I've just added a new science game to my website. It's a fun fair style arcade game to help in learning the chemical periodic table.
Madonna stopped her concert half way through in Bucharest last night to launch into one of her 'human rights' speeches. Many of the musicians and dancers she had employed were gypsies and the crowd politely applauded the fact but when she started on about how sad she was that the gypsies, or roma as they are officially known, were badly discriminated against in this part of Europe, the boos and whistling started. She should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. Not only was most of the concert badly mimed but she grossly offended the Romanian people with her arrogant remarks.
I am an Englishman living in Bucharest and Romania is the only country in the world where gypsies are tolerated. They are a nomadic people originally from India and it is an inbuilt part of their culture to beg and steal. Often to the extent of disfiguring themselves or children (often not their own) to gain pity and more money. I have seen this with my own eyes. Small children begging between moving cars, have to take all the money they receive to the adult gypsy who is controlling them. No charity on earth will ever break this and yet these do gooders believe that it is Romanians who make their lives so poor.
Remember, every other European nation has sent thousands of gypsies 'home' to Romania, the only country who will have them. Europe should be grateful to Romania not patronising to them. And as for Madonna, most people paid between a weeks and a months wages to see her perform and she provided them with a mostly recorded performance, including mainly dance which most could not even see. Shame on you.
The Google algorithm is shrouded in mystery when in fact it is very simple. It doesn't matter what content you have on your page. It is only about who links to you, their relevance and their importance. You can have the best website in the world and have thousands of inbound links and still appear much lower down than a crap site that has a handful of links. How? Well the secret is that the site with a handful of links has a couple from US government .gov sites (not UK government as Google doesn't see them as important) and a couple of links from US university .edu sites (same again with Google, UK universities are not important). Plus these links to you must contain the keywords you want to rank highly for.
I can hear the howls of derision from SEOs everywhere. OK so you want proof. Search on Google for the keywords 'educational software'. Several results on Page 1 do not contain this keyword phrase, 2 have little content and 1 has not content at all, in fact that 1 site says 'momentarily under construction' and has done since 2003. Sadly you cannot verify the back links so well as Google hides some of its backlink results (i.e. .edu and .gov links) 'to protect webmasters' according to Matt Cutts (yes Matt we belieeeeeeve you. Well you are the Holy Ghost after all).
Everyone with a website can, and probably does, show up on Page 1 of SERPs for keywords i.e. try typing in your full name or some contact information that appears on your website and you should see yourself. The difficult bit is showing up for keywords that are searched for in much bigger numbers. With other search engines following Google with this US University and Government favoured algorithm (now do you see why Google became so popular and got a ton of investment!!!) I cannot see the situation getting any better for genuine optimisation efforts, you just need those 'important', relevant, inbound links.
Just updated and uploaded Dinosaur Hunt
Hi and Happy New Year. I have just uploaded a new much improved version of my MP3 Player which now also plays Windows media compressed audio files (wma).
Details and free download at:
www.greyolltwit.com/mp3player2.html
Take care,
Simon Hensby aka Grey Olltwit
www.greyolltwit.com
or
www.go-education.com
My 'Advent Calendar' and 'Spare A Thought For Santa' screen savers
have been updated and are now totally free again.
Download at:
Advent Calendar
Spare A Thought For Santa
Happy holidays to you all
Learning is a fantastic process that is carried out by all of us every day, whether you are 5 or 105. Then why when it comes to educational software, do the majority of programs have these silly pre school graphics? Granted they can be useful for very early learners but those looking to improve their number skills or sentence building can be any age and in my experience of teaching, are put off by this sort of software that is mostly available from the big companies. What is more they tend to go from one extreme to the other, making often too simple software pitched to 4 and 5 year olds and then producing programs that have so many menus and tool bars that the user is left completely bewildered.
Let us also not forget that not all learners are children. Many teenagers and adults, often through no fault of their own, need to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. As an example, my own son has ADHD, which many consider a disability but in fact, with the right help, it can be turned into a huge benefit. Attention Deficit Disorder sufferers often have many extraordinary skills but often find conventional studying extremely hard, as they cannot focus for too long. Many are able to multi task at an extremely fast rate, so it is just that their brains are working in a different way to others and it is certainly not because they are deficient in some way. Other special needs people are very versatile in other areas too. For example dyslexics, who can design fantastic architecture or engineering feats but find it harder to understand the written word. We don't all have fit in the same round hole.
So as educational software developers, we have a duty to understand our users and to try and help them in whatever way we can. Often by just listening, a program can be tweaked a little to open it up to new users, who before had no hope of using it. I hope this will inspire educational software authors to look at their products and bear this in mind when developing new ones.
I have just returned my popular ten pin bowling game to freeware. You can get a copy at:
free bowling game
Happy Bowling. More free games coming soon.
I have just added a new free game to my software website. It is my version of the classic breakout game. It's called Blobby Breakout and non members of my website can download a free copy. Check out my free breakout game.
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