Considering the furore surrounding freedom of expression on Twitter at the moment, the social networking site has looked to placate users by providing some brand new features for IOS and Android. Twitter, where your account can be dealt with by Tweet Adder, have been under pressure in recent weeks after announcing that they would remove tweets in particular countries where they came into conflict with the law.

Since the announcement, the Brazilian government has already filed a law suit against the site and other governments are looking to request Tweets be removed in line with the site’s new terms and conditions. The announcement about new IOS and Android functionality has therefore been seen in some quarters as a way of appeasing those unhappy with Twitter’s new stance.

The new applications features include the ability to “swipe” on tweets to get even more options while staying on your timeline, such as “favourite,” “retweet,” “share it” and “reply to.”

As we have mentioned before too, Twitter are also changing the information regarding contact information as there was additional controversy lately over the fact that Twitter keeps your phones contact details for up to 18 months after you allow the site to “scan” your contacts. Twitter is now changing the language to “upload” rather than “scan” to make it clear that the contact information will be kept by Twitter.

These features will only be available to IOS and Android users though if they refresh their Twitter app update screen. Other devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and ICS compatible Android devices have been added by Twitter so you can access the social networking site on a vast array of different platforms so you can keep in touch with the latest information and gossip, whilst also utilizing Tweet Adder to manage your business.

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Some of you may have heard about Cuil, others may not have, but back in 2008 it was described as a potential rival to Google. A few reasons why the search engine was so widely promoted was because it had 3 times as many pages indexed as Google and over 10 times as many as Bing. It was also the Brainchild of IBM co-founder Tom Costello and ex Google employees Louis Monier (also founder of Altavista) as well as Russell Power and Anna Patterson. For SEO experts, who use Senuke too, it was an intriguing new search engine at the time.

Things however quickly went downhill as after Monier left the company following a dispute with Costello, the search engine was closed at the end of 2010, with rumors of a possible takeover. The takeover never materialized and Cuil became just another search engine which failed to topple Google.

One of the biggest reasons for its failure was attributed to a couple of design flaws which made the search engine pretty difficult to use and in stark contrast to the minimalist design of Google. Rather than a one column search engine result page like Google, Cuil had two columns and had thumbnail images for every site. The search often looked cluttered and the images often didn’t completely represent the sites they purported to.

Still, Google have looked to take on some of the ideas that Cuil had used and the search engine giant have bought some patents from the now defunct company. The most obvious reason is that former Cuil employee Anna Patterson is now back at Google as Head of Research and maybe investigating how Google could integrate some of Cuil’s functions.

Some of the patents surround the use of multiple tabs to distil between similar search terms which may have different meanings. There is also a drop down menu patent so you can really search your query thoroughly within a category so you can find exactly what you are looking for. SEO analysts, who also use Senuke, may find these seven patents very interesting and we will have to wait and see if Google ever use these functions and features.

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The co-founder of the file sharing site MegaUpload, Mathias Ortmann, has been released on bail after being arrested last month. The website, which Ortmann co-created, was closed down after charges were made against Ortmann and his colleagues that they were doing very little to combat online piracy the site. File sharing, unlike web hosting with Bluehost, has come under the microscope in recent months as the US congress have deliberated over new laws to combat copyright infringement online.

Ortmann was not released on bail earlier because, like his business partner Kim Dotcom, he was considered a flight risk. His bail was further delayed when it was revealed he under-estimated the amount of money he earned while at MegaUpload. According to Ortmann, he had made $17.5million from the website since 2005, but his accounts were revealed to have $20.2million in.

Still, Ortmann has now been released but he has strict bail conditions so he cannot access the internet while he has been charged. He will be living in the home of co-defendant Bram van der Kolk, as well as living with another Finn Batato, who have both also been released on bail.

It means that Kim Dotcom is the only one arrested by New Zealand police who is still in jail as he is still considered a flight risk. The courts are worried that because he may access to a plane or helicopter, Dotcom could escape to another country which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. Dotcom will have another hearing soon regarding the decision to keep him behind bars.

The controversy over MegaUpload has sent shockwaves right through the online world, where Bluehost hosts over 1million web domains. Where online piracy laws go from here is unclear as both SOPA and PIPA have been put on hold in the US congress as protests about the freedom of information online has led congressmen and women to backtrack.

PeoplePerHour.com have released figures that show that there is a significant shift towards eCommerce among small business owners. Web hosting companies, such as Bluehost, are reducing prices and creating plans aimed at helping small businesses start up online and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) are now taking them up on their offer to make money online. Xenios Thrasyvoulou, chief executive of PeoplePerHour.com said that:

“We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in the way small businesses market their products and sell their products and services – and it’s happening at an incredible pace.”

In the UK, where the statistics were collected, 26% of businesses are now solely selling their products online, utilizing the help of web hosts such as Bluehost to establish shopping carts and to create secure areas for payment transactions.

