Just received this scam email from the Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited. They are very kindly telling me that somebody wants to register blogstorm as a domain in Hong Kong.

I have a hunch that giving my credit card details to them would be a bad idea.

Richard.liu (Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited) wrote:
Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword

2 Apr. 2009

Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited which is the domain name
register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is
apply ing to register “blogstorm” as their domain name and Internet keyword
on 1 Apr. 2009.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been
in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark,
so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet
keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering
them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

Kind Regards,

Richard Liu
Tel:+ 852-31757931(ext.8021)
Fax: +852-31757932
Email: richard.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn
Website: www.hknsc.hk

An internet startup has been forced to settle out of court after they were threatened by a large law firm involving the way they were linking to pages on the law firms website.

Ars Technica reports on the rather strange case.

A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, “jonesday.com” is okay, but not “blah blah blah”.

I’m thinking of changing the name of Blogstorm to “SEO” and then threatening legal action against any sites that refuse to change the anchor text of my links.

In early January Sky News asked if they could interview me for an evening show about the latest Internet news. The show is going out tomorrow night at 7pm.

Unfortunately I won’t be on it because the person who arranged the interview didn’t notice the word “Leeds” in my email signature or company address and assumed I must live in London (doesn’t everybody?). The end result is that today when they rang to arrange everything and found out I didn’t live in London they told me that they didn’t want me on the show anymore.

If any Londoners would like to appear on Sky News tomorrow there is a slot available. I won’t be watching.

Now I wish I hadn’t told everybody to watch the show.

Blogstorm is around 18 months old and I wanted to post some details on how 2008 has been.

We started in June 2007 and now have just over 4000 RSS readers. In terms of traffic 2008 has seen the blog get over 1.1 million page views from 776,887 unique visitors.

The traffic this year isn’t actually very high when you consider in just 6 months of 2007 we got 823,000 page views and 569,000 unique visitors. The difference is easy to explain – in 2007 it was possible to get a blog onto the front page of Digg whenever you wanted. In 2008 it isn’t.

The most popular post was this one with 106,000 page views, even without a Digg front page.

Have a good Christmas & thanks for reading!

Took some pictures of the snow in Harrogate today. After half an hour trying to get the car off the drive I called it a day and built a snowman instead.

Most roads from the village are blocked apparently so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get very far.

This week we are busy with new & existing clients so blogging is taking a back seat.

In the meantime here is an iPhone picture of the snow outside the Branded3 office window looking across our conservatory, BBQ area, garden and tennis courts / basketball area.

I notice that a number of people still don’t have avatars when they leave a comment on this blog and a number of other blogs too.

We use Gravatar to provide our avatars because it’s built into Wordpress by default and most blogs will be using this system in the future.

The process takes about 3 minutes if you have an avatar ready to upload.

A few people seem to have misunderstood the Blogstorm Newsletter – it isn’t the same content that’s published on the blog.

The newsletter goes out a few times per month (we’ve only sent one so far) and focusses on techniques that for some reason I don’t want to reveal on the blog. The last newsletter was excellent according to the feedback I got so the next one needs to be even better.

To sign up you need to fill in the form on the top right of the website (see image below).

This month we are launching a new blog about organic OLED TV’s.

If that sort of thing interests you or you want to see whether we can get any readers then please go subscribe.