Just Another Social Profile Really

You know how sometimes you hear a song and just know that before too long everyone is going to be singing one particular line? Well the recipient of that particular honour for the Summer of 2008 is here, and it’s Everybody Nose, the comeback single from N*E*R*D (or NERD as most people would say.)

All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom!

I’m really glad that N*E*R*D are back, especially as I had thought that Pharrell Williams had split the band due to problems with record label Virgin. In fact he had, but it seems like Pharrell changed his mind later.

Well, whatever, Pharrell Williams & the rest of N*E*R*D are back, and they’re better than ever if Everybody Nose is anything to go by. Whilst I’m not sure that the video or the lyrics to Everybody Nose are going to win Pharrell & the boys any feminism awards (the clips which appear to show Pharrell cuddling a really drunk girl verge on being distrubing) the music’s better than ever.

I’ve always felt that N*E*R*D were better in theory than in practice. Apart from a couple of amazing tracks, including Provider (which Zero 7 did an amazing remix of) & Lapdance, it seemed like Pharrell Williams & Chad Hugo saved their best music for when they produced for others as The Neptunes. Certainly most of Pharrell’s solo stuff has been weak compared to the stuff he’s done for the likes of Justin Timberlake & Snoop Dogg.

But if they’ve produced anything for anyone else recently, they must have been holding back the good stuff because Everybody Nose really rocks. Pharrell manages to get in some nice falsetto vocals without becoming annoying; the bassline is so fat it should probably join Weight Watchers; the tiny snatch of horns is funkier than James Brown’s wake; there’s a great break in the middle when everything gets all smooth. And then, of course, there’s the chorus. Fuc*ing genius.

So, once more, after me everyone (you know that you’ll be singing it at the end of every night out from here to 2009);

All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom!

Eddie Izzard once riffed on what the canteen would be like in the Death Star. Now, thanks to the wonder of Lego & YouTube, we can see what that might look like.

You’re Mr Stevens?

Who’s Mr Stevens?

He’s Head of Catering

I’m not Head of Catering, I’m Vader…

And from the same genius, Cake or Death?

Jamie Lidell is the sort of artist who could confuse you. He’s white, British, painfully trendy, and signed to Warp so one’s immediate assumption would probably be that he makes achingly cool electro, or ragged Hoxton rock. In fact he creates 21st Century (blue-eyed) soul of the finest variety.

His new album, which is called, in what is certainly a nod to the great soul albums of the 60s, Jim, starts off with this amazing track. If you knew nothing more about Jamie Lidell than what you heard on Another Day you would probably swear that he’s a pure blood descendant of Sam & Dave, or maybe Jackie Wilson. There’s no attempt at irony, no Ronson-esque playing with the genre; this is just soul, pure & simple.

Everything about Another Day is wonderful; the beautifully naive lyrics, the optimistic sound of bird song at the start, the glorious piano. From the hand-claps that open the track to the uninhibited whoops that close it, this song just screams of the joys of summer, love & music. If I play it much more I’m liable to ruin it, but I just can’t help myself; playing Another Day is like turning on the Sun in your ears. It is, to be blunt, fabulous.

And the rest of Jim is pretty good too. Wait For Me sounds like Otis Redding reborn in East London; Little Bit Of Feel Good is warped funk; Figured Me Out is an amazing blend of everything from early Jamiroquai to classic Prince whilst final track is a beautifully laid back affair that always reminds me of ELO. In a good way.

This truly is an amazing album, and Another Day opens it in true style. The only thing that annoys me about this album is that it makes me think of how good Ben Westbeech’s should have been. His early singles (particularly So Good Today & Get Closer) showed real potential but in too many places Welcome To The Best Years Of Your Life drifted into average.

Apparently Ben’s working on his 2nd album now; I know that Gilles Peterson (the owner of Westbeech’s record label Brownswood Recordings) is a big fan of Lidell - here’s hoping he find whoever produced Another Day & the rest of Jim and sets him to work on Westbeech. Maybe they could even call the 2nd album Ben?

