Enter: The Royal Navy. They have successfully implemented the meta description tag on their homepage and various other pages… however not all pages have had a unique meta description included in the page header:

Add to this the fact that their new cookie warning appears at the top of the page when you first visit the site, as per the screenshot below, and you’re looking for trouble:

You see, in the absence of a meta description, Google and other search engines will usually pick up the first piece of text it finds and given it’s prominence, use it to form the snippet in the search results. Whoops:

Easily fixed, but perhaps something that shouldn’t have been overlooked in the first place. Try not to fall into the same trap.

I will obviously update this post once the results are in :)

Here is the announcement from the AGCC in full:

AGCC Commissioners, sitting as a tribunal, have today revoked the licences of Vantage Limited, Filco Limited and Oxalic Limited, trading as Full Tilt Poker (FTP), with immediate effect.  This follows the earlier suspension of the licences on 29th June 2011.

At a hearing held in London over six days, it emerged that FTP had fundamentally misled AGCC about their operational integrity by continuously reporting as liquid funds balances that had been covertly seized or restrained by US authorities, or that were otherwise not actually available to the operator.  Serious breaches of AGCC regulations include false reporting, unauthorised provision of credit, and failure to report material events.

At the commencement of these proceedings on 26th July, AGCC made clear its preference to hold the hearing in public, to the benefit of players and media alike. However, the tribunal was persuaded that the hearing should be held in camera on the basis of claims by FTP that this would maximise the chance of a commercial rescue of the business for the benefit of players. For this reason an adjournment of 54 days was allowed.

It is important to note that the revocation of FTP’s licences does not, as has been suggested, prevent a reactivation of the business under new ownership and management. Unresolved claims by players against FTP become a matter for the police and civil authorities. Now that FTP’s licences have been revoked, AGCC no longer has jurisdiction over these companies.

The licence of Orinic Limited, a recently added geographic sub-division of the FTP poker room, remains suspended.
The determination notice containing the decision of the Commissioners and reasons for it is available at

http://www.gamblingcontrol.org/userfiles/file/Determination%20Notice%20290911.pdf

What this means for the players who are still trying to extract their funds from FTP is as yet unknown, but it certainly isn’t looking good…

Become a Facebook Developer

Search for the Developer App on Facebook using your search bar:

and accept the relevant permissions:

Create an OpenGraph Enabled App

Don’t worry, you’re not going to publish the app or anything like that, we’re merely going through the motions so your Facebook profile is flagged as Developer. Click on Create New App within the Developer home page:

and give it a name and namespace, anything will do:

You’ll be prompted with a CAPTCHA at this point, just fill it in and move on to the OpenGraph tab on the left hand side of the App page:

Now, OpenGraph allows apps to use the notifications where “X is [action] a [thing]” – eg: “Andy is reading some news on Newspaper“. It does this by having certain words, etc, built into the app. Fill the main ones in here:

You can simply click “Save Changes and Next” on the following two pages and “Save and Finish” the final page.

Enable Facebook Timeline

Now, go back to Facebook, click on your name at the top right to go to your profile and you’ll be presented with a notification for your new Facebook Timeline profile:

All done :)

The trademark in question is Interflora, the offender, none other than UK high street superbrand: Marks & Spencer. You can read more about that case over on The Register, but yesterday’s news is of much more importance.

Yesterday, the EU Court of Justice (full judgement can be found here) ruled in Interflora’s favour stating that M&S are in breach of trademarks in place and should not be allowed to profit off of someone else’s trademark. The UK High Court needs to now follow suit with the Court of Justice’s ruling, which Interflora expect to happen during the course of 2012.

If/Once the High Court applies this change, this will set the precedent for all other companies to block their competitors from bidding on brand names thus taking away potential profits from that company. That leaves a really important question ringing through my head:

Will Google block people from advertising on partial brand names?

