This Week on the Web: 17/04/2009

So what little digital titbits have caught our eye this week?

First there was the much discussed amazonfail, where the online retail giant removed the ranking for thousands of LGBT books, making them practically impossible to find via search.
A PR storm followed – with many in the Twitter and Blogosphere accusing Amazon of intentional homophobic practices.
The company’s responses were too little, too late and at times conflicting – the final word from Amazon is that the deranking was the result of an “embarrassing and hamfisted cataloguing error”.
Whilst many have been satisfied by this explanation, we’re yet to find out the long-term impact this mistake will have on Amazon’s brand.

In the world of search, Google announced the phased introduction of a new referrer string, which is only really of interest to analytics nerds like us…

Of more general interest for webmasters is Google’s expansion of the sitelinks feature, allowing more sites to have a one-line set of sitelinks, even when not ranking in the number on spot for a given query. Yay!

We were sad to hear that the O’Reilly found conference has been postponed for budget reasons. It’s a darn shame, as it’s the first search conference we’ve been excited about for ages.

In other news…

We love twitter, we love our charities and we’re super-juiced about the upcoming cinema release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Given that little bundle of information, it ticked all our boxes when Hugh Jackman announced that he will donate $100k to a charity that his twitter followers nominated – all they have to do is convince him which charity is most deserving. So, if you’ve got a cause you care about, now’s the time to get on twitter!

And finally…

We couldn’t let you go without pointing you to this walkthrough of Bahnhof‘s super-cool Pionen White Mountains datacentre which is built in a nuclear bunker under Stockholm and designed to emulate a Bond-villain’s underground lair. Awesome…we want.