You may already know about this, but Google has rolled out “Sidewiki”, whereby Google Toolbar users can comment directly (and permanently) on webpages. The basic idea is that every page on your site now comes with a publicly accessible discussion board that cannot be moderated.

Google Sidewiki is a new browser plug-in that adds a universal commenting system to the web, allowing users to comment and read other people’s comments on any page on the internet. It’s not a new idea, but, well, it’s Google.

Immediate reactions

Jeff Jarvis from the Buzzmachine comments, concerns for blog owners:

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google.

Sean Carton on what Google Sidewiki means to marketers:

There’s an algorithm that determines which comments are more relevant and moves them to the top of the sidebar. Of course, exactly how relevance is determined has yet to be explained (and probably never will be), leading to yet another SEO type battle, where “experts” duke it out over whether they can get your comments to the top of the heap.

Top tip: How to claim your website’s Google Sidewiki

An important aspect is that if you register a site as yours in your Google profile, you can leave a comment as the site owner which stays at the top. This would be good for your clients for pushing USPs and contact details etc.

1. Install the latest Google Toolbar with Google Sidewiki.

2. Once installed, you will need to restart your web browser, I use Firefox, so you will probably get a message telling you that you need to restart Firefox.

3. Visit your website, the website home page where you want to claim your Google Sidewiki.

4. Make sure that Google Sidewiki is turned on in the Google Toolbar. You may need to log in to your Google account and adjust your Google Toobar settings so that it’s turned on. While you browse the web, you will see the Google Wiki sidebar on the left side of your web browser, it will look like this:

5. Open up the Google Sidewiki. If you aren’t signed into your Google Account, you need to sign into your Google account first.

6. Once signed in, you will see the name of your site, as well as an area to “Edit your name” – Change the name of your website if necessary, you might want to include your company name and a few keywords if you feel so inclined to do so.

7. Add a title of the Entry, perhaps “Welcome to Vizion Interative”.

8. Add your entry:

Thanks for visiting The Floating Frog. If you’re reading this, then you most likely have the Google Sidewiki turned on.

The Floating Frog provides a daily dose of web, design, social, dev and current trends. If you’re interested in any of these issues, you might want to subscribe to my RSS Feed, which is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/thefloatingfrog

Thanks for visiting.

9. Once you’ve entered the text you want and the title of the entry, click the “Write as Owner” checkbox, and hit the “Publish” button.

Don’t forget to authenticate your site first!

What you’ll need to do first is verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters). You’ll need a Google Account. Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the site.

Then to verify the site you’ll need to add a file that Google specifies or an HTML Meta Tag to your site. Once one of those are added, then you log into Google Webmaster Tools and click on “verify”.

Once it’s verified in Google Webmaster Tools and you have the new Google Toolbar installed, you will need to go to your site’s home page. Click on the Sidewiki on the Toolbar and you should then see the “write as owner” area.

Found this article useful?

Let us know below in the comments.

Today it’s Googles official 11th birthday! To mark this day Google have tweaked their logo to make the double L look like 11.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. This year it’s Climate Change!

Blog Action Day video

Why Climate Change?

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis.

Founding story

Blog Action Day was founded by Collis & Cyan Ta’eed in the summer of 2007. With the support of their team at Envato in Australia as well as numerous volunteers, they recruited over 20,000 bloggers to write about the issue of Environment on October 15, 2007 – making the first Blog Action Day an immediate and quite unexpected success.

In 2009, Collis & Cyan asked the team at Change.org, the world’s leading blog network for social issues, to take over responsibility of Blog Action Day and expand its reach. We were honored to accept the offer.

BeTheMiddleman.com, the private property portal we’ve been developing has finally gone live to the public.

The team has tried to capture the essence of the site through the slogan – No Agents No Fees No Fuss. Estate Agents may soon find themselves losing out to cost-efficient online alternatives that put the power of selling and letting back into their own hands.

The Price

BeTheMiddleman.com aims to be the best, to encompass the entire housing ladder and to always be free. The service is built on a Freeium model, where advertisers can start by adding a free property listing and then be offered premium features at a small cost to give their property maximum exposure. A simple Flickr-style premium account will be introduced soon that allows power users unlimited access to the amount of listings they can post. The free account will have no limits apart from the amount of listings they can show at any one time. On top of this each listing can be upgraded with targeted featured spots around the site. These premium features will enable BeTheMiddleman.com to compete with the major players and allow us to reinvest back into the business to fulfill our objectives.

Third party products and services are also been planned for inclusion including insurance, mortgage quotes, legal documents, contracts, HIPS, energy certificates and much more besides.

