A BBC study has revealed that the confidence of small business owners remains, on average, unchanged since April – which is about a good as we could expect given the general doom and gloom of the British economic climate.

The report on ten UK small business owners showed an average level of confidence at 7.6 out of 10. Another three businesses questioned in the sample group revealed that confidence in business had actually grown, with an average level of 8.3 out of 10 reported.

So long as these businesses are a representative sample then perhaps we can allow ourselves a little optimism for the future well-being of Britain’s small business enterprises.
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Are there any businesses that are being more or less confident?

No doubt most of you are aware that Matt Cutts is in the habit of posting useful nuggets of webmaster info on the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central.
The latest video concerns the question “Do meta geo tags influence search results?”. Apparently the answer is, “Well, no not really.”
Instead Cutts does suggest that webmasters or owners:
* Have the right domain name
* Have the right IP address
* Specify in Google’s Webmaster Tools that certain content is relevant for a particular country.

A new e-marketing report has revealed the 10 most “marketing friendly” words used in the subject lines of emails. According to MailerMailer, an email list manager provider, the top 10 words most likely to get recipients to open an email are:
1. news
2. party
3. newsletter
4. free
5. night
6. sale
7. com
8. update
9. holiday
10. week

MailerMailer also claims that emails are being opened sooner than six months ago. They reckon that just over 32% of all emails are opened within the first two hours of receipt compared to 29.6% half a year earlier.
What we don’t know, however, is the breadth of this survey. Does anyone have any email marketing-friendly words they would like to add?