Yesterday ‘The Dungeons Tug’ team went along to the new London Dungeons on the Southbank to experience their second ‘Adult late night – Strictly Over 18′s’

After queuing for a short time with rats to the left of us, a cockney peasant hurling abuse to the right and a glass of wine in hand, we we’re KIND OF ready for the experience….

The journey starts by taking you through the haunted times of Henry VIII,  a pitch black boat journey which jolts through the Dungeons with dips and corners, that included a special appearance from Brian Blessed as Henry VIII

The other shows includes visiting the Judge  where you have  to prove you’re  not a traitor in court, to Jack the Ripper stalking you through a desolate Whitechapel. Each corner holding a nasty surprise such as projectile vomiting  and alleys which are filled with the stench of the plague, unless you were in Ms Lovett pie shop, which surprisingly smelled quite nice.. 

After a chilling experience through the darkness, you’re led to a dungeon bar with the soundtrack of a peasant playing the harp, the ambiance is surreal and it is certainly time for another drink !

Defently worth a visit and a great alternative date night

Check out the new ‘ Dungeons lates’ show and find out more here…   http://www.thedungeons.com/london/en/book-tickets/london-attractions-combi-tickets.aspx

I’ve been using Songkick for a number of years now and am a huge fan of what they do. In a previous blog post I described them as the perfect affiliate site.

The business model is incredibly simple. You tell Songkick which bands you like and they build a personalised calendar for all upcoming relevant gigs in your area. As soon as a new gig for a band you’re following is announced, Songkick send you a notification. As someone who previously suffered from ‘oh look who’s playing! Too late, it’s already sold out’ syndrome for many years, the service has been a blessing. Songkick generate their revenue from commission earned on ticket sales using good old fashioned affiliate links. The service is completely free for users.

I was lucky enough to be one of the first 100 people invited to participate in the Beta release of their latest feature, Songkick Detour (you can sign up here) and last night I attended the official launch party. I firmly believe that this will have a massive impact on the future of live music and like all great ideas, it’s a very simple one.

For example, I am a big fan of American Analog Set. A quick Google search only returned with details of one previous London gig back in 2009. It doesn’t look likely that I’ll get to see them any time soon, which is a real shame.

This is where Detour comes in. It is essentially a crowdfunding platform for live music. I have pledged that I am happy to pay £15 per ticket to see AmAnSet if they ever come to London. Not only that, but Detour shows me exactly how many other people have pledged. Once enough people have committed to seeing the band live, Songkick approaches the promoters to make it happen. If the gig goes ahead, you’re guaranteed a ticket ahead of everyone else. If for whatever reason you can’t make the gig, you won’t be charged a penny.

As you can see from the screenshot below, a total of 34 tickets have been pledged to see American Analog Set and a promoter has now been selected. The next step is for the concert to be confirmed and I’ll be going to see a band that otherwise would never have come to London.

This eliminates the financial risk for the promoters, which in turn enables more gigs and more fans get to see the bands they like. It’s another product from Songkick where literally everyone wins, which I think is the reason I like those guys so much.

Regardless of your thoughts on the success (or flaws) of Google+ the new features announced at Google I/O 2013 have definitely changed the way the social network operates. The platform now boasts a sizeable 190m monthly active users and Google has integrated many of its products and features into the network to bring everything together.

The news feed is now three-columned stream of posts and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take.

Hangouts are a big focus, releasing an app for iOS, Android and desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. Google knows that people want to talk to friends and family using technology like Whatsapp and Snapchat, so the logic is that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — desk, phone, tablet etc. — then you are covered.

The audience response to the changes has been quite immediate, the streaming of news feed is proving to be an either love it or hate it fix.

Display advertising has evolved!

Learn how to finally reach a targeted, responsive audience with your campaigns by attending Tug’s breakfast seminar on “Display and Real Time Bidding” hosted by Ollie Vaughan, Media Director, and Nick Beck, CEO.

Thursday 6th June 2013 – 8.30am – 10am.

The session will be an introduction to display and real time bidding, the most efficient way of reaching your customers across multiple channels via a single campaign.

Topics covered will include:

• What is RTB?
• Optimisation and buying strategies
• How Facebook has started to capitalise on the dynamic, real-time bidding market.
• RTB vs traditional digital display

Coffee and breakfast will be served at 8.30am on the terrace of Tug’s stunning Shoreditch office, with an opportunity to meet the rest of the Tug team.

Please RSVP to:
hannah[dot]melbourn[at]tugagency[dot]com

We hope to see you there!

Tug 61 Charlotte Road Shoreditch London EC2A 3QT

Yesterday Google unveiled a new version of its Google Map service which has been “rebuilt from the ground up”. The aim of the new design is to personalize the product and show labels that best match the interest of the user.

It also has a cool new features more related to PPC in particular – These are new icons, which overlay the map, highlighting businesses who run ads and promotions.