Help us promote BeTheMiddleman.com

The initial marketing of the soft launched BeTheMiddleman.com is relying on the online community to help us. Once we have road tested the service and the user experience we’ll be in a better position to crank up into a higher gear and market ourselves. Until then we’re asking for your support. We have developed a section dedicated to all kinds of banners and text link for you to put on your website. For those that place a banner on their site we’ll offer them a premium account, giving them unrestricted access.

We’ve soft launched the site to help us gauge the initial reaction, to give us time to sort any outstanding issues and to develop some more killer features.

The Floating Frog is my baby and has been for several years. Starting as a personal portfolio website it has now developed into a leading UK based Digital Design Blog, if there is such a niche? Lately I’ve been a bit quite as all my attention has been concentrated towards a very exciting project I’ve been working on, with Zoe, Doug and Nick. Bethemiddleman.com is it’s name and through all the efforts of the team throughout the last few months, it’s almost ready to go into BETA!

It’s an exciting exercise to see if we can use our expertise and industry knowledge and start an online property portal for private house sales that has the potential to changing the way the property market operates and how we buy and sell our homes in the future. It’s a subject we all feel passionate about and we want to shake things up a bit. For those who have never heard of Bethemiddleman.com before, here is a quick summary of the Bethemiddleman.com concept.

Overview: Bethemiddleman.com cuts out the middleman (the Estate Agent) and let’s you advertise your property for sale direct to potential purchasers.

The Offer: Bethemiddleman.com let’s you do this for FREE! No Agents No Fees No Fuss!

The whole housing market: Bethemiddleman.com doesn’t stop with just buying and selling, it links up the entire housing market. Landlords can advertise a whole property or a room to let. Renters can in turn search, find and contact these landlords.

Savings: Bethemiddleman.com is FREE. If you’re selling your home, you have the potential or saving thousands in agents fees by missing them out. While this new market develops, you can also use Bethemiddleman.com and your existing Estate Agent. The service is so flexible and will be a pleasure to use.

We’re going to have a countdown for the beta launch on the website as soon as date have been agreed so for this and everything else, stay up to date over on the blog. Also signup for free to get the VIP treatment.

Yesterday Patrick twittered about an article in The Times – apparently Your Golf Travel are advertising for a writer/researcher to travel the world playing golf and talking about it. Applications are encouraged from redundant ‘city types’ – city types are getting a bad rap at the moment so this does sound a little like charity from the company owners (also ex ‘city-types’) – but then, who better to go and work for a golf company than someone who knows about business and plays a lot of golf?!

Anyway, I actually quite like the idea. Remember the Wookey Hole job advert on Piggynap the other week? Well, they said that because of employment regulations and their lack of hard evidence for witches being female, they had to accept applications from men. This might be a tenuous example but I’ve never been one for positive discrimination – you should be allowed to hire the best person for the job. So Your Golf Travel are holding a golf tournament to find the best candidate. Yes! Interview By Tournament!

Entrants have to have a handicap of less than 14 (whatever that means) so presumably CV’s saying “I’m sort of okay at golf” will go straight in the bin. I applaud Your Golf Travel for choosing employees based on their own metrics, and I reckon they’ll get loads of applicants from people really well suited to the job.

In fact, this is an interview that could run and run, Apprentice/British Open style. There could be pictures and video of  ex-city men, wearing slightly ragged suits, playing ‘desperation golf’ with a set of sticks because they had to pawn their clubs, and instead of ‘You’re Fired’ they’re told ‘You’re Shit At Golf’…! When not playing golf they could be seen sleeping under old copies of the Financial Times in the club house, or hunting for food on the green.

Am I getting too much fun out of this?

fr0gsqu1d

A former oil rig worker spent 15 years building an exact replica of a North Sea platform – out of more than four million matchsticks. David Reynolds, 51, spent up to 10 hours each day painstakingly crafting the half a ton model of the Brent Bravo rig in his living room. The full article and image gallery can be viewed here.

Buzzing around Twitter today was a link to a Microsoft competition where users of Internet Explorer 8 have the chance of winning $10,000. What you have to do is follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter, watch out for the clues to uncover the location of the prize somewhere on the internet. Sounds like a fun challenge, but what’s in it for Microsoft?

IE8 has been out now for a short period and believe is now part of Windows update. The amount of IE8 users should now increase dramatically as users update. To coincide with this launch, Microsoft are tangling a carrot at users of other browsers with the aim of converting them to IE8. $10,000 is a very tempting but requires IE8 to participate. They follow up this tasty carrot by saying:

But you’ll never find it using old Firefox (so get rid of it, or get lost.)

