VW Jetta: Too Fast?

I posted recently about a great ad featuring an in-banner slider. You just don't see people using this functionality to great effect. So when I saw this VW ad I thought it was worth sharing as another example of how a simple interaction can make an ad.

Digital Round-Up

Congratulations to the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) who took second place at Elsevier Grand Challenge. The international competition pushes the development of new and innovative tools to deal with the increasing amounts of life sciences information online. Competing against over 65 groups from research companies and universities, from around the world, DERI's project, 'CORAAL - Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge', is a prototype system to bring together information representation and artificial reasoning technologies in life science publications to allow better integration, search and retrieval of life sciences information. DERI is a research organisation based at NUI Galway who focus on developing semantic web technologies.

During the week Facebook was hit by a major phishing scam. Through the use of a very convincing fake log-in page, users were tricked into revealing their facebook passwords. The people behind the scam then used this information to access profuiles and trick further numbers of people to the fake log-in page. Facebook has said that the link at the center of the scam is now blocked and that there will be an increase of the security services provided by MarkMonitor to prevent future scams of this nature.

Twitter announced that every public update sent to Twitter is now instantly indexed and made searchable through their new real-time search. Further to this, if you search for the same word or phrase regularly, you can now save your search with the "save this search" tickbox. This will then place those keywords as links into your home page just under the search box, giving you one-click access to your regular searches.

SEO Consultant Ireland

Check out this great article on everything Google, by Jonathan Darling.

Google's "iTunes for Books"

In an article in the Guardian it has been announced that Google is facing accusations of anti-competitive behaviour. The US Justice Department is reported to be currently investigating Google's dealings with the book industry. The investigation surrounds a $125m settlement that Google made with authors. Google have been trying for some time to create an "iTunes for books". Last September Google made significant progress with a deal that would allow the company to digitise millions of books in the US.

The deal followed two years of negotiations and was called a "great leap" by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. However the deal caused a lot of concern in a number of camps due to the exclusive rights that Google would gain to digitise "orphan works" (books that are still under copyright, but without any clear owner).

"There are legitimate antitrust issues related to Google's ability to solely commercialise this content," said Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based organisation that documents millions of web pages and digitises out-of-copyright books.

In a move that pleased campaigners, a New York judge granted a four-month extension allowing those affected by the deal to examine the details and decide whether to opt out of it or not.

"We now have time to really sink our teeth into what this agreement will mean," said Gail Knight Steinbeck, chair of the Creative Property Rights Alliance and daughter-in-law of late author John Steinbeck.

The outcome remains to be seen, but I for one think that this is a pivitol case, and the result will have serious implications for all online and offline publications going forward.

Chrome Goes Viral

In his AdAge article, Michael Learmonth describes Google as having "ambled into the Safari-Explorer-Firefox derby" with the introduction of their browser Chrome last year, and to be fair it would be very hard to argue differently. Internet Explorer, the often controversial and always-included option, has been around forever and still holds as favourite for many web explorers. Safari, the streamlined mac browser, is without doubt the Apple users favourite. Firefox, the new kid on the block, has come out of no where to totally dominate many demographics of net users. So why try and take on these goliaths, and not do it with gusto and determination?

Well, they may not have done anything spectacular to date, but that has just changed. The global-hyper-mega-corp that is the world's search leader has releasing 11 short films to promote their offering in the browser wars. That's a lot of weight in this and it's sure to drive a serious amount of traffic and interest. But is it really likely to drive any downloads?

When I recently reviewed my site visitor stats, I was some what surprised to see just how big a percentage of them were Firefox users. Understandably this may be slanted by my content but still, it's a huge proportion.

Take a look and see what you think...