The adult industry has been moving Internet forward since its inception.  The driving force behind many of the advances we take for granted today.  Increasing connection speeds were largely driven by the need for adult sites to be able to display large, high resolution images, rich media and video content.  Live streaming was pioneered by the adult video industry as a new way of consuming live adult content online.  It’s not to say these things wouldn’t have come about anyway, but there development was sped up by the investment of large adult content providers.

Now the same could be happening with the iPhone and iPhone applications as the world of adult content reaches their users for the first time.  Thanks to the iPhone’s new operating system which has the important inclusion of parental controls Apple has its first sanctioned app providing adult content.
The application in question is Hottest Girls which previously displayed photos of scantily-clad women. Since the new release, it now comes with fewer articles of clothing and according to the App Store “You must be at least 17 years old to download this game”.

So is this the beginning of something big?  Or the beginning of the end?
If history is anything to go by, the adult industry will undoubtedly speed iPhone application development and release more and more complex and innovative applications, this can only be good for the platform and the future of mobile technologies.  But without a system for filtering of monitoring these applications there is a risk the App Store could become over run with pornography and adult content.  Apple could obviously filter this content, but that would require a lot of work on their part.  The parental control system is surely not enough to keep these applications from reaching minors.
Econsultancy thinks the “question for Apple is how far it’s willing to go.”  And goes on to say it is a question of short term profit versus longevity of the product: “Adult content on the iPhone would almost certainly be a significant profit center but if Apple goes too far and the App Store becomes seen as the virtual equivalent of a filth peddler, all bets are off”.
Whichever way I look at it, it looks like adult content is going to become more prevalent on the iPhone. Apple therefore needs to decide how far it is willing to go, and consider the broader picture of filtering and longevity of their product.

Econsultancy article here

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It seems like Michael Jackson and more importantly his reach and fan base, is actually bigger than the Internet can handle.  The king of pop’s demise brought the Internet to a standstill this week as Google interpreted the spike in searches for his name as a malware attack and users querying it received an error message for a period of around 25 mins.  Microblogging tool twitter crashed through the sheer volume of users logging on to the service and performance issues were reported on usually reliable services such as AOL, Yahoo and CNN.

It takes some sort of surge to bring down Google and it is difficult to think of any other occurrence other than some sort of natural disaster which would have had the same sort of effect on the Internet in a 24 hour period.  It is surely also making the affected services question their ability to handle large volumes of traffic in a short period of time, it would appear that in exceptional circumstances, their infrastructure simply isn’t up to the task.

Surge in Michael Jackson Searchs Brought Down Google

This instance also shows a changing shift in how people are turning to the Internet for up to date information.  As SERPs speed up their indexing, and twitter continues to be the go to location for breaking news, when people hear of a news story in passing, their immediate response is to head to the nearest Internet service, be that mobile or computer based, and use the web to find out the details of said story.  In times gone by the answer would have been to turn on the TV, or wait for the next scheduled news bulletin, but in a time of immediacy this is no longer quick enough.  if you want an answer now, you turn to twitter or the SERPs.

Undoubtedly the question will come in future years, “where were you when you heard about jacko?” And for many people it appears the answer will be “I was at my computer when somebody twittered it”.

It is an ironic fact, that after his unfortunate demise last week at the age of 50.  Michael Jackson will sell enough records in the next few weeks, and earn enough radio airtime to erase the debt problems caused by years of frivolity and legal bills from fighting off child abuse accusations.  You cant turn on the radio it seems at the moment without hearing a Michael Jackson song, he has no fewer than 14 singles in the itunes top 20, 9 albums in the itunes top 10, and music stores such as HMV have big displays of his work around shops.

Jacko will go down in history as one of the greats, and will hopefully be remembered for his musical brilliance rather than his car crash personal life, but he may also go down as the man who brought the Internet to its knees.

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There has been a lot of speculation in the world of social media about how twitter plan to monetise their huge user base.  It is a big decision for twitter as if they get it wrong, it could all come tumbling down overnight.  Bombard users with adverts, and you will put them off, decide you are going to charge for accounts, and they could all walk away.  The owners themselves have stated an intention to utilise paid corporate accounts rather than advertising, but that in itself surely wont bring a return on the investment they have received.

