John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

31 January 2008: Wow. Sometimes on the coast you get some weird weather. Just now I heard what sounded like someone dropping a tin roof, looked up and it was snowing heavily. My partner said she'd seen lightning, and the sound was thunder. So I went up to the top floor to look out over the bay, and we were in the middle of a snowstorm, with a very strong wind from the east, yet, also, the sun was pouring through a gap in the clouds. So, sun, wind, thunder and lightning, and snow all at the same time.

Here's what the webcam saw, one minute apart.

A snowstorm, Scarborough 31 January 2008, 15:56

A snowstorm, Scarborough 31 January 2008, 15:57

A snowstorm, Scarborough 31 January 2008, 15:58

And then this ten minutes later

A snowstorm passed, Scarborough 31 January 2008, 16:08

P J Harvey

27 January 2008: We spent a while on YouTube last night, accidentally proving that making music accessible increases music sales. I want the P J Harvey DVD, and the latest album.

Long Snake Moan at Glastonbury. I mean, you could lose it to this. Just .. do a Paris Texas.

The band I'm in covers that, and with luck, Perfect Day Elise too.

And this is the video I referred to earlier but couldn't find. How can anything be that good?

The thing I'm most proud of is, she's done what Kate Bush wasn't able to. She's done what she's done without being overtly sexual. Perhaps she's combined sexuality with power and scared all the chaps, whereas Bush was a bit more faye (is that how you spell that?). But the comments to these YouTube videos are packed full of respect.

But it's live when it comes through even more powerfully. Drink Rid of me. One woman and a guitar. Watch at least the end of that or the next bit won't make any sense.

I've been thinking about the current mode for singing in a local accent. Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks. Firstly, I'm sure that's not a new thing, lots of artists in the sixties must have done that. But also that's fine if you've got a cool sounding accent. But Polly is from Somerset. Those lyrics in Rid of Me: 'Lick my legs I'm on fire, Lick my legs of desire', wouldn't quite work as well as "Lick moy lergs, oim on foir". She's probably best sticking with what she does.

The Big Flake

21 January 2008: Love it. Make a wish, it turns into a big snowflake comprising everyones wishes. Either that or they sell your emails to spammers. I tend to believe the former. Although the snowflake won't be real, of course. It's a virtual snowflake. Kinda beautiful. I liked it anyway. Or is it for people who believe in fairies? Don't you find people are too cynical nowadays? I bet fairies aren't cynical. I bet they smell of sunny oranges hanging from the tree. I also bet they don't eat kebabs. Virtual snowflakes are probably more green than real ones because you don't have to keep them cold. Anyway, here's what I'm banging on about. It's a big snowflake thing.

Cow

19 January 2008: On my regular Saturday morning walk to the newsagent, passing the local church, I glanced up to see a woman entering the vicarage through the front door. To the side was a sign. I could only see part of it. ?ow ???rving.

My head immediately imagined she'd walked into the living room to find an emaciated cow. Cow starving. Religions and their rituals. "Oh yes, we always starve a cow at this time of year. It makes the God of hay happy and gives all our congregation a special moment to consider the plight of ... whatever". Might as well be. I think that shows what little I know about what goes on inside a church.

Co-incidentally, after a chance meeting with a religious person in Sainsbury's, we appear to be committed to taking on a Paleolithic diet (minus the meat).

The sign, incidentally, was "now serving". Oh well.

Yates & Sluik

14 January 2008: For a similar filing-error reason, I have a card for David Yates hanging around, and I have to clear out my room for a video shoot next week. It currently looks like a waste paper disposal area.

That page leads to Ron Sluik at www.sluik.info. We saw his work in a local exhibition and I was rather taken.

Jeez, there's no hiding place. I don't think that's the same Paula Zimmermann though.

Good, I can throw those cards now.

Holidays

14 January 2008: I keep stumbling across a list of holidays and trips my partner and I and two friends said we wanted to take together some time ago. Maybe we never will now, but I don't know what to do with the list. I haven't got a storage place for it. So if I stick it up here then I'll always be able to find it.

