30 January 2009: Following on from Cafe Heart winning Cafe of the year, another of my clients has just won an award. The Selomar Hotel has just won a Trip Advisor Traveller's Choice Award for 2009. Voted by the public as one of the top 100 bargains worldwide, that's really rather special. If you click the logo on Selomar's site you can download the full list of recommendations. Just doing my job.
29 January 2009: I've been to London and now have more than enough work, thank you very much.
It felt great. I carried no bag for the day, just walked around with my wallet and a few bits of paper. It felt like I could use the city like a tool, with shops and the A-Z as an interface. So I need to get myself from here to there, OK how do I do that? Invoke the cab tool or run the Underground function. Actually despite the pics I've put up .. it's a very romantic, thrilling place. I'm sure it's wearing if you live there, but it's fabulous to dip in to.
I saw the Rothko exhibition, after Simon Schama's Power-o-Fart alerted me to his existence. I knew from years ago getting emotional about some Paul Caponigro prints, buying the book, and finding the book emotionless, that the power was in the original prints. I imagined the same would be true of a Rothko. That the criticism I've heard levelled at multimedia .. that's it fosters recognition of artworks, not engagement. So you recognise a painting, but you don't know its full beauty because you haven't really experienced it. I guess the same is true of music. Both screens and music compression and stupid tinny headphones represent the artwork, but don't really deliver .. nodding along to some tune does not equal being there when a band does its thing. Rothko makes that large .. what's the point in seeing a Rothko on your screen? It's a big black rectangle. Or maybe it's red. But to stand in front of it. That's a real challenge. These are meditation pieces, but I'm not sure I could stand the clamour of doing that. These things have depth. They are your room 101. No, not the farty tv programme, the 1984 room that contains your darkest fears. There's nowhere to hide. Nothing to distract you. They are a black hole compression of whatever bothers you. Face-it therapy. Powerful stuff.
25 January 2009: All this Terry Christian stuff has taken me back to The Word days. Did I mention before that I was interviewed by Terry Christian when he did some sort of 'rock' show on Radio Derby and I was in Splat!
Then I remembered an unfulfilled ambition of mine that spawned a few days of frantic memory wracking before a Facebook friend finally furnished the feedback I'd fancied.
Here's the question. As I remember it, when The Word ended, its Friday night Channel 4 slot was taken on by a (fairly old even then) black rapper who fronted a magazine-like show. He was always on a white background, as if in heaven. Name that show. Name that rapper.
On that show, people frequently wore big long, often furry, often brightly coloured coats. My ambition? I want a coat like that! If anyone knows where I can get one, let me know. You Tube doesn't seem to have any BaadAsss footage.
Incidentally, I thought of describing the show as being a bit like EuroTrash, but that was poopooed. But I was right, it was produced by the same company.
Anyway, excitement was high in the latter stages of Celebrity Big Brother that Terence might win, but to the dismay of the nation, he didn't and we had to endure the concept of Ulrika's panty pads until .. well, it still hasn't worn off.
I'm glad Verne didn't win. That would just have been for the wrong reasons. And I think Terry lost when he didn't deal well with losing a token and rather insensitively told Ulrika what he thought of her, rather than telling the group why he'd lost them a token.
But Ulrika was unpleasant to watch. Here's what I feel was going on. I once (sometime in the 80s) met two young, blonde Swedish ladies and (yep, your brain's already done it) they professed being sick of the image of young, blonde Swedish ladies as being rather sexy and up for it.
Ulrika was a weather girl. I've nothing to base this on, but I'll imagine she was innocently enjoying her good looks and finding herself a profession and given that she now centres on her kids and that she's on her third marriage there seems to be a strong desire in her to set up the perfect family. So I think she was an innocent, taken from there to a place she actually hasn't been comfortable in since.
The panty pads comment and many others like it are designed to repell guys. Much as large breasted ladies seek men who aren't attracted by large breasts so they can be sure it's them the man is attracted to, and wealthy men might feign poverty to check the same thing, my guess is Ulrika has developed a few traits to knock away men who are looking for a happy-go-lucky Swedish bed buddy.
I think Ulrika simply resents the world she's found herself in, but at the same time, three weeks for £175,000 is a lot to turn down when what you want is to love and care for your kids and there doesn't seem to be a reliable partner around. She's still physically attractive, so she still wants that and hasn't gone the AndreaDworkin male repelling route, yet it feels like prostitution to do Big Brother.
