July 2006 Archives

For some odd reason the Aer Lingus website is now defaulting to the display for US visitors. I've tried this from several different IP ranges and it always does the same thing. Haven't they heard of Geo IP??

If people don't know about your website they can't visit it. Simple fact.
Of course there are mountains of content written on how best to optimise your website for search engines etc., but it cannot hurt to spend a couple of hours manually submitting your site to search engines and directories. Some people will whine about non-Pr passing links ie. sites using redirectors etc., but I would recommend any serious webmaster to ignore them. Every visitor to your site could lead to a sale. Would you turn them away? I don't think you would.
If you are running an Irish based / focussed website then you need to place some emphasis on the Irish market. So let's see:

Google - You probably won't need to submit to it, but you could look at adding a sitemap and validating your ownership. If you do you'll get access to crawl statistics and search query results, including clickthroughs.

Yahoo - Similar to Google, Yahoo's spider seems to pick up on sites with little or no intervention. They also offer a sitemap style solution as well

Altavista - Now part of Yahoo.

Scrudu - Currently in development. Not sure when it will launch, but it might be worth looking at. Update  As of January 2008 it looks like it has been taken offline and is currently showing a default apache holding page

WhoisIreland - Has been around for quite some time and crawls periodically.

BrowseIreland - One of the oldest directories of Irish websites. They recently launched a number of region specific sites and are also behind the Scrudu project. Commercial listings require an address and telephone number

Search.ie - Started life as Irelandculture.com before becoming IrishSearch.net and now Search.ie. Static PR passing links on all detailed pages

Browse.ie - Searchable directory of Irish sites originally seeded with DMOZ data but now accepting submissions as well as purging dead links (unlike DMOZ)

Armchair.ie - Directory of Irish shopping sites ie. ecommerce sites only.  All listing require tangible contact details to be displayed on their sites ie. no email only contact forms. SEO friendly

NiceOne - Another directory of sites that has been around for quite some time. They now seem to be pushing web development services.

Find It Ireland - Another directory

GuestHouses.ie - Directory of Irish bed and breakfasts /  guesthouses.  SEO friendly

HotelSearch.ie - Directory of Irish hotels. SEO friendly

GimmeDat - Directory of Irish sites with logos

WebSearch.ie - Another small directory
 

There are also a growing number of "made for adsense" sites or DMOZ clones. The problem with them is that they do not accept submissions and merely duplicate the listings (and the broken links) in the main DMOZ directory.

If you are going to submit a site to any of the directories mentioned above please bear in mind that they are human edited. That means that someone has to manually review each and every submission.

While the listing criteria may vary from directory to another certain things are probably true of all of them:
- avoid promotional language
- do not submit holding pages
- choose the correct category for your website
- provide a suscint and intelligible description NOT a list of keyphrases

If anyone knows of any other Irish directories I've missed out on please feel free to comment

EDIT: I've updated this entry to include some of the links included in comments etc.,

I recently got a Nokia 9300i, so I ended up posting to this blog from it yesterday. It was not a pleasant experience! To overcome the basic display issues with the public area of my blog I installed Alex King's Wordpress Mobile Edition, which strips your blog down to the bare minimum and makes it perfectly usable from a PDA / mobile device. But what about actually posting to the blog? While I could try posting via email, that would be a bit limited, as I wouldn't be able to choose the categories I wanted to post to. So are there are any Symbian compatible blogging clients or is there a plugin to simplify the Wordpress UI?

Just for laughs I thought I'd see how the number of subscribers to this blog had evolved over time. I first setup an account with FeedBurner back in June 2005, so the stats cover a period of just over 12 months: Of course there's no easy way of knowing exactly who is subscribed, but if you are into your stats it's still sort of interesting in a geeky kind of way :)

Over the last 6 months both myhome.ie and Daft.ie have been courting buyers, with an announcement early this morning that The Irish Times, who own Ireland.com, would buy MyHome.ie subject to the competition authority's approval. So what will The Irish Times do with it? Will they keep the site as is, or will they try to recoup their significant investment by making it pay per view?? It may seem like an odd idea making a property portal "pay per view", but they also made the bulk of Ireland.com only available to paid subscribers, so it wouldn't really surprise me if they were to do something similar ... Or would they? Forking out 50 million euro on an Irish website seems a little crazy, unless you have a sound business model to back it up. Will they now try to buy out Daft.ie also?

