John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Obama vs McCain: 31 August 2008: I get the impression from the news that McCain levelled recently with Obama in the polls, so I thought I'd check that out and see what effect the conventions and running mate thing had had on the results. I was surprised to see Obama seemingly comfortably ahead (scroll down a bit for graph). So where's that impression that McCain is getting level coming from? Anyway, I guess the meaningful measure is about a week after the Republican Party Congress next week.
Another Manfat video: 30 August 2008: Another Manfat Voodoo video. Bit weird this one (surprise!), but I'm looking forward to doing the drumning bit.
Men who don't mind: 30 August 2008: We see a lot in the press about Internet-based suicide cults and sites that encourage anorexia, but I was really happy to discover Alopecia World (nothing to do with me, I might add), and their forum page men who don't mind which has the description "Real men of substance who know how to truly love and adore bald or alopecic women without reducing them to fetishes. Women, this group is also open to you, but it's primary focus is single and married men who love you for all the right reasons!". Within the forum, as I write, men with alopecic (I've learned a new word) partners talk about how they handle things like people staring.; Isn't that just beautiful?
Help: 30 August 2008: Some help system must have changed how it does stuff, because in the last couple of days this has happened twice. Once with O2, and just now with Facebook.; You have a question, you wander around the help files, don't find the answer, so reach a form where you can send your query. Being a responsible typa person, you get all the details together, serial numbers, software versions, all that, and you send it.; What you get back is a standard email saying "here are the most popular reasons people email us, please read this and if your query isn't answered here, please follow the instructions at the bottom". Then there's a load of bullshit questions about "how can I upgrade" or "how do I switch it on", which were all the things that you've already read.; And here's the crux. They don't send you back your query. So you have to write it all out again.; Now .. isn't that jaw-droppingly rude? OK, fine, these companies probably spend a load of money all day answering inane questions and let's just thank Facebook: it is completely free of charge after all.; But for someone like me who often asks a question actually with an underlying purpose of highlighting an issue, who makes an effort to provide all the relevant information, who has genuinely rtfm, and who is actually promoting Facebook to others .. it's rejection, and it's not being cared for.; I remember a Tom Peters story of an MD who, having found some vocal client who was complaining about a product his company had sold, took a video crew down to see the guy to hear what he had to say, then came back and hauled the whole company up to watch the video and get their shit together: to connect the whole company with who they serve, get them to feel the customer's frustration and give them purpose and focus. That's the world I want to live in.
The Rubettes: 28 August 2008: A world that created The Rubettes can't be all bad.
O Winston Link: 27 August 2008: Beautiful photographs of 50s America, often including steam trains .. awesome.
Mobile phones: 27 August 2008: Something about the whole mobile phone business just winds me up. Mostly it's confusopoly stuff, but sometimes I resent the enormous 'tax' the mobile companies had to pay when they bought the radio frequency licences for 3G, but hey, they just bid for it.; One thing I really, really can't get my head around is the locking of phones to networks. I guess it's clearer when looking at the iPhone which is clearly so desirable that the network that 'owns' it would gain advantage. I guess that's the mechanism working underneath that whole thing, but from our point of view that's just bullshit put in our way. Why can't I buy the phone I want, and use it with the tarif and mobile company I want? Just because the whole industry has conspired to create an unnecessary barrier to stop me doing that.; So here's my current frustration. I just got my first ever bona-fide gadget, an E-TEN m700. Of all the phones and PDAs with GPS (satnav) I reviewed here, this one (uniquely) has wifi too, which means free Internet.; On the phone I moved from, I used to be able to get Internet over the phone. Now, I don't seem to be able to. The reason? After trying O2's website, having it tell me it couldn't help me online I'd have to contact them, and after using their arcane form ("what date did you last top-up?" .. months ago, how am I supposed to remember that?) to send my query, I then got a stock email back saying, more or less, "yes, Mr Allsopp, nice query, but let me just ignore it and tell you about some of the common problems and solutions our customers are experiencing" .. not one of which was "some of our customers want to chew at the foundations of our headquarters until we all die in a horrible HQ Chew Screw-You Coup" .. and which didn't send me back my explanation of my problem, meaning I had to re-write the whole thing using my head and fingers. Finally, I got back "To able to use all the features on your PDA, you need to use Mobile Web which is currently supported only on Pay Monthly tariffs". Beautiful.; The problem with all this is equity theory (it's great having a work psychologist g/f) which says that if you mess with me, I'll mess with you back until I feel we are