Misspelt domain names is a very common occurance, a user speedily types in a domain name and quickly presses enter without realising they have misspelt the web address and have ended up on a bogus website. One of the most common misspellings of domain names is missing the ‘.’ between ‘WWW’ and the domain name.

Unfortunately because this misspelling results in a new domain name there is no way of diverting the user back to the correct website unless you actually register and own the misspelt domain name.

Savvy domain spotters were quick to spot this and have targeted some of the top sites to capitolise in this free traffic:

Here are some other incorrect www addresses:

• wwwapple.com is a Mac applications review site
• wwwtechcrunch.com is a squatter
• wwwmyspace.com is a squatter
• wwwfacebook.com appears to be broken
• wwwgmail.com appears to be broken
• wwwcnn.com appears to be broken
• wwwdigg.com is a squatter
• wwwning.com redirects to some site called Streetball.com
• wwwespn.com redirects to magazines.com and smartly features ESPN the Magazine

Clever little squatters trick huh? Personally it’s a dirty trick but one that was waiting to be exploited.

FWAPhoto is a dream photography gallery that showcases one photo a Day. The website has some truely inspirational images and has always been my first port of call when looking for fresh inspiration. FWAPhoto has also released an iphone application so you can now get your daily inspiration on your mobile, and even leave comments if you register.

It’s one of those simple sites that you find yourself returning to again and again. Septembers winning picture of the month is a little bit to risqué to show but you can a glimpse of it below. Visit the site or download the app to see that shot and all the other great photos in their entirety.

Tango, the orange flavoured fizzy drink from Britvic PLC, recently launched a new advertising campaign which we featured. The campaign stirred a mixed reaction amongst our readers with some being offended by the dumbing-down tone and offensive language. Others however found them highly amusing and asked where they could get one from.

Popart UK are giving away a limited run of 4 different Tango posters.

1. Too Much Tango Will Make You Bite Stuff
2. Too Much Tango Made Me Think I Was a Ninja
3. Too Much Tango Causes Hair Loss and Casual Sexism
4. Too Much Tango Causes You to Spy on your Mum and Dad

Get a free limited edition Tango poster

Get a free limited edition Tango poster when you buy any poster or print. Offer limited to one poster per customer, while stocks last. Click here to get your free Tango poster

Google Wave is getting a lot of people excited, but if you’re anything like me and have no idea what it is or why it’s making so many people sweat in antipication of getting an invite to test it then look no further. We asked Twitter “Explain what Google Wave is in 140 characters”, we got the following replies:

Helpful descriptions of Google Wave in a nutshell

It’s a communications (email + instant messaging) + social networking tool, with various commun. threads neatly compiled

By EamonSpotlight on Twitter

Google Wave is a rethinking of electronic communication, combining email, instant messaging, status updates & other collaboration features.

By Wabbit42 on Twitter

Think email crossed with instant messaging crossed with forums crossed with chat crossed with rich media… and more

By Aaronrussell on Twitter

I think of wave as email meets IM meets twitter meets facebook wall, perhaps. Will be more obvious when it gets some use.

By Vextasy on Twitter

From what I’ve gathered, it’s the ultimate collaboration tool. Hopefully I’ll be one of the lucky 100,000 testing it.

By Genericsteele on Twitter

Less helpful descriptions of Google Wave…

Its like a mexican wave but online

By Xobman on Twitter

Googles new shiny toy that makes gmail look boring and all the cool kids want an invite and the uncool ones have them!

By Tnash on Twitter

I don’t know

By Savamaloy on Twitter

140 characters? Now, that’s a challenge! Srsly, you should watch the video.

By Raph_ms on Twitter

“Roll the tape!”

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.

We’ve all seen them. “5 ways to cut your toenails”, “10 things that will bore you silly”. What are they? List posts, link bait style.

Here’s the concept. You take a subject or topic. Devise several tips or points on sed subject, then hit <ol>. But you need to stop right now! These things are beginning to grate on me, and many other users. Twitter is becoming overrun with these low quality, rhythmical posts. I figured the best way to convince you would be with another link-bait post. A bit of irony should prove my point.

1. Every topic is covered 5 times now

Such has become the popularity and laziness of bloggers, you’ll often find that every new blog post they write is a list post. And because of the large amount of blogs / bloggers most topics have been covered at-least 2 or 3 times. Ever heard of saturation? Take the subject “Free wordpress designs”. From memory there must be 100’s of these posts around the web, and only a handful are half-decent.

2. They never really live up to expectation

The most enticing thing about a list post is usually the title. But then that’s it. The rest of the posts contain little meaty content, just lots of poor quality content. Ok, granted, some content, such as designs and perhaps link round-ups might work well with list style posts, but founding your blog based upon lists is a bad idea. A user could feel short changed, and never return. Not good!

3. They stop been interesting or effective

Because there’s sooo many, they are getting old quick. And often this means that they become dis-interesting, and actually turn away customers. So if your going to use them, then do it sparingly. Very sparingly.

4. They don’t encourage positive comments

Its been my experience that list posts often encourage, even if by accident negative comments. People disagree often with something that isn’t explained as well as it could if it had its very own article. Plus, because your writing a huge list, you don’t focus on every point as well as possible, and so possibly you may even be wrong. Make sure what your saying is correct!

5. Little to no long term value

If you write a list post, you’ll probably notice that initial buzz quickly wears off. A proper, interesting article, well written with insightful content will gain much more recognition and value as a ‘genuinely’ useful post.

