Most Wordpress blogs these days use nofollow tags - a Google promoted device to make a vague attempt at stopping link spam. i think it may have also dampened the desire to debate on blogs though. The debates are now being dragged into Facebook groups or back behind walled gardens at Google’s expense as well as the public’s.

What do you think? nofollow free - good idea or bad?

Regardless of your opinion, here’s how to eliminate nofollows in your comments:

I am experimenting with two plugins to do this “Nofollowfree” and “Nofollowcasebycase“. Not sure which is the better yet. To install a plugin to Wordpress you really need FTP access to your Wordpress site. You download the plugin, and then unzip it (Don’t try and put a zipped file onto the server. It doesn’t work). The unzipped contents should, themselves be in a directory and need to be put in the wp-content/plugins directory on the server. For some people, that will be /public_html/wp-content/plugins.

That’s not it though. You then need to activate the plugin from within Wordpress. Log into the /wp-admin area and click on “plugins” on the far right of the screen to do this.

Dixon.

Friends and family are always coming up to me asking for my opinions on their latest business idea or website and more and more I am starting to find myself giving the same advice time and again. Write it down! I don’t know for sure that your business is going to make a million or break the bank - but what I do know is that you won’t even get a bank account for the business if you don’t write it down - and filling in the forms these days to open a bank account is not as straightforward as it was 20 years ago I can tell you.

It dawned on me just how often I have been wanting to say this to people again and again when my wife and I broke open the Captain Morgan the other night. Rum and coke is a great drink for relaxing the tongue without giving it that sharp “just drank Gin, now beat me” attitude. As a drink we found it on honeymoon a decade back and it’s amazing our livers are still functioning to this day.

Anyway - my wife and I were drinking and she asked me for maybe the 50th time about her used items exchange idea for the local village. Or was it her “Mums back to work” recruitment agency? Anyway - I finally said “write it down” and however the conversation went on from there, I had to come back to the same advice as the only “next step” that was viable in the development process.

Even if you are a local plumber looking to have your own 5 page website, you still need to write it down. Going to a web designer and saying “please could you build a simple website, nice and cheap” already got twice as expensive as if you went along with a word document to the same guy and said “can you make a website out of this text”. It has to be your text in the end doesn’t it? So you are going to have to write it however much you pay. All I am saying is that you need to write your thoughts down, not just mull them over in the pub.

Well - oftentimes I am a disaster at listening to me own advice. But not this year. For better or worse, I have written down my business plan for my main business, and properly budgeted income and expenditure right down to the postage costs. Then I agreed the plan with my fellow directors and then summarized the objectives and delivered these to the entire team (15 people). Having written it down, we had much better boundaries for the annual review round and a clear idea of what needs to change to be able to meet our targets.

Writing a business plan - in the first instance at least - is not about WHAT you write as much as it is about THAT you write anything at all. 90% of business ideas fail right there. What - would it kill you to write the idea down on one sheet of paper? This blog post is more developed than 90% of business ideas. We have a one page business plan in the office, which is maintained and updated monthly - in addition to the more elaborate business plan. But if you are trying to get your business off the ground, here’s my 10 things you should write down before you even talk to a friend in a pub.

1. An advertising headline and tag line that explains and sells your product all in one go. Mastercard are calling Mastercard “the new change” encouraging micro-payments on cards these days. You know the product, you know the USP, you know that you don’t need to go to the cashpoint anymore to buy a sandwich from Tescos.

2. Write down a list of boring things you will need to arrange and very rough costs in money AND TIME. Here’s a few:

• Bank Account: £nothing ….. 1/2 day
• Legal trading name (LTD Company?) £50… 2 hours
• Website domain and hosting space £10… 2 hours
• A place to work from? A filing cabinet?
• An accounts package?

Usually - the realization that you either need an accounts package or alternatively a VERY expensive accountant right at the start puts most people off right there.

3. SWOT analysis on your competitors. What - going to Google and finding out who they are will kill you?

4. A spreadsheet with cash-flow projections based on SALES NEEDED after costs are incurred, not “SALES EXPECTED” before costs are decided. Bank managers have given up looking at projections because they all start with “I will sell 2 more memberships every day ongoing, so I will break even in six months and be a millionaire in two years… just look at the figures”.

