I’ve just been sent an interesting article about the, now infamous, tv-links.co.uk website. For those that don’t know TV Links provided links to TV shows online and in effect gave people the opportunity to view them. From my understanding they didn’t actually host anything themselves, rather just gave people one central location to find links. Like Yahoo did in the early days of the Internet. The big difference this time, is that by providing links to copyrighted content, they have stepped on a few rather big toes, and made themselves a very big target.

The site has now been raided by the police and taken offline, and from the report I’ve just read, the 26 year old from Cheltenham responsible for the site, has been taken into custody… The extra shocking thing about this case, is that not only the owner, but also the moderators associated on the site have been accused of organised crime and could they could now face a possible law suit of £100,000,000 between them which is apparently the amount ‘lost’ by ‘injured’ companies. The other extraordinary thing, is the scale of the operation, which involved international policing; the site was actually hosted on servers in the Netherlands.

Whatever your view on copyright infringement, I think this case does bring to light a scary reality. That someone can be arrested for doing in a small way, what Google (arguably the biggest player on the Internet) does in a much larger way; by providing people with links to content. Why don’t the big companies chase Google and every other search engine, surely it’s exactly the same. They also facilitate people to commit copyright crime, therefore aren’t they aiding in a crime and should be brought to ‘justice’?

We can’t have one rule for the rich and another for everyone else! Read all about it in the article here.

This follows on from another article I came across last week, where a lady in America was being sued for an enormous amount, having lost her case brought by the RIAA. Where will it all end?

If Carlsberg ran conferences they would probably be something like a4uexpo! That was one of the comments I’ve read today about the a4uexpo affiliate marketing conference held last week at ExCeL London. It was a fantastic event although probably the most exhausting couple of days of my life!

Here’s a run-down of my 3 day a4uexpo experience.

Wednesday - Arrive in London after a slightly hair-raising minibus trip down from Bristol with the rest of the a4uexpo team. We’re given ‘party’ bags complete with mints, twirly whirlys and pro-plus! (thanks Claire T) to see us through the next couple of days. I’m not sure who taught the driver to drive, but I made sure I had my seatbelt on all the way! He was a bit of a nutter! We grabbed some dinner, and checked into the hotel.

Thursday 5am - Get up and head over to ExCeL to start our marathon day. I start by putting on my lovely branded a4uexpo t-shirt (The shirt I ordered was giant sized!)

Thursday 8.30am - People start to arrive, things are remarkably organised! Exhibitors are still setting up, but registration opens and away we go. Meanwhile I’m frantically trying to work out how the audio visual equipment works in the conference room I’m in charge of running! I hadn’t expected to be faced with a 20 channel mixing desk and loads of audio equipment I don’t even know the name of. Whatever happened to pressing play/stop… This could be a challenge!

Thursday 11am - Thankfully Ryan and I manage to figure out what all the buttons do and the talks begin. Starting with a really interesting talk about Social Networking and it’s importance and relevance in todays Internet marketing world. Food for thought indeed. There seems to be demand from all quarters at the moment for Facebook application development, it will be interesting to see if it lasts.

Thursday 6pm - The last session is over, and it’s been non-stop all day! Now the fun begins, in the shape of the a4uawards and evening event!

Friday 2am - The awards are over, the David Brent lookalike did his trademark dance and everyone is suitably wasted after cashing in all their free drink tokens. We now head over to the hotel bar for some more drunken ‘networking’ I’ve been involved with these affiliate events for a few years now, and free bars seem to be the one common theme.

Friday 3am - Get to bed at last!

Friday 7am - Wake up and ready to start the final day of the expo, sessions start at 11

Friday 6pm - I’ve never felt so exhausted in my life, but it’s been a great couple of days. All that stands between me and going to bed now is the London rushhour! The last thing you’d want to face when you’re finding it hard to stand up straight without passing out, but with minimal delays and a seat all the way, we manage to get back to Bristol by 9pm.

Only 363 days until the next one!

Whatever happened to editorial control? Since when has every Tom, Dick or Harry been an expert on everything and anything!? Sharing information and ideas is a great thing and the internet has given everyone a voice. Web 2.0 has taken this a step further by taking control away from the few and putting it firmly into the hands of the masses, but do we really want to listen to some guy next door with an over inflated ego and delusions of grandeur. Should we even waste our time.

I think social bookmarking is great, I wasn’t sure at first, but now it’s clear to see how successful and revolutionary it’s really been. Allowing people to work as a society and cherry pick the best bits of information to share with everyone else. You would think it’s faultless, how can the masses be wrong… Right!? Well as we know, public opinion is sometimes influenced more by hysteria, emotions and fiction than cold hard fact.

The scary thing about everyone having so much information, is that people actually believe it makes them experts in everything they spend 5 minutes reading about. I don’t know why doctors even bother going to medical school anymore, when you can spend 5 minutes on Google and self diagnose yourself with practically every deadly disease under the sun.

I think we should have a new form of social web order, one influenced by everyone but ultimately decided upon by experts in their fields. Lets make achievement, hard work and qualifications actually mean something again… I would call it Web3.0, but people have already started running away with that acronym, mostly marketing types who jump on every bandwagon they can, so instead I’ll call it Web2.0 +1. I don’t know if anyone else has used that before, but I think it fits well; it’s still web2.0, just with 1 editor to decide between fact, fiction and plain rubbish.

You might be thinking this all sounds very familiar, well to be honest with you, the idea is nothing new, it’s called a newspaper! People lead very busy lives, we are being presented with more information than ever before, yet we have less and less time to distinguish the crap from the creme. That’s why I don’t think newspapers and magazines have anything to worry about.

So that’s my (not so) revolutionary idea!

