Christmas is fast approaching! Last night the New Zealand IAB held a great 1980s themed Christmas party in Auckland. Plenty of people put effort into dressing 1980′s style, no doubt spurred on by the chance to win Big Day Out tickets for the best outfit. Rod Stewart hairstyles & leg warmers aplenty!

Prize for best male outfit went to SureFire Search Marketing Analyst Craig Whitaker who came dressed in an ingenious PacMan outfit he made. Great idea & well deserved win! According to Wikipedia, PacMan was released in May 1980 & an icon of 1980′s popular culture.

Rumours have been circulating about Google launching a revamped version of its famously minimalistic search interface. Well looks like this is the case &, as reported in Gizmodo, it’s possible to see this for yourself by opening Google.com and  pasting some JavaScript into your web browser’s URL address field. Note it doesn’t seem to work for www.google.co.nz at this stage.

If you can’t be bothered doing that, below are screen shots showing the old & new interfaces side by side. As you’ll see the new one has a cleaner looking logo & brighter buttons. The key difference however is once you’ve done a search.

In the new interface the search options automatically get presented down the left hand side of the search results page, whereas in the current version these options remain hidden unless clicked on. This is an interesting enhancement &, on reflection, not surprising.

Last week at the Search Engine Room Conference in Sydney Justin Baird, an “Innovationist” for Google (cool job title), gave an interesting presentation entitled Search – Personalisation, Localisation, Portability. Something he highlighted was the fact Google gives users the option of refining searches by clicking on the “+ show options” link at the top of search results.

However when I asked him during the Q&A session how many users actually refined their searches this way his answer, whilst not explicit, indicated few normal users do. Reading between the lines it sounded like it’s a feature only SEOs & other advanced users use.

I’m guessing this is likely to change with Google making these search options very prominent in the new interface.

Below are screen shots of the current & new interface. The left hand column has the old current interface & the right hand column the new interface (click images to enlarge).

Sounds like a spoof story, but apparently this actually happened. To control a crowd of hysterical teenage girls NY police demanded an executive use Twitter and send out a Tweet telling them to disperse.

He didn’t comply & so was arrested. Details here on CNET

Forget tear gas, water canons, Tasers & SWAT – Twitter is the new police crowd tool.

Twitter now – it’s the law!

Increasingly people are accessing the Internet using mobile devices.

It doesn’t surprise to me that iPhone owners are the heaviest mobile internet users. In August 40% of visits to mobile websites came from iPhones according to AdMob. (AdMob serves ads to 9,000 mobile websites & monitor the types of phones being used to access these sites).

Clearly TVNZ recognise this trend & so have just released an iPhone application which provides free access to the latest news, sport, weather & TV listings.

Obviously TVNZ is onto a winner – currently the TVNZ iPhone app is the # 1 free app on the iTunes NZ Store.

It’s getting pretty positive feedback from users & if these iTunes customer reviews are any indication, probably winning TVNZ some readers over from competing New Zealand news websites, like the Herald & Stuff :

I’ve downloaded it onto my iPhone & have to say I’m impressed. It’s free, works like a charm & access to the TVNZ content is free (apart, obviously, from teleco data charges). Also works with the iPod Touch.

Highly recommended.