A recent report on the state of the mobile Web, released by Opera Software, has revealed that different countries have different patterns, as far as surfing the mobile Web is concerned.

Unique Users

Users in two-thirds of the countries surveyed surf the mobile Web more actively on weekdays, while users in the remaining countries are more active on weekends.

The countries that have more unique mobile Web users on weekends are led by Egypt followed by Iran, Ghana, Ethiopia and Tanzania. In Egypt, there is a 7.6% increases in the number of unique users during weekends.

On the other hand, the leaders as far as weekday usage go are Romania, Belarus, Moldova, the United States and Poland in that order. In these countries there are more users surfing the Internet from a mobile device during weekdays.

Page Views

An interesting point to be noted is that a drop in the number of users, does not necessarily mean a drop in the number of pages viewed. A case in point is the country of Georgia, where there is a drop in the number of users during weekends, but they top the list for growth in pages viewed during the weekend.

In the United Kingdom too, the number of unique users accessing the Web from a mobile device drops by 1.6% over the weekends. However, this smaller number of users consumer a much larger amount of data and register many more page views on average, resulting in a net 6% increase in the number of page views and a 6% increase in data consumption too.

Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software says, “The trends in this edition show that users in different countries do behave differently on the mobile Web. Their reasons to be a ‘weekend surfer’ or a ‘weekday surfer’ may vary, but the statistics remain very consistent throughout the measured period.”

While some countries show more than 10% increase between weekdays to weekends, others show a decrease. Interestingly, the increase in page views from weekday to weekend is almost consistently greater than the decrease after the weekend.

A new report by comScore provides details about the current trends in usage of mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices across the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada..

The report indicates that mobiles have done exceedingly well in 2011. Not only has the usage of smartphones increased substantially, but also tablet devices are becoming increasingly popular.

This trend is expected to continue through 2012, according to Mark Donovan, comScore Senior Vice President of Mobile. He says, “As mobile channels present a more personal, social, and ubiquitous experience to consumers, advertisers and publishers have an opportunity to better engage target audiences, given an understanding of how to connect and leverage the unique characteristics of these emerging platforms.”

56.6% of UK users access the mobile Web. This is the highest in the West, but is far behind in comparison to Japan, where over 76% of mobile users access the Web. 42% of users in U.S.A. and 40-50% of users in the 4 main EU countries use smartphones to access the mobile Web.

Google’s Android OS and Apple’s iOS are the leaders in most markets, with Android leading with nearly 50% market share. However, Apple’s iPhone is clearly the most popular single device across all markets.

Mobile apps are being increasingly used to access information on subjects like health, retail, auctions and electronic payments. Shopping behaviour is also being affected as more shoppers use mobile devices to research a product, while they are actually in a store.

In Europe, 38.2 of the total mobile audience accessed mobile media via applications, up 10.1 percentage points, while 38.1 percent used their browser, up 9.2 points.

Smartphones continue to be increasingly used to access social networks. Almost half of the smartphone owners surveyed in the report use their mobile to access social networks everyday. About half of these users also read posts from brands, organisations, and events.

Tablets are rapidly gaining in importance. While mobile phones took about 7 years to reach the 40 million mark in the USA, tablets have reached the same level in less than 2 years. Nearly 15% of mobile users had tablets by the end of 2011. A lot of the recent growth in the market is fuelled by Android devices.

Rise of Tablets in the U.S.A. among unique mobile users in aged 13+

For marketers and brand owners, this means a further diversification of the media they need to target, but it also brings with it the possibility of richer, better advertising options, as we’ve already seen through Google’s recent launch of tablet-specific ad formats.

The U.K. has about 30 million users of Facebook. So it is expected that 15 million users from U.K. find it essential to log in everyday.

This announcement was made by Facebook’s head of insight management Robert D’Onofrio, during a London Facebook conference co-hosted with Omnicom Media Group.

Other details about the U.K. Facebook user base reveal that the male-female ratio is approximately 50-50.

It was also made known that the users between 18 – 24 years of age are the most proactive. Among other age groups, the 35 – 44 year age group is also very active with a 50% daily log in rate. They also have the maximum number of check-ins.

Users over the age of 45 years have been found to be responsible for generating over 400 million stories each month. Robert D’Onofrio says that “They’re just as engaged content wise as a 19-year-old college student,”

Statistics collected from regular polls of the user base reveal that over a quarter of the users share photos of recent purchases such as shoes. Over two-thirds of the users take friends recommendations into account while making regular purchases such as groceries and 40% of respondents say that they would like to see promotions from their favourite department stores.

Data from analytics provider, StatCounter’s global stats shows that Chrome currently occupies the number two spot among web browsers in India.

The first place is held by Firefox, which currently has a market share of 32.97% after displacing Internet Explorer from the top spot just last month. Google Chrome is second, with 31.75% and is closely followed by Internet Explorer, which has been losing popularity steadily over the past twelve months and currently has only 31.33% market share.

The success of Chrome in the Indian market could be attributed to various factors including advertising on television, which is the most popular form of advertisement in India and the need for faster browsers to compensate for slower Internet speeds in the region. The browser also gets promoted through various other Google services.