A lawsuit in the happening?

To me this seems like anti-competitive behaviour. Microsoft got fined £680.9m in May 2008 by the European Commission and previously £194m in 2006 for a similar act. This isn’t in the same relms, but it’s still targetting it’s competitor Firefox with a monetory bribe.

The concept

Stripped down, this is a clever viral campaign. It engages both non-IE8 users and the ever growing Twitter community for a period of time. Personally I don’t have the time to digest it, but I’m sure others will embrace it.

Will you be taking part?

Micro-sculptor Willard Wigan is launching a new exhibition. The Birtish sculptor is known all around the world for his miniature sculptures that are invisible to the naked eye. Willard uses tiny homemade tools and paints with a hair plucked from a housefly’s back and carves microscopic figures from grains of rice or sand or sugar. The sculptures, which often take months to complete, are then mounted on pin heads or needles.

Curiosity cat

Pictured is a miniature sculpture of the US President Barack Obama and his family

A big part in history, but scaled down in size…. Henry VIII and his six wives

The Incredible Hulk rips apart the head of the needle……

Former South African president Nelson Mandela perched in the eye of a needle….

Marilyn Monroe in a classic pose on a diamond…..

The prestigious Oscar statuette…..

Homer strangles Bart in a classic scene from the The Simpsons…..

A Dressage rider sits elegantly on top of a needle……

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No….. it’s Superman! A very small Superman that is…..

A detailed Statue of Liberty……

Dwarfed… Snow White and her Seven Dwarfs

The Last Supper…..

Dorothy and her friends on the yellow brick road in a scene from The Wizard of Oz..

Born in 1957 in Birmingham, Willard Wigan began his artistic life at a tender age. Suffering from dyslexia and learning difficulties, he struggled at school, finding solace in creating art of such minute proportions that it virtually could not be seen with the naked eye.

“It began when I was five years old,” says Willard. “I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn’t hold me back and my teachers couldn’t criticise me. That’s how my career as a micro-sculptor began.”

Willard’s micro-sculptures have become so minute that they are only visible through a microscope. Each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle, or on a pin head.

The personal sacrifice involved in creating such wondrous, yet scarcely believable, pieces is inconceivable to most. Willard enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by traffic outside can affect Willard’s work. He often works through the night when there is minimal disruption.

Willard’s work is described as “the eighth wonder of the world”. One of the specifically commissioned works includes the replica of the iconic Lloyds of London Building. This piece was later auctioned by Eric Knowles of Bonhams. Willard was subsequently honoured with receiving an MBE from HRH Prince Charles for his services to art.

Unsurprisingly, Willard’s life is now attracting significant attention from the literary and film industries alike, each eager to secure his life story.

You can see Willard Wigan’s work at 40a Museum Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1A 1LU

Last year Hitwise highlighted the massive growth in UK Internet traffic to Polish websites, noting how the increase in visits reflected the growth of the Polish immigrant population in the UK (over a million). Things have changed significantly since then; and one theory is that many Polish workers are returning home to escape the recession in the UK.

Estimates as to the number of Polish people in the UK range from half a million to over a million. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe has led to a rush for the ‘Polish Pound’, with everyone from multinational banks to independent grocers getting in on the act. One of the great things about Hitwise is that we can use Internet data to illustrate changes such as these. As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet traffic to a Hitwise custom category consisting of the top 100 Polish language and community websites increased nine-fold between January 2006 and January 2008.

This year the wind has seemingly changed direction:

While statistics from the Home Office indicate that the number of Eastern European migrants has fallen since the economic downturn started to bite, it is less clear whether there has been a net reduction on the number of Polish and other ‘new Europe’ citizens living in the UK. Maybe Hitwise stats might provide some evidence: if Polish Internet usage in the UK increased during the period of net immigration, surely the opposite trend would imply net migration? Well, looking at the chart below, it’s certainly the case that Polish Internet usage is declining in the UK for the first time.

Top 10 Polish websites in the UK, ranked by market share of Internet visits to the Polish sites custom category during April 2009

1. Nasza Klasa (22.8%)
2. Google Poland (15.7%)
3. Onet.eu (14.3%)
4. Wirtualna Polska (9.8%)
5. Interia.pl (4.6%)
6. poczta.wp.pl (4.5%)
7. www.o2.pl (3.2%)
8. Polish Wikipedia (1.8%)
9. Peb (1.4%)
10. Wizz Air (1.3%)

Nasza Klasa, as highlighted in our recent post Top 20 Websites and Search Engines in the UK, in the 9th most popular Social Media website in the UK, above websites like Gumtree.com with a respectable 0.63% of the overall traffic.