5. Write down some building blocks about how you are going to meet your sakes projections… Look at the sales funnel that you will need so you can get early warning signs if you are missing the target. I am looking for a certain level of new business each month for my main company. This equates to for new contracts a month, based on experience. To get this I need 12 opportunities assuming I convert one in three. Most leads are not going to even turn INTO opportunities, so to create 12 opportunities I need (say) 36 leads, or about two every working day. Now I can get these through the web, through network meetings, through conferences or through cold calling… (except I could never personally do cold calling) but the point is that for 4 new bits of business I need nearly 40 people saying “hmm… tell me more”. All of a sudden that first million looks a little harder to attain - or easier if that’s your thing.

I am not saying that omniture is crap but I seem to be able to get Indextools to give me useful information whilst Omniture just gives me headaches. Where some people might say that Omniture has a steep learning curve I just call a difficult UI experience. My only wish now is that we don’t find Yahoo turning Indextools to crap.

There are two versions of Indextools - professional and Enterprise. Please don’t get me wrong - you need the Enterprise version to be able to compete with Omniture. But compete it does - and what seems to require consultancy help from Omniture just works on IndexTools with a few intelligent clicks and dragging a filtered report to a bookmark or a dashboard. It may be that I just don’t have access to administrator level of a full Omniture account… Actually - if I did - then Omniture are so scared of being properly compared that they don’t actually ALLOW their competitors to see omniture data. That’s pretty lame. If you have a world beating product, then you should show it off to anyone and everyone don’t you think?

Where things may differ is moving forward. Indextools did have plans for some very smart new ways of measuring lifetime values for visitors. I’m sure those ideas will have been part of Yahoo’s master plan, but the current “new face of Indextools” for the time being looks to be competing with Google Analytics, not with Omniture… but the real cool stuff is yet to come from Indextools. It may take a bit longer to arrive now, but hope, heavens to murgatroid, that Yahoo doesn’t ruin what partners of Indextools have seen in Indextools’ strengths for some time. Independence was one of those strengths… so given that we’ve lost that plank, let’s hope that the system doesn’t…

• Grind to a halt under the new publicity (It’s already slowed a bit)
• Get changed so that it cannot be used for deep analysis
• Get changed in ways that compromise the ability for large companies to fulfill their dataprotection act obligations.
• Get ad-funded (ugh!)
• Break

I am all for change. The analytics industry still has a way to go before we can all agree on how to measure things properly. Please Please Please, Yahoo - keep the IndexTools system healthy and ad-free. In the meantime, I think that if you want an Indextools partner then at the moment you will need to work with one tha believed in IndexTools before Yahoo bought them out. My guess is that this is going to be the only way to get a decent enterprise account at this time.

Yes - it’s true. From the 5th of May, on Adwords, you will be allowed to bid on a competitor’s trademarked keyword in the UK and Ireland. Be careful you don’t get sued by the trademark owners if you try.

Adwords trademark bidding has been possible in the US for a while, but will remain impossible in most of Europe after the 5th of May.

When the news came through to the office that this change was going to take place, a very interesting discussion developed as to whether it we should be advising our clients or whether they should be advising us on how this might affect their on PPC strategy. My instinct was to tell all our clients the facts and then ask our clients to consider how they wanted to deal with 1. people bidding on their trademarked word and 2. them using competitor trademarks as keywords. I thought I had written an article that did this quite well, but two of my team pulled me up on in, saying that we should not be giving out legal advice to our clients on IP and trademark law. Clearly whatever I had written had not struck the intended tone, because perception is reality and the reality is that if my team felt I was saying “bidding on a competitor’s trademark is fine and dandy” then I was clearly advocating something that was not always a safe bet! I think we’ll settle on fixing the typos and putting a disclaimer on the article when it comes out, but it got meto thinking. If we had not put out the article at all and kept our clients in the dark about this change in Google’s Adwords policies in the UK and Ireland, I wonder how many calls we would have received in mid May when clients suddenly see their competitors advertising when users type in our clients’ trademarked word? That will be the call, as the MD gets all hot and bothered doing his vanity checks. The actual COST though, is much more sinister. We have many clients that bid on their own trademark. We recommend it even when they are number 1 because it gives you twice as much exposure on the serps above the fold and knocks some other website below the fold. the cost is minimal. We have a client on a near six figure monthly spend and brand is by far the biggest converter. The brand keyword costs about £20 a day… £600 a month out of a near six figure monthly spend. Peanuts in other words. That is because nobody else can bid on the trademark (hell… most competitors can’t even spell the trademark) the quality score and relevency is through the roof, putting the CPC through the floor. But what happens when competitors start to bid on the term? Obviously they will be at a disdvantage, because they cannot say the same things as the trademark owner and cannot be seen to be passing off. But they CAN disrupt the low quality score on the advert. If the CPC goes from 2 pence per click to 20 pence per click, a trademark owner suddenly finds themselves paying a 900% increase in costs for the very same traffic that they had before ay 5th.