When Chrome was launched internationally, in 2008, it secured 10% market share in India, but that went up to 22% within a year, thanks to its technical excellence as well as rapid release cycle.

Last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in the U.K. to occupy second place, with a market share of 22.12% compared to 21.65% for Firefox. Similarly, Chrome has also overtaken IE during the month of July in three countries of South America – Argentina, Chili and Uruguay.

Google’s social network Google Plus, which was launched just a couple of months ago, is also doing well in India, especially when compared to the rest of Asia. 

In India, Google+ had 0.4% market share in mid-July, after it was released but has tapered down to 0.2% since then, according to data from Experian/Hitwise. In Singapore, the social network had 0.8% share a week after its release and grew to 1.2% less than two months later. Google+ has not, however, fared too well in Hong Kong, where it had only 0.074%. This could be largely due to the pre-dominance of local social networks in China and the East Asian region.

The study found that nearly 45% of users were using the mobile phone to access the internet as compared to about 31% in 2010 and only about 23% in 2009.

Expectedly, the highest rate of growth was seen in the 16-24 year olds age group. In 2009 33% of users in this age group were using the mobile internet, while 71% do so now. In contrast only about 8% of those above 65 years of age use mobile internet connections.

The survey also found that nearly 77% of households in the country now have an internet connection. Nearly half of the remaining 23% felt that they did not need an internet connection.

It was also revealed that the use of wifi hotspots in places such as restaurants malls etc. has gone up dramatically. There are over 3 million such hotspots in the country now.

About 4.9 million people or 13% now use this facility. This is a seven fold increase compared to 2007, and the figure has also doubled since last year. The figure of connects through this means is expected to reach 120 billion by 2015.

These findings suggest that in spite of the growing popularity of 3G services, free and paid-for wireless services continue to remain popular.

Newzbin 2 is a members-only site, that allows its users to access illegal copies of movies and TV programmes.

The case was under Justice Arnold, who has ruled that BT must block access to this website, as he believes that BT has knowledge of persons who use this service and cause copyright infringement.

The judgement states, “In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin 2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes.”

Rights holders have stated that Newzbin, the original site of Newzbin 2, which had been banned earlier, makes £1m a year from 700,000 members, but does not have any licence to do so.

While this judgement is a clear victory for the MPA, it is quite certain that BT and Newzbin 2 will appeal against it.

In the meantime, the MPA has every intention of following up, by targeting other services that also infringe on their copyright.

The judge has directed BT to use their CleanFeed technology to prevent Newzbin 2 from accessing content illegally. On the other hand, Newzbin 2 has threatened that if this is done, they will have to break the BT filters, which they do not think would be very difficult to do.

Digital Rights groups such as Open Rights Group have disapproved of the verdict. A statement issued by them says, “Website blocking is pointless and dangerous. These judgements won’t work to stop infringement or boost creative industries.”

Either way, this judgement is a landmark ruling and could open the floodgates for a number of other copyright owners to sue similar services and get them blocked or shut down in a misguided attempt at resurrecting the out-of-date recording industry.

• YouTube Trends Dashboard

Topics of interest can range from news and events to pop culture, people, new ideas and much more. For instance, during the last week, some of the videos in trending topics ranged from footage of the protests in Syria and a tornado in Pennsylvania to a videos about the supposed worst singer in the world and cartoons about the Middle East leaders.

The Trends blog lets people get to know what is happening around the world in real time. The feature highlights the daily trending topics twice a day – at 4.00 a.m. ET and at 4.00 p.m. ET. The four most viewed videos during this time frame are highlighted.

YouTube Trends Dashboard allows users to find out what are the hottest topics of the day across different demographic groups worldwide. The most popular videos of the day are shown according to location, age group and gender of the user along with information about the most shared, trending videos and trending topics.

In the screenshot above, the YouTube Trends Dashboard is being used to compare the most viewed videos in the United Kingdom for Males versus Females aged 25 – 34 years versus all users aged 55 – 64 years. Videos that are unique to the older demographic are highlighted with the red number.

This feature can be of great help to advertisers and agencies as it can tell them what sort of topics a particular group of people would be interested in. They can then select appropriate ad content designed specifically for their target audience.

Microsoft adCenter provides paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing, and their premium partners in the U.S. and Canada. Bing supplies the organic search results for Yahoo! Search.

The combined offering allows advertisers to reach a far greater audience with a single ad buy than they could before the alliance took place.

Since this arrangement has been successful – as successful as it could get in the presence of Google – in the U.S. and Canada, Microsoft and Yahoo! are now contemplating a similar formula in other regions. They intend to start this facility early next year in certain markets within Europe, such as the U.K., France and Ireland. They hope to be able to extend this service to all of Europe by the end of 2012.

Advertisers have been advised to continue to manage their Microsoft adCenter accounts with their existing support contacts as the holiday season approaches.

Once Microsoft and Yahoo! are ready to roll out their new facility in Europe next year, they will inform advertisers about the changes 3 months before the transition actually takes place.

