, and injected by Tom’s enthusiastic performance I grabbed James and Andy Murd to head for a lunchtime pint and a dissection of what had went before. Upon return, we met up with the usual behind-the-bike-shed bunch consisting of Shaun, Andrew Burnett and in some form-or-another Big Chris as we talked both shop and the night-before hilarities. I then jumped across to speak with the Polr team : Ryan, Lynn and Calum and get a quick catch-up of events with those guys. Then it was onto the afternoon shot …

Dave Naylor
Wow, is about the best thing I can say to summarise Dave’s talk. He quickly rounded up his slide presentation in about 2 minutes flat then opened the room upto a Q&A session. From Google Base to SilverBullets to Unique Content Generation to Authority Blogs to Personalised Results and quite a bit in-between, Dave answered it all. A huge plus point in my day.

However, after Dave’s speech my ill-health kicked in big time. I felt extremely weak, tired and dizzy and decided that enough was enough and headed back to my Hotel room for a 3 hours sleep. Unfortunately, I never got to hear the other speakers but after asking around I realised that I had missed some real gems.

I have listed further reading for Think Visibility below and hope you all take the time to read each post. Here’s to a future Think Visibility (I hear from good sources that September the 12th 2009 is scheduled, so to avoid future dissapointment I guess you should follow @thinkvisibility on Twitter to see when those tickets will be released, because, believe me, if the next line-up is anything as good as that one then they’ll be gone quickly).

Further Reading :
www.ratssawgod.com
www.searchenginechocolate.com
www.polr.co.uk/
www.pfft.co.uk
www.seomoz.org/

Images courtesy of Sk8geek Think Visibility images on flickr

There are a number of Free SEO tools available on the Internet but I’d thought I would share the tools that are not only my favorites but which are also part of my everyday working SEO toolbox. Seeing as they are free they might have some less functionality than there paid equivalents, so with this in mind I have pointed out what I feel are their main points along with their bad ones.

SEO Book Keyword Tool

What is it and when do I use it? Great for quick research on finding the estimated average of searches on keyword phrases for the big 3 search engines.

Plus Points: Now using Wordtracker as its datasource (better up-time than Overture) also ties in with Google’s Adcenter keyword tools amongst others.

Bad Points: The International Keyword Tool (which is the one that I’m interested in) doesn’t work half-of-the-time. Aaron if you ever get round to fixing this bug I’d be most pleased.

SEO Link Analysis

What is it and when do I use it? Firefox extension that allows you to check inbound back links in Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal. Show the PageRank of the page the link is on, its anchor text (very handy) and if the link is still live or nofollowed. Great for back link analysis on your own or competitors site.

Plus Points: Very efficient and does exactly what it says on the tin.

Bad Points: erm…

SEO Digger

What is it and when do I use it? Type in the url of a website and this tool returns all the top keywords that the site ranks for. Really useful for competitor analysis.

Plus Points: Fast set of results can be turned round. Results can be saved as CSV files.

Bad Points: Sometimes the returned data can be a little out-of-date but really hard to pick faults with this tool.

SEO Browser

What is it and when do I use it? Browser tool that shows your website the way a visiting bot or crawler would view it. Handy for running SEO reports.

Plus Points: It has an advanced tab that allows you to get much deeper analysis of a web page.

Bad Points: The CSS style sheet viewer returns the page source code.

Keyword Density Tool

What is it and when do I use it? All in one function tool for checking your servers header code, linking ratio and also external links.

Plus Points: Useful for getting good information on a web page quickly. Handy for your own seo campaign or getting a better knowledge of a competitors.

Bad Points: I’m not sure the name of the tool fits best especially with the information you receive back perhaps Web Page SEO Analyser or something like that.

These are just a few, I hope to add some more to this as time allows. Please use the comments to promote a Free SEO Tool that you feel belongs in this list.

I recently registered with SEOrce a social click-bank website available in beta mode from Chris Gray – SEOrce CEO. So how does it all work. The idea is simple (as usually the best ideas are) you register with the SEOrce website and download their widget/code and insert it into an existing/new page on your site.

