Ashley Friedlein

I started out working in digital TV and multimedia production. I then worked at the Financial Times on arguably the first commercial application of Video on Demand (1996) before getting involved with FT.com as a Producer / Project Manager.

In 1997 I moved to digital communications agency Wheel as the third person in the then 'internet team'. I went through the dotcom boom, seeing Wheel grow from 30 people to 450 in just 3 years, and was involved in launching sites for M&S, Abbey National, IPC Magazines, Autoglass, Channel 5, AMP etc.

Following the dotcom crash (which saw Wheel shrink back to a more modest 90 or so staff) I left and spent a very pleasant sabbatical year writing my second book in the South of France. I then returned to the UK and from June 2002 I have been running Econsultancy full time.

Getting creative with SEO tactics

Increasingly it is common knowledge on how to do best practice search engine optimisation. That doesn't make it easy, but it does mean you'll need to start thinking more creatively to keep a competitive edge.

So outside your standard SEO best practice, what more creative tactics might you use?

Guardian to publish news to web before the printed version

According to an article in today's MediaGuardian by Kim Fletcher, as of tomorrow (Tue 12 June), the Guardian will publish stories first to the web, "ending the primacy of the printed newspaper".

The newspaper industry seems to be agonising over such decisions and this is no doubt a 'ground-breaking' innovation for them. But isn't this as obvious as was the need for a format of newspaper you could actually read on the train (Berliner format blah blah)...?

Google's Smart Pricing - how's it working for you?

In the past people have commented that their ROI from clicks from Google's Adsense content network didn't match performance from Google search-referred clicks.

Smart Pricing, a click-discounting system for AdSense, was meant to help address this - so how's it working out?