While the combined market share of Yahoo! and Bing in the USA is more than 25%, the two search engines account for almost nothing in most of Europe. Most advertisers do not even consider advertising on either platform, and even when they do, impressions and click volumes are found to be dismal. The search alliance might get some interest, mostly out of curiosity and the hope for a serious Google replacement, but it is unlikely to make any significant impact.

Nevertheless, advertisers who do use the service have been advised to keep their contact preferences in ‘My Settings’ up to date, in order to receive regular updates and avoid inconvenience of any kind.

The service will be provided by ‘The Cloud’ in association with Arqiva.

Wi-fi connections will be available on all 15 railway stations of the network on its platforms but not in the tunnels, reports CNet.

The Wi-fi connection will initially be available for free to all users for the first 15 minutes and after that they will be charged at the rate of £2 for 24 hours.

iPhone users with service from O2 will be able to use the service for free and will be automatically connected whenever they are within range.

The Cloud also intends to attract more mobile phone companies to tie-up with them for this service by providing advertisements and brand placements.

Services such as train timetables, delay updates and transit maps will be available for free. VoIP calls through services like Skype, Fring or Apple’s FaceTime will also be free.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has been trying hard to get such a service available on the London Underground before the 2012 Olympics, but so far he has not succeeded.

The addition of Wi-Fi on underground train networks could significantly increase the amount of mobile Internet usage in the UK’s major cities as commuters would be very likely to use the services to pass time during their commute.

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

Prime Minister, David Cameron, was accompanied by his Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Jeremy Hunt. Nobody has actually disclosed what they discussed in the course of the meeting.

Jeremy Hunt, however, sent out a tweet stating that Zuckerberg was a really smart guy with some good ideas. Mr. Hunt’s press office did make it known that the meeting had been organised by the Prime Minister’s office itself.

Mark Zuckerberg later praised the U.K.’s open data initiative, which had been launched by Tim Berners-Lee under the previous Labour government. He also found that the Prime Minister and his team were very “insightful”.

While Facebook’s social networking prowess is unchallenged, their record on consumer privacy is rather poor, at best. The Conservative government would need to tread with extreme caution when taking on any serious initiatives based on Facebook in order to avoid any privacy faux-pas akin to the Labour government employee losing CDs containing personal data of 25 million citizens.

On the whole, though, Cameron and his government’s intention to involve the public and open themselves and the workings of the government up a bit more is definitely commendable.

“I Gotta Feeling” was released by the band in the beginning of June last year, was at the top of the charts for 2 weeks and then continued to remain in the top 40 for a total of 33 weeks.

The Black Eyed Peas also hold the record for the maximum number of downloads by a single group – a total of 3.3 million, in the U.K.

Martin Talbot, Managing Director of The Official UK Charts Company, says that this is a very significant milestone. While the industry started recognising the importance of downloads as far back as 2005, by counting them as part of the singles charts, this is the first time that a song has actually been legally downloaded so many times.

Initially, downloads were counted only after a CD was made physically available in shops. One year later, the rules were changed, and downloads started getting counted even without a CD release.

Now, 98% of all singles’ sales are through downloads. However, according to record company executives, the easy availability of downloads is only adding to the problem of online piracy, which results in the loss of millions of pounds of revenue to the record companies every year.

While this might be mixed news to the record company, it definitely marks a continued change in the way the U.K. public consumes media. Digital definitely seems to be the way forward. The record companies need to catch up with the rest of the business world and start building a more digital media friendly business model.

When Google launched the Nexus One some time ago in the U.S.A; they had started by selling it directly online without a tie-up with any particular mobile service provider.

Shortly after launching the product, they started receiving a large number of complaints regarding the customer care and after-sales services, which were not geared for the sudden onslaught of queries that they received.

A desire to avoid any recurrence of such an event could be part of the reason they have decided to go through a service provider this time around.

In U.K; the Nexus One will be available through the high street Vodafone stores, online through the Vodafone store and on the phone through Vodafone’s sales phone line.

Google will continue to sell the phone directly online. However, it will remain priced in US$, will be shipped without a SIM card or 3-pin electrical plug and pay international shipping charges and VAT on importing, all of which could amount to an additional $144.55.

Vodafone will offer the phone free to users with a standard price plan of £35/month with a minimum 2-year contract, which is not a very good deal.

The phone is available directly from Google for £439.28 (including shipping, adapter and import VAT). Vodafone’s contract, on the other hand amounts to £840 in addition to the inconvenience of being tied in to one provider for two years.

Vodafone contract users might be thrilled to have this new handset added. However, many users will be put off by the idea of a long term network tie-in with Vodafone, and might instead choose one of the many other smartphones now available on the other networks.

Google Nexus One sold via Vodafone online store

Former deputy PM and member of the U.K. Labour Party, John Prescott, has been urging and instigating his followers on Twitter and supporters to click on Google pay per click ads from their opponents.

Prescott isn’t actually encouraging users to click on ads posted by the Conservative Party rather than on links to his own party. Instead he wants users to click on these ads in order to cost the Conservative Party money and make them bleed through their search engine marketing budget faster.

The logic behind this is simply that the Conservative Party pays for every click their ad receives. They could end up wasting their entire daily budget paying for clicks from Labour supporters and their ads would then stop showing.

In other words, John Prescott is encouraging his supporters to commit Click Fraud.

