New Online Media and Advertising Rules on the Way

How up to speed are you about the forthcoming new rules about how businesses promote themselves online?

Last week the Advertising Association submitted recommendations to the Committee of Advertising Practice to extend the non-broadcast code to company websites and even branded Pages on social networking websites like Facebook.

It's been suggested that a refreshed version of the Code will come out in Autumn and will be enforced by the Advertising Standards Association, who already enforce the Non-broadcast Code (CAP Code) which already covers paid for online advertising.

My guess is that like most of us, this has one has crept up unawares, especially on smaller businesses. So I'll be reviewing both the current code and the new proposals shortly and will report back on the implications for websites, socil networking and online advertising.

ASBO's for Dogs? Now thats what I call tactical.

Just heard a BBC radio news headline about a government proposal for ASBO's for Dogs. Yes really.

Now doesn't that sound just like something from an episode of satirical political comedy The Thick of It? Ollie Reader throws his desperate Minister a quick headline grabbing policy idea to take the heat off - "Quick Ollie, give me something I can go to Cabinet with this week; ASBO's for dogs? That'll do!"

Or maybe it's just coincidence that the proposal comes from the department of Home Secretary Alan Johnson; a former postman.

In either event, it sounds awfully like a short term tactical measure, at a time when surely the attention should be on strategy, and dare I say it the 'bigger issues'.

In other words, sounds like the tail is wagging the dog.

Are Ebay and Amazon underated as E-commerce sales channels?

I've just been having a catch up with a former client who's coming back for some more work, and our discussion has raised some interesting issues about the use of Ebay and Amazon.

Useful Free Link Analysis Tools

Here are a few useful free link analysis tools and backlink checkers....

Why Don't all Backlinks show up in a link: Search on Google?

Here's a nagging little issue that's been bugging me for ages, and recently came to a head when a client asked me why they had so few backlinks showing up when they use the link colon command?