Blogs

  1. Cogapp blog

    [Blog] Cogapp blog: Tech weekly roundup

    Each week we round up what’s been happening in the tech world and share a few of the things we like.

    This week features Lego Rubik’s Cube solving machines, learning to code, Hollywood movie datasets, creative technologist residencies and the dangers of fracking.

    Tech News

    Happenstance: a new residency programme for Creative Technologists

    Read more

    read more

    Posted 27 January 2012, 5:20 pm

  2. Favicon Tom Hume

    [Blog] Tom Hume: Network operators and identity

    We had a big hoo-hah this week over O2 mis-sharing customer phone numbers. They've been sticking them in the HTTP headers for trusted partners for years (a few services FP built used them), but it looks like someone misconfigured a proxy and they leaked out on the wider web. They've been found, had a public slapping, and apologised.

    It's a shame, really, because identity is probably one of the last places where operators could really do something useful. They've long prided themselves on their ownership of relationships with their customers, and part of that relationship is their knowing who you are (more for monthly subscribers than PAYG, but still). I'm a bit puzzled as to why they haven't done more with this: one problem that the web has is a complete lack of innate sense of identity, which is why we all have to either remember lots of passwords, use software to manage different passwords for different sites, or have one password we use everywhere - and all of these situations are painful.

    (Aside: I can imagine passwords being one of those things that we have to explain to our incredulous grandchildren as an artefact of a Less Civilised Time)

    I get that for many people and many situations, this anonymity is a feature not a bug, but I don't see why anonymity and convenience have to be mutually exclusive. Operators, of course, know who you are: it's not called a Subscriber Identity Module for nothing. And, just as they missed the boat with location services 5-7 years ago (by gathering useful location data and either refusing to release it, or trying to charge £0.10 per location lookup, ruling out some classes of application completely and making most of the others commercially unviable), they're probably doing, or have done, the same with identity.

    Imagine if when you bought your Orange phone, you could opt in to a service which identified you to web sites (Facebook, ebay, Google, Hotmail) automatically. Perhaps it could do this by presenting them with unique token, a bit like a cookie, which they could use to get your personal details from your operator (with your permission, of course). It'd be great for them (easier sign-ups and logins means more customers and more use), great for the end user (no passwords, hooray) and a decent proposition for the operator ("never forget a password with Orange"). If you're worried about security - well, you can lock your phone already and control physical access to it as well as you can your wallet.

    This needn't involve sharing your mobile number - the unique token could be a one-way hash of the number, or similar: something guaranteed to be you and only you, but of no value to spammers if they catch sight of it. As a customer you could control which web sites could use it, and which didn't. Parental controls could be used to restrict logins to specific web sites from the phones of children. It feels like this ought to be useful.

    There are privacy issues, true, but if you're using a mobile then you're already trusting an operator with your calling circle, communications, logs of text messages, web pages accessed… a whole pile of very private stuff. Is offering management of your identity on top of all this really a step too far?

    Posted 27 January 2012, 5:05 pm

  3. Favicon Andy Budd::Blogography Articles

    [Blog] Andy Budd::Blogography Articles: Web Design Disciplines Explained Through the Medium of Dungeons & Dragons

    First off let me apologise for the laboured metaphor I’m about to inflict on you, but I thought it could be entertaining to try and describe the web design industry using a medium I’m sure you’re all familiar with—Dungeons & Dragons. However I should point out that I’m no D&D expert, having played it last when I was 13. So please don’t leave comments to the line of “you got that all wrong as those character classes were changed in AD&D 2nd Edition, Unearthed Arcana.” or I’ll pull out my +2 broadsword and go Berserker on your ass.

    In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, characters could have a variety of professions such as Fighter, Thief or Magic-User. These professions were loosely related to a characters natural abilities. So if you were intelligent you’d be well suited to becoming a magic-user, whereas if you were dexterous, becoming a thief was a good option.

    In the real world, your natural interests and abilities will also dictate the career path you follow to some extent. It’s doubtful that you’ll have a natural ability in a particular discipline, but your innate attributes will make it easier for you to pursue certain careers than others. So if your a logical thinker, development is a natural avenue, while if you’re empathetic, people management is a good career. If you have both, you get to choose one or the other or maybe even combine those skills and become a scrum master.