Making the most of your time is very important when working for yourself. It’s a great feeling to have complete freedom over your working day, but if you’re not careful this feeling of freedom can leave you with a lack of purpose or direction. It’s hard to stay motivated and excited about what you do, especially when you’re sitting at home, often working on your own. I’m actually very lucky being part of a 2 person team, as we manage to keep each other organised and occupied with work. When one is feeling unmotivated there is always the other to take up the slack, or that’s the theory anyway. It’s not actually been put into practise yet, as we’re both so excited about starting 18a!

But anyway, the point I’m trying to make is how important it is to give yourself some structure and focus to your working day. Being new at this myself, I thought it would be a good idea to think of the best ways of doing this, here are a few of my suggestions.

1. Make a list - Lists are great, start every day by making a list of all the things you want to achieve, complete, work on or just think about. The more items you can tick off the better you’ll feel! I love ticking items off lists, and the time taken to focus your mind on what you want to do that day, is without doubt worth it. I find myself much more productive this way.

2. Turn off the radio - One thing I personally find incredibly distracting when trying to work, is the radio or TV bleating away in the background. Before you know it, you’ve spent the past 20 minutes just sitting listening to the radio! If you’re working, then work! Otherwise you may as well just go and watch TV, because you’re really wasting your time and not achieving nearly as much as you should be. Get all your work done early and go down the pub! I’m not against music full stop, but find something that doesn’t distract you, but helps you focus. Classical music is well known for it’s intelligence effect. It’s all down to taste at the end of the day.

3. Start every day with some fresh air - I’m terrible at this, I often just get up, grab some breakfast and head straight for the computer, but it’s definitely worth taking at least 10 minutes to have a walk/run/cycle or some kind of exercise in the morning.

4. Take breaks - Working hard doesn’t mean not blinking for 8 hours and working solidly. That’s just not productive! Take breaks, make a cup of tea, do the washing up, anything to get some time away from the screen every couple of hours.

5. Develop a points system - This is an idea I read about a little while ago, I don’t remember where exactly… I have a feeling it might have been on pro blogger, but I think it’s a great idea. A points system can help to start your day off in a productive way. Basically it works like this:

i) You come up with a list of the jobs that you feel you ’should’ do every day, but really can’t be bothered to. As I develop and promote a lot of my own websites, for me this includes writing blog articles, commenting on other people’s blog articles, commenting on forums, contacting other website owners to see if they want to swap links… That type of thing. All the kind of monotonous jobs that you could spend your whole life doing, but probably never get round to.

ii) Once you have your list of boring/daily chores you then need to assign each job a certain number of points. I.e. Writing a good blog article takes some time, maybe 30-45 mins, so that’s worth 8 points. Whereas commenting on a forum is pretty quick and easy, so that’s just 1 point for each comment (don’t forget your signature!)

iii) Every day your objective is to get 10 points, your points can be gained by any combination of chores and must not take more than 1 hour, preferably just 30-45 mins to achieve. The great thing about this plan is that you can mix it up, if you don’t feel in the creative writing mood there’s no point in forcing yourself to write something dull and uninspiring, just write on someone else’s blog instead! Comment on a forum or contact a possible business partner.

Starting every day this way gives you structure and helps you make the most of your time online, organised, focussed and effective!

When I first heard about Google sitemaps I have to admit, I was a little skeptical. I didn’t see why we should have to make Google’s life easier. Surely it’s Google’s job to index our site, not the web developers job to spoon feed it information! Infact if practically any other company had tried to impose it’s rules on web masters, I’m sure they would have been rudely ignored. However the big G, with all it’s traffic is just too important to be ignored, so web developers in their masses have started to abide by it’s rules and produce lovely XML based sitemaps for their sites.

Basically a Google sitemap is a very simple XML document, which just lists all the pages on the site, along with the date it was created, the priority of the page and how frequently it changes. A sample sitemap looks something like this:

<urlset
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
                            http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
        <url>
                <loc>http://www.wikipedia.org</loc>
                <lastmod>2006-11-18</lastmod>
                <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
                <priority>0.8</priority>
        </url>
</urlset>

Once you have created your sitemap, you should tell Google where it is, by signing up to Google Webmaster Tools. Now I could go on all day about Google webmaster Tools, as they are very cool. Especially the statistics you can generate, but this isn’t what this post is all about, so I’ll resist the temptation to go off the point any further, suffice to say that every good web master should acquaint themselves with atleast some of Google’s tools for webmasters.

Back to the task in hand.

Another method of ’submitting’ your sitemap is to include a reference to it in your robots.txt file using the following format:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

Auto Generating your Sitemap

If you are anything like me, you’ll have websites which are dynamically generated and therefore can contain millions of pages! Creating a sitemap manually would be virtually impossible, or the biggest waste of time imaginable, that’s why I was so relieved to find the Free Sitemap Generator. It’s a brilliant site which will create a nice shiny sitemap for you. It takes a couple of days due to the level of processing required and the number of people using the service, but it’s really great and worth the wait! Well done Free sitemap generator people, and thanks!

Is it worth submitting your site?

Well that’s a good question, and I’m going to sit on the fence a little. I’ve always tried to make sites which get indexed effectively, so if your website is already in the index then I don’t see the point in creating this sitemap, on the other hand if Google starts getting lazy and only updating it’s index to include sites with a sitemap, then it becomes critically important to have one, but at the moment I don’t see this happening any time soon. So is it worth it? Well yes I think so, if you use a service like Free Sitemap Generator, it only takes a few minutes to setup and if it helps my sites get indexed better then it’s alright with me!

I thought this was very cool, and as it’s vagely website related, thought I’d include it here

Download it here