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Dear Reader,
In this issue, Google continues to dominate web searching and bloggers continue
to dominate the media. Thank goodness nanotechnology is finding applications in
medicine, and if you want to make a pledge to improve the planet or lift your
soul then read on.
If you have any feedback or would like to discuss how we can help you with your
technology PR, marketing or copywriting, please call me on 0208 996 1653 or
email me at
hbutters@prompt-communications.com
Best regards,
Hazel Butters Prompt Communications
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Technology News
Google unveils next-generation search ideas
by Sean McManus
Google has filed a patent application that reveals its new thinking in how it
could rank websites in future.
Patent application #20050071741 does not mention Google by name but is
widely believed to originate at the Googleplex.
Google introduced the concept of PageRank, protected by a
patent granted to Stanford University. This uses the number of incoming
links to a website as a measure of its quality. Today this is widely abused,
with website owners exchanging links with unrelated sites purely to achieve a
higher PageRank.
The new patent application can be seen partly as an attempt to protect the
integrity of PageRank.
Key ideas include:
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Monitoring not just the presence of links, but how often they are clicked. This
would challenge the practice of housing link farms in little-visited pages of a
website.
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Calculating the average age of the incoming links to a website and prioritising
new links. This could discriminate against sites that conduct short link
exchange campaigns and generate few independent editorial links.
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Checking for disappearing links to see whether a website is losing links as
quickly as it is gaining them.
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Watching how long people spend on a website. This would challenge the practice
of having pages with little content purely to drive people to advertisers or to
secure more places in the search engine listings.
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Checking how long the site's domain name has been registered for. Many spam
websites only register a domain for a year, Google reasons. Longer
registrations could be considered to be related to higher quality websites.
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Checking for changes in a webpage's topic over time. This will guard against
websites falling under new ownership. Website promoters often buy abandoned
domains with high traffic and use them to sell unrelated services.
With all the online debate surrounding this issue, it's important to remember
that this is only a patent application and it has not yet been granted. Nor
will Google be obliged to use the ideas in it, even if it is. It has been
suggested that some ideas are included purely to stop competitors using them.
Google launched in 1998, four years after Yahoo and three years after AltaVista.
Having fought on the quality of its results from the beginning, Google's
ability to weed hype from its search results and stay one step ahead of the
search engine spammers will be key factors in its future success.
Keep on Blogging in the Free World
by Lance Concannon
When it was initially suggested that bloggers might be able to have any sort of
meaningful impact on politics, society and even disrupt the mainstream media,
many commentators dismissed the idea as little more than a fresh batch of
hollow tech-hype. Nevertheless, during elections in the US, UK and more
recently Iran, political blogs have undeniably played their part in shaping the
debates and provided a depth and breadth of coverage which traditional news
sources were unable to match.
One of the most notable recent developments has been the Downing Street Memo
(www.downingstreetmemo.com) crusade which has seen liberal bloggers in the US
force the mainstream American media to cover the story. The leaked memo from
July 2002, seemingly provides damning evidence against the Bush
administration's justification for the Iraq war but had been largely ignored by
US news outlets. However, after a concerted campaign by left wing bloggers to
keep the memos in the public consciousness, the conventional news providers
eventually began to give the story the level of coverage it warranted.
Regardless of how this particular story plays out, there's something to be
learned here: Blogs are important, use them to your advantage or ignore them at
your peril.
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Mobile News
Blackberry users suffer cold turkey
by Edward Pearcey
 US
users of the BlackBerry (or is it CrackBerry) knew what it was to be scared
late last week when the devices were totally unable to send or receive emails
for nearly four hours.
All Research in Motion (maker of the device that is beginning to rival the iPod
in terms of ubiquity) would say is that the issues that brought the service
down were related to it, not the carriers or service providers.
T-Mobile was running over half a million BlackBerrys at the end of Q1, most of
which are used by a business community still bonded by a common admiration for
the device that puts emails in the palm of their hands.
Not that I'm suggesting we return to the days of Morse code to aid long
distance communication (or even a conch shell and a high cliff), but maybe
there's a lesson here about too many people being too reliant on a single
technology.
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The Prompt Guide to Corporate Doublespeak
With Lance Concannon
Stakeholders
Nobody likes to hear the phrase "This is your problem!" because it is so often
followed by the question "What are you going to do about it?" which in turn is
traditionally followed by "Here is your P45."
