Every year most popular search engines releases the stats which are the compilation of the most searched queries of the year. All popular search engines on internet have released their own top search terms in this year, and they might be interesting for you.

If you own a website, it is always good to know what is popular and in trend at the given moment. If you react fast and provide some quality work, you will success. As 2010 comes to a close, it is time to check out which terms was the most popular in 2010.

Google Top Search Terms in 2010

Google’s top search engine terms is also known as Google Zeitgeist. There you can see some detailed stats about search engine terms on a global or a local areas.

Here are the 10 search queries that grew fastest in 2010 (UK):
1 Chatroulette
2 Formspring
3 Hotmail signin
4 ipad
5 justin bieber
6 worldcup 2010
7 fb
8 santander
9 youtube
10 metcheck

Top 10 Fastest-Rising People that grew fastest in 2010 (UK)
1 Kristian digby
2 justin bieber
3 nicki minaj
4 ellie goulding
5 alexander
6 mcqueen
7 kesha
8 miranda kerr
9 kim kardashian
10 katy perry

Yahoo! Top Search Terms in 2010

Yahoo is one of the most popular search engine today. Serving billions of search queries each year with thousands of satisfied users and members worldwide.

Here are top 10 most popular search queries in 2010 (UK):

1. Lottery
2. Job centre
3. Weather
4. Big Brother
5. Cheryl Cole
6. TV guide
7. World Cup
8. Train times
9. Katie Price
10. Horoscopes

Yahoo! has a great website which shows a whole Year in Review. Showing you the most popular trends and keywords from this search engine, allowing you to find some other good information.

Bing Top Search Engine Terms in 2010

The Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft and it is one of the three most popular search engines on internet. Let’s see which terms was the most popular in 2010 from this search engine.

The most popular overall search queries in 2010 (USA):

1 kim kardashian
2 sandra bullock
3 tiger woods
4 lady gaga
5 barack obama
6 hairstyles
7 kate goosselin
8 walmart
9 justin bieber
10 free

Most popular people searched in 2010 on Bing:

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Sandra Bullock,
3. Tiger Woods,
4. Lady Gaga
5. Barack Obama
6. Kate Gosselin
7. Justin Bieber
8. Jesse James
9. Lindsay Lohan
10. Jennifer Aniston
11. Michael Jackson

You can also see the most popular people searched in 2010 on Bing from their official blog. Interesting thing to notice there is that Kim Kardashian has received roughly 20% more searches than the second most popular search term on Bing in 2010.

Top 10 Search Terms on All Search Engines

So, let’s now look which are the most popular search engine terms on all search engines was in 2010. Including all above search engine query stats from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Top 10 overall search engine terms in 2010:

1 Justin Bieber (Celebrity)
2 World Cup (Global event)
3 iPad (Apple’s gadget)
4 iPhone (Apple’s gadget)
5 Kim Kardashian (Celebrity)
6 Lady Gaga (Celebrity)
7 Chatroulette (Online service)
8 BP Oil Spill (Global event)
9 Megan Fox (Celebrity)
10 Swine Flu (Global event)

So, what we can learn from this? We have here 4 celebrities, 3 global events, 2 popular gadgets and 1 online service. So, we can guarantee that the most popular searches on internet in UK (and probably worldwide) are related to the celebrities. Following with global events, Apple products and online services.

“It’s quite normal for e-commerce sites to increase sales by 100% or more as a result of usability. More important, they can probably avoid 9 of 10 returns by eliminating most mis-designed items (a 1000% improvement of the error rate metric)”.
- Jakob Nielsen

“A report by Creative Good showed that 39 per cent of test shoppers failed in their buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate. Additionally, 56 per cent of search attempts failed”.
- Creative Good

“Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use”.
- Forrester Research

“The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”
- Tom Peters

“A bad web site is like a grumpy salesperson.”
- Jakob Nielsen

Why is it important?

If your visitors find your site but then can’t navigate it, use any of the functionality on it or find what they’re looking for, then they will leave empty handed and disappointed in you and your site. Need I say more?

Link to Usability papers:

Measuring the quality of eService
“By conducting exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we found that e-service quality is measured on six dimensions: information quality, website usability, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization”.

Designing usable online stores: A landscape preference perspective
As an exploratory effort, we adopted and extended Kaplan’s landscape preference model by including factors of legibility, coherence, variety, and mystery, and examined their effect on cognitive and affective appraisals and their impact on purchase intention…Our ?ndings demonstrated that the proposed model explained a large amount of the variance of purchase intention, invariant across different subgroups.