    In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighters were the bedrock of any quest. For a new party, you wouldn’t get very far without a fighter or two to guard your back, while a group of fighters could easily operate on their own, without the assistance of other classes. The same is true on the web. Programmers are the fighters of the web. It’s entirely possible to start an online business with a couple of programmers and you”d be successful for a while at least.

    Thieves are sharp, agile and good with technology. The hackers of the fantasy world. In a modern campaign you’d want at least one thief along to pick locks, disable traps and run interference. With their penchant to form guilds (The Guild of Accessible Web Designers anyone), Thieves were front end developers of the D&D multiverse.

    Thieves and Fighters could make pretty good headway on their own, but throw an illusionist into the mix and you’ve got a powerful combination. Illusionists are learned in the arcane sigils (typography to you and me) and had the power to dazzle people with their magical incantations. Relatively useless straight out of college, they only came into their own at higher experience levels, where they become formidable allies. Illusionists benefit from being around higher-level magic users as they can swap spells and learn faster. Similarly design is typically a learned profession but novice designers struggle on their own. So they need lots of support from senior practitioners. However when designers start to become seniors themselves, they are amazingly powerful, and a good creative director is worth their weight in sharpies (£5,500 if you assume the average weight of a man is 62kg).

    Clerics are the wise healers of the pack. Their job is to look after the spiritual and physical well being of the team. A little like a good project manager when you think about it.

    Lastly you have the Rangers. Rangers require higher than average attribute scores across a range of different areas, so tend to be less common. Like Wizards and Thieves they are also a learned class, having to study things like tracking and animal lore. In fact, higher level Rangers even have the ability to cast certain spells or defuse traps. As such they are a bit of a hybrid. Rangers are great in open country and typically work alone. However they’re not much use in towns. So Rangers aren’t needed on every quest and are a bit of a specialism. To me, Rangers are the UX Designers of the D&D world. Highly trained specialists, of use in a subset of specific projects.

    Characters in Dungeons & Dragons progress by gaining experience points which relate to the complexity of the quests they undertake and the level of the foes they defeat. If they do something themselves all that learning goes to them. However if they are part of a team the experience is typically distributed amongst everybody. So the more quests you undertake, and the bigger those quests are, the more you’ll progress in your careers. If you play infrequently and only accept easy challenges it can take you ages to move forward, while if you work with a small but experienced team on tricky adventures you’ll grow much faster.

    The same is true with the web. Learning comes through experience and the more projects you undertake the better you’ll get. If you accept simple projects with little risk you’ll have an easy life but you won’t push yourself. It’s only by taking risks and working on projects that are slightly outside your comfort zone will you learn new skills and push your career forward apace.

    With some character classes, new skills become available at higher levels. You could argue the same is true on the web. There are certain skills you would typically only pick up at higher experience levels and are unlikely to be present in junior practitioners. As such, your level of experience really does impact what you can and cant contribute to a project.

    Now here’s where things start to get interesting. In D&D it’s possible for characters to follow multiple classes. However if you do this you have to split your experience across the different classes making progress much slower. In new of mid level teams, this isn’t so much of a problem. So a 2nd level Thief-Ilusionist can hold their own with a 4th level fighter. But a 6th level Theif-Illusionist would probably be outclassed by a 12th level Ranger.

    This is also true in the real world. It’s totally possible to do both design and development, and in the early stages one will actually aid the other. But as you undertake one project after another you’ll find that it’ll take you longer to become an expert in either. So it’s great if you’re an all rounder in a team of all rounders, but becomes difficult to carve out a meaningful niche amongst a group of experts.

    There is one caveat here and that’s that Bard character. Bards were a really weird class and therefore not something many people played. They had to have really high ability scores across a range of attributes. They also had to start out as a Fighter, then duel class as a Fighter-Thief and then finally duel class as a druid. It’s only after going through this long and laborious process that they could become a 1st level Druid and start all over again.

    I think this is the position a lot of UX practitioners have found themselves in. Rather than going through the higher education track, they have worked their way thought the design and development professions, never settling on either. Instead they will get to a medium level of mastery before getting bored or distracted by something else. As such, there is a subtle but important difference between a designer and developer who does a bit of UX (think multi-class character) and a self trained UX practitioner (think a multi class character who took a specific set of steps in order to change class to a Druid).

    And that’s it. My slightly laboured, incredibly nerdy description of the web design industry, as explained through the medium of D&D.