But the Social Media Insider this week made a good point in its bulletin this week suggesting that paying for elements of social media, or giving members the option to pay, may not be so much of a crazy idea by asking the question “How Much Would a Protester in Iran Pay to Have a Twitter or Facebook Account?”  The political situation and media black out in Iran has once again thrown twitter into the limelight with protesters using the microblogging platform to get stories out of the troubled country.  It became such an important channel for getting comment out of Iran that the US government intervened to prevent some planned maintenance which would have pulled twitter down for a few hours (read more here).

By either charging for social media accounts (it wouldn’t need to be much) you would undoubtedly lose some users.  But those who are regular users and involve it in their everyday life would probably be willing to pay something.  And if that figure was only a nominal $5 or so it would soon add up across millions of users.  On top of that, by stripping out the infrequent users you would free up a large amount of server space and overheads too.  Win, win.

There is also the option pointed out in the article of charging for additional functionality, the Facebook vanity URLs for example.  A couple of dollars a pop to secure your URL probably wouldn’t have stopped millions of people for bagging theirs.  The problem is of course, once you have been giving something away for so long, it is difficult to start charging for it.  You could do a radiohead and ask people how much they are willing to pay, but you run the risk of everybody offering up a big fat zero.  From somebody who works in the industry, I think a nominal fee for an account, or maybe a “pro” account would be easy for me to stomach, but it would need to be nominal.

What do you think?  Would you pay for your twitter or St, what about spotify, last.fm, myspace, bebo or any other social tool for that matter?

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Its been an interesting couple of weeks for UK SEO’s as Google makes a couple of changes and announcements which keep them guessing about the best methods for better search engine positions.

Pagerank Sculpting Debate - Google came out with the news that around a year ago they changed the way pagerank was passed between pages.  The original model was that a pagerank score (not necessarily the one shown in toolbar but the ture link score a page can pass) was split evenly between the links out from that page.  So if a page had a link score of 10 and linked out to 5 pages it would pass a score of 2 to each of the links.  Realising this SEO’s started to use the nofollow attribute to “sculpt” this pagerank to those pages it wished to page link score to.  So they would nofollow the 3 links to pages they didn’t want to benefit, anf the 2 remaining would get passed a link score of 5 each.  But Google are now saying that this tactic hasn’t worked for around a year and in the example explained above the 2 links would still only receive a link score of 2, and the other 8 would stay unused.

Queue a thousand SEO bloggers coming up with a new way of displaying links you do not want to be given credit (iframes? flash? or simply robots.txt?) and webmasters scampering to amend their current links.  In truth, if this has been in place since last year, you are not going to see any new changes in your SEO efforts by leaving things alone.  And given there is yet to be a definitive way to deal with this issue, it is probably best to leave things alone.  Matt Cutts himself recommends not attempting to sculpt Pagerank and to leave it to flow freely within, and outside of your site read more here.

International Confusion and Bungee Results - Also in the last couple of weeks there has been a strange shift in the SERPs which has producing natural search results reminiscent of a bungee jumper with websites bouncing up and down the rankings on a daily, if not hourly basis, and strange occurrences of international sites appearing in .co.uk results.  US, Australian, and even Finnish websites have been spotted in the google.co.uk SERPs causing confusion amongst users and SEOs alike.  Andrew Heaps, Head of SEO at Latitude Group,  puts the changes down to a push in trusted sites gone wrong, but there has been no official comment from Google.  Whatever has changed, it seems to be in error, as there is no way these changes can be improving Google’s user experience.  For now, SEOs are watching their results and waiting for them to settle down to see the real impact the changes have had on their rankings.

Have you seen major changes in positions?  Think you know the changes and how best to use the to your advantage?  Feel free to share with the rest of us!

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So one of the big news stories this week has been bing overtaking Yahoo! to become the second most used search engine since its launch last week.  On its launch date of June 3rd bing received 10.8% of search engine traffic ahead of both Yahoo! and Ask and whilst this figure reduced to 3.1% of search engine traffic by June 6th but it still remained ahead of its rivals.

This news will obviously delight Microsoft but I cant help but thinking it is just an initial spike as people check out the new kid on the search engine block.  I like bing, and I think given time and more importantly awareness, it will gain an increased market share for Microsoft but right now, noone but those who are involved in search engine marketing, or who previously used Live Search, are too aware of its existence.

Apparently users are also spending over 8 minutes a piece on bing which will also please Microsoft as the more time spent on site, the more ads displayed, the better chance of revenue generation.  Again this stat could again be skewed by users playing around with the new bing functionality so time will tell on this one too.

Early indications are good, but there is still a long way to go before bing can be described as a success.

Bing stats

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