Andy Blackburn – SEO Consultant

I’m currently in transit between Prague and home, and going over my notes from the iGB Super Show, and there is one outfit that really caught my attention. Real Deal Poker‘s platform is something refreshing in what I feel has become a reasonably stagnant market place. There are poker products aplenty out there, all have their pros and cons and all are, within reason, relatively similar in their offering.

Real Deal Poker is the only poker software developer at the moment, which has shied away from RNGs (Random Number Generators) and has developed a platform that actually involves real decks of cards being shuffled (though be it by machines) in order to create a matrix of permutations, from which their poker platform pulls a deck. From my conversations with Gene Gioia the system works something akin to the following:

• A deck of cards (with barcodes) is shuffled by machine
• The order of the cards following the shuffle is recorded and placed in a matrix
• When this particular “deck” is pulled by the poker client, a player (here’s the random element) gets to cut the deck at a random position
• The cards are then dealt in order from that position, to create the rest of the gameplay

The client itself isn’t much different from any of the others that are readily available, with the exception of the burn pot. The dealer shows a burn card being placed to the side of the deck before each phase of play, just like in a real game… which begs the question, why do we never see a burn stack on any other software platform?

The guys over at Real Deal quoted a piece of research which stated that a large percentage (up to 30%!) of players interviewed at land based poker games state trust issues regarding RNGs as their primary reason for not playing online. By eliminating that hurdle, RDP are inviting a target market which would vastly supersede the current number of online poker players, to join the online poker world!

There is a great vid (albeit a little long) of Gene demoing his platform below, and for any of you wanting to see it in action, hope over to www.realdealpoker.com, take a look, and enjoy some free bucks on me:

Whilst adding some social links to a client site, I had a quick search for a facebook button to chuck in a sidebar. Anyone else notices something funky about this SERP:

See for yourself: Google SERP

Unfortunately the page seems to be down, but there’s still a cached version here, screenshot-ed below:

Enough amusement for one day :)

This morning, a slightly misplaced click, opened up a page full of code which caught my attention. Who knew that the page source for the Developer Toolset within Google Chrome would start with:

Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

?
See for yourself. Load up a fresh Chrome window, click the page icon, and scroll down to Developer > Developer Tools:

Right click anywhere in that window, and select View Source:

Tada:

WordPress App for Android – Thoughts

Android’s WordPress App may be light on the features, dull and not overly exciting, but it does the job. Quite how well it does the job will only be truly apparent after I hit the publish button at the end of this post!

WordPress App for Android – What’s missing?

Straight away, we notice the lack of 1 touch buttons to insert H2 tags, most of the nice plugin functionality for SEO stuff and no functionality to upload media from the phone into the post. Makes live blogging a bit of a chore! Still, it’s getting there!

PUMPT! Quite a few people will have noticed the #pumpt hashtag begin to trend on Twitter earlier on today. Links to a webcam in a warehouse in South London began circulating, and suddenly everyone was watching SpaceHoppers inflate! The premise was simple:

• Tweet using #pumpt
• Watch spacehopper get inflated for a random number of seconds
• See your message on the big screen in the background

A video explaining the pumpt concept is below

Bolivian SEO is an ongoing office joke between myself and my (strangely) Bolivian colleague. Although a paid search monkey himself, and not quite as skilled in the art of organic search, he shows some promise and has often threatened to start his own Bolivian SEO Agency.

So, my good friend, consider this a heads up for when you do finally get round to starting up Bolivian SEO dot com, or whatever, I’m already in there ahead of you, by a long shot, and will be stealing all of your business!

Bolivian SEO? HAH!

Today, I found the following in my comments queue:

Many firms charge top dollar in order to produceresults that their clients can be satisfied with. SEO is a very complicated practice of using key wordsrelated to a particular subject or topic that a business orindividual covers. These key words can be found embeddedinto the meta tags of the website. There are many packages available through SEO consultants and Internet Marketing specialists that can be tailor made to suit your requirements…..

Not only was it attempting to link back to use[dash]seo[dot]co[dot]uk but it was also placed on a completely irrelevant post, on the Remembrance Day 2009 Logos.

These jokers advertise “Guaranteed Ranking” with a small “TC Apply” caveat in a nice star shaped “web-two-point-oh-arific” button and list, amongst other items, “Reciprocal links” as one of their “Advanced Bundle” features, as well as “Customized Monthy (sic) Reports” as a “Premium Bundle” feature. You openly advertise that you won’t provide reports on your performance unless clients pay a premium fee? Allow me to refer back and repeat myself, bunch… of… jokers.

Following a week of Sesame Street Logos, Google amended their logo to represent Remembrance Day.

Nice to see Bing joining in also:

Another Remembrance Day post, regarding the Mail Online’s refusal to honour the fallen.

What is one ivy log? And why should you care? The truth is, you shouldn’t, but you might do some time in the future.

One Ivy Log

is a concept for an SEO project we are currently working on in house. It won’t mean much do anyone outside of the WPP group, but for those within, you’ll need to attend the Lab Lunch on October 6th at 12 noon in the Cabot Square offices to find out exactly WHAT is going on.

One Ivy Log: Watch this space.

Google’s logo is missing another letter this morning. 10 days ago, one of the Os took a hike:

Today, as SEL reports, the L has gone missing:

Is this some sort of intergalactic spelling bee? O…L… Whatever next?