Click fraud was a major cause for concern for PPC advertisers in 2006, when a number of unscrupulous businesses hired rings of click fraudsters to keep clicking on their competitors’ ads till the competitors’ campaigns ran out of their daily budget, which would then mean that the competitors’ ads would stop showing for the given search term.

The Labour MP’s advice to his followers, may just boomerang on him, as the ultimate aim of any political party is to pass on their message and ideology to voters, which is precisely what is likely to happen when supporters of any party click on ads of the Conservative party and visit their site.

Moreover, voters would most likely tend not to look favourably upon a politician who encourages them to commit fraud, albeit online.

Social media will help the parties get the attention of the public and, in turn, garner more supporters.

Facebook has about 20.9 million users aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom, which is almost the same as the number of people who voted in the last general election.

At the time of publishing this article, the official Labour Party page has 11,922 fans on Facebook. The Conservatives have 31,745 fans and the Liberal Democrats have 11,550 fans.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook feature prominently on all three major parties’ websites. RSS feeds are just as prominently available for subscription and blogs are widely used.

The extent to which the Internet is expected to help in the U.K. is less than in the U.S. as it is a much shorter campaign and the level of fund raising is much lower.

It is rumoured that the Conservative party’s digital team is spending as much as 20% of their time on Twitter. Sarah Brown, the wife of the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has a follower count of over 1.1 million on Twitter – which should be a reason for the Tories to worry, as they only have a little over 23,000 followers!

Channels such as YouTube, Delicious, Livestream, podcasting and even email are also expected to play an important role during this election.

This is the first time the Internet will play an important part in the U.K. election process especially by allowing the party leaders to communicate directly with the younger generation – usually the most politically indifferent demographic.

Political parties will be able to show highly targeted ads to the users, which will be much cheaper and more effective than traditional newspaper ads.

The down side of such an increased network presence is that the slightest mis-step by a party leader can go viral and be broadcast to millions of voters in no time. All candidates now need to be more aware than ever of the fact that they can now be tracked almost all the time and their privacy is something they can never be entirely sure of having.

Liberal Democrats on YouTube

The GSMA is the industry association for mobile phone operators. It carried out a study on mobile Internet use in December 2009. The study showed that almost 16 million people in U.K. spent nearly 4.8 billion minutes on the mobile Internet and generated 6.7 billion page views between them. Of this, nearly 50% of the time people spent on the mobile Web was on Facebook.

The total number of mobile Internet users is likely to be much more than 16 million, as T-Mobile and 3 were not included in the survey. This data will be published shortly.

While Facebook was visited by almost 5 million users, it was closely followed by Google, which was used by 4.57 million users. Users did not spend anywhere near as much time on Google, though, as they did on Facebook.

The figures were released by the Mobile Media metrics service, which has been recently launched by the GSMA and comScore, to help various brands and agencies to set up their mobile ad campaigns and to judge the response they receive, to these campaigns.

Mobile marketing has definitely been on the upswing lately. Mobile commerce showed significant growth in the 2009 holiday season and reports predict that mobile Internet access will overtake PCs in 2013.

The survey shows that on weekdays most people spend about 5 hours online, of which 2 hours are related to work while the remaining 3 hours are for personal reasons including emailing, shopping chatting socializing etc. Even over weekends users spend 3 hours a day online. Youngsters between the ages of 18 – 24 years of course spend much more time online.

The time spent by users online is put to various uses. The vast majority of internet users (93%) now do their shopping online, which serves the dual purpose of saving time, as well as offering the best bargains available without having to move from shop to shop. This means that an estimated 38 million people spend up to 2 hours every week shopping online.

82% of users are believed to now manage their finances online, for which they spend anywhere up to 2 hours a week online.

At least 25% of people are quite addicted to the social networking sites and must access theses sites at least once every day. Amongst the elderly and senior citizens there is some resistance tot his trend as 67% do not use social networks at all, but 30% of those between 18 – 24 years of age spend over 5 hours a week on these sites.

A communications expert at uSwitch, Jason Glynn says, “this research shows the huge impact that the internet is having on British life. Broadband is rapidly becoming a necessity – as important as gas or electricity”. He further indicates that this trend is only likely to increase even further in times to come.

Well, there is an old proverb, which says that too much of anything is bad. Addiction to the Internet is bound to bring its own set of problems, most notably poor health due to lack of physical activity and being cooped up indoors.

Users would do well to guard against going to such extremes!

In an attempt to criticize the health care reforms suggested by the Barrack Obama team, Republican Sarah Palin commented that the British NHS did not value human life enough as it had put on an ‘Orwellian’ financial cap, and it left people to die.

She obviously could not have expected that her comments would have raised such a hue and cry among the Britishers.

Once these comments were publicized, several thousand British nationals, loyal to the NHS started tweeting on ‘#welovethenhs’. They commented on how the NHS had saved them or their loved ones from time to time, and about how good the scheme was, as it even took care of those who did not have the financial resources for their healthcare needs.

So much so, that even the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown felt compelled to comment on the issue through Twitter. His Tweet said, “NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there.

