Hitchin residents have known for years how good their market was, and now it has been recognised by organisers of the Market Of The Year Awards who decided it was officially the Best Private Market in Britain.
The award was presented by Rosie Winterton, the government minister for markets. Hitchin Market received the award after receiving the most votes from the public.
The French and German governments have both issued statements recently advising their citizens to stop using Internet Explorer 6. It advises users to move to another browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome, or upgrade Internet Explorer to versions 7 or 8. The UK government is under pressure to issue the same warning but has yet to do so.
Google has released its annual Zeitgeist giving insights into the collective search trends of internet users in 2009. A clear trend has been the rise of social media sites with Facebook, Tuenti (a Spanish version of the former) and Twitter making up three of the top four places, topped only by Michael Jackson.
Google have been releasing their annual Zeitgeist since 2001. While Yahoo and Bing also release similar reports, the huge market share of Google makes their report all the more important.
Christmas is fast approaching, and online retailers should be gearing up for the increased volumes of trade that peak on Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is known as the busiest internet shopping day of the year. It is called Cyber Monday due to the fact that it happens every year on the first Monday of December.
Last year Amazon UK fulfilled 1.4 million items on Cyber Monday. At once stage this resulted in 16 items per second being ordered and the most items ordered in a 24 hour period.
The BBC is changing how it publishes content online as it adopts one of the best known search engine optimisation (SEO) practises. This change should increase the number of visitors who visit the site from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live.
The change it is making, is to increase the length of the headline for stories. By doing this they are allowing the journalists to add words that will help the article get found. The headline appears as the web page title when viewing that BBC story.
Those with an eye for detail may have noticed a change that Google has rolled out this week on its search result pages. Google are replacing some of the green URLs (a URL is the web address) of search results with something new: hierarchical links.
There are a few problems with showing URLs in search results. When a bit of thought has been put into how a site's URLs should be formatted, they can be descriptive and helpful to the seacher. But often they are too long to display fully, or too cryptic to provide any extra information about that search result.
Microsoft's search engine Bing (previously known as Live and before that as MSN) is to display results from Wolfram Alpha, greatly enhancing its functionality. This will certainly boosts its appeal and help it catch up with the mammoth Google. While Google controls a massive 70% of the market, Bing is its fastest growing competitor.
When Obama was campaigning, he promised to bring change, and that is exactly what he did to the White House website www.whitehouse.gov which now runs on Drupal. While things may not look different on the outside, you can expect to see many changes over time as they start plugging in some of the thousands of modules that users around the world have created.
Could you ever imagine Hitchin hosting a round of world rally car racing? The streets would be turned into race tracks with super charged cars racing across the town square, past beautiful old buildings and ancient churches. Try to conjure up the smell of oil and petrol and burning rubber in our quiet town. Well, it has already happened!
News out this week highlighted the importance of finding the right partner for your internet marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). The consequences of making the wrong decision and hiring someone who turns out to use techniques, known in the trade as blackhat practises, can have dire consequences. Blackhat techniques include keyword stuffing, the use of doorway pages, invisible text, multiple domains, duplicated content and many others, in an attempt to trick search engines to place websites higher up the results.