Spend some time in a Scottish lodge near a loch. My partner will cook wonderful breakfasts and I'll cook wonderful teas. We go off into the surroundings and learn how to draw.
Camping in Northumberland
Rome, to see the Berninies
Go and see Another Place, the Gormley statues on Crosby Beach.
The west coast of Ireland
New York
Iceland
Florence
Madrid
Barcelona
Bilbao, the Guggenheim
Wherever Picasso's Guernica is

Blogging for profit

13 January 2008: A potential client took my advice, started a blog, and sent me their first posting with a request for my advice. Here's what I said.

"Cool, thanks for asking, and well done.

It's a nice blog, no doubt.

Three things.

You get three benefits from blogging.

1) You get people watching your exploits and coming back to you and getting to trust you and, in the end, perhaps buy something from you or otherwise support you. So, traffic, is one benefit.

2) You get PageRank. That's a Google thing, and it's how Google calculates the importance of your page. How important your page is helps define your position in the search results. It's calculated by working out how many inbound links your page has, and how many outbound. And of the links inbound, what their PageRank is (same formula).

So if you are linked to by a page with a big PageRank, you get a big PageRank boost. If you load the Google Toolbar, you can get it to show you the PageRank of your and other's websites.

3) Link reputation. Remember the George Bush campaign where lots of people posted a link for the words "miserable failure" to his website? I think even to this day if you type "miserable failure" into Google his site's at the top. So if you want to get a higher ranking for searches on, say "lucky ducks" (or whatever, you have to choose those a bit carefully, look at your site's log to see what phrases people are finding you for), then you need to create a link to a page on your site that is about "lucky ducks". (I saw the piece on them in the news, that wasn't who enquired, I'm protecting their identity)

Each link you create gives the page you point to a little bit of PageRank, and a little bit of link reputation for the phrase you used, plus a few actual visitors.

So you need to work out how to make links in whatever blogging tool you use. Ideally, try putting in <a href="http://www.yourURL.com">your search text</a>, with a sentence around it that makes sense. If your blogging tool lets you do that, fantastic. If not, it might just take a URL. Which is OK, but it doesn't let you do (3) above, so it might be worth finding a blogging tool that does.

Once you've worked that out, look at the page source for your blog page (there's an option in your browser: view (page) source). Use the 'find' function to find your link. See if the blogging tool's added rel="nofollow" to your link. If so, it's not passing PageRank (2), so again, find another blogging tool.

Roll your mouse over the link in your blog, and make sure it's your page that comes up in the wotsit bar at the bottom of your browser. If it's anything else, again it's not passing PageRank (2), find another blogging tool.

Make sure, in your blogging tool too, that you fill out your profile. Not quite enough perhaps for someone to pinch your ID, but enough so people who like what you like can find you.

After all that, you've just two more problems to solve.

1) how to raise the profile of your blog so it gets lots of traffic and PageRank of its own to pass to your main site, and

2) trying to discipline yourself to write short, succinct blogs so, essentially, you're using your time efficiently.

Oh, there's working out where to efficiently spend your time too, ie. what actions you can take that will provide your best ROI. There's no point in spending all your time promoting the phrase "lucky ducks" if a) no-one's searching for that, or b) the page you're sending people to doesn't do whatever you need to happen, whether that's they buy something or they sign up for something or they come to your shop or your event or they just like you more or whatever.

There's more to it, too, but that's a start. And there's a whole lot more to blogging culture that I don't know about, too. I'm not sure I fully understand what a blogroll is for a start. But I think that summarises the important stuff :-)

Happy blogging.

Cheers

On the question of efficiency, of course I've been efficient here because I was able to write a comprehensive answer to this person in the knowledge I could blog it. And this blog didn't take loads of time because I'd already written the crux of it to an enquirer.

