UK High Street retailer Woolworths is to launch a digital music download service before Christmas. Named Download@ woolworths.co.uk, it will be closely tied to the existing online CD store, which focuses on the top 50 singles and top 100 albums.

Yahoo! has teamed with Hewlett Packard and Compaq to bundle its comms software with their products.

A new search engine for blogs has launched called Blabble, claiming to help brand owners to find out what bloggers think about their products.

Camelot has launched a new text based lottery for mobile phones.

Over 5 million songs have been sold on Apple's iTunes Europe music store since it opened 10 weeks ago.

The Met office has unveiled a new supercomputer which will allow more accurate predictions to be made.

The BBC are to use "gaming style" graphics to improve the visuals of their weather forecasts.

O2 has launched new SMS, MMS and WAP rugby services just in time for the new season.

Wanadoo are now offering one-megabit broadband for £17.99 a month.

Microsoft finally launched Windows XP service pack 2

Most popular web browsers

1. IE 6 71%
2. Mozilla 15%
3. IE 5 7%
4. Opera 7 3%
5. Netscape 7 2%
6. Safari 1%
7. Others 1%

Web marketing: it's the little things that really count

When it comes to the Internet, traditional marketing rules often no longer apply. Techniques that focus on driving people to a product with advertising and promotions, and working to retain business with incentives and loyalty programmes don't work well on the web. In fact, a recent study has indicated that many traditional marketing techniques are found annoying by many web site visitors. read more about web marketing

Can't accept any bids, gone phishing

EBay Germany suffered a domain hijacking last week, which was originally put down to phishers.

[A quick translation for all the non-techies out there: a domain is the name of your web site (www.experience-engine.co.uk, for example). 'Phishing' is the term used to describe a specific form of hacking whereby fake e-mails are sent to unsuspecting users asking them to divulge personal financial data, such as card numbers and account passwords, via fraudulent websites.]

Later however, it transpired that it was not phishers, but a 19 year old German from Helmstedt who was responsible. He claimed he was not a hacker and did it "just for fun".

Worryingly all he had done was to request a DNS (domain name server) transfer for several sites, including Google, Amazon and eBay. The other sites all denied the DNS transfer request, but the eBay request slipped through, leading to eBay Germany being unavailable for several hours, with the subsequent loss of revenue. Now eBay wants to know who is to blame.

Usually with a DNS transfer, the existing holder has to accept the request by responding positively to an e-mail message. It begs the question how many other large sites are open to hijacking? However, it's not just high profile sites that are vulnerable - anyone in charge of a domain should take care to check any technical requests that they may receive.

experience engine tends to be the nominated technical contact for our clients, so we are in a position to stop any such attempts - anyone concerned about DNS administration can call us on 01992 500990.

Search Engines: the rogues' gallery and good netiquette

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques once considered best practice are increasingly being considered inappropriate and unethical. In some cases these techniques reflect badly on your company which is undesirable, but not the end of the world. However, others can result in your web site being excluded from certain search engines entirely , which can drastically affect business!

So here is the low down on the low life rogues that can seriously affect your search engine visibility, in no particular order of rogueishness:

• Doorway/gateway/bridge pages. These are external pages written explicitly to contain dense repetitions of keywords and phrases that will appeal to the search engine. Likely to end up in several bannings from search engines.
• Cyber Squatting. Including your competitor's brand names in your own meta-tags is considered poor netiquette and could land you in court.
• Spamming. Whereby you constantly make requests for the search engine to list your web site. Results in a ban, and you'd deserve it.
• Cloaking is a technique that attempts to detect search engines when they visit your web site and to then serve up a specially constructed page that will appeal to that search engine's particular method of indexing. The search engines are wising up to this and will not index sites that attempt it.
• Hidden Text. The practice of including hidden or invisible text containing key search phrases in the same colour as the background, so humans cannot see it, but web spiders can.
• Automated Submissions. We've all seen the "we'll submit your site to thousands of search engines" e-mail messages. Don't believe them, because the main search engines don't accept these kinds of submissions - and it can result in the banning of your site.

So given that all this is bad, what is good SEO netiquette? Essentially, it boils down to making sure that your web site contains good, relevant content with lots of relevant inbound links. Page titles and alt tags are important, and meta-tags are useful but not essential as they once used to be.

There is no magic formula. A site with poor content, no matter how many SEO techniques are employed will still not achieve a great ranking. The bottom line is that employing SEO techniques will help your great content get better rankings, but as the old saying goes, you can't make something out of nothing.

Only on the web:

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, poet, alchemist and imbiber of absinthe. What if his long and boring walk through the shadow land of memory were punctuated by a strange creature named Helium? This will mess with your head.
http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/

About:

Esquared is a regular digest of news, opinion and developments within interactive communications which we find interesting and hope you will too. If you want more information about anything that we mention, or have any comments, please call us on 01992 500990 or e-mail esquared@experience-engine.co.uk.