According to statistics available, more than 20,500 tweets have been sent out on the subject of the NHS, since it started on Wednesday, making it a ‘trending topic’.

The only drawback of topics becoming so popular on Twitter, is that unscrupulous users and spammers make use of these hashtags to spread false news and to attract attention to their own sites, and it possible that this may soon happen to ‘#welovethenhs’.

After a very encouraging opening on Friday, with collections of $14.4 million, the rest of the weekend turned out to be something of a damp squib by comparison. While Friday’s collections made observers predict a first weekend collection of around $50 million, the actual takings at the box office amounted to only about $30 million, which is a very big let down, and rather unusual.

Trade analysts and others from the field, are suggesting that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter caused the downfall of the movie. It is believed that reviews sent out on the social platform could have discouraged prospective viewers from going to see the movie.

While this may certainly be true to an extent, one needs to evaluate objectively why the tweets sent out were so largely negative in the first place.

Could it be possible that the movie was really not what the audiences may have expected, and therefore it did not do well?

The article on Time.com indicated that the second Transformers movie and Ice Age both performed very well during the same time frame, in spite of both being in their second week.

The trend for Bruno on Twitter, seen above, shows a definite spike on Saturday, with Bruno-related tweets accounting for 0.71% of all tweets, followed by a steady descent. The same pattern was seen a week earlier, for Transformers, albeit with a much higher peak – 2.13% of all tweets – followed by a sharper decline in discussions, as seen below.

Comparing Twitter streams for Bruno and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, both have equal numbers of positive and negative reviews today.

However, the real reason becomes more obvious when we compare the US and UK markets. Tweets from the UK are largely positive, which probably reflects its success at the UK box office – 2nd biggest opening ever for an 18+ movie – whereas tweets from the USA focus on the gay content and the sexual obscenities.

Cultural differences, especially rampant homophobia in the USA, are probably a big factor that could explain why the movie is faring poorly in the USA. Another factor could be that the movie is just plain bad. To be fair, though, it is certainly possible that the existance of Twitter allowed viewers who could not stomach the flamboyant homosexual fashion designer to spread their views faster than normally would have been possible.

This new technology ‘keeps track of’ the websites that users visit, if their ISP has signed up with this service.

Feedback: The representative says, “Phorm does not view or store the sites users visit. Phorm uses technology that has been built from the ground up to avoid any information that might identify a customer personally. Phorm’s system stands out from other online advertising systems in that it does not store your browsing history, IP address, or any personally identifiable information. The unique design of Phorm’s technology ensures that consumer privacy is protected and that, even under compulsion, no personally-identifying data or detailed browsing data can be retroactively provided to anyone.”

While it is a good thing that Phorm does not, at present, identify users individually, that does not change the fact that it tracks user activity, which many would consider to be spying.

But this is being done without the express consent of the users. BT admitted to using this technology without asking for its users’ consent initially. The BT trial, called Webwise, ended in 2008.

Feedback: According to them, “Phorm offers a clear consumer choice. Before any ISP launches Phorm’s service they will evaluate several different approaches to opt in and opt out and decide what best suits their customers. Whatever the format, users will be provided with clear details on what the service offers, and how it works, so that they can make an informed choice as to whether to participate. The most recent BT trial was conducted on a completely opt in basis.”

Tracking user interests helps the service provider to serve better targeted and more relevant ads to the customer in future, thus keeping the customer happy and helping the service provider to generate more revenue.

Phorm’s service is not very different from Google’s own ad and organic search results delivery service. Google can track a lot more sensitive information, including content not found directly through a Google search. However, Google is a much loved brand and hence gets away with a lot more “evil”.

According to the BBC, the UK Home Office has been accused of ‘colluding’ with Phorm.

A spate of messages have been exchanged between the Home Office and Phorm since August 2007, in which Phorm asked the Home Office if they have no objection to this technology, while the Home Office asked for more information about it, ostensibly to better understand public safety considerations and legal obligations. They have denied giving any advice to Phorm about possible criminal liability.

Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Spokeswoman on Home Affairs however, says, the Home Office was interested in this technology to help with their agenda of counter terrorism.

Phorm’s Chief Executive, Kent Ertugrul however, says, the Home Office has only given an ‘informed opinion’ on the matter.

In the meantime, the BBC reports that the European Commission has started legal action against Britain, for allowing the use of this technology, following complaints about this service being used on BT, without user consent.

Feedback: Their spokesperson points out, “Phorm’s technology can be operated in a manner that is legally compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives. This has been confirmed by BERR and by the UK regulatory authorities. Consistent with UK and EU legislation, and in anticipation of any changes that may be made to the law in the future, our system offers unmissable notice and clear and persistent choice to consumers, a choice that is head and shoulders above current internet standards. The EU Commission announced infringement proceedings against the UK Government concerning the alleged failure of UK legislation to conform in certain respects with EU e-privacy and personal data protection rules. This is a matter for the Commission and the UK Government to discuss.”

The results of this matter, of course, remain to be seen.

British officials had said, last year, that Phorm conformed to European data laws. As can be seen in their feedback above, Phorm says its technology is “fully compliant with U.K. legislation and relevant E.U. directives.”