    You have the initiative. What’s your next move going to be?

    Posted 27 January 2012, 4:23 pm

  4. Favicon Andy Budd::Blogography Articles

    [Blog] Andy Budd::Blogography Articles: UX Developer is a misleading and potentially damaging job title

    I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term.

    Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences, membership organisations and college courses. User experience designers therefore have a distinct set of skills and practices that form the core of their profession.

    That being said, user experience designers don’t own these practices any more than developers own the ability to code up wireframes. So it’s right that designers and developers look to understand more about user experience as it is for UX designers to want to understand more about the technology that drives their products or the designs that bring them to life. This is one of the aspects of being a professional; the desire to develop your core skills while understanding where your domain overlaps with others.

    When I look at new job titles my first question is to ask what new or specific activities form the core of that discipline and make it distinct from other fields. Is this indeed a brand new field of practice or simply a catchy name for a set of composite skills? So when I first heard the term UX Developer I was intrigued. What new skills or techniques are these practitioners using that are specific to the technological side of the equation, and is there anything here I can use?

    With eager anticipation I grilled every self styled UX Developer I met to find out what new skills or techniques they had developed. However the more people I asked the more disillusioned I became. Rather than being a new discipline, it became clear that UX Developers were simply developers interested in UX. So developers who wanted to get involved with the initial research, attend (or even set up) usability tests, build HTML/CSS prototypes, consider user needs when coding up pages and put pressure on designers and managers when these needs fail to be address.

    I’ve been working with people like this for years. They’re called “good developers.”
    There seems as little need for the title UX Developer as there is for the term UX Product Manager, UX Programmer or UX Database Engineer. Similarly, if you’re happy for Developers that do some UX activities to invent a new title, what should a UX person who does a bit of front end or back end development call himself or herself? How about front end UX designer, or creative UX technologist? That has a nice ring about it and isn’t confusing at all.

    The sad truth is that UX has stopped referring to the quality attribute of a product or a set of specific skills and activities, and has become a value judgement. For some reason people think that the term UX means “better”, “more valuable” or “more important”. So by adding UX to your business or job title it somehow sets you apart as a better designer, a better developer or a better agency. That, or at least one that can charge more money. This is obviously nonsense and disrespectful to all the talented designers and developers out there. So when I see people adding the term UX to an otherwise perfectly descriptive job title, it makes me view them with a healthy dose of scepticism.

    [Andy Budd spent 5 years as a designer and front end developer before transitioning to a dedicated UX designer; a role that he has had for over 8 years. During this transition period he would never have dreamed of calling himself a UX Developer. He hopes other developers feel the same way.]

    Posted 27 January 2012, 10:58 am

  5. Favicon Tom Hume

    [Blog] Tom Hume: Getting to grips with properties of sensors

    One of the courses I'm really enjoying right now is Pervasive Computing. It involves playing with hardware (something I've never done to any real degree), ties into the trend of miniaturising or mobilising computing, and humours an interest I developed last year about the potential for mass use of sensors, and spoke about at Future of Mobile.

    Dan Chalmers, who runs the Pervasive Computing course, has us playing with Phidgets in lab sessions, and very kindly lets us borrow some kit to play with at home, so I've had a little pile of devices wired up to my laptop for the last few days. The lab sessions are getting us used to some of the realities of working with sensors in the real world: notionally-identical sensors can behave differently, there are timing issues when dealing with them, and background noise is ever-present. At the same time we're also doing a lot of background reading, starting with the classic Mark Weiser paper from 1991 (which I'm now ashamed I hadn't already read), and moving through to a few discussing the role sensor networks can play in determining context (a topic I coincidentally wrote a hypothetical Google project proposal for as part of Business & Project Management, last term).

    I've been doing a bit of extra homework, working on an exercise to implement morse code transmission across an LED and a light sensor: stick text in at one end, it's encoded into ITU Morse, flashed out by the LED, picked up by the light sensor, and readings translated back first into dots and dashes, then text. It's a nice playground for looking at some of those issues of noise and sensor variation, and neatly constrained: I can set up simple tests, have them fired from my laptop, and record and analyse the results quite simply.