fair again. I wonder if I could campaign to have O2 show negative goodwill in their balance sheet? Because it's real. Fuck 'em. Really. They can provide me reliable mobile services until they're blue in the face, I'll still want to nick pens from their showrooms until I feel we're back in balance. And that would take a lot of pens.; I started to wonder if open source has an answer to this. There is the open source phone coming (but not ready yet), but the issue is really open source mobile services. I guess that's wi-fi. Free Internet, donated by whoever wants to do that. For instance, we have wi-fi in the harbour area now, and as I'm wandering around with the m700 I'm finding open wi-fi around in various places, but certainly not everywhere.; So anyway, perhaps the point is .. next time you buy a phone, try to get wi-fi on it because it's basically free and gets you out of being tied to the mobile companies for data charges and so on.; Either that or I'm wrong. Like I say, I'm not a gadget guy, I'm like a pensioner* discovering the Internet "wow, there's all sorts on the web" .. yes, I know, I've seen it.; * That's bad of me .. pensioners are just as likely to be Internet users so I don't want to perpetuate a myth or stereotype. But .. you know what I mean.; Nor am I *that* far from pensionable age myself.; And hey, mobile Internet isn't food. We don't need it, we just want it. It's not a right. So I should pay the money or shut up.; And, imagine how many Israeli pens the Palestinians want to nick.
Mouse disassembly: 25 August 2008: I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to get into my Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Serial mouse. It was sticking, so I removed the ball underneath, which is fine, and picked away at the hairs and crud around the three shafts and wheels underneath as I usually do with tweezers. Except this time, a shaft and gear assembly came away as I did that, and I couldn't work out how to put it back with the mouse assembled.; It looks like it's a pretty old mouse, the online disassembly instructions I found (without using a mouse .. alt F for the file menu, tab through page links, etc) all referred to other, newer looking meece.; Anyway, in those instructions the screws were hidden under four sticky pads on the underside corners of the mouse. My mouse didn't have those. I peeled away two pads, top and bottom and there was nothing under there.; Mine had a single screw I reached by punching through the sticker just above the bar code, and that was the key to it.; An awful lot of DNA collects inside your mouse over the years. Just in case you need to know.
Internet marketing and the self employed: 25 August 2008: I come across this a lot, so just thought I'd write it up.; There's a mismatch between how Internet marketing works and sole trader psychology, and it goes like this (and between me (an Internet marketer) and my bird (who is a work psychologist) we know a thing or two about it).; Tom Peters used to say 'be the best at what you do', and even back then, pre-Internet, when I used to market people in the real world, the issue existed then too. Even marketing myself the same issues apply: I'm not the world's best PHP programmer. I'm not even the world's best Internet marketer. So how can I seriously expect to be the best in my area? And when I spoke to a writer about this he said things like "I'm not the world's best writer, and I write all sorts of stuff, press releases, brochure copy, ad copy, letters to shareholders, how can I say I'm the best at something?"; The answer is .. when you satisfied your last client, you were the best in the world to them. And if you can think through your clients and why people choose you, you can find characteristics and situations that join them into markets. You need to find a niche to market, but that doesn't mean you're limiting yourself.; The point is, this isn't a choice. I can't afford to be the top of Google for "web developer" because .. it's a free market. Whoever is at the top of Google for that phrase is the one who is applying the best techniques and the biggest budget to being at the top, and in order to afford to do that, they are converting that traffic into business better than anyone else. Internet marketing isn't cheap because the price is set by your competitors: it's who can outspend the others and get to the top.; So, as a self employed person, you've no chance of getting a position for a really competitive phrase. You have to find a phrase you can afford to succeed at. You have to decide on a niche. So for me, for instance, maybe I'm the world's best at marketing B&Bs in Scarborough or something. And maybe I can make a living at that, or maybe that'll just be a part of my income. For my writer friend, perhaps he needs to go back over his accounts and work out where he made his most profit in the last year .. was it writing catalogues or press releases? And if that's still competitive, and I bet it is, maybe his niche is catalogues for Spanish holiday homes or something.; The top of a Google search is where all the money is, and to reasonably expect a top slot you have to legitimately believe you have a right to be there for whatever that search query was. So maybe I need to be top for 'scarborough web developer SEO hotel', something like that. The great thing about that is if someone types that in, finds me, and then they visit my website where I say "I'm the world's best web developer and Internet marketer for Scarborough hotels" people go "wow, that's exactly what I'm looking for, let's go with this guy", so the sale is done.; Bear in