EU’s Telecom Commissioner, Viviane Reding however said, “Britain needs to change its laws to ensure proper sanctions to enforce E.U. confidentiality rules.”

If the UK does not voluntarily do so, Reding could take matters to the European Court of Justice, which would then have the final say in the matter.

Several individuals and organisations that advocate user privacy have approved of the European Commission taking an active interest in the matter.

To tell their side of the story, Phorm has created a website that attempts to rebuild its reputation, demistify the technology and clarify rumours that are currently being spread against the company.

Stop Phoul Play

Now that it has been confirmed that terrorist organisations and other unscrupulous groups are using the latest technologies to communicate and organise their actions, it has become essential for law enforcers to keep track of the various communications methods which these people may employ.

Earlier, plans had been afoot to create a database, on a government run computer system, for all communication taking place via email, phone calls, social networks etc. This plan has, however, been shelved, as it was seen as being too invasive, apart from the cost and other practical difficulties in setting it up.

Communications service providers will be required to store only the contacts people make, and not the content. They will, however, have to record some third-party data or information that is partly based overseas. The proposed system will not record personal information such as the messages or photos which are posted.

Information stored by the communications firms will be accessible by authorities such as the police and MI5 when required. They will require top level authorisation from a public body to do so.

Home Secretary, Ms. Jacqui Smith said to the BBC, “Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime.”

The project is estimated to cost about 2 billion pounds, and while the Liberal Democrats are pleased that there will be no centralised database, many still feel that a careful balance will have to be maintained between investigative powers and the right to privacy. Some even believe that this project is a colossal waste of time and public money.

The survey was conducted across 16 countries, with over 27,000 participants, ranging between 18 and 55 years of age.

Users from China were found to spend the highest amount of their leisure time online – approximately 44%, as compared to only about 16% of free time spent online by users in Denmark, which was ranked last among the 16 countries.

While youngsters below the age of 25 spent about 36% of their free time online, Chinese users in the same age group spent nearly 50% of their leisure time online.

Interestingly, while the average U.K. user spent about 28% of his / her spare time on the net, the average housewife from the UK spent 47% of her spare time on the net, which is even higher than the average time spent by the Chinese online.

Unemployed U.K. resident spent 32% of their free time online; students spent 39% of their free time online.

British residents also revealed that the majority of them do not trust the information provided through newspapers too much. Only 23% of them trusted newspapers, as compared to 69% of people from Finland. The British feel that online news is a trustworthy source of information, second only to that relayed by a good friend.

Where social networking is concerned, the BBC reports that the survey found the average number of online contacts each user had was 17.

When the respondents were asked if they had met any of their online contacts in person, the Germans topped the list, with 76% replying in the affirmative, while China was at the bottom of the list here with only 44% saying yes.

On an average 60% of users had managed to meet some of their online friends. Users from U.K. reported that 58% of them had met online friends, while 455 of them had spoken to them over the phone.

37% of users from U.K., however, reported that they could not be sure of the true identity of their online friends.

The results, reported by the BBC, show that Internet search giant, Google, has occupied the top slot for the first time, to become the most popular brand in the country.

Last year Google was ranked at third place, but this year it has beaten Microsoft and Mercedes Benz, which are now at number two and three respectively.

Surprisingly, none of the well known supermarkets managed to reach even the top 100 list. Stephen Cheliotis, Chairman of the Superbrands Council says, “Lifestyle brands, particularly those in the technology sector, have considerably more sway with the public than everyday staples such as supermarkets, which now seem further than ever from the affections of the British people.”

He also said that, “The results are also a further sign that Google is continuing its dominance in the U.K. It is clear that Google is the brand that people value at work and in their personal lives”

The web intelligence company Hitwise has now released some data that should come as a big surprise to most people. According to a study carried out by them recently, in the space of just about 3 years, the viewership for blogs in U.K. has gone up by 208% compared to just a 70% increase in traffic to traditional news and media sites.

It was found that between May 2005 and June 2008, the percentage of web traffic which accesses blogs has grown from just over 0.3% to 1.19%. That is approximately 1 in 84 internet visits.

Of course this is a growth of blogs and personal web sites in general and not of any single blog.

The increasing popularity of blogs is very well illustrated by the fact that during the announcement by 3G iPhone – the iPhone site received more hits from blogs than from traditional sites.

When compared with the growth for readership of blogs in the UK, the growth for readership of blogs in the U.S. is rather poor. Although it is generally assumed that Americans are very aware and concerned about the social media, it has been found that only about 0.73% of internet traffic in the U.S. showed an interest in going to blogs and personal web sites.

Ads run before and after videos on the service. While Sony BMG provides the music, Rhythm New Media is in charge of selling and serving the ads. The music video service was officially launched on the 31st of March. According to 3, the response to their free-to-access mobile video scheme has been excellent, with about 1 million users (25% of their clientele) signing up for the service by October 2007.

Signing up for free ad-funded music videos on 3 is quite simple. When a subscriber wants to start using this facility, he/she needs to simply visit the 3 music page, select the ‘opt-in’ option on the mobile screen, enter their age and gender.