Big Brother always does show something that incenses me every single time. The guys vote for women and stick together. The women vote for women too because they want less competition for the guys. Look at what happened the week Coolio was so despicable, irritating, and repressive towards Michelle and others. He got one vote against him. Just one. I think that shows a force that's society-wide and needs sorting. Get it sorted!
So by the time Ulrika was the only woman left in the house, she concentrated all the female vote who were heartily sick of all that bullshit.
I think that was there for all to see, and I think that's why people voted for her. Who voted? Friday night. Not young people who were out doing whatever young people do nowadays. Probably a lot of women like Ulrika who suffer the same inconsistencies in their lives daily. I think she matched the demographic of the audience. I think that's why she won.
One final thing. No. Two final things.
Terry did turn out to be lovely. Nice one Terry.
Tommy turned out a complete disappointment. Remember Kitten the activist campaigner who almost overthrew the regime, setting up Big Sista to tell BB to f-off, and almost getting everyone to walk out, leaving them with no programme? Now that's proper. She was only felled by prison rules .. OK Kitten, every time you do something wrong, we'll kill one of your friends.
Tommy .. arch socialist campaigner, where were the practical implications of his beliefs? Did we find out how to implement socialism in our daily lives? No. He tried to persuade LaToya Jackson that gas ought to be publicly owned, and didn't join in the group when they were tasked to do things. Weird.
See, it's educational. From Big Brother to Andrea Dworkin and Ice-T. I mean, what do you want?
24 January 2009: Many, many hot dinners ago, my g/f had the jitters. Actually I had the jitters too, but it was er wot was moaning about it. YouTube videos that started, then hung, then did a bit more, then hung.
Many, many .. hoards. Crowds of people ask me every day which broadband service I recommend and when I say I use IDNet and it costs £35 a month they go, Life of Brian style, "how much? I can get it for a tenner". Every single time it begs the question, "wtf did you ask me in the first place?"
The point being, I don't want the Internet for fannying about on while there's nothing on tv. It's my job, it's my work, it's my calling. It's what I do. I want it to be there always. And the fact that when I ring up my provider with a question I get to speak to someone is pretty cool. That they aren't in a call centre in Bangalore is nice, nothing against Bangaloreans. That it's the same person each time and he remembers my issues is fabulous. That he can fix things is nothing short of awesome. That's what my £35 is for. I'd choose that every time.
So I called him about these jitters and he had me run a speed test and it turned out I was getting about 2.7mbps.
I had BT come to check the line and the man said everything was fine.
I called back Mr Nice from IDNet and he said basically it was likely to be the telephone wiring in my house, and I should move the router so it connected directly to the BT line coming into the house. Then the exchange would notice and automatically morph itself into a better thing and I'd be happier.
Did I mention that the telephone cabling in my house included a connection I'd made by cutting the phone cable and a B&Q extension cable and twisting the copper cores together before wrapping them in electrical tape and then avoiding hoovering around it because sometimes when I did it cut off my Internet?
Moving the router kinda worked enough for me to be able to ignore the problem for a bit, but I did get some drop-offage and I didn't really like where the router was (geeks like to watch the flashing lights and make big decisions based on what they see). Plus, I had to dangle a long network cable along the stairs in a non-health-and-safety-approved manner in order to be able to do what I do, so .. it wasn't ideal.
So I tried to talk to BT about getting the phones rewired, which was just a joke. Do I want a new extension fitted? No. Do I want a new line? No. That was kinda it. I tried to explain to someone in a call center, yes, in Bangalore, what I wanted and I don't think we really saw eye to eye and so he gave me some random number and the whole thing reached a dead end.
I tried searching for "telephone rewiring Scarborough" and it didn't come up with anything.
After a few months of ponderations it occurred to me that what I want might be a 'telephone engineer'. Once I'd clocked that, I managed to find Graham, Telephone Engineer (07748 691302). He's a telephone engineer in Scarborough, which is what I wanted. Although I didn't know it.
He's been. For £160 I've got new wires between my phones and router, a lot less wire around the house, a plate thingy that tidies up the electrons in the cable and buffs them 'till they shine .. just think of it as a weeny cyber Lakeland Plastics, it just gets things organised inside the wires .. and I now have 6,609kbps on my 8mbps service, which I think is pretty amazing.
