(26/08/05) A video review of the City Learning Centre’s Summer Space Camp (1st - 5th August) is now online on the Space Camp pages. The film, which includes an introduction from US astronaut Bruce Melnick, gives a snapshot of the events of the Space Camp week set to a dance soundtrack.

Search engines are big business. As the Internet expands daily with more pages and more information (and more junk), a high ranking in search engine results becomes increasingly important to organisations who rely on web traffic to drive their business. A whole industry has grown up around optimising and marketing websites to achieve the holy grail of a top-10 placing on top search engines. Companies hand over thousands of pounds to search engine optimisation services.

When most people think of search engines, they think of one word - GOOGLE. The search engine giant, begun in 1998 by two American students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (read more about the history of Google) is now worth $50 billion, and its two founders (still only in their mid-thirties) over $1 billion each. Google is now diversifying into software with technology such as Desktop Search and the fantastic Google Earth (articles on the latter are planned for the blog in the near future). Microsoft, it is reported, are concerned that Google is moving into their turf . . .  . 

Google’s search engine success leads to problems though. Because it is the dominant search engine, it is also the search engine that web designers target when planning their internet marketing strategy. While Google wants to provide the relevant search results that their visitors require, web designers want Google to return search results that include their website. All manner of techniques and tricks are employed by web-designers in an attempt to improve their Google rankings for searches. 

Google (and all other search engines) use "robots" or "spiders" (computer programmes that scour the web indexing websites) to examine sites and work out what they are about and whereabouts in the rankings they should appear. Because these programmes are not human-beings, they can be fooled - they don’t "know" what a good website looks like or whether the information on it is valuable or accurate. Google uses the rationale that if other sites are linking to a site then it is probably more useful then a site which isn’t linked to by other sites. This is open to abuse too, however, as people set up "link farms", websites that are nothing more than a series of links to other sites. Google is constantly updating the way that it indexes sites in an attempt to protect the quality of their search results.

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(18/08/05) It’s always great to receive feedback from students, teachers or parents about the activities that the City Learning Centre organises and runs. This week we have received two very rewarding emails from parents of children who attended our Space Camp and Theatre Group Summer Holiday activities (quoted with their permission):

I just wanted to thank everyone involved in both courses. My son has yet to stop talking about space camp and can’t wait to get back to school to tell everyone how great it was. I have never seen him so excited about anything. It was also great to be able to see what they have been upto on the website. My daughter was very nervous about coming to theatre school but she throughly loved it and it helped to boost her confidence. She has a long standing back injury which was unfortunatley hurting during this week but nothing was going to stop her completing the week. The show was fantastic, you would never believe they had achieved that in 5 days. They will be talking about it for a long time to come. Thank you, hope you run similar ones next year.

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(18/08/05) A video of the full performance of "The Circle Of Life" is now online on the Theatre Group page, together with a collection of "highlight" video clips. The performance, which took place last Friday, was the culmination of a week of hard work at the City Learning Centre for a group of 7 - 16 year-old Wolverhampton students working with professional actors and musicians from BSS Spotlight.

• Theatre Group page

(15/08/05) On Friday night, students from the City Learning Centre Theatre Group entertained their family and friends with a fantastic performance in the theatre at Heath Park Business and Enterprise College.

Over the course of five days, the students, aged 7 - 16, had worked with professional actors and musicians from BSS Spotlight to create a stageshow which included songs from The Lion King, Robbie Williams and Grease.

The audience were thrilled by the quality and energy of the finished show. Congratulations to all of the students and tutors who participated - you worked incredibly hard to put it all together in an intense week of rehearsing.

Photographs from the performance are now available on the Theatre Group page. A complete video of the performance will be posted onto the CLC website soon.