As consultants, don’t we also have a duty of care to forewarn our clients about this possibility? Our clients, then, have a duty of care to their shareholders to give us the best advice to us as consultants as to how we handle this new front on PPC advertising campaign management. But if anyone gets lawyers in to stop us all reaching a concensus, then the only winners will be the lawyers.

Dixon (I am NOT a lawyer) Jones.

Ever since SMX Seattle LAST year (2007) it dawned on me that staying alive in any shape or form in the Social Media was going to either take huge amounts of time, huge amounts of talent, or… basically… a shortcut. I’m not sure if I was even ON facebook then, and certainly avoided blogging if I could pay someone else to do it. But the world was changing. Very fast.Towards the tail end of 2007 I came across Netvibes. Now I know everyone seems to be using all sorts of other tools to keep it all together, but Netvibes does a huge amount all in one place. It currently manages:My Facebook; My Twitter; Digg; Delicious; My images (Ask, Google, Flickr and Yahoo) all on one screen. On the second tab I can see my RSS feeds, and on a third tab I can see my Yahoo Emails, My Gmails, my Hotmails. Not that I NEED to lay it out that way. With a press of a few buttons I can drag and drop the layout or add all manner of modules. Here’s a screenshot of my main page.It’s clean and clear and makes all the modules easy to use. Although Rae is too short to look over the ledge there!Take the Twitter module, for example. Just being in my Netvibes I can see my Twitter conversations really easily, but if I was on Twitter itself, I have to refresh my whole page every few minutes if I want to see if anyone loves me. That’s really depressing, because usually I just get ignored. But here, life’s easy. I can update my Twitts or whatever they are called on the screen, or refresh the feed, without losing sight of my Facebook or other areas.

What I like about Netvibes:

• It’s web based, so it works on my iPhone as well as my laptop or wherever I get connected.
• As soon as I log on it retrieves all my online world at once.
• You could use it for multple accounts (including multiple Twitter IDs if you are schizofrenic)
• It is entirely adaptable with drag and drop functionality.

What I don’t like:

• It’s a bit too slow to be my default home page, as it tries to log in to everything at once when it loads
• It doesn’t appear to have Microsoft Exchange support.

So what other widgets can I bring in other than Twitter and RSS feeds? Well I am way off learning everything. I do have a day job you know! but here’s just a few…Weather; Craigslist; Calander; Facebook; Myspace; HTML pages; Ebay; Yahoo News; BBC stuff; box.net Link Widgets; Alexa widget; Stocks; Hack a day; Url shorytener; Mashable; Forbes… and hundreds more.It’s certainly a time saver for the average SMO Joe! But it’s not the only one.

Here are a whole load of other reviews for Twitter timesavers:
Twitterfox Review
Review of the Twhirl Twitter Client
Review of TwitterTools to integrate Wordpress and Twitter
Twittering and Twitterific - A Review
Review of the TwitterBerry app for BlackBerry and Twitter
Twitterfeed Review
Twitter and TwitBin - Microblogging Made Easy
The Guide to Being a Drunken, Debaucherous Twit

 It had to happen. Someone has found a way to share personal data between websites without technically invading privacy laws. Microsoft is going to let Bebo, Facebook and LinkedIn all share their data, with others no doubt coming on fast. Facebook and Bebo are going live as I type.

 I was having dinner with Microsoft and Danny Sullivan last week and Danny laughed at my take on the whole privacy issue. He said, “hey -what are you gonna do? it’s going to happen anyway!” I had to agree that it would, but maybe he was a few days ahead of me knowing just how quickly the world would change upside down. So how have they got around the presumably significant invasions on out privacy that arise from swapping personal data between companies? Well it seems that the big winner here will be Microsoft… who will get more or less everyone’s data - and then individuals have to “opt” to let other Microsoft partners see the data. But… If you want your Facebook friends and your Bebo frienmds “in-sync” then you’ll probably find yourself opting out until the cows come home until you succumb to the new world order!

