The BBC are running a story about Microsoft starting an anti-virus and security service for PC users.
According to the BBC’s site
The service is designed to automatically patch-up security holes, as well as beef up anti-virus and spyware protection. It will also help maintain the health of a user’s PC generally
Is it just me, or does anyone else see a conflict of interest here? Why would Microsoft want to create secure software incapable of being infected by viruses if they are selling anti-virus services. It would be bound to be in Microsoft’s interest for non-customers to become virus infected and thereby require Microsoft’s anti-virus services.
To anyone who is tired of viruses/malware and spyware infecting their PCs I say - buy a Mac (or a linux based PC). I don’t have any anti-virus or anti-spyware software on my Macs (I do on my PCs) because I don’t require it. There are simply no viruses or spyware for Mac.
I’m on the Steering Committee of an IT networking organisation called IT@Cork. We run evening events at least once a month for our membership (we have around 170 member companies - from sectors as diverse as Bankingand we are aggressively growing that number).
As several people blogged about yesterday, I’m organising an event on business blogging (I’m calling it Blogging for Business ‘cos I’m not the most original of thinkers!) on 9th of June in the National Software Centre in Cork. Speakers will include Dr. John Breslin, Maura McHugh, Richard Delevan and (God help us) myself!
What I am hoping to do with this event is to educate business people on how adding a blog to their site could be beneficial for their business.
Love to hear people’s ideas/comments.
Mozilla have released version 1.04 of Firefox today. This update fixes critical bugs in Firefox and is highly recommended that all Firefox users update. You can download the update here.
Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimisation initiative. Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the “optimum� keyword phrases that will bring relevant visitors to your site. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords (i.e. if you are an Irish law firm, do you want to target people who search for “Attorney� or people who search for “Litigation and Dispute Resolution Ireland�?).
The keyword research phase will consist of i) discovering keyphrases, ii) analysing keyphrases, iii) selecting keyphrases and iv) deploying keyphrases.
The discovering keyphrases phase will consist of combining existing keyphrases with ones gleaned from the site logs, competitors websites, and the target audience review and analysing them using tools like WordTracker and Overture to expand the list to include all possibilities.
In the keyword analysis and selection phases the keyword list will be refined based on factors like competition for particular phrases and PageRank to produce a focused list of 15-20 keyphrases.
Focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, they deliver highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic to client conversion ratios.
The keywords should be deployed on the site carefully to maximise their effectiveness (positioning the keywords optimally on the page, making use of H1 tags, etc.) while avoiding over-repetition of keywords on a page (might be interpreted as spam by the search engines). Also, devising individual customized keyphrase strategies for each page on your site will be vital to your project’s success - to this end, ensure you include your keyphrases in your page titles and page descriptions.
My update from WordPRess 1.5 to 1.5.1 went extremely smoothly - only 1 hiccup and that was my own fault (I accidentally deleted a line from the header.php file causing the header to be slightly too narrow on some pages - now sorted).
Go for it, I say - the site is significantly faster as a result.
UPDATE:
James on MacManX is reporting having a couple of issues with pings and trackbacks - also having problems pinging ping-o-matic - I seem to be having the same ping-o-matic issue but as I never checked it before i can’t say if it is a 1.5.1 issue.
Jeremy Wagstaff wrote an interesting piece yesterday about HP.
HP have started blogging. However, they are still on the learning curve. Earlier this week on David Gee’s blog (David is head of worldwide marketing for HP’s management software business a.k.a HP OpenView) a comment left on the site, which was civil but critical of HP, was pulled from the site.
A storm ensued and the comment was re-instated. David Gee posted an explanation of what happened
Earlier this week, an HP customer posted a comment about his experience upgrading a media center PC. His experience was not good and he let us know. We pulled the comment. This was a bad decision and we have reversed it
He went on to say
This was a good learning experience for us and we strive to maintain honest and open communication with our customers. If we are going to use blogging as a legitimate connection between us and our customers, we need to choose either to be in all the way or out. We choose to be in. We want to hear from you
Isn’t it amazing the speed with which blogs are forcing transparency on businesses - and as more businesses start to blog, this level of transparency and accountability will become the norm. Companies who don’t adapt to this new reality will lose market share to companies who embrace it.
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