Don't start thinking, btw, that my blog, this one, is in any way some kind of calculated way to prise your mind open, quickly followed by your purse. Yeah, right, that's a laugh. Boy what a success :-)

I started this blog so you (my sweetly perfumed potential clients) could get to know me so we can have a successful (possibly long distance) relationship. I think if you know me and broadly like what you read, we'll have a good business relationship. And me putting all this stuff out means, if you like the same stuff wherever you are in the world, at some point we'll connect.

That's it, I'm not bending your mind. I'm just saying, it's possible to do that and it's possible to use blogging for business ends.

The extent to which I do that here is what I just said plus: I might put up an occasional Amazon Associate link although I don't know why I bother because I've never made a penny out of that (what do you mean you don't want to buy the same butterfly book that I've just read?), I may well link to my client's sites to spread the lurve, and there are Google ads up top right from which I make perhaps 13p a month (I get paid a little bit when you click on them).

All of which means there are people out there doing blogging purely for money. You can recognise them, they are soulless, like wandering around an empty shopping centre. This kinda thing. In truth, I use that particular site as an example partly to get them back because I actually didn't quite spot that and sent in a comment to that story, mentioning KoolTrax, software which can turn your GPS mobile phone into a location tracker. Obviously they didn't print it because it competes and perhaps they are only blogging about stuff they can make money on, so they wasted a little of my time for me.

Are you getting the idea?

Saint of the day

13 January 2008: "ST. HILLARY OF POITIERS. In the early centuries of Christianity, there were still many people who did not believe in God as we do. They believed that there were many gods, some more powerful than others. These people were not bad. They just did not know any better. They were called pagans."

A friend who is now, I think, a minister published this online. It's interesting to me because this is a sneaky peak inside the Church of England.

Doesn't it just reek? Doesn't it contain within it the attitude "we are right, everyone else is wrong, we are higher and better than you, we have the exclusive right to judge what's good and who's bad"? It's even written in a "teacher to class of children" manner. "It's OK children, we killed all the pagans years ago so they can't hurt you".

There's a lot of talk about extremism in religion nowadays. I think that's extreme. There's no flexibility there. You can't work with someone who takes this stuff on board, they'll never feel you're as good as they are. No, friends. Christianity? Run like the wind.

It's you. It's your decisions and the things you do that matter. If you're saintly and go to heaven, it'll be because of your actions, minute by minute and every minute, right now and all tomorrows, not because of anything whoever wrote that St. Hillary piece has to say.

Then again, St. Nicholas, after whom I'm named, seems pretty cool. "The wonderworker" eh? Yeah, I might use that :-)

Bread usability

12 January 2008: It was 8:38am on Saturday morning and I was out hunting for bread. Costcutters only had white, so I'd reached the local small Tesco and caught a loaf. A Tesco Finest, as it happened.

I'd only just unfolded out of bed. Although I'd remained sober, the night before I'd played my part in a blinding gig in a local pub, so I'd eventually rolled in at about half one the previous morning. So I was a bit bleary.

Tesco has self service tills. I like using self service tills. There was no checkout person in sight, so me, the loaf, and the till were alone together.

I couldn't find the bar code on the loaf.

I looked all over. I turned it around. All six sides. Eyes wide open. I looked, consciously, all over.

Now there's the 'men and women looking in cupboards' theory, which I can't remember, but I do remember that there's a very good reason why men look in cupboards and don't find what they were sent to find, and then the woman turns up and puts her hand on it immediately, usually to a cry from the man of "well, it was behind something!" It's to do with the different way men and women model what they are looking for.

I think what happened here is I was expecting the bar code to be somewhere near the ingredients list or the icons for how you recycle the plastic or contact the company if you have a complaint. In other words I had a model in my head of where I expected the bar code to be. I was arriving at the situation with expectations.

Furthermore, I think I know something about marketing and I expect packaging to show off the best parts of the product inside, and hide the grungy bits. Another model, another expectation, another preconception.

Another model was that I expected the bar code to be presented at a particular size and in a particular way.

