Firetop

This week I, like many thousands of others, have almost become the part-owner of a non-league football club residing in the Blue Square Premier… it’s name ‘Ebbsfleet United’. I would rather the members of ‘MyFootballClub’ bought Stevenage Borough instead, but I’ll settle for the club formerly known as Gravesend and Northfleet. However, before everybody gets carried away with talk of fan-owners voting on team selections and tactics, I’d like to cast people’s minds back to January 2002. This was a time when Stevenage Borough announced that they were taking part in a Channel Four TV reality show called ‘You’re The Manager’ with viewers set to vote on team selections by text and email… and guess what? The Football Conference board didn’t ratify the deal so it didn’t happen. (more…)

I’m not as obsessed with Google PageRank™ as I used to be, but was disappointed to see Firetop’s score lowered from 5/10 to 4/10 last week. For those that don’t know, PageRank™ is Google’s scoring method for determining which websites are most popular and therefore in all likelihood contain valuable content. The algorithm behind the scoring looks at the volume of in-bound links from related websites, which also have high PageRank™ scores… of course it’s a bit chicken and egg. If you use the Google toolbar in your browser you probably already have a little green PageRank™ bar at the top of your page. Interestingly it seems that there are now only ten ‘PR10′ websites - down from twenty or so earlier this year, probably not the sites you would think of either. (more…)