I was idly browsing this afternoon and ended up on NME. Looking at the site of a magazine that, as a teenager, I bought religiously, made me think of a magazine I bought religiously for much of my 20s. The magazine in question was The Face, the genre-defining style magazine launched by Nick Logan in 1980.

The Face covered fashion, music, art, youth culture, politics, and anything else it fancied, with intelligence, wit & elan. Unfortunately due to the fact that “the format [became] stale, there were too many competitors, sales had declined and advertising revenues had consequently reduced” it was closed in 2004.

In many ways it was the internet that killed The Face (as trends were being tracked so quickly online that a monthly style magazine just seem like an anachronism), and it was something that the team at The Face never really seemed to understand. Just take a look at most of the iterations of The Face website archived by the Way Back Machine, and you’ll see dull pages which had obviously had about as much thought put into them as most people would into choosing a stapler. Or even less in fact. Ironically the last editor of the magazine, Neil Stevenson, was one of the founders of the website Popbitch (which is in many ways what The Face should have been doing online) but by then it was probably too late.

I still have the last ever copy of The Face and seem to remember that, at the time of the closure, it was suggested that the brand would be kept (i.e. not sold) by its owners EMAP (now Bauer, following a buy-out) in case there was a desire to relaunch it in thefuture. And that’s what I think Bauer should do. Seriously, how expensive would it be to launch an online only version, possibly using blogging software? When I think of some of the sites I regularly visit, such as The Sartorialist, the aforementioned Popbitch, PSFK, Holy Moly (which is doing very well, thank you very much), Josh Spear & many more, I see exactly the sort of things that TheFace should have been doing, and probably still could be.

I’m sure that there are many people like me out there; (reasonably) young, web savvy, interested in everything from hip hop to politics, and who loved The Face when they were younger, who’d be happy to see it up & running again, and who would probably even help out.

So come on Bauer; you’ve had a fresh start recently, why not celebrate that by showing a new Face to the world?

A friend (the one who pointed me in the direction of Sam Sparro’s cover of  Estelle’s American Boy) described her Mac as being her lover. Whilst I’m not quite at that stage of Mac-obsessiveness (yet) I have decorated mine, just as you might a favourite pet.

So, I was wondering what anyone else’s Mac looks like. Have you decorated/vandalised it with stickers etc..? And if so, do you regret it? (I recently described the stickers on my Mac as being like a tattoo, i.e. something I’m starting to regret a little). Please feel free to share in the comments.

Back in March of 2007 Matt Cutts posted about a question he’d seen on the Google Webmaster forums: regarding what people should do about the search results pages from within a site, and whether or not those should be open to search engine spiders for crawling.

Is there any official Google statement regarding that search result on
one’s own site ought to be disallowed from indexing (e.g. via
robots.txt)?

Matt then detailed how Vanessa Fox had resolved the question by adding a line to the Google Webmaster guidelines.

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Now I’ve just checked and that advice is still there. Which is strange, as it now seems that Google is ignoring its own advice, and the use of noindex, and indexing search results pages.

Have a look at this page from Google. What you’ll find is over 100,000 pages from Computer Weekly, all of them search results pages. And yet if you look at Computer Weekly’s robots.txt file, you’ll find the following instruction:

Disallow: /SearchServices/

And if you actually check the code on any of the search results pages which have been indexed, you;ll also find the following instructions:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,follow”>

Seems pretty obvious what the owners of this site want Google to do with the search results pages doesn’t it? It certainly seems that they don’t want them indexed (if only because they’re keen to stay within Google’s guidelines).

So what exactly is going on here? Well to me it seems pretty clear, and it’s not anything that makes Google look good.

The news that Google was planning to start spidering the ‘deep web’ was pretty well publicised. However, it was also reported that Google would still obey robots.txt and nofollow. So why aren’t they?