A Usability Evaluation of the Business and Industry Web Site
“During September and October 2008, the Usability Lab tested 12 novice participants in a “one-click” usability study of two different versions of a low-fidelity prototype of the Business andIndustry main page. The page was developed by the current Economic Web Site RedesignTeam. The page did not have any clickable links, though it did include text that appeared to belinks. Participants were given a set of tasks and were asked to click on a link that they felt would best lead them to information that would answer the task question. The link did not takethe participant to another page— once the participant had clicked, the task was complete. Thestudy evaluated the success and satisfaction of the participants and whether the link theparticipants chose would have led them to the answer they were seeking”.

Usability Evaluation of Three Social Networking Sites

“This study evaluatedthe usability of three of the most popular social networking sites (MySpace,Facebook, and Orkut). Results revealed issues related to confusing terminology,inadequate feedback and error messages, and improper link location impacted user performance and satisfaction”.

Webpage aesthetics, performance, and usability:Design variables and their effects

“Fifty-seven design variables and ten underlying clusters that conceptualize the structure of user webpage judgement are identified through content analysis on literature and structured interviews, balanced incomplete block user survey administration, and cluster analysis.”

The Discussion on Influence of Website Usability towards User Acceptability

“From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the development of Internet technology makes the existing value of websites has revolutionary change. How to provide suitable service platform for human-machine interaction through websites is the subject of debate that many technology developers and users concern about nowadays. This study uses Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the foundation, from the perspective of tourism companies and Internet users to analyze the relevant
factors of website usability”.

Effects of Interactivity on Website Involvement and Purchase Intention

“This study aims to understand how website interactivity (active control and reciprocal communication) can impact purchase intention through website involvement and how the impacts are moderated by the type of products featured on websites”.

Technical Review: Current Issues of Usability Testing

“System usability can be measured through various methods. One of the more important and widely employed techniques is ‘usability testing’, where asks, number of users, evaluators, and other factors are the main elements. This paper reviews usability testing together with current issues that can influence usability testing results, both negatively and positively. It also reviews web usability testing. In addition, in this paper, usability testing in the future is considered in order that improvements may be made.”

Recuperating Website Link Structure Using Fuzzy Relations between the Content and Web Pages

“The link structure of website allows us to spread the link power of home page to the individual pages of the site. In this paper we define the content and web pages as two important and prominent factors in website navigation and restate the enhancement in the website navigation as making some useful changes in the link structure of the website based on the aforementioned factors. Then we suggest a new method for proposing the changes using fuzzy approach to optimize the website architecture.”

A Heuristic Based Approach for Improving Website Link Structure and Navigation

“As web sites evolve over time, their complexity in both the content and the link structure also tend to increase,hence, causing disorientation and cognitive overload on the user side. User traversals tend to become more cumbersome,and information get hidden deep inside long chains of web pages and links. As a result, we need more creative design features to allow automatic and dynamic improvement of web site link structure. This paper describes a set of heuristics to optimize the web site usability and link structure.”

RockMelt, which is launching in beta, is “challenging the conventional assumption that a browser is all about navigating pages.”

The company’s first blog post explains:

With RockMelt we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser can and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages. Today, the browser connects you to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on. Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on. And RockMelt will tell you when something new happens.

On paper, RockMelt, which is built on Google’s Chromium open source browser project, looks intriguing. Consumption habits on the web have changed, and as we’ve seen in the mobile space, there are plenty of opportunities to create user experiences that allow consumers to interact with existing content and applications in new ways that are consistent with those changing consumption habits. From the looks of it, RockMelt is making a decent attempt to make using the internet and popular social networking services like Facebook a more seamless exercise.

Despite all this, it’s hard to see RockMelt gaining much mainstream traction any time soon. The browser market is highly-competitive and will be a very tough nut to crack. As a Facebook account is required to use RockMelt, the company has inherently limited its market to Facebook’s 500m registered users, and will have to convince them that there are no privacy issues with logging in to browse. Perhaps most importantly, history is not on RockMelt’s side. As others have noted, the makers of the Flock browser have done a good job making the browser more social but they haven’t been rewarded by the market for it.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt that, for many consumers, using the internet has become a ‘social’ experience. But it’s quite unclear whether or not there’s a need for an additional layer of ‘social’ at the browser level. Even for a billion-dollar behemoth like Google, browser market share is hard won. Reinventing the browsing experience, marketing that new experience and educating consumers will not be easy, nor will it be cheap.

