August 2010

There's just a couple of days left to add your support to the Brits who have submitted panels for the massive digital shindig and Digital Mission destination that is South by South West Interactive 2011.

The Panelpicker lists all of the 2,410 submissions to the conference section of the event with audience votes comprising 30% of the decision-making progress, so those votes are crucial.

There have been some quite big changes in the way search engines work over the past 6-12 months, mainly due to Google rolling out what they’ve nicknamed the Caffeine update.

All this means that SEOs now need a lot more coffee so that they can stay awake all night long wondering how the heck to optimise their clients’ websites. 

So what is this Caffeine? In a nutshell, it is a new web indexing system that means that the crawling and indexing of web pages now happens in parallel (in the past these were two separate things). The impact this has is that the current index (and thus the search results you see) are now far closer to real-time. Gone are the days of waiting for your latest blog post to get indexed; this has probably already happened by the time you’ve boiled the kettle.

Can it really be that time of year already? The PanelPicker for South by South West Interactive (SXSW), the annual mass-gathering of digital types in Austin, Texas is open for votes and we're building a list of all the panels submitted from the UK.

The lengthy journey to Austin hasn't deterred an increasing numbers of Brits from making the trek, with initiatives like the Digital Mission to SXSW organised by Chinwag, which involved nearly 100 companies this year mixing with over 14,000 delegates from the US and beyond.

Project Canvas, a partnership formed by some of the biggest names in broadcasting and digital, has recently received its backing from the BBC trust. The project could change the way in which commercial entities communicate with consumers and the scope for digital content development and interactive services could be huge. So how can digital designers attempt to capitalise on this new venture? And how will it change the market place?