I hope this post has dissuaded you from using so many list posts! Yes, ok I admit, writing a more traditional blog post requires a little more effort, it needs to flow better and you need to keep yourself much more in line as you write to stop wandering off topic, but a well written post will be equally if not more readable than a list post. So stop, and just write normally! Please, I beg you, because I cant take any more meaningless content.

Google Earth has been used once again to uncover some pretty cool images, this time it’s familiar faces. Amongst these natural and man made familiarities include an iPod girl, the 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Oprah Winfey, Jesus Christ on sand dunes in Peru, a Haloween Pumpkin and the Short Circuit robot.

Google Earth spots 6 familiar faces

A native Canadian with a headdress? Or do these hills in Alberta look more the iPod girl with earphones?

A bearded man in a Polish field? But could it be the 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln without his hat?

Five alive? Nope, not this time. But the grounds of Versailles do look remarkably like the Short Circuit robot

Her face is often on American TV screens, but could Oprah Winfey also feature on a maze in Arizona?

Could this be Jesus Christ?

Spookey! Is it a coincidence or has this Massachusetts field been ploughed into a Halloween pumpkin?

Full Credit Dailymail.co.uk

Google Earth

Which one do you like the best? Personally the man made Short Circuit picture is the best. The Abraham Lincoln comparison is a little dubious to us.

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

A look back at the humble beginnings of some of the internets biggest websites. This post was originally posted by the Telegraph and we feel it fits as a sturn reminder to all those companies and individuals who wait and wait and wait in launching their website while messing over the little details. We say – ‘Just launch it!’, as as we can see from the following screenshots you have to start somewhere.

1. Google.com – launched in 1996

2. Facebook.com – launched in 2004

3. Myspace.com – launched in 2003

4. Yahoo.com – launched in 1994

5. Youtube.com – launched in 2005

6. Wikipedia.org – launched in 2001

7. MSN.com – launched in 1995

8. Apple.com – launched in 1987 (screenshot from 1996)

9. Drudgereport.com – launched in 1997

10. Amazon.com – launched in 1995

11. Twitter.com – launched in 2006

12. Whitehouse.gov – launched in 1994

13. Craigslist.org – launched in 1995

14. Nytimes.com – launched in 1995

15. News.bbc.co.uk – launched in 1997

16. Dell.com – launched in 1996

17. Friendsreunited.com – launched in 2000

18. Telegraph.co.uk – launched in 1994

19. Blogger.com – launched in 1999

20. Flickr.com – launched in 2004

Had a website in development for over a year?

Direct your client to this page, prove to them it doesn’t have to be perfect from day one! Web design is NEVER perfect!

There has been a lot of talk lately about mobile plugins for WordPress – there are plugins that make your blog look and work like an iPhone, ones that make it work on Windows Mobile devices and a range of others that are somewhere in-between.

But until recently there haven’t been any mobile plugins available that make your blog work on every handset as well as making it look amazing to every visitor.

I say until recently because there is now a viable alternative to the mobile plugins that have been around for a while and it’s called the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

Screenshots

The acid test of how good it is is to show some blogs with the mobile plugin activated. You can see in the first screenshot below how it looks on different phones, a Nokia N95, a Nokia E71 and an iPhone respectively. The second screenshot shows a comparison between the web and mobile site – you can see that they both compare pretty favourably!

Why it’s different to other mobile plugins

The first major advantage the Wapple Architect plugin has over any other mobile plugins is the number of devices it supports. It can tailor to old WML or CHTML capable handsets as well as brand new ones that support almost as much as a web browser. It uses advanced web services from Wapple to do device detection and it does it to a very high level.

Another huge plus it has is that it retains the installed theme from web to mobile. Colours are maintained and you get the option to upload a specific mobile logo which means you can retain your brand identity perfectly across platforms. And because of the way the plugin is written, that mobile logo will dynamically resize perfectly on the fly to fit any handset no matter what its dimensions are.

You have full control over every aspect of the CSS on the mobile site so you can make any changes to how your site looks – from changing the size of post headers to adding a extra little bit of padding in the navigation menu. You get a couple of stylesheets, pre-populated with the styles you’d need to edit so it really is a case of finding the style you want to change and making a few edits. How good you make your mobile plugin look is really up to you!

In addition, you have the ability to change a whole stack of options. You can allow visitors on mobile to make comments, show the post excerpt on the homepage, show thumbnails on the home page or even build the home page in a slightly different way so that you show selected category posts rather than the latest ones!

Using the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin also means your mobile site scores higher on both the readymobi compatibility test and the W3C mobileOK check than other mobile plugins around. For readymobi, most of the time you’ll score a 5/5 and for W3C, a score of over 90/100 is the norm.

There are dozens and dozens more options – you really get to specify exactly how you want your mobile site to look and function.

How to install

It’s really easy to install either way you want to do it. You can download it and put it in your /wp-content/plugins folder, or install it through the WordPress control panel. Even for a WordPress newbie it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you’ll need to get yourself a free dev key from Wapple in order to authenticate your blog. Head over to the signup page and get yourself one, it only takes a minute and once it’s made its way to your inbox, enter it in the Wapple Architect Basic Settings page to mobilize your WordPress blog!

There are plenty of other resources about this plugin – check out the home page on wordpress.org or it’s home page at Mobile Web Junkie. Finally, here is another screenshot of how the mobile version compares to the web version on Mobile Web Junkie, you can see how the brand identity is completely retained.