Anyway. Obviously I seemed helpless (although in my defence I hadn't yet started wailing), a lady came over to help. She said "look, it's here", and pointed to an enormous bar code right on the top of the package, over the brown top of the loaf.

(In retrospect it's probably quicker just to show the scanner all sides and have done with it, let the system do the work, but anyway).

So now I assume she'd got the idea of me as one of a series of useless customers (old geezers perhaps) who can't even use a simple self service till. She had no idea I actually design this sort of thing, and it was the system that was crap, not me. Oh yes.

I had another preconception for her. I didn't think these systems took cash. I only wanted a loaf of bread from a shop. Now she wanted me to think whether I had a Tesco Clubcard or not. "Yes", I said, opening my wallet. Then realising, "err, no, actually, I haven't". We don't shop in Tesco's much. She was going too fast for me. Look, I just want toast, can I have my loaf of bread yet?

The next bit's a blur, but there was a series of grunts and facial expressions, by the end of which I realised the machine took cash, even quite crumply fivers. She complimented me on how well kept my fiver was in comparison to others she's seen.

She took the fiver from me and pushed it through a, rather hidden IMHO, money eating slot. Did it matter which way around it went? No idea. I'll have to find out next time. She put her hand over the change bowl.

"Aha", I said, hoping to regain the advantage, "you have sneaky tricks to stop our change spilling over the floor". My mind wandered back to an embarassing pub episode where I put £1 into a jelly bean machine, turned the handle, and it threw all my multicoloured, noisy jellybeans over the pub floor as if I was about to make a run for it and wanted everyone to run like they do in cartoons and then all fall over in a heap, allowing me my getaway. She explained to me where the cash was stored in the machine and how far it has to fall to reach the bowl. She likes the machine, she understands its needs. She's been trained to use a self-service machine.

I took my change and turned to go. Then turned back. "Did I get a receipt?" I like receipts. She looked at one that was lying around. "It's not this one". "Oh yes, I have", I said, remembering, "you gave it to me earlier".

I walked out carefully through the sliding doors. Carefully, because last time I went out through the sliding doors of this Tesco, the doors had been in the process of opening as I walked towards them, but just as I got to them, they stopped opening, halting me dead with both shoulders, thrusting my head through the gap. It kinda hurt. Faulty sliding doors are a pet hate of mine. They'd be in my Room 101. Not much annoys me, but this did. I turned to the security man and asked "does this happen often?" "It does that sometimes", he said.

How do I feel about all this? Well for all their power, Tesco really didn't get much right there. In moving the bar code and making it bigger, they presumably wanted to make it easier to find. But they didn't reckon on our mental models. I bet they never tested it.

The woman who helped was nice enough, but made me feel like a useless old duffer. I didn't go to Tesco to feel like a useless old duffer. I walked in feeling like a rock star.

And the sliding doors? If I were managing that store I'd want to have fixed that instantly, and if I didn't know about it, I'd want to make sure I got to hear about such stuff in the future. I'd have tried to feed back, too, to make sure the supplier of those doors knew.

This is a big PR, marketing and branding issue.

As well as illustrating the effect of mental models on usability, this illustrates something else. In usability testing we consider what environment or situation people will be in when they use the system we are testing. Noisy or busy? Quiet and studious? People at work are generally skilled at what they do and can be expected to repeat actions and find efficient ways to do things. You can train them too, and they'll know how their job or profession works, they may have had all their mental models set up by taking a degree or other training. People who have just woken up and want to buy a loaf of bread may be perfectly useful and skilled and intelligent (not to mention handsome) people, who just happen to be bleary eyed at that moment and unpracticed at the system.

I'm currently designing the interface for an extreme case. If a kid goes missing, but is wearing a tracking device, the parents need to see their kid's location. Perhaps on a mobile device in a shopping street on a sunny day, while in a blind panic. One word: usability.