The statistics do also show that the percentage of those doing more than half of their business online is also significant. 47% of the small businesses surveyed said that they did more than 50% of their business online these days.

These figures are significant for it shows that not only businesses are capitalizing on the internet to improve the fortunes of their respective businesses, but it also demonstrates that the growth in this business is down to a far more straightforward way of setting up your website. Web hosts, like Bluehost, are targeting small businesses to help them get online and it is showing in the dramatic rise of such small eCommerce retailers and businesses.

This trend is only set to continue as the internet becomes ever more popular around the world and becomes all the more prevalent on mobile devices whose searches on Google and other search engines are geared towards “local,” which will no doubt assist in making small businesses more visible online.

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A new website by Microsoft went live yesterday. In what looks to be another challenge to Google, msnNow is designed to give live updates on current trends from the likes of Facebook, Twitter (where your account can be maintained by Tweet Adder ) and their search engine Bing. MSN’s general manager Bob Visse described how the site was going to work:

“What we’re really looking for is the velocity of trending topics – what’s boiling to the surface. The goal is to catch trends as they are accelerating and capture them before they hit the mainstream, in a way that is captivating.”

In what is effectively a news aggregator for social networking trends, Microsoft are trying to utilize the agreements they have with both Facebook and Twitter to the greatest extent possible. Still lacking way behind Google in the search engine stakes with Bing, Microsoft do however have the edge over Google in the fact that the search engine giant does not have agreements in place with either Twitter or Facebook.

Google’s agreement with Twitter, where your account can be managed by Tweet Adder, ended acrimoniously only a few months ago as the social networking site disputed Google’s favoritism to its own network G+ on its search engine and they couldn’t get an agreement over terms of use.

Google also don’t have access to Facebook’s endless amount of information which Microsoft got access to back in the middle of 2010. Probably one of the reasons for this being the case is the fact that Microsoft bough a stake in Facebook all the way back in 2007. With social and personalized searches looking to be the way forward for search engines, Google may well be getting a challenge from Microsoft not so far into the near future. MSNNOW certainly looks like to be a test drive for a new way of searching online through social media.

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There are so many different aspects to search engine optimization and new techniques are being developed all the time to help people improve their rankings in search engine result pages. Below there are some excellent techniques that I and others have used to help them, such as Senuke, to the top of Google for their respective keywords.

Before link building – Analyze your website – Do not start any off page link building tactics before ensuring your website is as Google friendly as possible. What I mean by that is not only on page SEO, but also ensuring your site can be easily accessed and crawled by the search engines. You need to check for dead links, feeds, HTML and CSS coding errors which can be real issues, as well as assessing how well your site displays on different web browsers. Using validation tools such as the ones that SEO Moz have are very useful in this regard.

Become an authority – There are multiple ways of doing this. First and foremost, provide quality content which people will be interested in. You then try to spread your content by doing guest blogs on other sites in your niche. You then partake in interaction with people you know who are authorities in your field. Talk to them via Twitter and Facebook if possible and build up a relationship to an extent where they start sharing and retweeting your content, giving you access to greater traffic and a higher profile in social media which will allow you to be ranked higher on Google, similar to the power of Senuke.

Continue to change and optimize your website – Use Google Analytics to assess to bounce rate of pages. Lowering the bounce rate is good for SEO and it also keeps your visitors on the site for longer so you can convert more leads into sales. Use Google’s Website Optimizer, a totally free application to A/B test landing pages so you can fully optimize your sales pitch to get the highest conversion rate possible.

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Web hosting is an essential element to get right for any online business; the only problem is who to trust when looking out for the right web host. Is there really a perfect web hosting provider out there? There are some, like Bluehost, who offer very good standards, but you have to be careful when looking at the claims so other web hosts make on their site. Here are 5 aspects of web hosting you need to know about:

1.Discounts – Web hosts will sometimes offer discounted monthly deals for their services, saying that the offer is for a “limited time only.” You may get the first month at that discounted price but for the following months, you will receive the normal charge, which makes the advertisement pretty deceiving.

2.Outsourced technical support – To cut costs, some web hosting firms outsource their technical support. Generally the support is of a poorer quality as there is less technical knowledge and they are not as well equipped to deal with your problems leading to extended downtime issues and costing you more money than if you went with a slightly more expensive web host, who have support staff inside the US, like Bluehost.

3. Large v small web hosts – Smaller web hosts can provide a more personal service but they have fewer resources and less technical expertise. A middling web host such as Bluehost is the perfect compromise for personal service and good support.

4. Don’t trust web hosting awards – Many web hosting review sites are affiliates to some of the most notable web hosts and they will award their prizes to the web hosts which they are closely associated with.

