The Venture Skills Blog

I haven’t done a Friday round up for a while so hopefully this new look Friday round up will bring a cheer to your faces on Friday the 13th for those who haven’t read one of my Friday round ups they contain a large dose of sarcasm -Tim

Google Checkout UK

The big thing this week is Google checkout is now available for merchant providers in the UK, so expect a whole range of new deployments on UK websites. Google has taken its time getting to the UK with this service but its hopefully worth it. Signup takes less then a minute from Google checkout website.

Ask is getting a mathover

Widely reported but Ask have announced a new search algorithm code named Edison which has been described as turning the engine into a more “social search service”. It’s not yet deployed but expect a large amount of scare stories mixed in with a lot of increased search activity from nervous webmaster in the near future. More coverage from Search Engine Land and SEO by the sea.

AdBrite not so bright

The latest craze on the web is putting ads embedded in images you can find out more about it from Payment Blogger. The idea does have one major draw back it uses javascript and flash to reproduce the images which makes the image inaccessible and therefore useless both blind readers and to search engines. While the implementation has made my blood boil there is an easy work a

<script>
britepic_src="http://www.yoursite.com/yourpic.jpg";
britepic_id="your_unique_britepic_id";
</script>
<script src='http://www.britepic.com/britepic.js'>
</script>
<noscript> <img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/yourpic.jpg” alt=”my description” /> </noscript>

Wow that was hard! Hopefully AdBrite will be including the extra line in their instructions in the near future!

Are Americans really illiterate or just innumerate?

Finally an amusing finish I came across a fun new tool today called Web site Grader. Its worth checking out but one of its results is to inform you of the required “reading level” for a page. Now you will be pleased to know if you are in the 12th grade in the US school system you should be able to read this thread and comprehend it! Sadly if you visit SEO Forensics or my Blog timnash.me.uk you will require 2 years worth of College education to comprehend my scribbling!

So what’s going on is the American education so inept when it comes to literacy levels that words such as forensics and optimisation prove to be too complicated for people. Well I suspect not so let’s look at a different reason, the algorithm the site is using is the Flesch-Kincaid which seems to be a little critical of the poor American education system or perhaps just perhaps the maths is wrong!

That’s it for this week, if you are looking for more you can always check out my Guest posts
An intro to reputation management on Engtech and a post on Paid for posts on David Leonhardt’s blog.

While I know we have had the notices saying we are moving up for a while we really are moving next week, so stay tuned!

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