To cushion the blow of responsibility it's useful to refer to people as
"stakeholders" which makes them feel important - like shareholders, but without
the dividend payments or limited liability. Telling somebody that they are "a
stakeholder in this project" is far more likely to get results than saying
"This is your problem and if things go wrong, you're out on your arse."
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Hot Off The Press
Local Government News, published monthly by B&M Publications in Croydon,
has replaced editor Tom Idle with former assistant editor, Laura Sharman.
Tom Idle left Local Government News to become editor of Environment Business.
Futures and Options Week which is distributed to brokers, dealers and
fund managers has made some internal editorial changes.
Laurence Davison, a formal staff writer since 2004 is now editor of Futures and
Options Week has been made editor. Staff writer and sub-editor Elliot Ackroyd
becomes senior staff writer and sub-editor.
Brian Groom, European editor at The Financial Times has been appointed as
its comment and analysis editor to oversee features and special reports.
This move is to replace Andrew Hill, currently financial editor.
David Walker is also retiring as executive editor. Walker is to be succeded by
current assistant editor Hugh Carnegy.
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NanoTech Corner
Medicine and Biology
by Max McConnell
Biological organisms can be considered on three scales; macro, cellular and
chemical. Macro refers to the actual organism; arms, legs, eyes, ears; think
ants or elephants, so sizes range from meters to millimetres. Cells are the
building blocks of organisms; think stem cells or bacteria, so sizes range from
millimetres to micrometres. The chemistry of biology is very much in the
nanometre regime: cell walls (lipid bilayers) are 7 to 10nm thick; DNA, RNA and
proteins are a few nanometres in diameter and vary in length from 10s to 100s
or even 1000s of nm.
Cells are nature's chemical factories and scientists are busy trying to
understand the complex chemistry that occurs inside cells such as protein
folding, the mysteries of DNA chemistry and how it relates to genes, motor
proteins (that can 'swim') and 'scissor proteins' that cut and manipulate
sections of DNA.
Understanding these processes has many uses in medicine and in particular in
targeted drug delivery and in blood testing.
Nanotechnology in targeted drug delivery is quite advanced now with some
clinical trials in place. The concept is very simple: seal a toxic chemical
within a non-toxic 'wrapper' then attach proteins which are matched to cancer
cells. When injected into your body these medicines only attach to cancerous
cells. Following this, the non-toxic wrapper is disintegrated (by laser at an
appropriate wavelength or the administration of additional drugs) releasing the
toxin in the cancerous cells. The results are stunning - this really works,
well, in rabbits anyway.
Sample testing today takes a long time because your blood is sent off to a lab
for analysis in large machines. But thanks to nanotechnology, scientists are
developing 'lab-on-a-chip'. This is basically a silicon chip with proteins
attached (not trivial). The proteins are matched to viral proteins and when
they attach to any such viral proteins in a blood sample then the electrical
properties of the chip change, thus detecting the presence (or not, we hope!)
of a virus. In theory a micrometre size chip can carry hundreds of different
proteins allowing the testing of hundreds of viruses, diseases, or toxins in
the blood all at once. This remains a fervent research area.
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Website of the week with Sean McManus: www.pledgebank.com
If you've ever wanted to start some community activity, but been concerned
about getting enough people to join in, Pledgebank
is here to help.
Launched just a few weeks ago, Pledgebank enables you to register promises
along the lines of 'I will do something if so many other people will help me'.
Heather Brooke, for example, pledges to set up a British Library users' group,
if 20 people will join it. Jo Swinson MP will organise a meeting about phone
mast applications in her constituency if 20 people will attend.
Many of the pledges are independent of location too: people have promised to
give up smoking together, make charitable donations together, improve their
recycling habits and engage in various political demonstrations in their own
towns.
Website visitors can agree to join a pledge and a counter on each one shows how
many more people are needed before a pledge's threshold has been reached.
Pledges that don't reach their target number of signatories by the deadline are
removed, but many pledges exceed their author's expectations and finish up with
many more signatories than required.
The site says: "As a well intentioned subscriber, you get insurance against
being the only person to show up to a demo in the freezing rain or against
being the parent who discovers they've just volunteered to run the entire
school play on their own. As a pledge creator you get a greatly improved chance
of achieving whatever change it is you want."
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