I think it all comes back to the recenet addition of the ’search within a site’ functionality, that I wrote about a while back. As I said at the time, one of the many things I disliked about this was the fact that in many cases Google might actually not be able to search a site as well as an internal search engine, as if a site was not optimised, content behind search boxes would be inaccessible.

Well it seems like Google wasn’t going to allow this to stop them, and so is now spidering those very pages it has told webmasters to block, and the only reason I can think of for them doing this is money. I’m not a big one for conspiracy theories but the only reason I can think that they would do this is that they want to be able to serve more pages within those ’search within a site’ results, and therefore show more ads. Including of course the brand ads which were, until a remarkably short time after search within a site was released, forbidden in the UK (vive Lastminute!)

Google has now moved, in my eyes at least, from a service, helping users to get to where they want to go as quickly as possible, to a publisher, determined to hold onto them for a couple of seconds more, so that they can serve up a few more ads.

Because even if they do spider previously inaccessible pages, they still don’t allow users to search with the sort of advanced filters that many internal search engiens utilise. Which means that at the end of the day, this is the sort of decision that can only have been made by accountants rather than engineers.

Dollar bills image: yomanimus on flickr

I’ve been reading quite a lot about Sam Sparro recently but couldn’t decide whether to invest in any of his stuff. But having been pointed in the direction of this cover version of Estelle’s American Boy that  he recorded for Radio 1’s Live Lounge, I may have to do just that.

It doesn’t differ hugely from Estelle’s original version, although it is now of course a man signing about the lovely American boy he’s found (like Amy Winehouse signing The Zutons’ Valerie he sees no reason to change the gender of the song’s subject, and it’s all the more interesting for that).

The instrumentation is pretty standard 21st Century Soul; keyboards, bass & lazy drumming. It’s kind of like an American Jamie Lidell and as I write this, sitting in the garden on a sultry May afternoon, I can think of no better sound for the coming summer.

The friend who told me about Sam Sparro’s cover of Estelle’s American Boy  reckons that it’s better than the original; I’m not sure I’d go that far (if nothing else, whilst Sparro has a great voice, his rap is not a patch compared to Kanye West’s). It is however really very good, and another reminder that I really ought to listen to the Live Lounge more. Although I’m glad I missed Estelle’s own appearance; take a listen to her live version of American Boy & be thankful that’s not the version that got released.

So, London has spoken and it has said that it would like a clown to go with its giant ferris wheel. Truly, the English love of irony and our (justly) famous sense of humour means that we now face 4 years of one of the world’s greatest cities (if not its greatest) being run by a philandering racist who could barely keep a magazine afloat, let alone a capital with a population in excess of that of a lot of countries. As David Mitchell, of Peep Show, said before the result;

Boris as mayor? Lovely to see other comedians getting work, but four years is a bit long for a comedy routine.

Yes, London voted Boris. Or at least somewhere in excess of 20% did, as less than 50% of people could be bothered to vote. So, in 4 years time, when Hyde Park has been turned into a giant fox hunt, and a helter skelter has been erected around the Houses of Parliament, and parking is free for all Chelsea tractors, and boarding fees for Eton are subsidised, perhaps the 55% who couldn’t be bothered to make a small mark on a piece of paper will realise why voting matters.

In the meantime, rumours that the signs at London Heathrow are to be changed to read “Welcome to Wally World” or that the entrance to the Dartford Tunnel is to be redesigned to look more like the image below, could not be confirmed.

London Eye image: wwarby on flickr

PS: I’ve just had a vision of Boris accepting the Olympic Torch in 4 years time, turning round & tripping over his shoe-laces. God help us.

Yesterday saw Yahoo anounce earnings that took many in the industry by surprise. As Michael Arrington on TechCrunch (not a breakfast cereal for robots) summarised:

Total revenue for the quarter was $1.8 billion, net revenues were $1.35 billion. Net Income was $542 million, or $0.37 per share. Analysts were expecting Q1 net revenues of around $1.33 billion, ebitda of $435 million and EPS of $0.09/share.