    Here's what the set-up looks like:

    Phidget LED and light sensor for Morse (de)coder

    Note that the LED and light sensor are jammed as close together as I could get them (to try and minimise noise and maximise receipt of the signal). When I'm running the tests, I cover the whole thing to keep it dark. I have run some tests in the light too, but the lights in my home office aren't strong enough to provide a consistent light level, and I didn't want to be worrying about whether changes in observed behaviour were down to time of day or my code.

    First thing to note is the behaviour of that LED when it's read by a light sensor. Here's a little plot of observed light level when you turn it on, run it for a second, then turn it off. I made this by kicking the light sensor off, having it record any changes in its readings, then turning the LED on, waiting a second, and turning it off. Repeat 200 times, as the sensor tends to only pick up a few changes in any given second. Sensor reading is on the Y axis, time on the X:

    LED levels measured over time

    A few observations:

    1. This sensor should produce readings from 0 to 1000; the peak is around 680, even with an LED up against it. The lowest readings never quite hit zero;
    2. You can see a quick ramp-up time (which still takes 250ms to really get to full reading) and a much shallower curve when ramping down, as light fades out. Any attempt to determine whether the LED is lit or not needs to take this into account, and the speed of ramp-up and fade will affect the maximum speed that I can transmit data over this connection;
    3. There are a few nasty outlying readings, particularly during ramp-down: these might occasionally fool an observing sensor.

    This is all very low-level stuff, and I'm enjoying learning about this side of sensors - but most of the work for this project has been implementing the software. I started out with a dummy transport which simulated the hardware in ideal circumstances: i.e. stick a dot or dash onto a queue and it comes off just fine. That gave me a good substrate on which to implement and test my Morse coding and decoding, and let me unit test the thing in ideal conditions before worrying about hardware.

    The Phidgets API is really simple and straightforward: no problems there at all.

    Once I got into the business of plugging in hardware, I had to write two classes which deal with real-world messiness of deciding if a given signal level means the bulb is lit or not. I used a dead simple approach for this: is it nearer the top or bottom of its range, and has it changed state recently? The other issue is timing: Morse relies on fixed timing widths of 1 dot between morse symbols, 3 between morse characters and 7 between words… but when it takes time to light and unlight a bulb, you can't rely on these timings. They're different enough that I could be slightly fuzzy ("a gap of 4 or fewer dots is an inter-character gap", etc.) and get decent results. There should be no possibility of these gaps being too short - but plenty of opportunity (thanks to delays in lighting, or signals travelling from my code to the bulb) for them to be a little slow.

    I didn't implement any error checking or protocol to negotiate transmission speed or retransmits; this would be the next step, I think. I did implement some calibration, where the LED is lit and a sensor reading taken (repeat a few times to get an average for the "fully lit" reading).

    I ran lots of tests at various speeds (measured in words per minute, used to calculate the length in milliseconds of a dot), sending a sequence of pangrams out (to ensure I'm delivering a good alphabetic range) and measuring the accuracy of the received message by calculating its Levenshtein distance from the original text. Here's the results, with accuracy on the Y axis (lower is fewer errors and thus better) and WPM on the X:

    Accuracy of Morse transmission over LED/light sensor

    You can see two sets of results here. The blue dots are with the sensor and LED touching; the green ones are with sensor and LED 1cm apart. You can see that even this small distance decreases accuracy, even with the calibration step between each test.

    Strange how reliability is broadly the same until 50WPM (touching sensors) or 35WPM (1cm apart), then slowly (and linearly) gets worse, isn't it? Perhaps a property of those speed-ups/slow-downs for the bulb.

    So, things I've learned:

    • Unit testing wins, again; the encoding and decoding was all TDDd to death and I feel it's quite robust as a result. I also found JUnit to be a really handy way to fire off nondeterministic tests (like running text over the LED/sensor combo) which I wouldn't consider unit tests or, say, fail an automated build over;
    • I rewrote the software once, after spending hours trying to nail a final bug and realising that my design was a bit shonky. My first design used a data structure of (time received, morse symbol) tuples. Second time around I just used morse symbols, but added "stop character" and "stop word" as additional tokens and left the handling of timing to the encoding and decoding layer. This separation made everything simpler to maintain. Could I have sat down and thought it through more first time around? I have a suspicion my second design was cleaner because of the experiences I'd had first time around;
    • I'm simultaneously surprised at the speed I managed to achieve; there was always some error, but 50 WPM seemed to have a similar rate to lower speeds. The world record for human morse code is 72.5 WPM, and I'm pretty sure my implementation could be improved in speed and accuracy. For instance, it has no capacity to correct obviously wrong symbols or make best-guesses.