Here's the thing, and I'm willing to bet you either don't agree or it hasn't yet got itself on your radar screen or it just doesn't seem important to you. Usability is a massive potential source of advantage over your competition.

I see the benefits of doing usability testing, and I absolutely think (partly because no-one's really doing it yet) it holds huge potential for even just a small investment. Usability tests aren't terribly expensive. I'm sure you spend money on marketing, and there's a huge industry around that which means that if you want to get above the crowd you have to spend at least as much as your competition. With usability, your competitors probably aren't doing it yet. Which means you can spend a little and get a huge leap forward.

Think how much you might save if more of your enquirers bought from you, fewer of them called for help, and you had fewer returns.

If Tesco can't get the usability of a loaf of bread right, then usability hasn't hit the mainstream yet. It's an idea whose time is yet to come.

Which means you can get first mover advantage. Whatever type of work you do, running a usability test today can make a huge difference to the success of your product or service. I don't go into that branch of Tesco if I can help it, because of usability, not because I'm a prissy academic with high principles, but because the things that happen in that shop seriously piss me off. Usability shows you not just which bits are annoying your customers but also how to fix it. Which means usability is about gaining and retaining customers. Halleluyah.

So (if you've got a little something to spend on increasing your (website) conversion rate (enquiries:sales ratio) or retaining customers or increasing word-of-mouth sales) email me now or Skype chat with me: JohnAllsoppInternet, tell me something about what you do, ask me about usability, and let's get this world sorted. It's built for people you know.

Anna Crilly

11 January 2008: At one time the nation was surprised to discover that Manuel from Fawlty Towers wasn't actually Spanish, but was actor Andrew Sachs, pretending to be Spanish.

I wondered if Magda from Lead Balloon, which I like because it's predictable and my partner doesn't like because it's so predictable, might be the same.

Shock, she's Kent born English comedienne (scroll down about halfway) Anna Crilly.

air

7 January 2008: Some software I need uses Adobe Air. "Great", I think, "I'll be using my cranky old Windows machine for that". I went to the Adobe Air page and the first sentence says it's "cross platform software". "Wow", I think, "I won't be using my cranky old Windows machine after all". I scroll down the page. There's a version for Windows. And a version for Mac. And that's it. Given that Mac has Linux underneath (more or less), that's kinda weird and pretty annoying. So, Adobe, you want Brownie points for going cross platform? Nada.

1983

6 January 2008: Both my g/f and I can remember a life of watching the skies for nuclear weapons. I even thought I saw one once. I went on the CND march in either 1980 or 1981, can't quite remember. I was a Computer Science student in Leeds and had to get up early to catch the coach, but it was also the morning we got an extra hour in bed. I ended up in Terry's All Time Cafe (it's famous) with other out of touch people who also had no idea about the end of British Summer Time.

It seems hard to conceive of now, but every household received a copy of Protect and Survive, which really did seem to suggest we should hide under some doors in the event of a nuclear attack, prompting the obvious "Protest and Survive" response and Raymond Briggs' "When the wind blows". It's easy to say the door thing is ludicrous, but for everyday people far enough from the epicentre, it's probably the best we could have done.

There was the CND film too, which was probably the most chilling thing I've ever seen, which was shown in churches and village halls everywhere you turned. Can't remember what that was called.

Anyway, none of that was covered by "1983: The Brink of Apocalypse" which we watched last night on Channel 4 which, although the title might suggest otherwise, wasn't one of those Channel 5 WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE programmes, but appeared to be, sober, very well researched, balanced and excellently presented story of a moment in 1983 when the Americans were running a simulation of their response to a nuclear attack (Able Archer) while unaware that the Russians were thinking it was all real.

The programme didn't say this, but I was left with the feeling that, with Russian missiles primed and ready, subs hiding under the ice, mobile missiles out and hiding in the woods, Chernenko's finger on the trigger, the Russian's having intercepted the American (mock) order to press the button and so breathlessly waiting for the first real signs of weaponry heading their way, fingers at the ready, and just eight minutes between American missile launch and destruction in which to work out whether any warning was real or not, we were pretty close to a right mess. Especially given a false alarm earlier where a listening station went all Lost In Space ("Danger! Danger!") because it had seen some clouds that looked a bit like Pershing missiles. Again, we were OK thanks to a clear thinking and not-being-atomised loving Russian.