mind .. this is radically different from normal marketing. With normal marketing you place an ad in a magazine and you want to say something fairly broad because you want to attract people who are browsing through the magazine to start a dialogue during which you can work out what you want to do for them.; With Internet marketing, that's not what's happening at all. People are searching for a solution and are often ready to buy, and they are searching more and more specifically until they find what they want.; Now, here's the problem. No self employed person wants to be chopped up, boxed in into a niche like that.; People become self employed because they want their freedom. They usually leave employment where they had no freedom (freedom can't be given or granted) and probably reached a point where they could take no more. So they have an aversion to having their freedom curtailed. Freedom is the freedom to take or turn down work, to change direction, to develop and learn new stuff, and to work when it suits (and not when it doesn't).; So, me turning up and saying what sounds like 'hi, you don't know me from Adam, but what I think you need to do is one thing every day until you die' doesn't go down very well. That's not what they want to hear. That's not actually what I'm saying, though.; So here are some thoughts that can help us get through that problem.; Firstly, all I'm trying to do is to find what the Americans would call a revenue stream: a repeated set of actions that turns into income. OK, I'm creating a slit through which the correct-shaped customers pass, but once they are through, you're free to do what you want with them. Part of the freedom issue is about determining for a client and project what bits you want to take on. For one client you might want to expand the project and offer additional services, for another, you might just want to do the minimum. That's all fine, I'm just talking about finding a way to let customers find you.; Secondly, if you can kick through this issue, you've broken the back of Internet marketing. You're in the 1% of people who will succeed online (OK, I made that percentage up, but it feels right). So precisely because it's difficult to live with and because you're reading this article and you're in touch with me, it gives you an opportunity to get well ahead of your competition.; Thirdly, it saves money. Getting to the top of Google for a non-competitive phrase like 'scarborough web developer SEO hotel' can probably be done in an afternoon, so it's cheap as chips (well, about as cheap as £180 pounds worth of chips anyway). Getting to the top of Google for a phrase like, 'car insurance' is going to take tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds and months of hard work. Niche marketing saves you money.; Fourthly, this isn't a complete reshaping of your business. Leave your website as it is if you like, this niche can just appear as a page on your website or elsewhere. It's about adding to your existing business.; There's nothing that says, once you have your first niche in the bag, that you can't expand on that. Once I have Scarborough nailed, maybe I should go for Filey, Bridlington and Whitby. Or maybe I can expand from hotels to B&Bs and guest houses and then hospitality and tourism.; It's that first step that's important, and it's all about what's in your head .. whether you can manage your mind enough to let me find you a revenue stream, however small and niche that might be, and then expand from there.; Start small, don't run the risk of just running out of money before you get your top slot.; So the way search engines work determines an Internet marketing strategy: nail a tiny niche first, then expand on that. If you can overcome your understandable and natural resistance to that, you're more than halfway there.; One final point. If you use the right techniques, you can usually hold on to your Google position for quite a while. That's different to many traditional marketing techniques where you, for instance, send out a mailshot and that's that. Place an ad, and that's that. I know, obviously you're building your brand while you're doing that, but you are online too. Here, you might invest some money into getting a great search engine position and then reap the benefit over the next few years.; Manage that by allocating an amount you can afford each month to Internet marketing, even if it's just £100 a month or so. Do that with a view to perhaps allocating 10% of the turnover from your niches towards more Internet marketing. Then when you're earning £ 1,000 a month from niche, Internet marketing, you can move to saying something like "OK, John, let's pay you 10% of turnover from Internet marketing" and we can just build it from there, lessening the % as it gets bigger. It gets easier, too. Once you have online credibility, online marketing does get easier, so once you've got your first £1,000 a month, the next is usually easier.
Content: 22 August 2008: One of the big deals about successful Internet marketing is content, getting into a routine where you keep creating and publishing great advice and information. The search engines love it, and the more (and the better) you write, the better it gets.; Take a look at this as an example. It looks like a dropped dinner, but it's full of content. I mean, I can see lots of ways to improve it, and it's maybe not written the way I'd write it, but it's written for middle aged American guys, so I'm not supposed to like it, they are.; The take-home point is: think about how this site has approached creating content, and think how you could do the same.
