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It’s become quite fashionable to criticise OpenID these days and the latest tirade to come to my attention is from Kyle Neath. Although he raises some valid points, none of them are problems with OpenID. Rather they are general problems with proving identity on the internet. Like most critics of OpenID, Kyle seems to ignore the simple fact that we already have a single, centralised identity: email. Your email address is your identifier for most online services and shares many issues with OpenID. OpenID is not the be all and end all of online identity but it does offer many advantages over the currently favoured username/password system. More…

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If you’re anything like me, you’ll use your browser’s built-in Google search more than the address bar itself to find websites. The search engine is so pervasive (it’s in my desktop browser, Nintendo Wii Internet channel and the iPhone I’d love to own) that ‘googling’ is often the easiest way.

That’s why this week’s changes to Google’s trademark rules are quite significant. Until 5th May, companies were not permitted to bid against trademarked terms. I commented on this story in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago (requires free registration), and it’s also been covered in The Times Business Section this weekend.

Google’s trademark rule changes effectively force every company to pay for advertisements as well being listed in natural search, or face losing clicks to competitors.

Here’s how it works: If you enter ‘PlusNet’ into Google, it made sense that you should be shown results that are relevant to your search. This is very different from searching for ‘UK broadband’ for example. New rules have changed all this, and it’s all going to drive extra cash towards Google. Already other companies are starting to bid against PlusNet’s terms. It’s natural that we would want to be the top result - after all, you’re searching for PlusNet, right?

At PlusNet we chose to bid against our own name, but we weren’t obliged to. Since May 5th, to flourish in a competitive market, we’re going to have to start paying more to Google or risk being drowned-out by competitors with bigger budgets. Of course, we’re able to bid against other trademark terms, but our competitors have much deeper pockets and currently pay up to £12 per click to Google for every click on the word ‘broadband’.

How else could this affect you? If you run a small business and use search engine marketing to promote your products then you face the same challenge. The risk grows the more successful you are, because your company name will become more of a target if it generates a high volume of searches. For example, if you run a small business of 3 flower shops across your region and generate lots of leads online, you could find that big national players are able to bid against your company name when previously they may not have been able to. If you generate a significant number of searches, it’s a realistic scenario as there are lots of software tools that let search companies target the ‘long tail’ of related terms. It’s like a competitor sticking a big billboard on the side of your corner store.

What do you think?

• Are you glad that there’s now more opportunity for advertisers to target your search?
• Or would you prefer to have search limited just to the subjects / companies you asked for?

I’d love to hear your opinions.

Phil Sheard, Emarketing manager @ PlusNet
Twitter me: philsheard

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I’m guessing that most people in the tech industry must have been watching the snooker considering there seems to be more green baize related headlines (two 147s in a week) than tech industry news. However, there have been a few interesting things that are noteworthy, so I’ll cue them up now. More…

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Earlier on today I stumbled across a post by dgwebb on our Community Forums that paid mention to a recent news article published by The Register that quite took my interest.

In this article, El Reg write about a couple of Software Engineers who have managed to reverse engineer the executable behind one of the most prolific botnets currently out in the wild.

To quote from WikiPedia, “Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.”

Whilst this description might sound fairly innocent, it’s a sad fact that these botnets are also used by spammers, Internet criminals and other such miscreants as a catalyst with which to conduct fraudulent, malicious or morally questionable activities .

More…

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ARIA is a W3C standard for making complex JavaScript & AJAX-powered web apps more accessible to people with disabilities. Unlike most accessibility initiatives, this is more than just theoretical chit-chat: Firefox 2 & 3 already implement it and recently Google Reader announced an ARIA-enhanced version. John Resig has a good introduction to how it works.

It’s great to see movement in an area where we’ve almost grown used to stagnation and huge, complex, impractical recommendations (c.f. WCAG 2.0).

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I’ve just spent the last hour or so going through my last-minute check-list of things to sort out before I fly to India on Friday to kick-off some new projects with our Software Development teams over there.