So IDNet were right, and I was right. Right to buy a service I could trust and then risk £160 on finding out if they were right or not. I was probably wrong about the electrical tape connection though. Never mind.
But seriously, as well as that dodgy connection of mine, the phone wiring in my house had been built up over many years, the top floor was once a flat, so there were many junctions and long cable routes. So, if you have similar issues, perhaps Graham's the man you need.
22 January 2009: It's about time somebody around here published a link to something that is actually funny, as opposed to whatever the hell it is American people think is funny. So here's my contribution. Everyone knows that a burrow owl lives in a hole in the ground. Oh yes. Watch it more than once and I guarantee you'll be wandering around going "I like you [insert friend's name here], you're not like the other people".
Now, I picked that up from Facebook, so let no-one tell you Facebook's a waste of time.
20 January 2009: Wow. For me what will stay is the snicker, the burst of emotion that broke his control and showed on his face as a blink-and-you've-missed-it laugh, a grin, a snort as he took the first step up to take the oath. As if he wanted to shout "Crikey moses, just look at THIS!" He quickly wrapped that up, but he's human, he's in there. Fabulous.
And I feel good. Now I don't know whether that was from my first successful raw green smoothie today (I was feeling good this afternoon), or Obama finally there, or both. But yes. Oh yes. I like.
20 January 2009: I've just been revisiting my O level stats and remembering how to calculate a correlation co-efficient.
I'm trying to get a blog I wrote, let's say it's about a Wolverhampton donkey sanctuary (it's not, and apologies for using you as a frivolous example if you do run a donkey sanctuary in Wolverhampton).
So clearly to try to appear in Google for a search on "Wolverhampton donkey sanctuary" you need to write and publish online something that includes those words.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) people (like me) try to work out where and how often to place the keyphrase in order to get the best position.
Google made, if I remember rightly, over 400 changes to its ranking algorithm last year, so the goalposts move every day. Google doesn't want SEO companies to 'game' the system. Google's success rests on delivering high quality results, not bullshit sales copy, to its users.
So anything you read about title tags being most important or the text people link to your site with or social bookmarking or whatever is, by definition, old news. Probably since the time it was written, Google's made a hundred changes (or a thousand).
So good SEO is about testing the reality today.
Having said all that, I've been spending a lot of time on getting external links to my clients' pages. I made a decision perhaps a year or so ago that concentrating too much on on-page optimisation of a website (working out the perfect density of keywords on a webpage and how to position them) was a way to go ever so slightly mad, and that the best thing to do is to write good copy around a theme and that's good enough. After all, if you ever get traffic to your site, you're going to want people to read the great page you've created, not be repelled by clumsy keyword stuffing.
But I've come back to on-page optimisation having tried lots of other stuff for this donkey sanctuary client and I've found some fabulously exciting tools to play with, and I've been working out the correlation between different page elements.
For instance, the best correlation co-efficient I've found is .77 between the number of instances of the keyphrase in all the visible text on a page and its position. But since I'm using position 1 as the best position, it's a negative co-efficient I want. So this quite strongly suggests that the more mentions of my phrase I have on the page, the worse my position will be. In fact, 7 out of the top 20 pages that rank for my phrase "wolverhampton donkey sanctuary" don't mention that at all. But they do mention "donkey sanctuary". Probably with 'Wolverhampton' elsewhere on the page.
So I wonder whether that's an overoptimisation penalty. Basically Google saying "once you mention a phrase too many times it becomes clear an SEO is at work trying to mess us around, so we'll knock the page back".
The next best correlation co-efficient is 0.32 for the percentage use of the phrase in the text. More or less the same thing.
The best negative correlation appears .. this is busting my brain .. for the rank relative to Google's ranking just for the text of the page alone (yes, Google can tell you that). Well, bugger, for that we'd want a positive correlation. In fact, there's almost no correlation between, for instance, what Google thinks is the best page title for this search and the actual results of a normal search. That seems to be heavy evidence of an overoptimisation penalty. I happen to know that "Wolverhampton donkey sanctuary" is a very competitive term. I wonder if Google applies its overoptimisation penalty more in competitive areas. It knows which are competitive because it sees the bids in its pay per click system Adwords.