My head's busting: 22 August 2008: My head's busting with a dream. I'm reading Chomsky's Understanding Power and one overarching idea throughout the book is that .. well, he never quite nails what it is, whether it's people or systems or corporations, actually the closest he gets is that it's corporations so let's go with that .. companies hold power over us and that it's getting to be more totalitarian than any political structure.; I had the idea one time of trying to get everyone on our street together to share a single mega broadband connection, thinking it would probably save money. But looking at the power and utility bills rise (not, actually for us, we were already with Good Energy and their prices don't seem to have risen much perhaps because they are not based on oil), I started to wonder what would happen if we co-operated to generate our own power somehow, maybe there's a roofer and an electrician on the street who can work out how to put up solar panels or something. Wouldn't we save money?; And I have a real feeling of ridiculousness each time I cook a meal .. it takes maybe an hour to cook it and every person along the street is doing the same, what a waste of time. Why not have a communal street canteen somewhere and just go get food?; The problem is organising people. Is it, actually, more trouble than it's worth, considering the variety of people (some are genuinely arseholes .. honestly) on the street.; But I am really interested in 'anarchist' ways of organising, ways of reaching communal decisions without power, without exclusion.; And the thing is. Chomsky says that that feeling I have .. that it's more trouble than it's worth .. is put there by corporations and society power structures, because they don't want us to get together. They want us all sat in our homes watching DVDs on our flat screen TVs or playing video games, drinking beer and eating pre-prepared meals because that way, we're neutralised. No revolution started that way, no-one's going to organise a protest or even write a letter of complaint from there.; It's only when people get together that things that benefit 'people' happen. So, socialising is a revolutionary act. And, actually, the Internet is too because it can connect people.; So the reason why my head is busting is because I'm struggling with the idea I have of building a really strong community (in order to save money, save time, and support each other) and the other thoughts of "it's more trouble than it's worth" and struggling to work out whether those thoughts are planted there or are from my experience. And even if they are planted there, they'll be planted in everyone's heads, so does that turn propaganda into reality .. if we all believe it's more trouble than it's worth, does that make it so. If I turned out along the street with a handful of leaflets would everyone go "it's more trouble than it's worth". Would that idea, then, have won. Remember, I'm a marketing guy, I know something about how these ideas can get internalised.; Might it even be possible that people's selfish attitudes have been encouraged because we are easier to control in ones than if we had communal, organising thoughts and turned ourselves into movements, labour unions and the like?; I know it's a bit 'conspiracy theory', and I don't really go in for those. I don't think it's a single controlling mind, I just think it's structural. A zillion tiny decisions all taking us in a direction we didn't actually plan for. A bit like giving robots control. I feel a bit like (and I might have this wrong, I don't actually care about the film enough to check the details) the guy in the Matrix, waking up in a bath of gloop and seeing through the false realities.; Of course, I'll do nothing about it. C'est la vie. At least Chomsky got me to think about it, which means there are thousands out there who went further.
Beached 2008: 18 August 2008: It was Beached weekend, Scarborough's biggest music event.; I think Scarborough's quite an unresponsive crowd. Maybe, a bit Yorkshire, a bit: "c'mon then, entertain us, we've come down from t'old town for this" .. in attitude at least. It's a free festival, we can come and go as we please, so the band's had better be good or we'll just wander off.; I felt that even for One Night Only who we really liked, but the crowd just didn't seem to go wild enough for, somehow :-); Manfat Voodoo (who appear to defy all attempts to find them on mySpace by cunningly naming their page "manfat voodo0" with a zero replacing the last 'o') played on the Truck stage on Saturday night at about 5pm. Here's how it looked just before we went on .. this is The Occasion and their audience.; It was very beachy this year. There was surf and surfers, sun, and .. I'm not sure the organisers got their tide times right because when Detroit Social Club came on, there was nowhere to stand where you wouldn't get wet. Maybe the surfers were there because the planned Cayton Bay surf party got cancelled.; Oh, I almost forgot to mention Dodgy's lesson in how not to use a backing track. The end of something like the third song had to be basically abandoned after what turned out to be a pre-recorded backing vocal track didn't switch off and interfered with the next part of the song which was in a different timing. It was switched off with a pedal after the song ended, so I don't know what the problem was, but it forced the end of the tune anyway.; Beached always seems to throw up a band that I really like (but had previously never heard of). This year it's Detroit Social Club. Watching the drummer for One Night Only, very capable, but in the modern style .. fussy, playing drums like an instrument rather than like a rhythm machine. I like my rhythms clean, and Detroit Social Club is as clean as rhythm gets. One song ('Black and White', I think) seemed to be entirely bass thud, snare, thud, snare, thud, snare, thud, snare. Not even a hi-hat. Yet it grooved. Think of the rhythm of Queen's We Will Rock You if you don't think a clean rhythm can work.