 Now - don’t get me wrong - I would MUCH rather let Microsoft be the custodians of my personal data that Google. They seem to have a bit more of an idea about the dangers of having it and a bit less of an idea about how to use it against me. Still - I think the days of “free-spirits” on the Internet are numbered. Big Brother is most certainly here and the mildly amusing thing is that it is the right wing that are behind the cultural shift.

 Mildly amusing… but somewhart more alarming wouldn’t you say?

P.S. (Thanks to Engine for the tip off on this)

It started as a “Build-a-bear” party. It has ended in tears.

A few weeks ago my daughter went to a “Build-a-bear” party. Basically a party in a teddy bear shop where you build your own teddy bear. there’s probably all sorts of child slave labour law issues in that whole model, but the kids loved it and the bear comes with web access to a Build-a-bear-world… a kind of Second Life for under tens. It looks well made and the only way to get the entry code is to buy a bear in the shop… which in itself offers some protection for the kids. So I let my daughter join and - to be fair - she’s been enjoying life in Virtual reality.

Then along comes a “Celebrity Beach Party”… but here’s the scam… er …. promo. You can only get into that section of the virtual park if you go BACK to the shop and buy something else. You also get a chance to win £5,000 but that’s really not the point. My daughter just birst into tears when she realized that with all the will in the world, she couldn’t get into that part of the virtual world.

She cried.

Now - as a parent, when a child starts crying for something that clearly she doesn’t need, it’s time for a parent to put on the brakes. NO. I will not be bullied by an eight year old. Especially one that is trying to extort time and money out of me through some virtual mafia Godmother teddy bear company!

Nice try though Build-a-bear!

Here are some of the SES crowd who were ar Alan Dick’s Vintage Tub party. names below. 

From Left to right: Loren baker; Li Evans; Lee odden and jolene; Joost; Jen; Dennis and Becky; Danny Sullivan; Ani and Jonathan(?); Mel & Jessica Bowman; Mel singing Karaoke; Bill and Motoko.

Want £30 free from Google? Go to www.google.co.uk/advertising-offercode and get your £30 off.

Voucher codes have been a very popular way to track the effectiveness of campaigns even before the web came along. They are great because they transcend marketing mediums. You can give a voucher online to be redeemed in store or you can give a voucher code to a chap handing out calling cards on Oxford Street for redemption online. They have been working well until recently.

Now I hear rumblings. Rumblings from the affiliate community that voucher codes are killing all theit hard work. An affiliate spoends loads of time pre-selling a customer and at the last moment the buyer sees a box saying “if you have a promotional code. enter it here”. This kills the poor affiliate’s commission and gives it to some other affilate. Case in point - we went to Centerparcs last year and managed to get a discount by doing that search at checkout.

But on balance, surely the affiliates win. Well - thiose offering voucher codes win. It’s the brands that lose. 20 seconds before pushing the “sale” button and savvy internetters go to their not so favourite search engine and get a discount on something they were going to buy anywy. Everyone loves a deal. But the problem is that the voucher code as a way of tracking the source of a marketing channel is breaking down.

Last month I went to buy one of those needlessly large fridges with needless ice making and cold water facilities. (Significantly better for the environment than the half size one we had before, by the way.) We went to Currys, and found the exact one. Delivery charge… £45 extra. Since we decided that even if we could fit it into the estate (car, not house), we couldn’t carry it into the kitchen, we decided to just check online first.

The net result? We got a discount through Can’t B arsed.com after a quick trip to Google. We also got it from Dixons’, not from Curry’s. We also got free delivery.

So I’m happy. I got the deal. But as a tracking mechanism, promotional vouchers are rapidly becoming unreliable.

Oh yes… that Google voucher? I got it from a Google paid link in New Media Age this morning.

According to the Herald Tribune, Enom are locking names on a US Treasury blacklist, preventing the owner from carrying out legitimate business. The owner is in Europe, selling travel packages to many places, but including Cuba. Now what on earth is wrong with that? The Americans may have problems with Americans going to Cuba, but the Brits and the go to Cuba in their droves. It is a VERY popular destination for us every summer and packages are sold by almost every major tour operator in Britain.Now I have a reseller package with Enom. It is therefore with some alarm that I hear stories of my DNS provider closing down entire businesses with no good legal reason. I guess if I was Enom and the US treasury came and shouted at me, I would buckle too… but in this case the Treasury should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.