Many apologies for the break in posting but on this occasion I have a fairly good excuse. Last Sunday (17th August) my wife went into labour and shortly after I became a Dad for the first time!

Jack Finley North and Emma are both doing great and after the initial shock of things (Jack arrived 4 weeks early and within 3 hours) I can honestly say I’ve never been so chuffed.

Things are hectic at the moment so my posts might be a little eratic for the next few weeks but I’ll try to get posting with some regularity as soon as possible.

Wait for a bus and then two come along at once? Well same thing today but with social media websites.

Firstly Smarta.com is billing itself as a information resource for business. Essentially providing social support for your business or future business projects. With the official launch in November 2008 you can check out the blog and register for updates as they come. I’m going to keep an eye on this one as it seems to be backed by some big names like Vodafone and various UK Government agencies.

The next one is called GetCloser.com which is social media site built on your music and film tastes. It’s produced by HMV and isn’t getting the best of press. I’ve had a discussion with Scott Boyd at Fused Nation and he’s got some valid points about how this service is basically a cynical customer profiling system. While I agree about HMV’s motivation for this website I have to say I actually think it’s a very clever way of getting excellent quality data from your customers - you’ve got to respect that.

Are people willing to trade a window into their World for a few nice features on a website? On the whole the answer is yes - people are far too free and easy with their information in my opinion. The law can cover data protection but if people want to hand their personal information over to every Tom, Dick and Harry then they should learn not to be so naive. In the same way that regulation of social networks for children should take the lead from parents protection of your data should start at home.

However other aspects of GetCloser’s marketing of this site are darn right stupid with their marketing agency spamming forums with beta test invitations. Yeah I’ll sign up! Not!

Microsoft’s live search webmaster tools have been updated. Pretty much essential if you want to know what’s going on with your website on live search. The update basically means Microsoft now have webmaster tools comparable to Google’s.

Interesting screen shot on the article I found this on though - it’s for the microsoft.com website with a piddly 186 millions pages!

I posted a little while back about Google’s better support for Flash movies. At the time I was more worried about the potential for abuse by black hat SEOs however an article dissecting in more detail about what Google can and can’t see in Flash movies has reassured me slightly and what’s more it backs up my belief that if you want to be listing in search engines relying on Flash isn’t going to help.

The biggest thing that I noticed involved where JavaScript is used to embed a Flash movie into the page. In these cases it is unlikely Google will be able to access the Flash movie and therefore your content is again worthless. So if you’re using the fantastic standards compliant swfobject make sure you include backwards compatible object tags to ensure Google sees your movies! Or better still only use Flash where you can’t do the same thing in HTML and CSS.