Solzhenitsyn's hair: 14 August 2008: As you probably know by know, I'm spending a fair amount of time nowadays promoting hair loss solutions, so when Solzhenitsyn appeared in our newspapers recently for dying, what stuck me was his hairstyle.; I'm slightly irritated that I can't find the picture I'm looking for, I'm sure it was in the Grauniad but I've been through their Solzhenitsyn pics and it's not there, this probably illustrates it best.; In the pic I saw, he looked stern and rather like a bear. And then there's the hair. It's male pattern baldness giving the bald pate, but then he's grown hair everywhere else. I don't want to say it's comedy, although there is something slightly comical about it in the sense that getting told off in class makes you really, really, want to snort with laughter. There's something about the fulsome bushiness of the hair everywhere .. except on the top of his head where he's completely smooth. It's a challenge. It's "I'm Solzhenitsyn, and I made my hair this way on purpose .. got anything to say about that?" which is kinda fantastic.; I should probably take it a bit more seriously and work out what he spent his life doing, I'm sure he's worthy of a damn sight more respect than I appear to be showing him here. I am very respectful in truth, but time's short, as always, so if I'm going to get political, I'll probably stick to something a little closer to home.
The Analects: 8 August 2008: I'm not religious, but one of the few things I do like about religion is how it might give us rules for living, albeit that (perhaps especially in Western religions) those might well have been adapted by whatever power structures are around (religion being one) in order to keep the plebs down.; But in the Kama Sutra .. well in the version I bought and read, anyway, which for some reason wasn't illustrated and didn't bang on about sexual positions .. I found a really inspirational page about how everyone should have some basic skills, and they were things like .. how to make a perfume, how to cook, and how to sing. Sounded, and sounds, fabulous to me. And what harm would that do other than taking up our time that might otherwise be spent chiselling away at the structures of society?; So, anyway, in last Saturday's Guardian there was a guide to the Olympics, and each day contained a Confucius quote, and I found them particularly inspiring. My favourite: "It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness". It turns out Confucius' teachings were distilled into The Analects and from there we can get more quotes than you can shake a stick at.
Wearpalettes: 5 August 2008: "Yeah, yeah, when do I ever go shopping for designer clothes?" (Err, I do actually, every now and then). That was my first reaction to Wearpalettes, a palette of colours extracted from photographs in a style blog.; But when I looked closer, I loved the palettes, and could see them used strongly in website design.; Because I haven't quite cracked the colour rules. I mean, actually colour is a whole lot more complicated than it seems. For instance, you see rules that go like this: take a colour, put it into Photoshop (I use The Gimp, but then I always was awkward) then using the same saturation and value settings, choose other hues, preferably ones a particular distance away from your starting colour to achieve the effect you want .. opposite if you want to knock them off their seat, slightly different if you want them to stick around and drink cocktails.; But there are two mammoths wrong with that. The first mammoth .. shall we give these mammoths names? Yeah, let's call them Reality and Perception.; These are speaking mammoths, btw. Quite clever. So Reality mammoth says this. RGB and HSV and whatever other crappy ways we've come up with to make colours on screen are just there to drive the technology that creates the colours on screen. In other words, we only use RGB because screens are full of red, green and blue pixels and between them all they make the colours we see. The problem is, take a look at the diagram here. See the coloured triangle? That's what RGB can give you. See the big grey 'other' curvy bit? That's all the other colours there are, that RGB can't give you. So whoa .. screens .. tv .. only gives you about half of the colours you can otherwise perceive. Pretty crappy isn't it?; Now, Perception mammoth advises a quick peek at Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, which basically says that colours look very different depending on the other colours that are adjacent. Perception mammoth is a mammoth of few words.; All of which says: when working out a colour scheme, yeah, it's nice to know all that theory nonsense, but what looks good looks good.; And when you look at Wearpalettes, that's what you get. Yes, OK, you can start to think of the theory of how a palette works and then it just seems to fall apart and you end up with .. you know what? It just works.; So inspiration is good and this is good inspiration. Now if you don't mind, I've some mammoths to feed.
Fair Trade organic chocolate: 2 August 2008: Sometimes I'm writing about finance and accounting, and sometimes I get to write up a Fair Trade chocolate taste test. It's a tough job, etc.