It seems however that this isn’t going to be enough to make Steve Ballmer increase the Microsoft bid. As Reuters reports:

We think we can accelerate our strategy by buying Yahoo and will pay what makes sense for our shareholders.. I wish Yahoo all the success with its results but it doesn’t affect the value of Yahoo to Microsoft.

So what the hell could Yahoo do to make Microsoft do to up the bid? Well let’s look at what Yahoo does well. Its search engine is doing OK, in the US at least, but then so is Microsoft’s (relatively speaking). Where Yahoo is really ahead of the competition is with its photo (and now video) sharing site, flickr. And if they could increase the number of people paying for premium membership, well, maybe that would be enough to push Ballmer into putting his hands (further) into his pockets.

Whilst it recently overtook its main US rival Photobucket in terms of traffic, it is now dropping again, perhaps as a reaction to the introduction of video to the site, which hasn’t been too popular with a lot of users.

Or maybe it’s because, despite the fact that flickr’s parent company Yahoo owns a search engine, flickr’s breaking one of the first rules of SEO.

You see you can get to flickr at both http://www.flickr.com and at http://flickr.com. Now this means two things.

1. flickr is wasting a lot of links. Because whilst there are millions of links pointing at www.flickr.com, there are also a fair few pointing at the version sitting at http:flickr.com. If Yahoo were to redirect one of these versions to the other, so that there was one canonical version of flickr, it would undoubtedly help their SEO. Maybe then they would even rank #1 on Google (because that’s the engine you need to worry about) for terms like photo sharing which they don’t currently do in the US or the UK.
2. They could end up being blacklisted for spam. You see engines don’t take kindly to sites that try to pull tricks in order to rank highly, or to try and flood the results pages with multiple versions of the same piece of content. I remember working with a site a few years ago that had a similar problem and Yahoo kicked it out of its trusted feed. Now I’m guessing that Yahoo won’t do that to flickr, but can you imagine if Google penalised it? How embarrassing would that be?

Anyway, this needn’t be a big issue. All they need to do is sign up for a Google Webmaster tools account and then they could select which version of the site they want to be the canonical version. Alternatively, if they’ve got any spare developers, they could implement a 301 redirect. I’m not a techie, but I’ve been told it’s a pretty simple thing to do.

Anyway, I hope that the people at flickr don’t take this personally; I’m a huge fan of the site, and if they wanted to give me my next year of premium membership for free as a thank you, I wouldn’t be offended.

(With thanks to Matthew Inman for inspiration)

The digital world is all a-Twitter this morning with the news that Alexa, the much maligned ranking system, is to change its methodology. In an announcement on its site, Alexa explains exactly what this will mean (well, almost):

We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

Up until now Alexa has based its ranking system on sites visited by users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. This meant that its rankings weren’t really worth the paper they could be printed out on to, as it inherently skewed rankings towards sites likely to be visited by Alexa users, most of whom tend to be involved in tech, and particularly SEO.

For instance Matt Cutts once pointed out that according to Alexa data his blog was only slightly less popular than Ask.com. Despite this Alexa data is frequently used by people who simply don’t understand how meaningless the data is (other than for trending purposes). At one company I worked at the board actually decided that Alexa rankings would be a good KPI by which to measure success, not realising that by doing so they encouraged everyone in the business to download the toolbar, thereby skewing the data even further.

So the news that they will now be using multiple data sources is a good thing right? Well, it might be if they actually disclosed what these new sources were. Until they do one can only assume that they will be as statistically water-tight as the ones they have used up till now. With that in mind I’ve been trying to contact Mystic Meg as I’m sure that she’d be able to provide them with the kind of water-tight data they’ve so far lacked.

As of posting this Meg could not be reached for comment; she’s probably too busy downloading the Alexa toolbar and reading Matt Cutts’ blog.