Many new clients believe that climbing the rankings is down to technical tweaking of the website, when actually it’s hugely influenced by the number of inbound links to a site.

You see, search engines like Google look at what value the rest of the web places on a particular web property.

How often other relevant websites talk about a site and, crucially, link to it, is a far better way for an algorithm to determine which pages are going to be useful to searchers.

It’s going to place far more value on peer assessment than it does on the metadata you post up.

Think about it, when you search for ‘cheap laptops’, do you want to see what other people found useful or a list of websites that want to sell you laptops, cheap or otherwise?

Encouraging inbound links to your pages is crucial. If you build them, customers will come.

So how can you generate this elusive link juice for your site? Here are my top tips for beginners.

Strike all thoughts of link farms from your mind

Let’s get one thing straight, it isn’t about the sheer quantity of links to your website anymore. Search engines are cleverer than that, they want to see links from relevant and authoritative websites before they rocket you up the rankings.

Don’t shell out cash to some proxy link farm business thinking it will help. Some search engines, including the behemoth that is Google, will penalise your website if you’re caught relying on a farm.

At best they’re useless, at worst, they’re actively harmful.

Create valuable pages

The very best way to encourage inbound links is to fill your pages with valuable, useful, informative, interesting, relevant content. Simple, right?

One great way to do this is to set up a blog, allowing you to post guides, industry news and opinion pieces. If your posts are interesting then people will naturally link to them as they discuss, rebut or expand on your comments.

Sometimes, you’ll really strike gold with a post and it will go viral.

Articles that do so brilliantly are known as ‘link bait’, because people will want to link to them. There’s nothing sinister about deliberately posting such bait, it is simply that you’ve created something very popular.

In fact, it’s exceptionally difficult to do, even newspapers only manage it now and again.

You have to be interesting

I am really going off the saying ‘content is king’ because it just doesn’t convey enough.

Let’s be frank, what’s in my bin can be described as its ‘content’, but I want some pretty different ‘content’ in my sandwich.

Content isn’t king; that implies the churned out garbage of rewritten press releases and plagiarised copy is useful when it comes to SEO.

Relevant, interesting, valuable copy is king and it takes time and skill to create.

It could be a blog, it could be a series of videos, it could be some amusing game that goes viral. Just make it interesting. The web is full when it comes to barely literate ramblings.

Make industry friends

One key way to build inbound links to your pages is to place guest posts on other industry blogs and include links to your own website.

However, that is much, much harder than it sounds. Although you might think blogs are crying out for content, if you don’t have a reputation as an industry authority then no one will be that keen to carry your copy.

In fact, knowing the value of a link to your website, some powerful blogs will try to charge you money for carrying your post.

The best way to avoid this kind of situation is to make friends with the humans behind the blogs.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make industry friends – follow them on twitter, comment on their blogs and (best of all) corner them at conferences and buy them a beer.

Making friends in your industry will be rewarding because you’ll learn a lot in discussion with them, your finger will be more on the pulse of your sector and you’ll stand a much better chance of being invited to place articles on their blogs.

The internet is a social place, so be sociable.

Use the right anchor text

The anchor text that’s used to link to your site matters, so bear that in mind when you’re writing guest posts. Using relevant keywords reinforces your page’s relevance for that keyword.

Far too often you see ‘click here for more information’, when it could be something better like ‘book cheap flights’ or ‘compare car insurers’ or whatever it is you sell.

Don’t miss out on the chance to reiterate to the search engines just how relevant your pages are to those search terms.

This is also relevant when choosing headlines for posts on your own blog. People will probably link to your pages using your headline, so it’s worth including keywords there when you can.

Of course, don’t let your keywords spoil your headlines, they are the hook that encourages people to read and then share your content.

Make the most of your position

Not everyone reading this will be a business. You might be a charity, sports team, music act, comedian… Everyone is trying to promote themselves online these days.

If you are an organisation that people want to support then design a badge and ask people to place it on their sites. They’ll be happy to support you, it will drive up brand awareness and you’ll receive a link.

Corporations will find it harder to get people to give away space on their pages. But you could try running a competition, for example, and offer winners and runners up a chance to display a proud badge declaring their success.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that I recently joined Foursquare, admittedly to try and find out what all the fuss was about.

In actual fact I think it could provide great value to a lot of businesses, as well as certain individuals trying to promote a cause or product.

What businesses is Foursquare good for?