5. “Unlimited” does not mean infinite - Web hosts really only have a certain amount of space on their servers so if your site outgrows its server you will have to pay for a more expensive hosting package. It is not possible for a web hosting plan to have unlimited transfer rates and storage space so don’t take this as a deciding factor when opting to buy web hosting.

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After the singer Whitney Houston’s death at the weekend, there was a lot of talk on the most popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where your page can be maintained by the tool Tweet Adder. What has generally happened in recent years is that online hackers have used such tragic events as a way of scamming people out of money or personal details.

With “RIP Whitney Houston” a topic which was trending on the night of her death, scammers set up some tweets which would lead visitors away from the social media site to be scammed. As there were a lot of people looking for information about the singer and about reports relating to her death, scammers starting tweeting posts which were links to websites where they could begin to get information off their unwitting victim.

Firstly, after leaving Twitter where you account can be managed by Tweet Adder , you were then directed to a web site purporting to provide info on Whitney Houston’s life. You were redirected twice more for Whitney Houston wallpapers and ring tones. Even you tried to navigate away before this though, you would be sent to an apparent “survey” site where you would be asked for your phone number.

According Trend Micro’s Christopher Talampas, who have been monitoring the scams since they were created, the scam also has spread to Facebook where it comes in a form of a Youtube video. Of course the video is a fake and if you go onto the link, Talampas says:

“Clicking this link only leads to several redirections until users are lead to the usual survey site.”

The best advice is to never click on links which don’t look trustworthy. At the moment there are numerous scams relating to the death of Whitney Houston, with Trend Micro stating that they have discovered 101 such scams so far since Saturday.

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The techniques and tactics in search engine optimization are ever-changing; you cannot afford to stand still and cease looking at new avenues, such as Senuke, to improve your search rankings. If you want to continue being successful in the field, learning something new about it every day is key, and as I speak today the term “SEO” is becoming more and more loose in its definition.

What I mean by this is that it wasn’t too long ago that SEO meant doing a few very limited things which would help improve your results in search engines for your key words. Building links and on page SEO were the basic principles to SEO for a long period of time since the advent of the internet.

The fundamental reason why they were both so important was because the most popular search engine Google didn’t have an algorithm which could take in as many factors as it can today. The search engine initially then utilized links as a way of measuring authority. For Google, it was a very simple methodology; if a person was linking back to you then you had some worthwhile content which needs to be ranked. Much like a reference at the bottom of the page in an academic textbook.

SEO experts therefore took advantage of this algorithm and began to build links, like you can with Senuke, back to their sites which they wanted to rank for. Search engines like Google have however never been too keen about SEO in principle as they believe that if content is good and is relevant for people searching online, then it will automatically be ranked anyway.

This is why then, that in recent years, Google have begun to develop their algorithm to make sure those that rank have valuable and relevant content. After all the purpose of the search engine is to provide people with search results they want, and in some respects old school SEO was a barrier to do this.

With the rise of social media, it gave Google the opportunity to re-establish their mantra for what can be more relevant and valuable content that what has been shared or retweeted the most on Facebook and Twitter respectively. That is why SEO has had to adapt its game. There is now a heavier focus on content and social media marketing in combination with conventional SEO tactics for that is now the only way to get the amount of traffic you want to your site.

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For those believing that file hosting site MegaUpload’s shutdown affected online piracy in any way, you would be wrong. According to analysis, the dip in online piracy immediately after being taken down by the FBI never materialized and it is now just spread to many other file hosting web sites. File hosting, unlike web hosting like with Bluehost, is where anyone can share their files online, keeping them private for their own storage or allowing them to be public for everyone else to see.

The piracy occurs due to the fact that copyrighted material can be uploaded to these sites and no royalties of fees are given to the owner of the intellectual property, and this has led to the co-founder of MegaUpload being arrested because they didn’t do enough to prevent the spread of copyrighted property. There are however many other sites on the net that carry out the same services as MegaUpload and according to DeepField Networks, nothing has changed in piracy levels:

“File sharing has not gone away. It did not even decrease much in North America. On January 28, MegaVideo was clearly the king with 34% of all file sharing traffic. According to the indictment, the gigantic MegaUpload sprawled over more than 1000 servers and 25 petabytes of data in Carpathia facilities (with another 700 MegaUpload servers in Leaseweb hosting centers). The main impact of the MegaUpload takedown? Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over transatlantic links.”

Despite the fact that some file hosting sites such as BT Junkie and FileSonic have adjusted their terms and conditions; other websites have continued as normal. Even within the first day after the MegaUpload shutdown, MediaFire, RapidShare and PutLocker had massive upsurges in traffic.

Online piracy has essentially moved places rather than being deterred by the MegaUpload controversy. Web hosts such as Bluehost, as well as many other sites would be impacted if sterner laws such as PIPA and SOPA were enacted however, and there is still uncertainty at how these laws will move forward.

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