At the moment the only way to differentiate a PPC campaign on Google Maps is the blue pin at the side of the screen, which was not clear to most users. However now the name of the business will actually show on the map itself with a couple words from the ad copy in a box superimposed over the location. Also, if there are any special offers to promote, a blue shopping bag icon will appear next to the name.

Skype’s 630 million registered users and popularity was reason enough for us to check out its website’s humble beginnings in 2003.  And let’s be honest – Skype should need no introduction. It’s extremely likely that you’re either an active user or have used it at least once at some point – that is the reality of the VoIP software’s ubiquity today.

Skype was bought out in 2011 by Microsoft, and the software giant has recently retired its Windows Live Messenger service in favour of it – an understandable move in an effort to streamline its product range and take advantage of the integration both networks offer.

What I found interesting in the screenshots below is the developers’ reference to  Kazaa in the 2003 screenshot, designed to give the VoIP software credibility (how times have changed!). The notoriously famous P2P network shot to fame in the early 00′s by offering users the ability to share and essentially pirate media such as Mp3s.

Another intriguing observation is Skype’s eventual brand colour transition from red to blue – with the logo itself surviving the changes and remaining almost identical to its predecessor.

Click on the image for a clearer view.

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900m Android devices have been activated to date according to Sundar Pichai, who runs SVP, Chrome and Apps at Google.

“Google is very fortunate to have two large open platforms … two fast-growing platforms,”

Roughly 2 years ago Android just clicked 100m activations, and a year ago, Android had reached 400m, which shows a dramatic increase, over doubling annually.

All Aboard! Tech Tip Tuesday, Captain JonJon highlighting once again about technical SEO issues & FAQ’s we come across with you…

“What is a Robots.txt and would I need to implement it for my site?”

Last week we talked about redirections, this week we will be talking about utilising Robots.txt file.

Benefits of a Robots.txt file and what they are used for…

Ideally in the SEO world, we are great cooks; most ever welcoming hosts and we certainly love inviting search engine spiders to attend our site and feast on our pages. We would love them to crawl all over our pages and be impressed with what we have cooked up, so that they will eventually give us as much thumbs up as possible and list us on their billboard search engine index for our keywords.

Having a site crawled is a great opportunity to show off our site and impress these judges, but then again their might be a few places we don’t want them visiting and this is where a Robots.txt comes in place.

A Robots.txt file is a room which houses certain URLs that indicates to search engine spiders to not crawl upon. No juice or equity will be passed along when blocked using a Robots.txt.

It is not advised to use a Robots.txt for disallowing duplicate content as you can always use a “Rel Canonical” tag instead. It is also worth to mention anything disallowed will not prevent them from showing up on search results which may lead to “suppressed listing”. This means that Google’s search engine spiders will have no access to content which are blocked using “disallow” hence will have no information or snippets regarding this URL. When this URL comes across a point where there is a possibility of being linked to and being displayed on Google’s Serps (Search Engine Results Pages) then this will appear to be a bad user experience. Note: disallowing a URL will not prevent it from gaining link juice & equity, but blocking this URL will supress it and prevent this URL from passing valuable equity. As referred previously, it is recommended to use alternative methods for duplicate content issues.

Robots.txt is a good way of letting search engine spiders know which parts of the site you want to exclude from crawl or alternatively highlighting to them specifically where i.e. your sitemap is located. Blocking URL’s with a robots.txt does not prevent URL’s from displaying on Serps, it prevents crawls. It is also advised to have a Robots.txt file in place in comparison to none at all.

Ahoy fellow passengers! Follow us & stay tuned next week for more information on alternative methods… and every Tuesdays for more technical issues reviewed by Tug.

Why not like us on Facebook too?

Neat social media content aggregator Vizify brings together your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Foursquare data to paint a biography of your digital self. The graphics are nice, the layout is slick and iPad-friendly and creates a neat digital business card you can tie to a blog or website that gives people a quick introduction to your career, education, experience and content: https://www.vizify.com/

It’s Wednesday – so let’s go way back to 1997. Why? Well, if you aren’t already familiar, we travel back in time every Wednesday to unearth archived websites of old – and compare them to their existing versions (while looking out for remarkable changes, if any).

This week we’ve delved deeper into the archive and uncovered bbc.co.uk – with a number of interesting developments visible in the screenshot below.

While most changes are brought about due to advances in web development, browser technologies and social media influences of today, I always find it particularly interesting to scan the types of categorized content on display – and compare the two.

In this case, and many others, the array of categories and content displayed can be illustrative of the types of audiences the BBC were and are targeting – while also demonstrating the shift in brand identity focus. This type of shift will not entirely be clear by solely comparing the 1997 website with that of 2013 (variables aplenty!) but does become visible if you were to revisit the BBC’s other versions using the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine - which I strongly encourage!

Click on the image below for a clearer view – and check out our Facebook page for more great stuff!