Users can browse to select videos. A short pre-roll ad gets displayed before the video plays, followed by the music video the users selected and after that a post-roll ad gets played. In order to encourage customers to use this service without fear of exorbitant data charges being levied on them the word ‘FREE’ is prominently displayed next to each link.

Ads are shown to suit the demographic profile of the user according to the gender and age group they specified when opting into the service. Hence different users may see different ads before and after the same video. In order to check the efficacy of the system, a special link is provided on the main page for viewers who may be interested in participating in a survey that asks users of the service what brands they think they have recently seen being advertised on their mobile, what ads they have seen and the main message of an ad that they were shown.

Responses to the service have been very encouraging, with viewers viewing 3 videos per day on an average. 25% of them had spontaneous ad recall and 75% reported total message recall. 95% of users are happy with this service. Some top brands like Microsoft, Unilever Lynx, Nivea and Paramount pictures have already advertised through this format.

3 Official Press Release

The new service will be more efficient than before for local searches, as they will maintain records of the user’s search location and therefore not require users to enter their address every time. Also, unlike the earlier version where it was necessary to be specific about the search type required, (such as images, websites or local results) the new search results pages provide relevant, location specific results that have been integrated from various sources.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have been much quicker to adopt the Universal Search concept onto mobile. Google has finally caught up, though the quality of results being offered here is not yet remarkable. The image below compares the mobile search results pages from Google, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft (in order, clockwise from top left):

A post on the Google Mobile Blog highlights that fact that the improved mobile search experience, also detects the language of the query and automatically delivers the most relevant results in one of the local languages (English, German or French) or via automatic translation.

Google says this service will be much faster than before and will therefore be useful for businessmen. Also, as the mobile search market expands, commercial opportunities for advertisers will increase; but whether mobile advertising will be really beneficial for all businesses remains debatable.

Last week also saw the launch of a UK version of Google Finance, which will provide financial news, stock prices, mutual fund information etc specific to the UK market.

The highlights of this facility are:

1. Search preference for UK companies and funds
2. Google news integration – organisation of business news according to date and topic etc.
3. Interactive charts on market data, news stories, stock prices etc.
4. Front page summary and exchange rates
5. Blogs and related company information
6. Group discussions by experts
7. An easy way to create and track portfolios.

PayPal and Google Checkout are both services provided by eBay and Google respectively to enable online shoppers to pay for their shopping easily. While PayPal has been around for a long time, Google Checkout was launched only in April 2007.

While PayPal has the advantage of a wider user network it is not without its fair share of customers complaints. The main grievances customers have with PayPal are their high fees and their policy of freezing customer accounts, without calling or trying to understand the nature of the clients’ business, on usually flimsy grounds.

EBay users and other online vendors have looked for alternative payment methods for long now, and are extremely hopeful that Google Checkout will at least cause PayPal to wake up and correct their arbitrary practices and become more customer friendly.

According to Heather Dougherty of Hitwise US, alternative payment methods have been growing in popularity, at the expense of established players such as PayPal and Google Checkout. Leading this group is newcomer Bill Me Later, whose ‘buy now, pay later’ and ’90 days same as cash’ options have propelled its traffic up 271% up from last year.

While the Google Checkout and PayPal are direct competitors, their manners of functioning are slightly different and their main client bases come from widely different sources. PayPal sources its clientele mainly from its parent company eBay and a few other email and social networks, with only about 2.2% of their customers coming from non-auction shopping and classified sites, while 45.3% of Google’s customer base is retailers.

It is expected that Google checkout will gradually incorporate a few new features in its services, which will make it a real threat to PayPal’s dominance of the market, especially through the much wider user base of its parent company, Google.

AOL Mobile UK

The new offering by AOL Mobile configures all Web content to match any phone, irrespective of its make. A once-in-30-day log in feature and an algorithm that remembers the user’s personal requests and favourites make the portal more user friendly than the mobile portals from rivals Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask.

Like the other portals, the service includes local weather forecasts, horoscopes, news and a regular web and images search feature. AOL Mobile uses Google search technology to power mobile searches.

The dynamic mobile transcoding feature included in the portal’s technology is supposed to easily render Web content from any internet site. Based on this belief, AOL has also chosen to omit the Mobile Search feature that Google offers on its own mobile search service. However, AOL’s transcoding system does not seem to live up to expectations. Even compared to Google’s transcoding technology, AOL Web Surf reportedly falls short.

A near desktop experience?

First -time users of the service and some bloggers are already complaining that the mobile browsing feature is inferior due to the poor transcoding technology. When compared to the Yahoo!, MSN and Ask’s mobile portals, AOL Mobile does not have a wow-factor and it is also on the slower side. AOL should pay more attention to little things such as server response times and sorting local search results by distance in order to win users.

As far as consumers are concerned, AOL Mobile will most likely get lumped with all the other major mobile search portals, as it does not provide any significant improvements, which is what the mobile Internet really needs.

Based on this premise, Andrew has provided a checklist of SEO Quality Assurance factors that all webmasters should consider when updating site contents.