    Things I still don't get:

    • Why accuracy decreases when the sensors 1cm apart are run super-slowly. I suspect something relating to the timing and fuzziness with which I look for dot-length gaps;
    • Why the decrease in accuracy seems linear after a certain point. I would instinctively expect it to decrease linearly as WPM increases.

    And in future, I'd like to try somehow taking into account the shape of that lighting/dimming curve for the bulb - it feels like I ought to factor that into the algorithm for recognising state changes in the bulb. Also, some error correction or a retransmit protocol would increase accuracy significantly, or let me run faster and recover from occasional issues, giving greater throughput overall.

    Posted 27 January 2012, 10:37 am

  6. CREATIVEBLOKE'S BLOG

    [Blog] CREATIVEBLOKE'S BLOG: James FIsher DOP showreel

    James Fisher Director of Photography Drama Showreel from James Fisher on Vimeo.

    Quick link to my good friend James Fisher, a really good up and coming DOP, who needed a creativebloke to give him a quick hand on his title sequence. For those of a technical nature I used the Foundry’s camera tracker plugin in After Effects to lock the text, awesome plugin, but it proved i need to relearn mocha, which i am fairly sure would have been quicker.

    Anyway enjoy James Reel

    Posted 27 January 2012, 9:23 am

  7. Favicon Adactio: Journal

    [Blog] Adactio: Journal: Cool your eyes don’t change

    At last November’s Build conference I gave a talk on digital preservation called All Our Yesterdays:

    Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

    The video is now on vimeo.

    The audio has been huffduffed.

    Adactio: Articles—All Our Yesterdays on Huffduffer

    I’ve published a transcription over in the “articles” section.

    I blogged a list of relevant links shortly after the presentation.

    You can also download the slides or view them on speakerdeck but, as usual, they won’t make much sense out of context.

    I hope you’ll enjoy watching or reading or listening to the talk as much as I enjoyed presenting it.


    Tagged with

    Posted 26 January 2012, 5:32 pm

  8. Mat Walker

    [Blog] Mat Walker: Challenges with Client Persona Adoption – UX Camp Brighton Talk

    Sorry its taken so long but I finally got round to publishing the slide deck from my talk at UX Camp Brighton in October 2011. In the talk I cover the main issues I’ve found with getting clients to adopt personas and some of the ways I’ve found to resolve these challenges.

    Post to Twitter

    Posted 26 January 2012, 3:17 pm

  9. NixonMcInnes

    [Blog] NixonMcInnes: Guidelines for a spin free world

    We’ve been talking for a while about social business; how new norms brought about by technology should be embraced by organisations wanting to evolve, and the need for organisations to stand for more than sheer profit. Aside from the huge cultural shift and new platforms, for me an important ingredient of social business is language.

    At risk of sounding like a naive puppy, language is pretty mega. It can set a stuffy, bureaucratic business apart from a dynamic, free-flowing one, and those that wield language effectively can influence far more than those that cannot. It’s the currency of gossip, meetings, press releases and marketing. If a business was a body, language would be the blood. Or piss.

    Business language is rubbish. Brands spout guff with alarming ease, and whole organisations can thrive on made-up words and well-placed adjectives. I imagine that most (or both) of you reading this will have rolled your eyes when on a conference call, or felt a part of you die upon reading some particularly puffed copy. ‘Bullshit bingo’ is a commonly used term for a reason – we are all surrounded by language which sounds great but means little.

    What if this was no more? What if we can the adjectives, lost the hyperbole and only said what actually was? A little while back I gave a talk to our charity clients entitled What if businesses couldn’t lie?, in which I posed the same question. Then more recently, I saw the term ‘Weasel words‘ when reading something random on wikipedia. Weasel words are part of a cracking style guide written by the wiki community, and help keep entries factual, rather than full of spin and speculation.