In my opinion, Foursquare as a marketing platform is a total waste of time for the majority of businesses, as unlike Twitter the ability to target a specific niche audience without having already built a relationship with them is very difficult, because there is friction with adding new people (due to privacy concerns).

The obvious type of company that benefits from using Foursquare are the ones that have a physical location and are open to customers – such as a shop, a restaurant, or a theme park. Here are some examples of businesses currently running marketing campaigns on Foursquare.

The reason why these types of businesses have an advantage is because they can get leverage from Foursquare’s shout functionality to incentivise customers to tweet or update their Facebook statuses tagging the businesses name when they check in.

Many businesses including Dominos Pizza also run mayor incentive programmes on Foursquare, whereby the mayor of a business venue (the person who has visited a store the most times over a period of two months) receives a free gift, in Dominos’ case a free small pizza – this obviously encourages customer loyalty, promotes word of mouth and raises awareness of the brands name across customers social media profiles.

Another great thing about having your business on Foursquare is that you can see who has been checking in, which can help not only with audience profiling, but also when it comes to building up other social media profiles such as Twitter with real customers – and not just any customers, but the Gen-Y ones that are web & social savvy and can help to promote your brand online.

What individuals is Foursquare good for?

For most individuals on Foursquare, they’re there because it’s fun, competitive, and a way of telling your friends about the cool places you’ve been visiting. But for some individuals trying to promote their cause or build a personal brand Foursquare can be a great tool.

There are some great examples of musicians using Foursquare to promote their music and let their fans know where they are on tour and where they’re heading, and even travel bloggers using Foursquare to map out their travel routes visually for their blog readers to see.

Obviously, there are many privacy issues when it comes to personal Foursquare accounts, which is one of the major reasons that people are reluctant to join Foursquare, but as long as your sensible (ie. not registering your own home so that people can see when you’re out of the house!) then you should be safe.

If you can think of a relevant way to utilise video as part of your marketing then there’s every reason you should.

Research shows that audiences are extremely comfortable with the medium (YouTube alone makes up almost a quarter of Google search queries), it’s cheap to distribute, needn’t be expensive to produce and ranks highly in the SEO stakes.

If you run things properly, then video can drive a huge volume of traffic to your site.

Here are a few key practices to get you started…

Part of viral marketing may be pure luck, but that doesn’t mean you can’t optimise your existing and upcoming video for maximum links and viral spread.

There are any number of reasons that certain video content catches the wider public’s imagination and experiences rocketing traffic, but by and large successful viral videos conform to a few set criteria.

Be relevant

If you want to grab a few extra hits, then you need to be fast on your feet. If you have the capability to produce video quickly, then you can certainly hop on board with current trends or relevant news.

Just remember that this option needs to be quick-in, quick-out. Nothing dates faster than pop culture, so while it’s fine to reference and riff on what’s going on, remember that timing is of the essence.

Don’t leap on a bandwagon too late or overstay your welcome.

Be entertaining

Just because online video is a relatively new medium, that doesn’t mean you should disregard the rules of cinema. As with any other marketing stream, people want engaging and relevant content.

If you’re making a video, that means you need to add drama, tension or big laughs. It’s easy to create a video about your product, but if you go for the straight sell you’ll end up with the online equivalent of a 1950?s TV commercial.

Instead, take the reality TV route. Create a story and utilise product placement throughout.

Sell the situation and the characters, not just the product.

Be concise

YouTube recently announced plans to increase video length to fifteen minutes, but that doesn’t mean you have to fill that time. A 90 second video can be more effective than a ten minute epic so make sure you start editing even before you start rolling.

Put together a concise script and really think about the visual medium. A picture paints a thousand words, so you have an opportunity to convey your ideas quickly.

Generally speaking a viewer will start to lose interest around the three minute mark, so ditch any filler.

Be progressive

Something else to think about early on is the possibility of a sequel. Just because you won’t be vying with Spielberg come Oscar season, there’s no reason you can’t have a successful franchise.

If you plan things properly and work with a decent director then there’s no reason you can’t film several short episodes in a single sitting, maximising cost efficiency and giving you the chance to progress and develop your ideas and your brand identity, creating anticipation rather than trying an audience’s patience.

A successful series will add up to more views and a longer lasting return on your investment, so plan ahead.

Be searchable

Whenever you right copy or put together a campaign, you’ll be thinking about key words and compelling headlines and you should keep that in mind with video as well. A good title should be catchy and concise.