SEO Quality Assurance Checklist

1. Does each page type have a unique Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tag?
   • For dynamic pages does the code generate a unique Title, Description and Keywords tag?
   • For static pages have content authors written a unique Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tag?
2. Is the robots.txt file blocking any URLs that you want the search engines to index?
   • Are pages such as the login, email to a friend, printer friendly pages, footer pages, etc blocked?
   • Does the robots.txt file contain a line “Disallow: /” that blocks all robots from crawling the entire site?
3. Do any dynamic pages that should be indexed have a “noindex” tag in the Robots Meta Tag?
4. Have all necessary URL redirects been implemented correctly?
   • Do non-www versions of every URL 301 to www versions (or vice-versa)?
   • Do URLs that end in / 301 to versions that have no / (or vice-versa)?
   • Do all mixed case URLs 301 to lowercase versions?
   • Do test version sub domains (e.g. alpha.site.com) either 301 to the root domain or are the password protected?
   • Are 301 redirects implemented for any URLs that are eliminated, to point visitors to the new version of the URL or if there is no new version does the 301 redirect to the root domain or a related directory on the site?
5. Has the xml sitemap file been updated to reflect the new changes?
6. Does running a crawler such as Linkscan through the site deliver error codes?
   • Are there any chain redirects (e.g. 301 to 301 to 301)?
7. Has a change log / list been created to easily identify and diagnose issues that could affect SEO?
   • Is the addition of or reduction of links on a page tracked?
   • Have rewritten page copy and Meta information been backed up?
   • Have new pages been added?
   • Are and URLs eliminated or redirected?

This checklist should be used alongside a regular SEO checklist for first time SEO, and on its own when changes are implemented on a site or when domains / sub-domains are created or moved. The principles in this list are just as applicable to local and multimedia search optimisation as they are to regular website optimisation.

28.3 million UK visitors used at least one Google property, making it the most popular site, beating Microsoft’s 26.7 million visitors. Each of these companies reached a phenomenal 80+ per cent of the country’s online population. Yahoo! did not beat eBay to the third position, in spite of a 2.4 per cent fall in eBay’s visitor numbers.

The top ten websites in the UK can be seen in the chart below:

Facebook was the fastest growing site in the United Kingdom, with total visitors to the site rising from 7.6 million to 8.9 million in just one month. The 18 per cent growth rate is not a one-off occurrence. The social networking site has continuously risen in popularity since February of this year, making it an attractive acquisition target for Microsoft and Google.

Other sectors that fared well in the UK included online TV and shopping comparison, with sites from both sectors demonstrating double-digit growth percentages. BSkyB and News International both grew over 10% in August, with total visitor numbers well beyond the 5 million mark. In France on the other hand, the greatest percentage growth in visitor numbers came predominantly from travel sites. The fastest growing site, though, was an automotive trading site, LaCentrale.fr.

The top ten websites in France can be seen in the chart below:

Interestingly, Google reached only 69.5% of the French Internet population, compared to its 89% reach in the UK. The total number of Internet users in France is also still less than that in the UK. Google, Microsoft and France Telecom are the most popular sites here, with Yahoo! trailing at a distant sixth position in overall popularity.

The detailed reports for France and the UK can be read on the comScore website.

Ask is hoping that the introduction of Ask Mobile in the UK might help boost its popularity. The company has launched a television ad campaign, a billboard campaign and even an ad campaign in the London Underground in an attempt to win UK market share.

Myles Runham, general manager for Europe at Ask.com, said that Ask Mobile provides a much more direct alternative to finding results than traditional browser-based search by taking the simplest approach rather than making users navigate through a number of search results. He said, “It’s extremely successful in the US, so we’re hopeful it can have the same impact over here.”

Ask Mobile currently includes Web search, images, business listings, maps, weather, bloglines, area codes, currency conversion, horoscopes and time zones in the USA. The Web Search page provides recent searches and example search terms in the form of clickable links below the search box. Unfortunately, Ask Mobile does not incorporate any of the design genius of the new Ask Search, and the mobile search results seem to bring up a mix of regular Internet sites and mobile-friendly sites.

Mobile Internet users can search on Ask Mobile by visiting:

m.ask.com

Although the market does not seem to be growing as fast as it did last year, growth figures are higher in the search industry than most other industry verticals. The main driver for this growth is that an increasing number of companies and marketing personnel are recognising the value of search in the overall marketing mix.

The growth in the overall search engine marketing sector from 2004 to 2007 can be seen in the graph below:

According to E-consultancy’s report, trends within this market include:

• Increased focus on organic search
• Greater ‘savviness’ about paid search ROI
• More complexity and integration with other marketing channels
• Sector consolidates as agencies seek broader range of skills
• New platforms offer further growth potential.

Growth in paid search advertising is expected to slow down from last year’s 67% to about 56% this year, as seen in the graph below, due to increased competition and keyword price inflation. Paid search will, however, still account for 89% of the total search marketing spend.

An increased awareness of the importance of an organic search presence is expected to drive SEO to increase by 68%, which is much faster than PPC or than its own growth rate of 50% in 2006. The trend in SEO growth from 2004 to 2007 can be viewed graphically below:

The Buyer’s Guide for 2007 covers a lot more ground including the increased focus on ROI in paid search, pricing models and market positioning. It can be purchased at:

SEM Buyer’s Guide 2007