We’ve just completed a bit of a website re-skin for Mclaren’s Pianos.

We started working with Jamie Mclaren (aka The Piano Wizard) when he was selling second hand pianos from a tiny workshop just along from our Glasgow Web Design studio in the Hidden Lane some six or seven years ago.

Whilst his previous website has been great for his business, it was felt it was time for a bit of an overhaul.  Mclaren’s also benefit greatly from our website optimisation and SEO services and as a result, pretty much own the first page of Google for terms such as ‘piano sales glasgow’, ‘piano scotland’, ‘piano glasgow’ and a whole raft of other piano-related (and ultimately income generating terms).

In fact last year, we even highlighted the work we’d been doing on his website to highlight how effective basic website optimisation can be.

His business has gone from strength to strength as a result of his hard work and his prominent search engine positioning and we’re delighted to be working with him, every step of the way.

Interesting Google search engine results for the term Google at the moment…Whilst they still maintain the number one spot (come on…it is their search engine after all) , they’re currently picking up a lot of negative PR over their Nexus One  within their news results which appear above the number one listing.

Google has long been branching out into different avenues, like with its mobile Android OS, or Chrome browser, but the Nexus One phone marks the company’s first attempt at launching a physical electronic product. Unlike the T-Mobile G1 Google-phone, the Nexus One is fully marketed and sold by Google, though it is still manufactured by HTC.

Billed as a legitimate challenger to the iPhone 3GS‘ dominance, moreover, expectations for the Nexus One were certainly quite high. The current troubles plaguing the Google model, however, have less to do with hardware failures, and more to do with a lack of support.

This is potentially highly damaging for Google, especially as they are also trying to encourage take-up of their Chrome Browser and OS.  Maybe taking on too much at the moment?  I’m sure they’ll sort it out.  In the meantime, I haven’t seen anything on the Nexus One that would make me want to choose it over an Iphone when my existing contract expires.

…starting with my daughter dancing to Nirvana.

Interesting “warning” from Facebook this morning…

We have removed your video entitled “Smells Like A Roll & Sliced Sausage” uploaded at 8:42am November 26th, 2009. We did this because it appears to contain copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio. If you believe this material was removed by mistake, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

Please note that if you re-upload this video without filing a counter notice, or if you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, we may remove the content. This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application, or your Facebook account itself, to be disabled.

You can judge for yourself whether the clip in question is a threat to the current and/or future financial security of Messrs Love, Grohl and Novoselic…

Considering the clip was originally uploaded to Youtube and I can simply add it to my Facebook profile, it seems a bit futile on Facebook’s part to remove  it.  It limits the effectiveness of their video upload service if it’s so easy to fall foul of copyright laws.  It’s even more futile when different sites operate different policies and Youtube don’t even stick to their terms and conditions of use.

Anyone had any similar experiences?

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been tracking Rupert Murdoch’s various outbursts on Google (calling them “kleptomaniacs” and “parasites” for indexing their content in it’s Google News pages), attacks on the BBC (“thieves”) and general outbursts about the internet in general. Top of the heap, and possibly the most controversial is making loyal site visitors pay for content that was previously available free.  His methodology for doing this is a bit mixed up though as he knows he needs search engines.

How do I know he needs them? Because the process for blocking ANY website from being indexed by Google takes just one line of code but News Corp haven’t done it yet.  It is fairly imminent though.

Newscorp content to be exclusive to Bing?

To spice things up a bit, the rumour doing the rounds is that News Corp are about to make Bing the only search engine that indexes News Corp’s content.

That’s right…unless you use Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you won’t find any content in Google that’s come from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and almost 2000 other titles across the USA alone.  That is a lot of content and presents Microsoft with a great marketing opportunity along with some extra oomph to their search engine market share.

It won’t change the game overnight, but if News Corp can convince other publishers to come with them, it could present a real problem for Google.

My personal opinion is that any alliance between News Corp and Microsoft is doomed to failure.  Whilst I’d love to see a Murdoch/Gates “riches to rags” descent on the scale of Randolph and Mortimer Duke in Trading Places, that will never happen.  What I do think  is that both of these companies, by trying to swim against the tide of everything that the internet now stands for, are about to get their noses bloodied.

Given the increasingly negative noise around Microsoft (overpriced, underperforming and downright shoddy operating systems…it’s taken them how many versions to get even close to OSX?) and let’s not rant on about the negative impact and damage that News Corp causes, is it just wishful thinking when I wonder if they are lining themselves up for a bit of a fall?

News Corp’s last major attempt at assessing where the internet is heading and spending money accordingly was their acquisition of Myspace in 2005 for $580 million.     How bad has that proven to be? His timing could not have been worse.   Check out this fairly indepth recent interview (Content on Youtube not blocked by SKY btw!)  Has he learned anything this time round?

I think not.  What do you think?

The Sub Club in Glasgow enjoys a near mythical status amongst true dance music enthusiasts and everybody that’s visited this legendary club has at least one positive Subclub experience that can make them quite misty-eyed when reminiscing!

We’ve been involved (in some shape or form) with the Sub Club’s web presence for almost ten years now and whilst a bit of a site re-design is on the cards but might be some way off yet, I’ve really enjoyed helping them add a Podcasting element to the current Sub Club website.

To celebrate Glasgow Fresher’s Week, The Subclub has produced a double-header of two podcasts featuring mixes from Saturday night Subculture stalwarts Harri and Domenic.

We love working with our clients to help them develop their internet marketing stuff and I’m sure there will be plenty more social media-friendly additions to the Subclub website soon…

Do you use Twitter?  Initially, the thought of recording every minutiae of your life over a series of posts, under 140 characters a pop and following others doing the same, seemed like one of the biggest wastes of time around.

Twitter is after all, just a communication tool in much the same way as the telegram, fax and mobile phone were before it.  Like it’s forebears, it is after all,  just a tool that lets one person connect with another.

Twitter for business

Here’s a quick list of Twitter uses that could be applied a variety of businesses.

• A restaurant tweets their daily specials
• A concert booking agency tweets about-to-expire tickets
• An estate agent tweets new homes on the market
• A specialist car dealer could list latest additions to his showroom
• A personal finance specialist could tweet about relevant blog postings and financial developments.
• A voluntary organisation tweets about upcoming events and promotions.
• An IT company could use Twitter as a customer service portal

Twitter for business / Twitter for fun

As with blogging, it’s important you develop your own tone when using Twitter.  Think about who your audience is and what you want to convey.  It’s pretty easy to blur the lines between using it for fun and using it for business.

In some cases, it may be better to establish separate Twitter accounts for business and pleasure.  How seriously would you take an estate agent on a Monday morning if you could read one of his posts from 12 hours previously where he talks about sinking his tenth pint of lager?

Me? I’ve not quite decided how I want to use Twitter.  You can view my Twitter account here.  I tend to use it to follow others in the industries I am interested in – it’s great for getting new ideas and differing views on how to do things.  I do tend to post tweets but as you’ll see they are of a pretty random vintage and I only really use Twitter in a business sense to draw attention to updates to this website and blog. That’s not to say we’ve not been dissecting it pretty thoroughly and working out how best to use Twitter in business.  We’ve also been developing some pretty nifty Twitter applications that integrate nicely with ubiCMS, our own fully-featured content management system.

I expect this to change at some point in the future, but for now it feels right.

How do you use Twitter for business?