    Example:

    Puffery

    … legendary, great, eminent, visionary, outstanding, leading, celebrated, cutting-edge, extraordinary, brilliant, famous, renowned, remarkable, prestigious, world-class, respected, notable, virtuoso …

    Words such as these are often used without attribution to promote the subject of an article, while neither imparting nor plainly summarizing verifiable information. They are known as “peacock terms” by Wikipedia contributors. Instead of making unprovable proclamations about a subject’s importance, use facts and attribution to demonstrate that importance

    What if such a guide governed all company comms? What if meeting rooms contained buzzers so that offenders would be shown the error of their ways? What if advertising was based on function rather than desire? To be honest, I think this extreme would also be pretty rubbish – the creative use of language is one of the best things about communicating. Could we meet in the middle?

    My utopian vision is for businesses that communicate honestly. If a business, and its employees, is honest about its intentions, its successes and its failings, clear guff-free language would be essential.

    What do you think? Do business needs to eschew spin and guff to evolve? Or is it an essential part of commerce?

    Peacock photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bbmexplorer.

    Contributor has not supplied alternative text for this image

    Posted 26 January 2012, 10:23 am

  10. BlogLm                                               

    [Blog] BlogLm                                               : The Myth of Gamification

    I’ve been talking/writing about it quite a bit recently and I’ve come to a rather startling conclusion – gamification is a myth (at least, as charged by the hype brigade). Take any list of game mechanics (e.g. Jeff Nolan’s 18 points [and I'm not suggesting for a moment that Jeff is part of that brigade - he just provides a rather well-defined list]). The thing is that there is nothing on that list that you can’t trace back to something that came from real life and was put into games in the first place. The shame is that we didn’t call it “lification” when we put these mechanics into games, because we would now be trying to lifify, er… life.

    I’ve taken Nolan’s 18 points and I’ve illustrated them in a little slideshow – it’s also, hopefully, mildly amusing.

    And what’s more I challenge anyone to come up with a list that really did come from games, and not the other way round.

    The interesting thing, and the thing that really matters is that people that are now starting to ask the more important questions (actually some people have been doing this for years). What is it really about games that make them compelling? And conversley, why do people find aspects of their lives so dull? Here’s an interesting view for starters from Scott Nicholson.

    It’s got me thinking about education, government and kitchens in a completely different way – more about this another time.

    Enhanced by Zemanta

    Posted 25 January 2012, 8:18 pm

  11. Favicon martyn reding - juggling with water

    [Blog] martyn reding - juggling with water: If you design or build anything for screens, I strongly recommend you see this presentation by @wilsonminer


    Wilson Miner - When We Build from Build on Vimeo.

    As I said in my previous post on the Build Conference. This is the most emotive and powerful presentation on design I've ever seen. It's also the only design presentation I've ever seen get a standing ovation. If you design or build anything for screens, I strongly recommend you take 40 mins to watch this.

    Posted 25 January 2012, 1:22 pm

  12. Favicon SiteVisibility

    [Blog] SiteVisibility: ABC’s of SEO: Q is for Queries

    3274597033 1388a96be6 o ABCs of SEO: Q is for QueriesSearch is great because of its simplicity. You can find just about anything you can think of online, as long as you can articulate the thought with a keyboard. The problem is the abundance of information available. You need to narrow your search, refine it, and this is where additional search queries can come in really handy. Google can do a lot more than simply return search results based on keywords; it can also convert currency, do maths equations, find related information and find relevant information from a specific source. It can identify certain URLs and domains, and even help you to understand the size of a website.

    The site: command will return results from a particular domain. This is useful if you want to search a site that does not offer a search functionality. The link: command will return links to a particular URL. While the backlink results will not be nearly as comprehensive as other backlink tools, it can give you a good general idea of a backlink profile. Putting search terms “in quotes” will mean the search engine will treat it as one search term, and discount search results which do not include it in full. You can exclude keywords from a search by using the –minus symbol. Using these commands and symbols is a great way of tailoring your searches and finding what you are looking for.

    When it comes to blogs, there are some even more advanced search queries which can be used. Inpostauthor: will help you find blog posts by a particular author, while inblogtitle: and inpostitle: will return blogs and blog post titles which contain the relevant keywords. Allintitle: allinurl: and allintext: will return results which contain each entered keyword in the page title, URL or body copy, while allinanchor: and inanchor: will return results which have text links which contain the keywords.

    These queries are useful for finding out where competitors are getting their links from, but how can they be used to influence SEO strategies and tactics? Queries like allinurl:category/guest can help to identify relevant blogs which accept guest posts. This is a great way of doing efficient work; finding the blogs which accept guest posts before wasting time with a blogger outreach request.