For example, could I bid on “inter flowers” “flora inter” etc? The reason I ask, is because within this great iGaming industry in which I work, there are a lot of major players who have a pretty important word in their brand name: bet. If no partial brand-bidding will be allowed either, is it going to be a matter of advertising spend that decides on who gets to use “bet” as part of their brand name? Betfred (who, incidentally finally relaunched their site after over a year of planning, preparation, development and deployment), Betfair, Bet365, 188Bet, SkyBet, SportingBet, UniBet, BetDaq and plenty more will be fighting over it!

As some of you may or may not know, I broke my arm pretty much in half back on the 30th of March this year in a rugby accident. It’s been a long road to recovery and I recently got the news that the metalwork they had put in to stabilise the break back in June has failed, quite catastrophically.

In order to keep a record (as well as keep myself sane), I have decided to backdate everything that happened thus far on a seperate blog and I’m currently in the process of writing up the posts.

For now, I’ve got an appointment with the surgeon tomorrow to discuss what to do about the buggered metal in my arm and to formulate some plan of action. I leave you with a link: Never Fracture Your Humerus and a picture:

If you’re going to change your router, you’re going to need the following bits of information:

Connection Type – PPPoE
VPI/VCI – 8/32
Encapsulation – LLC
Service Category – UBR
Telefonica ADSL Username – adslppp@telefonicanetpa
Telefonica ADSL Password – adslppp

And if you’re wondering what routers you can replace it with, there are a few good modem/routers available on Amazon, but I’d probably spend the money on something reliable like the WRT54GL by Linksys.

Why am I sharing this? Because I’ve swapped out the standard ComTrend router for a few people now, and I keep on forgetting, so in a way, this is just to help me remember :)

I don’t need to go over this in too many details as you can read about it on Dave Naylor’s Blog, where he performed a number of tests. The tests though, seem flawed. Dave managed to submit the removal request for BingoPlayUk.com, a site he does not have access to under GWT, but to date, it still hasn’t been removed:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Abingoplayuk.com

Nor do I think it will be removed. The issue is, unless you have blocked access to the URL or site via robots.txt or a robots meta tag, or have removed the site or page thus serving a 404, Google won’t actually remove the URL. As Dave notes in his post, it warns you of this when you submit the removal request:

I’ll keep an eye on the SERP for BingoPlayUK, but doubt it is going to change without a physical change to the site.

As for James and his results… linkbait-a-licious given his site is brand new? I’m not one to judge but until someone else can verify his results, I’m on the fence.

What this means, for now, is that Full Tilt must not:

1. Allow new customers to register with the site
2. Accept deposits
3. Allow existing customers to withdraw funds that are held in their account
4. Permit customers to participate in any form of poker game play or gambling transaction.

Number 4 being the big one just now. CalvinAyre.com managed to grab the below screenshot that was presented to poker clients trying to withdraw earlier today:

And it’s not going to change for the players any time soon, considering the press release continues on to say:

Due to the nature of the forthcoming judicial proceedings no further comment can be made at this time. The regulatory hearing will be held on Tuesday 26 July 2011 in London.

Will the Gambling Commission on the Isle of Man now take a deeper look at PokerStars following this? PokerStars are a pretty big employer on the Island, so I’m sure they’re already in deep conversations with the Gaming Commission to resolve any issues following Black Friday. It will certainly be interesting to see how that side develops!

Update: Isle of Man Gambling Commission Statement Released

This evening, the Gambling Supervision Commission on the Isle of Man released a statement confirming that PokerStars were operating within the boundaries of their license which:

remains unchanged following today’s statement from the Gambling Control Commission in Alderney.

More information can be found here: http://www.gov.im/gambling/

Having worked on a number of projects here, I can testify to the way the Betfred online business is moving. Things are getting more streamlined and the online operation really is priority number one. Testament to that is the recent acquisition of Bucky Bingo and BOGOF Bingo to further boost the online offerings.

Betfred is said to be preparing to rebrand all Tote shops in the UK, but the online operations will need to be carefully worked out. Betfred runs on Finsoft’s Margin Maker, where as ToteSport.com is well known to run on Orbis’ platform. The “merger” between these two platforms will NOT be pretty, never mind easy.

I look forward to watching it all unfold… here’s to Fred, his team and everyone who has worked on the project to date.