Video is often ranked highly by search engines as well, so make sure you frontload those key-words and offer value, consider using a question as a title. Overall, make sure you keep one eye on your customer research and target video accordingly.

Be clear

Finally, remember your CTAs.

Whatever you’re selling, make sure you emphasise it in the final frame, otherwise you could be left with a clever, shareable video that fails when it comes to sales.

You should brand your videos throughout with an on-screen bug, add calls to action whenever possible and make sure you optimise SEO in descriptions and tags when you upload your content.

Remember to make it easy for customers to click through to your site.

Above all, video is a creative medium.

Whatever your product, it’s usually best to keep a friendly tone of voice that isn’t too formal, and don’t be afraid to experiment or change your branding to suit the medium.

If you can present your product in a unique or amusing way then it will have a far greater chance of going viral.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the next keyword wet dream for the online industry buzz word bingo enthusiasts. As social media becomes more ingrained in commercial planning and the excitement fades into practical solutions, it’s inevitable that the new kid on the block will start to make headlines.

I think AR is an exciting development. However, behind the pomp that surrounds another buzz word, is there a commercial model that could make AR a practical tool in the e-commerce armoury?

I’m going to stick my neck on the line and say yes….

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

At a basic level, AR is the enrichment of your physical experience with virtual information and interaction. The best example to conceptualise this is the overlaying of maps on your mobile phone with local information such as directions to the nearest train station, which happens contextually as you navigate the map. For a more encompassing explanation, check out the Wikipedia entry for augmented reality.

What’s already out there?

The technology has been around for years, just think of televised Football games where the play markers are overlayed on the pitch for viewers at home. While the commercial application of AR may be relatively new, forward thinking brands have been busy experimenting.

Retail

1. Benetton used AR in a 2009 Colors magazine edition – pages with AR symbols could be held up to a webcam to display films of the person on the page. Whilst this is a basic application of what AR can achieve, Charles Arthur’s article on AR in the Guardian goes further and is worth reading.
2. Glasses Direct has a neat 3D tool that allows you to try glasses on using your webcam and what they call a virtual mirror. You can try the virtual mirror from their website.
3. Over in the US, Zugara offers the Augmented Reality and Motion Capture Shopping App. The app allows customers to render clothing onto their own bodies using a webcam. An intuitive interface lets you browse items and styles and get a feel for how the clothes will look on you. It also integrates neat community features like sharing pictures of your outfits with friends to get their opinion. You can then buy direct from the app.

Publishing

Grazia tested the waters with an enhanced 3D magazine that used AR codes that could be activated by webcam or iPhone. GQ has followed suit.

Automotive

GM is working with universities to develop a smart windscreen that overlays important information on the transparent windscreen display to enhance the driver’s ability to see objects in their physical space. I’m a bit unsure about this one and whether or not it could distract drivers and actually decrease safety but the concept is worth reading about.

What will drive the uptake of AR?

Quite simply, the increased usage of smart mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry, Kindle, iPad etc. There is a lot of discussion about the shift from desktop to mobile and the prediction that in several years time e-commerce will be dominated by mobile browsing.

The latest data from ComScore shows a 30% increase in social networking traffic among smartphone users in the past 12 months – so mobile is already driving social media usage. Research from Forrester shows that iPhone users are more affluent than users of other smartphones, therefore have a high propensity to respond to relevant retail offers direct to their phone. The average internet usage for an iPhone user is 100MB, x30 larger than on other phones. And we all know about the obsession with the iPhone App Store.

Where can it be applied for retail?

Attention spans will only decrease as technology breeds laziness and the expectation of rapid solution delivery. This means people will expect everything at their fingertips when they want it. The savvy marketers will deliver content and solutions that people didn’t even know they wanted but subconsciously always desired. I think retail can tap into this latent demand in several ways:

• High street retailers can develop a Store Finder mobile app that overlays local store information on interactive maps – perhaps an aggregation of all major brands would provide cost efficiency.
• Dynamic contextual advertising that displays offers and promotions based on the location and profile of the mobile user (e.g. iPhone user gets different message than Blackberry user) – next step on from voucher code sites.
• Serving customer reviews to mobile devices to facilitate decision making on the move.
• Dynamically generating cross and up-sell recommendations based on scanning a barcode in-store on your mobile phone.
• For the fashion industry, improving modelling of clothes from home to help make purchase decisions – increased accuracy should also help reduce returns.
• For the DIY industry, enabling customers to create 3D maps of their own rooms and then visually render colour schemes and furniture to help with DIY projects.
• Local tourist boards can create mobile maps of the region with key tourist hotspots, attractions and services – whilst free of charge they benefit the economy by encouraging spending.
• Museums could create virtual tours so that visitors are not reliant on a guided tour/headsets – for a download fee, you can launch the virtual tour which overlays commentary and content based on your location within the museum.
• In publishing, AR could be used to enrich the consumption of content to increase brand engagement, essential in such a competitive market.