So, this appears to be right up my street. Success appears to come almost from not doing 'traditional' SEO. It comes from something a bit more gentle, more subtle. No cramming as many keywords as possible onto the page, then.
18 January 2009: One of the things I love about what I do is there's always something new to learn. Yesterday I learned something so exciting I can't get it out of my head.
Internet marketing is based so much in numbers that it seems basically he who analyses best wins. And analysis is home for me. Throw in a bit of interest (I can do that), make it persuasive and you're done.
I do this naturally, for pleasure. For The DTs, for instance, I watch the video of the each gig, work out where the audience were engaged and where they weren't, and collate it all so the next gig's even better.
Went to see The Pulse at The New Tavern last night, most excellent. The overall sound was the most impressive thing to me, particularly since there were five members and each had a mic, then I noticed, they had a sound-guy mixing it. Lesson learned :-)
12 January 2009: There are a few stories around about a new wave of music. According to The Observer yesterday said "The public seem finally to have tired of the music that has held sway over their taste for most of the decade: the putatively "alternative" guitar rock variously dubbed ITV indie or flipchart indie or landfill indie by critics who tired of it almost as soon as it turned up. At the end of 2008, new albums by the Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and Keane dramatically underperformed." Thank Christ for that, I've been bored by them for so very long I can't even remember when it started.
What's on the up, apparently, seems to be a more upbeat, female pop. I guess we need something to uplift us in these times of hardship (you know, having to give up one of the skiing holidays).
The same paper (when did I start getting my musical hints and tips from the Sunday newspaper?) lists six upcomings and our favourite from that lot to win our mySpace friendship is VV Brown, on the Sunday Night Project last night (not that we watch that) .. Crying Blood is the single. I don't know if the 'Dust Brothers' remix is the Chemical Brothers or not. Doesn't quite sound like it.
9 January 2009: God I love this: OK, it's very alpha (by which I mean it's software that's complete untested and unfinished but I wanted to show you it anyway, and I'll improve it along the way), but on the webcam, I'm now saving the last 24 hours of images and you can see a slideshow of the last 24 hours, how exciting is that?
For the next 24 hours there's a proviso that some of the images are mixed up, there are some from a few days ago in there, but they'll be overwritten by lunchtime tomorrow.
So, get prepared for a thrill, strap yourself in, go to the Scarborough webcam page, and press that 'play' button.
9 January 2009: When people visit your website via a search engine such as Google, you can see what phrase they typed into Google in order to find you. There are many ways to do that, but the obvious choice is to run Google Analytics on your site. It's free, and Google has more money to invest than anyone else. Simply, it's an awesome product.
So, using Analytics I can see, for instance, the past year's traffic from search engines, and I can select the queries that contain a particular phrase.
If you search for question words: who, what, where, why, when and how, you'll see a whole bunch of questions people want answering. "How" seems to be the favourite on the site I'm looking at: "how can I prevent ... ", "how can I treat ... ", "how can I stop .. ". Well now, don't they just sound like great blog titles? So. Take the most popular question and blog the answer. If you don't have a blog, make sure you do answer it on your website somewhere. Keep checking, keep writing.
9 January 2009: Looking at Analytics for one of my clients I noticed a burst of new visits this week and so compared this week to the same dates last year, before I was on board. Organic visits (which were in the thousands per month) were up 37% and conversion was up 44%, and remember, this time last year the credit crunch hadn't been invented.
How did I do that? Oh, it's just a combination of breaking the marriage with obvious keyphrases, article writing and blogging, PR articles, social bookmarking, watching the news, blogs, forums and commenting where we can add stuff, making and publishing videos, getting the blog syndicated right, contributing to wikis, Facebook, fabulous keyphrase strategies that watch for trends and ride them, watching and trying to beat the competition especially regarding links, Tweeting, building business allegiances, writing book reviews, and keeping on top of my time efficiency.
There are about forty mind-blowing big-ideas in the pipeline too waiting for the client to approve them.
Did anyone else catch the Marks and Spencer results? Online sales up 34%. Despite everything in the general economy, ecommerce may well be a way to stave off the recession.