The Americans, completely oblivious and peaking on the high of a successful exercise ending on Armistice day and with Reagan off on some trip to the far east, if the Russians had hit the button, I'm not sure if we'd have responded. Which would leave America wiped out, and communist Russia unhurt. Now that would have been a turning point in history.

We were saved, pretty much, by a part of the Russian character that sees war and arms as the last thing to turn to, not the first. The programme said Russians feel they've lost too many people through war. So praise the lord the Russians are nice people. Perhaps we don't say that often enough.

Yes, they'd gotten themselves paranoid. But, as they said, America has used nuclear weapons before. Quite so. Twice. Us, paranoid? Who told you that?

Part of the build-up to this was the commercial Korean flight 007, the pilots of which lackadaisically set its autopilot and presumably started doing the crossword, while their plane kinda started heading inexorably towards a Russian target. Having flown into Russian air space and despite having a fighter jet pilot waving at them through their windscreen and firing warning shots, they carried on and got shot down.

In our Top Shop, Internet connected world, it's hard to remember those times, just 25 years ago or so.

Anyway, fantastically, Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons, but there's no eight minutes of thinking time and Pakistan's not very stable. Groove on.

Oh, and if you want a Lost In Space robot all of your own, you can have one. And, that end of the world stuff's all very well, but I'm really curious what was going through their heads when the makers of Lost In Space cast the camp old man into the perfect family unit, was it just comedy? Is he supposed to be gay or just something to laugh at while they traverse the cosmos?

Obama

5 January 2008: Please God let the next American president be a black man, a woman, a eunuch, a blue budgie, a Broadway dancer, anything so long as they don't resemble George freakin' Bush in even the slightest way. "But you've got two arms and two legs, you remind me too much of George!"

Here's my prediction though.

I think there are plenty of people who thought Obama would never get near anything because he is black so they didn't bother taking much of an interest. Now he has, I think they will mobilise and vote and he will lose in the end.

My feeling is, he would have been better off getting to the top near the end.

Clearly I've no idea what I'm talking about. Let's hope I'm wrong, it has been known. But just in case it does happen, I wanted to get my guess in first before I hear it from anyone else.

It's a weird thing. How I feel about it is actually I'm in a sulk. America let me down last time. I find I cannot get excited in case they disappoint me again. That's pretty unreasonable. But Britain is America's friend. Imagine what the rest of the world feels.

Spanish

4 January 2008: Yesterday evening I sent an email to a friend in Spanish. The most basic of emails and probably incorrect at that: "Hablas español? Soy aprendiendo. Hablamos? Adios J". New year's resolution and all that.

Today, I got spam in Spanish. I don't think I've had Spanish spam before. If I'm wrong about that then my next assumption will be wrong.

Which means emails really are open to the world. Assume every email is being read by someone looking to take advantage.

So never send credit card details over email unless you encrypt it. I tend to send usernames over email and the password by SMS text.

Pity, too, because I imagine the spam filter won't be so good at removing non-English spam.

NLP

3 January 2008: I've put on 4lbs over Christmas, probably through not running. Oh, and the Christmas cake. But I'm just 2lbs heavier than I was 2 years ago before I started running, so I don't perceive a slippery slope just yet. Co-incidentally, Paul McKenna was apparently on tv doing his I Will Make You Thin thing. I didn't watch it, this is hearsay. That might not even be a link to the right programme.

What I heard sounded like Neuro Linguistic Programming. There was something funky going on in even the recounted story. "If you feel hungry, you're probably thirsty". That just plugs right in, doesn't it? It goes straight from your ears into the centre of your brain and stays there.