So what do you think? Is AR powder puff or can it add real value to consumers and drive commercial value? I’m leaning to the latter because the increasing uptake of mobile devices gives me hope that AR solutions will catch the eye. I await the professional slaughter…

Six degrees of separation defines that given any two persons in the world, they can be related through at most six “friends of”. This concept was founded in 1995 and it has became part of the most welcomed notion being used around the world. It is also known as the Small World Phenomenon.

The phrase six degrees of separation is permanently etched into our collective psyches. The idea that every person in the world is generally no more than six degrees or connections removed from each other is a powerful, sticky concept that resonates with many people. Web 2.0 technologies, a continuation of the advancement of communication capabilities, may be helping us cut that average in half, especially through social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.

Six degrees of separation

This catch phrase was inspired by the results of the “small world” experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the United States of America in 1967 in order to determine how long it would take to get a letter from one stranger to another. After the results of this test were analyzed, Milgram’s team determined that the average path length, or the number of connections required to get from one point to another, was approximately 5.5, which rounds up to six.

Watch the documentary unfolding the science behind the idea of six degrees of separation. Originally thought to be an urban myth, it now appears that anyone on the planet can be connected in just a few steps of association. Six degrees of separation is also at the heart of a major scientific breakthrough; that there might be a law which nature uses to organize itself and that now promises to solve some of its deepest mysteries.

Interesting Links :
Microsoft proves there are just six degrees of separation between us
Six Degrees of Separation, Twitter Style

Few days ago Girish was wondering which were the top Mauritian-owned websites and in fairness it’s a very good question. I reviewed the Alexa list again and the following are the Mauritian websites that appear in the top 100 websites that people visit most regularly.

It is always interesting to see how Internet usage in Mauritius changes over time. The latest update from Alexa.com suggests that while social interaction is still the number one utility used by Mauritian net surfers, search is the next most popular activity.

If you’re into stats then here are the numbers; only 13 of the 100 most popular websites are Mauritians according to Alexa.

They are:

(1) Orange.mu (overall 10th in Alexa’s top 100 that Mauritians visit)
(2) Lexpress.mu (13th)
(3) Gov.mu (25th)
(4) Defimedia.info (28th)
(5) Myjob.mu (33th)
(6) Vinivi.com (43th)
(7) Lematinal.com (44th)
(8) Mcb.mu (50th)
(9) Lemauricien.com (55th)
(10) Islandinfo.mu (64th)
(11) Expat-blog.com (68th)
(12) Mauritiusturfclub.com (82th)
(13) Mbcradio.tv (84th)

The definition of Mauritian I’ve used is a little loose. We’re including websites here where the company is headquartered in Mauritius or primarily serves people in Mauritius. Two websites that I decided to omit from the list is the .mu version of foreign-headquartered multinational; Google.mu (2nd) and Servihoo.com (20th) as it redirects to Orange.mu. I’m open to sticking them back in if there’s enough of a protest.

Conclusion

Alexa is user centric method of collecting data where the user is required to install software which records usage, while obviously marketers & webmasters have access to their own site centric data. Ideally what’s needed and what would show the most actionable is network centric direct from the ISP’s. Alexa is completely inaccurate and can be gamed.

The film exposes the annual slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises off the coast of Japan, and how their meat, containing high levels of toxic mercury is being sold as food across Japan, labeled as whale meat. The majority of the world is not aware this is happening.

The purpose of the documentary and action site, is to raise awareness about the issue worldwide as well as to highlight the dangers of eating the contaminated meat and to pressure those in power to put an end to the needless and barbaric slaughter.

The result is a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery that adds up to an urgent plea for hope.

Nearly a million people have signed the campaign, which has clearly rattled the fisherman, however they haven’t stopped killing dolphins. Please watch the documentary, join the campaign and spread the word!
It’s far from easy watching, however it’s really important that this issue is brought to the worlds attention.

The dolphin hunt is scheduled to start again in September, though to April, and will continue to happen, unless we put an end to it.