Once that is done you then scout the already signed-up members websites and find their widget – enter your unique username and thus registering a hit against your company and gaining yourself a point. The website company that you just hit captures a point as well.

SEOrce have taken measures to stop spammy hits and captures – I’ll let them explain this one—

* You’ll receive a hit point for each unique visit to your site and a capture point for each unique visit you make to a member’s site. A unique visit is a visit from or to a seperate SEOrce user. Each visit is recorded to avoid the possibility of duplicate visits. The reason for this unique visit rule is to prevent one user bombarding one site and thus ignoring other SEOrce users’ sites, which is contrary to the whole point of the system.

They also add to your point scoring by adding the incentive to visit your members area each day and receiving an active membership point. However, each day your inactive points are skimmed from your overall score.

So how is this going to help me rank better by installing a widget and click scoring other like-minded soles – I hear you ask. Again I’ll let SEOrce answer the floor on this one —

As your SEOrce ranking increases you’ll be closer to the top of the all-time, daily and/or monthly lists that are visible across all SEOrce site pages. This makes your site easier to spot, become more likely to be targeted, and thus increase your SEOrce and search engine rankings.

Right it definitely sounds like a nifty social interaction site – it smacks of web 2.0 interaction – and I have registered but I haven’t yet found the time to install the widget and go and improve my click bank score. So what’s stopping me!

I do like the concept – I really do and hopefully SEOrce will grow beyond all expectations but I do have a gripe about a few things.

The League Tables are kept in IFrames so that means any top-level page holding some link juice won’t be getting passed to my domain if it were in the top tables. I would be happier if the links were clean and just regenerated onto the page itself. The lack of choice for anchor text instead of just my sites title. Finally the look and feel of the site it looks outdated and its just launched – not a good sign. But with feedback from myself and others I’m sure Chris will get these ironed out before it comes out of beta mode.

SEOrce is a grower (a slow burner at the mo) but it is heading in the right direction and just watch out for other serp-click-bank websites being spawned if this is a success.

Today I finished reading my copy of Visibility Magazine a free SEO & Internet Marketing published offering available for just a sign-up.

The magazine is heavily sponsored by some of the big guns in the industry, Bruce Clay, SEO Image, Top SEOS among many others as you would imagine. I’m pretty sure most of you have a copy on your desktop.

One thing that is extremely irritating about the mag is the consistent bad grammar and misspelling. Its actually quite embarrassing in some stages. This isn’t a blog where minor rules of the English language can be overlooked. This is a published work! Distributed to a global audience! I’ve seen third-graders write better.

If Visibility is ever going to be taken seriously then they have to start as they mean to go on. The proof reader needs a good kick-up-the-eighties. There are some big names in there that have been asked to contribute and I’m afraid if that was my name at the end of some of those articles then I’d be fizzing at the utter contempt that has been shown by those in charge when reviewing the written piece. This is Print (or Digital print) and if Visibility don’t have a proof reader then I’d like to throw my hat in the ring, because even a former code-monkey like myself could do a better job than what is already in existence.

Don’t get me wrong, there were some nuggets of gold within the mag like Kalena Jordan, of Search Engine College fame, who wrote an informative and funny piece about Online Brand Protection. I happened to bring this up in a meeting today and explained to one of our clients the benefits of having a model in place. The client in question has, over the last six months, made heady grounds into some highly competitive markets and are ripe for this type of backlash from their competitors.

Overall, I feel the mag is a reflection of the correct steps taken from those within the SEO & SEM to help the industry grow-up and take itself seriously. I, for one, am aware of how many people within differing business environments that are now being pro-active and switched-on in having their website optimized and the benefits of running successful online marketing campaigns can mean to their online business development. Our own conversion rates have never been higher.

Long live Visibility, that’s what I say. Just try and remember that you are in a published context now and that spelling mistakes or bad grammar reflects on us all.