Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Katie.
1. Game changer?
New Scientist recently reported on a paper that a team of research scientists at Google published, which explained the concept of Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). KBT is an alternate way of determining the quality of web pages by looking at how accurate they are – yes, that’s right, Google could compare the facts it finds on web pages to facts that are stored in a knowledge base like The Knowledge Graph/Knowledge Vault and then congratulate the more accurate pages by ranking them better. However, the accuracy of a web page would still only be one of the many factors that ranking would be based on, as the Google scientists say it would be used “in conjunction with existing signals such as PageRank” and “provide an additional signal for evaluating the quality of a website” rather than being the single key factor for rankings.
2. Google Hangout
On Friday John Mueller of Google Switzerland did a Google Hangout where he was asked about whether a web design company should be linking to their own site via all the sites of their customers in the style of ‘site design by XX’. Mueller gave a very definite answer on the topic and said to “definitely put a nofollow rule for those links” as it follows an unnatural linking pattern where “from our point of view, these kind of links, by default, are things where the webmaster doesn’t really place the link explicitly on their own”.
Watch the video in full:
3. ICC Cricket World Cup 2015
Maybe not something that’s rocked everyone’s world, but yet again this week I’ve been enjoying the Cricket World Cup. And cricket has really embraced social media to enhance the experience it can offer fans. Twitter and the ICC launched a series of interactive features for the tournament which includes an ICC Cricket World Cup Timeline, giving fans an instant snapshot of the match with commentary, expert and fan Tweets. The timeline also has a dedicated tab for photos and Vine videos to give fans inside access – a first for global cricket. They also use #AskCaptain, which allows users to participate in post-match interviews, #PlayOfTheDay, which allows users to decide what the best moment of the day was by clicking on a special Twitter Voting Card, and a digital wrap-up of every single match day produced by the ICC and tweeted using #CWCDaily.
4. Weasel hitches a lift
After the debate ‘that’ dress caused last week, it seems that the internet has quickly moved on and is now obsessed with the amazing image of that cheeky baby weasel hitching a ride from a woodpecker. Unfortunately for the woodpecker, what this image actually captured was the weasel trying to kill the woodpecker… but the internet doesn’t care about that (and the photographer said that the woodpecker survived) and has been going mad using the hashtag #weaselpecker:
Obviously, people have photoshopped literally anything they can think of to be riding on the back on a woodpecker, and The Guardian have done a nice roundup of some of the best here.
5. Vince Vaughn stock images
Vince Vaughn has made a great bit of publicity for his new film out of just how bad stock photos truly are. His new film ‘Unfinished Business’ have teamed up with iStock by Getty Images to create a new set of stock photos. What makes this so good is that the twelve images are free to download for editorial use for the next three weeks. So if you need an image that sums up ‘team bonding’, ‘man with pen’ or ‘flip chart presentation’ then why not use Vince Vaughn and his co-stars? You can take a look at the all photos here.