6 January 2009: I watched a small Scarborough shop go to the wall a few years ago as I went in each week and saw some stock never move while I tried to buy stuff they didn't have. I desperately wanted to get hold of the stock and sales database and work out where the profit was being made and do more of that and less of what wasn't working. I wanted to work out which foot length of shelving was selling best, and to try to find themes and go with newly discovered demands.
No-one seems to know what the hell I'm talking about (not the first time).
Is it so hard? I was reading the other day that the supermarkets sell position on their shelves. So if you're, for example, Nescafe and you want the optimum position on the coffee shelves, you have to pay for it, and the sums are ricidulous, something like £10,000 per store per month or similar.
They certainly know the profit margin for every square inch of their shop. It seems small, independent shops don't. Don't they need to?
I reckon I can do this for anything from a greengrocery to a newsagent, a toy shop to a cafe. So if anyone fancies that, yell.
5 January 2009: I just got a bit of a shock when comparing traffic from when I started with one of my clients in a competitive market, versus their traffic in December and it looked like traffic had dropped considerably. Whoops. But no, it's OK, there's seasonality. Comparing this December to last, traffic was up 15% and conversion up 8%. For a client who arrived to me near the top of their game, having used another SEO company, and in, as I say, a very competitive market and with the credit crunch stopping all sorts of spending, that seems fair enough to me. Anyone fancy 16% more business?
4 January 2009: I work with a client who just spent £500 on Internet marketing with me and they got a 50% increase in enquiries as a result. I'm just wondering how many times that's replicable, because this client is nowhere near his potential.
4 January 2009: Love that line. It's funny if you know Loughborough (I grew up near there). Anyway, Dunn Hair isn't one of mine, but I just wanted to show you it as a great example of what can be done. This really feels like it pushes the boundaries. I really should try to be more persuasive .. there's nothing here I don't push my clients towards every day, but what pushes back often is, I think, just a genuine lack of appreciation of what's possible. So Dunn and his developer have it sorted. Well done both, seriously.
3 January 2009: When I was the guitarist in Splat! one of the members was Mark Grebby, now with The Glistening Cogs of Greenland and formerly with The Shrubs (click, it's good, and there's Grebby) who are famous enough to have their own Wikipedia page along with mention of Ron Johnson Records which I helped to found. I came across my copy of C86 the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how many Ron Johnson tunes were on there (The Shrubs, A Witness, Stump, Big Flame and The Mackenzies). So that's exactly how famous I am.
3 January 2009: Anyone out there using Delicious? Add me to your network if you are, I'm jnaTall. Let's share bookmarks. Oh and geeky thing, their logo doesn't appear to be an image. Cool.
I just wrote this article for the hair loss clinic I work with which outlines idea a bit more. No point repeating it here.
2 January 2009: I'm a bit sick of American humour that isn't funny. Videos that are proclaimed to be the funniest thing someone's ever seen that leave me cold. Someone actually said in the pub the other day "I've had kids and I wanted a wee and I saw this and I actually did piss myself". I took a look, and .. I think you had to be there. So my answer is this, discovered during a Christmas YouTube pokearound. John Shuttleworth's "I can't go back to savoury now". Just awesome.
2 January 2009: Ever wondered? As someone who is outside the loop I sometimes see a pub chalkboard sign .. "live music from the Shitkickers" or whatever and I wonder whether that would be a great night or not. Well fear not fellow travellers for I have come to your rescue.
Ain't that curious? So let's see: Toby Jepson's a rocker who's been in the charts, Edwina Hayes is folk, Mermaids in the Basement are rock, Dave Dark is chillout, The Edger is a hiphop rapper, 3 Foot Ninja are punky rock, Approaching Clouds is vague noisery, Tony Morris is out there folk weirdness .. are you getting the idea? There's so much variety in here it's stunning, and so much talent too.
So there are all sorts of games we can play with this stuff but I want to find a sponsor for 2009, you'd get links to your website, a message in the weekly giglists and all that. I plan to auction sponsorship, so you might get it for £1, you never know. If you want to be notified when I do that, let me know, I may not mention it again here.
So if you want this sort of thing as a fanbase-ranked giglisting every week so you can easily pick the hottest events, either join this Facebook group or this mySpace one. Tadaaaaaahhhh.
Want my new years resolution suggestion? Rediscover local bands, local talent and local music. Resolve today to go and see a band a month.
