E3 Sport/Team Gravytrain – motor racing championship starts Sunday at Silverstone

Posted in Announcements, News on March 24th, 2011 by Angelina

Rounds 1 and 2 of the UK’s biggest single make motor racing championship gets under way on Sunday 27th March at the home of racing, Silverstone. E3 Sport is all set to run 4 cars; Gravytrain’s Kevin Taylor will be competing in a Mazda MX5 2.0 Sport (Mk3) in the MX5 Cup after graduating from the Mk1 series along with multiple Renault Champion and former BTCC driver Jim Edwards Jnr. Jim’s daughter Jade will be racing in a Mazda MX5 1.6 Mk1 in the Mazda MX5 Championship along with the son of a current BTCC driver, Brett Smith.

To help get your racing juices flowing for the start of the season, here is a little history on the single make motor racing championship. There are 2 championships; the MK1′s which is the MX5 Championship and the MK3′s which is called the MX5 Cup.

In its first year the championship was popular and by 2009 the number of drivers competing had doubled from 20 cars to 40! By 2010 the Ma5da MX5 racing championship had become the UK’s biggest single make motor racing competition. It attracted some of the best drivers in the UK, from BTCC (Jim Edwards Jnr), Clio Clip Cup and many more.

The Mazda MX5 Championship is now recognised as the UK’s largest single make racing series with over 120 registered drivers, extensive TV coverage and a huge following due to its ultra competitive and extremely close racing. With over 100 cars entered and full grids of 54 cars around the Grand Prix circuit, the weekend promises to be a spectacle.

We’ll let you know how the E3 Sport / Team Gravytrain cars get on with a full update after the weekend. All four drivers are looking forward to the races and hopefully starting the season with a good result.

Gravytrain Raise £2257 for Comic Relief

Posted in Charity, News on March 21st, 2011 by Angelina

We kicked off our 24 hour simulator car race at 6pm, Thursday 17th March, with the hope of raising £1000 and completing 300 laps for Comic Relief. Armed with pizza and beers, everyone at Gravytrain took it in turns to drive all night and day through the Le Mans circuit, located in our office on our PS3.

The guys worked hard through the night as Gravytrain reached the halfway mark, completing 150 laps, only 11 hours in to the race. There was some dressing up involved, motorsport enthusiast and director of Gravytrain Kevin Taylor came prepared in his race wear which suited the occasion well and Nick in a pink morph suit complimented with pink finger nails!

2 hours later, we completed an over whelming 179 laps and smashed our fundraising target with a new total of £1500. Tiredness was not going to stop us, as 17 hours in to the race we began to pick up pace and completed 232 laps, and this is the equivalent of driving from London to Istanbul! Everyone was feeling pretty proud of themselves as the finish line was drawing close.

During the final hour of the car race, Kevin Taylor held on to the fastest lap time of 3 minutes 27 seconds! We really tried to make the last hour count; everyone had given the 24 hour race their all. We ended the race with 331 laps complete and raised £2257.

Thank you to all those who took part and sponsored us! You can follow a timeline of our race on Twitter.

Blocked! Google attempts to make search more personal

Posted in News, Search Engines, SEO on March 17th, 2011 by Matthew Read

Since the dawn of Google one of the main aims has been to make search results more personalised and relevant to the individual user. Over the years Google have tried to achieve this aim with additions such as Stars in Search results, Search Wiki and of course the addition of location settings and Google Places.

However, even with all these additions, Google is still trying to make search results more personalised and so this week has introduced a new blocking feature on Google.com which will allow individual users to block whole domains from their search results.

Basically the new process will work like this; when you search for something, i.e. “how to fix a TV”, your usual search results will come up and there will be nothing different about the results. However, if you click on a site and then go straight back to your search results (because the site wasn’t what you were after) you will then see an option to block the website from your search results, located next to the “Cached” button.

So say there is a particular How To or Content site you always see in your results but don’t like, you will be able to block the domain and stop any of their pages from ever appearing in any of your search results.

