IanVisits…

A new comscore report has found that some of the UK’s largest news providers get more overseas visits than they do from within the UK.

Considering that the UK population is a tiny fraction of the global market - that shouldn’t be a huge surprise frankly.

However, I track a lot of US media, and it still surprises me how “localised” the news is. It is difficult to get a truely global news perspective from the vast majority of US media, and I wonder if that is driving people to seek news from other sources - and ending up with the UK newspapers and agencies.

Unsurprising, the BBC tops the traffic chart, with 61% of its traffic coming from outside the UK, although the Financial Times is the most international publication with 85% of its traffic coming from outside the UK.
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1457

Incidentally, my own business news website is in the same situation, with some 70% of my traffic coming from outside the UK.

Just writing a little article about the cosmetics firm, Avon and doing a bit of research.

According to Wikipedia:

Avon is a “sin of lust or uncontrollable emotion” under Jewish Halakha law.

…no wonder all those 1950’s housewives liked it so much.

I doubt there is a person on the planet by now who hasn’t heard that “Little Madeline” is missing. Nonetherless, there is now a website set up to add to the media overload.

I thought I would have a look and I instantly noticed a large block of empty space at the bottom of the page, and did as I always do when seeing that - I clicked CTRL+A.

A load of hidden text appeared.

Now this is an interesting ethical issue for the search engines.

The website is spamming - no question about it. That is bad, also - no question about it.

I am going to be charitable and presume that this is an amateur web designer who doesn’t know that hidden text is a VERY BAD THING to do. The text is not particuarly spammy itself, and there really is no need to “cloak” it frankly.

However, considering the media fuss right now - would any search engine risk the backlash if they banned the website from their index?

It’s a difficult one.

Personally, I think that they should ban the website as “rules are rules”. If you let this pass, then any charity style website can claim to be allowed to spam the search engines.

This is not some insignificant little website either - according to BBC News 24 this morning, over 4 million people have visited the website so far.

Google does tend to try and contact webmasters when banning them - so that may alleviate the issue slightly.

www.findmadeline.com

Here is the bottom of the site as you would normally see it:

And here is the hidden text which the search engines would be seeing:

I read this morning on the BBC News website that some 5,000 letters and notes written by Charles Darwin are to be published online.

As I also have a hobby researching history, I spend a lot of time reading other peoples letters and correspondence to get a feel for how people were reacting to a situation in the past.

How about today’s correspondence though?

We still write to each other - but use email and text messages as the method of communication.

Do you save all your emails and SMS’s though?

I have saved a few SMS’s which are personal to me, but the bulk is deleted - so no record of my correspondence is left for future generations to study - if you’ll forgive the conceit that future generations would actually want to read my writings!

SMS is not so important - but email is the modern letter.

How often have you lost old emails due to backup failures, or simply deleted them as “old and not important” ?

Checking my email achive, it seems that my oldest email is from the 13th November 1999 - even though I know I was using email long before that. How much of my life have I lost?

This is not just idle curiosity though - when I came out of hospital a few years ago and realised that I had lost a large chunk of my memory (it wasn’t immediatly obvious), I was able to scan down years worth of emails to try and rebuild a picture of what I had done over the years. My email archive was a vast help in that.

Anyway - back on topic - I do find myself wondering how future generations might understand the society of today if we treat our email archives with such casual contempt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6657237.stm