21 October 2009

Real Time Tweets in Search Engine Results

The revolution is finally upon us - the search engines are recognising the power of social media and at present Bing is winning the race.



Mashable (always up there with breaking news for us geeks) today revealed that Microsoft has agreed a deal with Twitter and Facebook to feature their real-time tweets and status updates in their SERPs.  This is big news and one of the most exciting developments I've seen in the world of search recently.

Hopefully this move will encourage those businesses which don't have a presence on such networks to pull their socks up and give us struggling social media junkies the thumbs up for action.  On that note, I best have a word with the boss!

**UPDATE** Less than 24 hours later Google has joined the race and officially confirmed that they too have struck a deal with Twitter to showcase their real-time results in Google's SERPs in the "coming months".  See Google's Blog for all the info.

11 October 2009

Free favicon hosting sites - ones to avoid!

Today's mission was to find a new free host for my blog's favicon.  As iconj seems to have disappeared off the face of the WWW after recently being hacked, an alternative solution was needed - a job evidently easier said than done.





After typing a myriad of keyword alternatives in to Google a trend was beginning to appear.  All of the sites claiming to offer free hosting, or blogs containing links to sites that offer it, either didn't actually offer hosting at all, or the links pointed to sites that were now defunct.

Here's a list of sites not to use.  WARNING: clicking on some results in porn, escort services or random gambling offers popping up.
  • http://www.oogletoogle.com/
  • http://www.shokimages.com/
  • http://www.picpanda.com/
  • http://www.imageboo.com/
  • http://cdmazika.com/
  • http://www.myfavatar.com/
  • http://www.iconj.com

And here's some sites that may initially claim to support .ico formats, but don't.
  • http://www.my-image-host.com/
  • http://www.myupload.org/
  • http://www.qfqy.com/
  • http://www.freeimagehosting.in/
  • http://www.imageboo.com/

But then finally, through the mists came a site that would actually do as I asked: provide free hosting; let me simply upload my favicon and then provide the code - hurrah!

Now I'm sure there's plenty more sites out there (that aren't as easy to find - clearly!) which offer the same service, but once you've found what you're looking for, you don't carry on looking...

Lou_geek