Here was one I heard. An audience member asked "Can I drink alcohol", and McKenna said "sure", and in the moment she relaxed and went "phew, that's good" he said "but maybe not with a meal". I may not have recounted that accurately, but .. oh .. there were also the ten commandments (a set of rules) which seemed to be there more to distract. Get the audience to concentrate on remembering the rules, meanwhile while their conscious mind is occupied trying to remember that, fire in little rules like "If you feel hungry, you're probably thirsty" that go straight through, under the radar, straight into the subconscious. Mental sleight of hand. I'm not sure the rules are that important, it's just something to occupy your conscious mind while he injects the important stuff.

Perhaps this exists in marketing and I've missed it, so I need to read up on NLP. My partner has a book, I'll have a borrow of that.

Anyway, that Paul McKenna programme's quite clever. I Will Make You Thin. It's not a book, it's just a one way ticket to Ethiopia. See he didn't even have to write anything.

Bebo

2 January 2008: May as well start the new year as I mean to go on. Bebo. I have a relative who uses Bebo and contacts me that way. I asked why that and not email and "I'm in it most of the time so it's more convenient".

He sent me some love. A Bebo thing, apparently, in an effort to get me to understand I should 'do something' with my Bebo pages other than just receive messages.

In trying to explain why I didn't really want that, I ran out of characters in the box Bebo gave me. I could rest my case there, frankly, but let's just say this.

The Internet is t'Internet. It's built using open standards. Social networking sites (Bebo, mySpace, FaceBook) are privately owned sites. One way or another, they want your time and they want your input. Why? Because it's valuable.

The Internet promised to give us control over our own resources. These services want to take that away.

Blogging, for instance, is very valuable. Not that I've made much use of the value of mine, but I do have almost five years of good content here. That's not why I'm doing it, btw. I still own that, and it's starting to prove its worth. There are plans afoot. If I'd typed all that into, say, mySpace, I do believe News International would own the right to use it too.

Social networks split the Internet, too. With technology the pressure to be biggest is enormous, because once you're the default service social pressure keeps you there. Microsoft Windows is the ultimate demonstration of that. People don't want to move from it because they feel they won't be able to share Word documents or whatever. Social networks are even worse for this. If all your friends are in Bebo, that's kinda that, you're not going anywhere. But, OK so we have the mySpacers, Facebook, and Bebo all with their different demographics (music, office workers, and teens, I think), different interfaces and capabilities, and there are a hundred other sites worldwide all trying for the same thing. In other words, it's much more split than it seems.

I'd rather have a standard to which all these things interface. The web is that, a standard. There's a standard for social networking too: Friend of a friend (FOAF) but I don't know if it really works: a bit like the whole semantic web thing which is starting to look a little like GNU Hurd, a free UNIX that Richard Stallman was developing which hasn't yet seen the light of day because Linux happened.

So I might be being idealistic, wanting us to use something like FOAF when clearly the world has moved on. Equally, I love free market competition and diversity, and the market for social networking software is that, so I should like it.

Perhaps, too, it's like those companies that used to come around and pick up your waste paper for recycling. They'd find value in something you were going to throw away. If Bebo makes some money out of me banging on about how I spent my Christmas and which is my favourite movie star, then good luck to them.

So I suppose it comes down to this. If I type content into a social networking site, I feel like I'm wasting my time. If I type stuff here, I feel like I'm building a body of work. If I spend any time learning how to use Bebo, I'm wasting my time. If I spend time building software to make my blog better, I'm investing in myself. If I have Bebo, mySpace, and Facebook all open I'll never do any work and never achieve anything. If I focus, I'll at least get through and, with luck, make a difference. If I put into mySpace, I'm only reaching a few people. If I put into the Web, I'm reaching everyone.

Those are my personal views (and I'm not even sure about those). Now, for Internet marketing, my views are completely different. For Internet marketing, social networks are vital. Make sense of that.

I was going to blog something happy after that but I've forgotten it now.

Happy new year btw.