One of the things on my list was “Investigate cost effective WiFi service at Heathrow and Doha Airports”. As I spend a lot of time travelling on trains and in airports, I often need access to the Internet from my laptop (when Internet access on my phone isn’t quite enough). The usual answer to this is to pay £5 a go for an hour’s worth of WiFi Hotspot access on BT Openzone (using my PlusNet WiFi minutes), T-Mobile or The Cloud or whatever else is in range; hardly a cost effective way of doing things.

My investigation lead me to some interesting software that I can install on my phone that will turn my phone into a WiFi hotspot. I can then connect to this hotspot with my laptop and surf away.

The good news? The software is free and I don’t pay for data usage on my phone.

For those people that are interested in this sort of thing:
• The software is called Joiku
• My laptop is a very small Sony Vaio; Great for taking on the plane.
• My phone is a Nokia N95 8GB

There are a few limitations, mainly that the Joiku software only works with HTTP and HTTPS traffic, so if I want Instant Messaging access I need to use Fring on my phone or a browser Instant Messaging interface such as Meebo, but I can live with that.

If anyone else has any recommendations that can beat this then I’d be very pleased to hear from you. I’ll report back with my findings as to how well (or otherwise) this goes…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

Twitter: MattGrest

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The last few days I’ve been playing around with a service that I discovered some months back, but it only really became a viable option due to a new cellphone plan that I have recently moved to. The name of the service is Qik and the reason why it has become viable is that I no longer have to pay for mobile data, wherever I am in the world (this is a big deal for me, for other reasons - see other blogs of mine).

So, what’s this Qik service all about and how is it going to change the world? Well, Qik is a small application that you can install on your mobile phone (only Nokia S60 Operating systems so far). It then allows you to stream live video direct from your phone and onto a web page. The quality is excellent and the delay is only around 3 seconds.

So, what’s the big deal then? Well, there is a growing Qik community forming already and due to the bottomless-pit of creativity from the users out there we’ve already seen live coverage from all manner of events; a guy running the Boston Marathon strapped his phone to his chest and broadcast his entire run live; we had the aftermath of a shooting at an American school last week streamed live from the campus, we’ve had live feeds of flash-mobs, Olympic torch protests, you name it, it’s been Qik’ed.

What we have here is a new level of immediacy with news reporting. With the likes of Flickr, YouTube, Picassa et al we have documents of history (albeit recent) that are subject to censorship, but Qik allows the user to broadcast live video and audio feeds from wherever they all in the world, cutting out the media corporation middleman. Certainly, with a laptop and webcam and the various “live-cam” services available you can do similar, but ultimately you’re somewhat tethered by the technology; running it off a mobile phone changes the playing field altogether.

Qik is also trying to maximize distribution possibilities for live and on-demand video watchers by building widgets for blogs and Facebook, enabling alert systems on Twitter and Pownce, as well as tying into other video services like YouTube, Mogulus, Seesmic and Justin.tv.

Qik recently received $3m series B funding in order to invest into their software platform, so it will be interesting to see the developments, to both the company and those that use it..

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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I’ve only just started these weekly industry news blogs and already I nearly failed to write one this week. Not my fault, you see my 5-month-old boy thought that it would be funny if he took a chunk out of my cornea. Mind you, he did laugh as I was clutching my contorted face so for him I guess it was funny. Having just regained enough vision to sit at a computer for any length of time I’ve just managed to catch-up on some of the news from the last seven days, so let’s get started: More…

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I popped down to the Slug & Lettuce on Wardour St last night for the Chinwag panel discussion on “Real World Usability”. It was a good evening but ultimately the free bar and comfy sofas didn’t quite make up for the lack of direction in the discussion. More…

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Some people think that I know what’s going on in the technology and internet industry so I’m about to be found out. That is, unless you can help me! On a weekly basis, normally Thursdays, I’m going to post a roundup of industry news that caught my eye. If you think there’s other equally (or more) interesting technology / industry news then just add a comment to the blog with details and a link to the story. Anyway, let’s get down to business::

• So, perhaps the story that most made my heart run with fear was More…

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