According to Out Law the UK will have legislation in place by this time next year - 3 years late!

I recently got a Nokia 9300i, but of course it didn't come with a case, so it spends most of its time in my pocket, along with keys, wallets and other junk, which probably isn't such a good idea in the long run. What kind of case do veterans recommend?

I'll be meeting up with a couple of people in La Bodega this evening. Feel free to drop by! EDIT: From around 7 onwards

I'm heading down to Cork today and hope to meet up with a few people for drinks in town either tomorrow evening or Friday.

It's not even a particularly good one and was flagged by Mailscanner immediately... The thing that worries me is why banks aren't using SPF...

Technorati got a revamp recently which added several new features to the site, but also seems to have made it quite hard to navigate. Dave Sifry has posted in detail about the changes and improvements I do like the way that I can access most of my account features from the main page once I'm logged in. I don't like the way that I can't access any of my account features once I start browsing the site - how hard would it be to add account links to the navigation?? The two images below are the links I see in the top navigation bar once I'm in my account (I cut them up so that they'd fit): Would it be too much to ask to have a simple "options" or "preferences" link there? Or even "my profile"? I really don't like websites that make me jump through hoops by forcing odd interfaces on me The "My Favourites" option is really nice, although it's quite broken. I exported my Thunderbird RSS feeds as an OPML and was told that several of my feeds weren't feeds at all. That's odd, as Thunderbird has no issues reading or updating them, so I'd have to ask what the hell Technorati are using....

I've been running Chitika (aff) on several sites for the last while and added it to this blog last week. To date my earnings have been really abysmal. This could be due to the nature of my visitors, or it could be that it simply does not work for non-US publishers... Has anyone had any success with it?

Amazon has announced a new tool / service for corporate account holders called Amazon Punchout: Screen shot below:

Anyone up for a pint or even a coffee in the real capital next week? I should be down in Cork from Wednesday and would love to meet up with a couple of people for coffee or beer or whatever

Paul O'Malley provided a link to the new Ubuntu counter, which is a bit like the linux counter except it's specifically for Ubuntu

I'm taking the next week off work as a semi-holiday. I've a lot of small niggly things I need to get sorted out and then I intend to head down to Cork to see friends etc., Will I be checking email? Probably Will I be replying to emails? Possibly Will I blog? Probably Does anyone care? Unlikely :)

If you have issues understanding those of us who hail from Cork, then maybe you should study this

Just over 10 years ago Mathieu Kassovitz's dark film, La Haine, was first released. The ultimate edition DVD is a really cool release, as it is a numbered 3 disc limited edition set which comes in a very tasty metal tin. Not only do you get the film, but you also get the soundtrack and a new documentary - 10 years of La Haine. The special features are listed as follows: When I was following the news of the 2005 riots in Paris I couldn't help but think of La Haine and now this DVD includes coverage of it all .... The Amazon list price shouldn't put you off, as you'll find market place vendors such as Caiman selling it for lower Edit: Image of the tin added Edit: Whoever decided that forcing subtitles on viewers should be shot. If I want to read the subtitles I'll choose to do so. Please don't force them on me!

Alan ,aka SpoiltChild, aka figment, is now a daddy! Congratulations!

Whoever is behind the new "design" for SalesOnline.ie should be taken out and horsewhipped, flogged and then shot. If I wanted to download a boring video I'm big enough and ugly enough to know how to do it myself. Forcing me to download the damned thing when I go to a website is just plain dumb. How do these people expect anyone to buy anything from them? For an online marketing company they really should take a close look at home....

Can anyone recommend an online supplier of kitchen furniture in Ireland? I've got a perfectly good kitchen table, but no chairs and most places seem to insist on selling tables with chairs

Channel 4's dedicated film channel, Film 4, will be free to Sky Digital users from July 23rd

If you were listening to Morning Ireland on RTE this morning then you would have heard about this story. Basically a girl climbed into the tiger compound and got mauled. It's not easy to get into the tiger compound Why would anyone with half a brain climb over several large obstacles to get into a tiger compound? Of course the tiger in question is an endangered species with only a couple of hundred left alive. Why would that person think that the tigers wouldn't maul them? Why was RTE's coverage of this so sympathetic to the idiot who climbed into the tiger's den? (Do tigers have dens, or is that only lions?)