    Using these search queries can really help you do SEO, whether it’s reviewing competitor backlinks or finding new link-building opportunities.

    Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

    ABC’s of SEO: Q is for Queries

    Related posts:

    1. Guest Post: SEO and Online PR
    2. ABC’s of SEO – B = Backlinking
    3. ABC’s of SEO: K is for Keyword Research
    Contributor has not supplied alternative text for this image Contributor has not supplied alternative text for this image Contributor has not supplied alternative text for this image
    Contributor has not supplied alternative text for this image

    Posted 25 January 2012, 10:22 am

  13. Favicon CarbonGraffiti

    [Blog] CarbonGraffiti: “Photogram.co”

     Notebook

    This is a link (“”Photogram.co“”) I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

    Bookmarked on January 24, 2012 at 09:53PM using Delicious and published to this blog with the fantastic ifttt.com.

    Great extension of instagram’s (pretty poor) web interface. Great design too by bdrck.me

    Visit the bookmarked site: Photogram.co

    Posted 24 January 2012, 10:34 pm

  14. Favicon CarbonGraffiti

    [Blog] CarbonGraffiti: “Wilson Miner – When We Build on Vimeo”

     Notebook

    This is a link I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

    Bookmarked on Delicious and posted using www.ifttt.com.

    Visit the bookmarked site

    Posted 24 January 2012, 9:53 pm

  15. Favicon martyn reding - juggling with water

    [Blog] martyn reding - juggling with water: Jonathan Ive On Simplicity

    "Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

    Jonathan Ive, from the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
    (via Aarrron Walter)

    Posted 24 January 2012, 3:59 pm

Flickr

These photos are the most recent added to the BNM Flickr Photo pool.

  1. [Flickr] river ouse lewes - filby

    river ouse lewes - filby

    Posted by http://heatherbuckley.co.uk, on 26 Jan 2012, 7:03 pm

  2. [Flickr] barcombe mills sussex

    barcombe mills sussex

    Posted by http://heatherbuckley.co.uk, on 26 Jan 2012, 6:29 pm

  3. [Flickr] filby barcombe mills sussex

    filby barcombe mills sussex

    Posted by http://heatherbuckley.co.uk, on 26 Jan 2012, 6:06 pm

  4. [Flickr] malling playing fields lewes

    malling playing fields lewes

    Posted by http://heatherbuckley.co.uk, on 26 Jan 2012, 5:28 pm

  5. [Flickr] BRIGHTON A SPACE ODYSSEY 2012: I have a dream...

    BRIGHTON A SPACE ODYSSEY 2012: I have a dream...

    Posted by pg tips2, on 26 Jan 2012, 1:32 pm

  6. [Flickr] Old windows & new Spring leaves in Brighton

    Old windows & new Spring leaves in Brighton

    Posted by brightondj, on 25 Jan 2012, 8:07 am

  7. [Flickr] o2 Publish your number in header of HTTP requests

    o2 Publish your number in header of HTTP requests

    Posted by Sevan Jan, on 25 Jan 2012, 1:16 am

  8. [Flickr] Brighton Lazy Sunday Afternoon 2012

    Brighton Lazy Sunday Afternoon 2012

    Posted by pg tips2, on 24 Jan 2012, 7:12 pm

  9. [Flickr] Brighton Lazy Sunday Afternoon: Bliss

    Brighton Lazy Sunday Afternoon: Bliss

    Posted by pg tips2, on 23 Jan 2012, 9:38 pm

  10. [Flickr] ACE CAFE Brighton 'Special' Sightseeing Tours 2011

    ACE CAFE Brighton 'Special' Sightseeing Tours 2011

    Posted by pg tips2, on 21 Jan 2012, 11:58 pm

pride trio

[Flickr] pride trio

Photo uploaded by pg tips2, on 27 Jan 2012, 5:32 pm

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Last.fm artist chart

This is a chart of the most listened to artists in the BNM last.fm group. Chart for the week ending Sun, 22 Jan 2012.

  1. The Chemical Brothers
  2. Moby
  3. Daft Punk
  4. Arcade Fire
  5. Nirvana
  6. Goldfrapp
  7. Mr. Scruff
  8. Radiohead
  9. PJ Harvey
  10. M83

Chart updated every Sunday.

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