This new option is linked to Google Accounts and so to keep the block permanent you will need to do it whilst logged in. And don’t worry if you change your mind later there will be an option to undo all of your blocks.

Ramifications for SEO

On the service this is simply a new tool to make search more personalised for individual users and in that sense has very little impact for SEO. However, although they are not doing so yet, Google have mentioned the possibility of using this new feature as a signal in ranking, stating that “we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future”.

In a very simple sense, the way this would work is, the more times a site has been blocked the more damaging to its rankings. So if a sites blocked by 100,000 people it will likely move lower than a similar site blocked by just 100 people.

If this idea were to be used as a new ranking criteria in Google there could be huge ramifications for SEO. With the addition of a block button, businesses could target rivals with negative SEO, setting up hundreds of fake Google accounts through Mechanical Turk and blocking a competitor site over and over.

So how can Google prevent this negative SEO? Well if they were to use this as criteria for rankings they would surely have to use just a select group of user’s activity to determine rankings. Basically, they would have to just look at users who have been around for a long time, have a well built up profile and are blocking domains very selectively.

Is this likely to affect rankings?

In theory this sounds like a great new way for Google to evaluate rankings, but with the huge possibility for negative SEO and the labour in finding a very select group of users doing it properly, it seems unlikely that it will come into practice anytime soon as the logistics are just too large.

However, although we may not see this impacting SEO anytime soon, the new blocking option is another step towards the ultimate personalised results that Google so desire! The new feature has gone live on Google.com this week and will be making its way to Google.co.uk very soon, so look out for it and start thinking of some sites you are sick of seeing in your results.

Gravytrain Does Comic Relief!

Posted in Charity, News on March 14th, 2011 by Matthew Read

Here at Gravytrain we are always working hard (well some of us are) but we still feel like we can do more, and so that’s why this year we are getting our hands dirty, putting in a long shift and doing a gruelling 24 hour race for comic relief. For 24 hours straight we will be involved in an intense, non-stop and physically demanding car race around the beautiful Le Mans circuit, located in our office on our PS3.

Ok, so we aren’t actually doing a real life race, but real or not 24 hours is still 24 hours and our epic GT5 race on the PS3 will be long, trying and full of many ups and downs (as the game is located upstairs).

And so why are we doing this? It is definitely not because we like playing video games, oh no, it is all in the name of Comic Relief! We are aiming to raise £1,000 for Red Nose Day 2011 and could really use your help getting there, so why not visit our Red Nose Day Sponsor Page and give what you can for this wonderful cause.

As an extra incentive, our in house food-a-phobic, Nick, has agreed to eat a curry for the first time in his life if we hit our target and complete our aim of 300 laps around the circuit. For your viewing pleasure we will be filming Nick losing his curry virginity and so sponsor us if you want to see the Gravytrain highlight of the year (and do something good for charity).

The King’s Speech vs. The King of Shaves!

Posted in Video on March 14th, 2011 by Matthew Read

Unless you have been in a comma for the last 2 months you will probably have noticed that The King’s Speech has been everywhere! The British film about King George VI, staring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, has stormed the box office and won pretty much every film accolade under the sun, including 5 BAFTA’s, 4 Oscars and a Golden Globe.

But who really cares? The film has been a smash hit at the cinema, but everyone knows that true film success nowadays comes online. If you can create a great YouTube video, make it go viral and get millions of viewers without even leaving your room, doing any PR or having a budget, isn’t that much more accomplished than getting people to go to the cinema?

You may not agree, but nevertheless you cannot deny that in recent years YouTube has become a kind of new Hollywood for the common man. And that is why instead of using this blog post to promote The King’s Speech I would like to direct you to The King of Shaves.

Some comic geniuses at The King of Shaves company have created a brilliantly funny parody of The King’s Speech which won’t exactly warm your heart but will split your sides.

Check out The King of Shaves video now at YouTube (it’s a lot cheaper than the cinema!)

March 2011