Typo squatting can be quite a lucrative business. Lucrative that is until you lose your domains via a WIPO ruling. One squatter had three typos of amazon.com: amazoh.com, qmqzon.com and smszon.com As is often the case with such practices the registrant had already been subject to a number of previous WIPO hearings... Don't they ever learn? Of course the question I should be asking is whether it really is worth the hassle or not.. Two of the three Amazon domains have already been redirected to Amazon.com, while the 3rd is pointing to a fairly standard monetisation service. If it's really worth the hassle then maybe more people should be taking advantage of the opportunities...

PR is probably a combination of black art, science and luck. However no matter how good your PR machine is it can all fall apart at the seams if your representatives don't know how to handle themselves in public If you take the now infamous web 2.0 fiasco as an example to illustrate this. One of O'Reilly's related companies hold a mark of some kind. It's in their interest to protect it. It's also in O'Reilly's interest to promote technologies. When the legal team "protecting" the mark decided to attack a small Irish not for profit organisation it opened up a can of worms and it took several days for the storm to die down. It could have been handled a lot better. I would argue that O'Reilly would have been better off not saying anything at all... But that's just me. Other companies' methodologies aren't much better... Around the time of the .eu launch we got a letter from a competitor, who also happens to be a .eu registrar, offering us reseller pricing on .eu domains. For a variety of reasons we would never do business with that company, so we ignored the letter - as one does. A couple of weeks later, after the launch of .eu, we got another letter, but this time from their solicitors! Why? Well they obviously don't like competition and so they were demanding that we make it explicitly clear that we were not a .eu registrar, but were acting as an agent for one (it seems they sent the same letter to the other big Irish hosting companies as well). So one minute they want to sell us things then, when we don't buy anything, they threaten us with legal action? That's fantastic business sense I must say! Post-landrush the .eu landscape is settling down again and the entire buzz about .eu seems to have all but vanished (my .eu blog's lack of recent posts being a reflection of this). Of course, in the hosting business, such moments of relative calm often disguise the reality... Several of the smaller Irish hosting companies have taken to squatting .eu domains that infringe our IP and that of some of the larger companies.. More wonderful business practice, but I guess you get used to it (eventually) But what has all this got to do with PR? Probably not a huge amount, but it leads me to today's little "bug bear"... There is a particular company that mines the CRO's data (though we've heard rumours that one of the other hosting companies has also started doing this) and sends personalised letters to new business owners offering them a "great deal" on hosting and domain registration. I personally do not approve of their business practices, but to each their own. However I really must question their public interactions.... The company in question were mentioned by someone on a public forum over the weekend in a negative manner. So what? We all get some bad press from time to time. It's part and parcel of doing business. However unless someone were to personally attack me or any of my staff I would never even dream of making legal threats. This lot don't seem to think along those lines. Instead of diffusing the situation and possibly converting the upset client into a "big fan" they have not only managed to alienate their client, but also sent a very negative message to a lot of other people. Yet another case of PR going terribly terribly wrong...

Apple's marketing department sends me email once every week or so.. Today they're trying to persuade me to swap my PC for a Mac: "Frustrated with your PC? Time for a Mac." Ok. Convince me! The Apple marketing department aren't that bright... or maybe they're on a different wavelength to the rest of us: Ok. The guy on the left looks a bit boring, but the guy on the right looks like he's missing a few brain cells. So would buying a Mac result in a loss of IQ?

Whilst browsing Irish ISP Test this afternoon I saw a video ad for Motorola. I wasn't sure what I'd expected to see, but it definitely caught my attention.

Which applications would people recommend for my new toy? I've been trying to find useful Symbian applications for the last couple of days, but most of the sites I've come across don't cater for my phone model, so I haven't been able to do much with it (though I will be posting a detailed review of what I have managed later this weekend :) )

The WIPO ruling on wiseowl.ie has been published. The panelist's decision explains why it is felt that the registration was in bad faith and awards the domain to the complainants. You can read the full text for an in depth explanation

Twenty Major is hilarious, though he comes with a health and safety warning John O'Riordan on the other hand has been posting some of the funniest stuff I've seen in ages. His "Ireland for Beginners" should be adopted by Bord Failte!

Scrubs season 4 will be available on DVD from September 9th according to CD WOW, but there's no sign of it on Amazon........