John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Fruit: 16 February 2009: No wonder no-one eats fruit. Our morning breakfast is a fruit salad with nuts and honey. Last Sunday we, unusually, shopped at Sainsbury's. Lots of fruit on offer, no problem.; It's all unripe. You could knock nails into the wall with it.; So I endured that for a while thinking, well, it'll ripen up over the days. Nope. It's now eight days later and I find I'm not looking forward to my beautiful breakfast because the fruit's still not ripe, it's tart not sweet, and it's a bit tasteless frankly. I'm adding more honey to compensate.; Usually I order a weekly delivery from The Organic Farm Shop. When it arrives it's ripe and ready to eat, juicy, sweet and gorgeous. You want to eat it as a treat.; So no wonder kids don't want to eat fruit. It's not true. Kids know what tastes nice, they just don't want to eat fruit that's been mass produced to survive being transported halfway across the world and sit in a supermarket fridge while still keeping its looks.; I think I read somewhere that supermarkets don't want their fruit to smell, either. It's a crazy, messed up world, honestly.; Nothing gets me more upset than food tinkerage.
Twitter: 14 February 2009: Twitter seems to be really taking off (here in the UK). For me it started with tv presenter Philip Schofield talking, on Good Morning, about how he'd become 'addicted' to it. Friending him (Schofe, from memory (Twitter is down for database maintenance)) gave what's really a masterclass in how anyone in his line of work can benefit. Perhaps predictably Britney does almost nothing with hers.; Twitter is a microblogging site. That means you and anyone you follow can type, in 160 characters or less, what you're up to at this moment. It's like ongoing chatter. You can tweet from your mobile phone, of course, and you can get things set up so that your Facebook status and Twitter are updated in the same action (but I don't really recommend it).; With Schofield, I've seen the studios from his viewpoint, I know every morning who's going to be on Good Morning, I know how the Dancing on Ice programme is going .. and I'm not at all interested in those programmes, but he brings them to life.; I know 'him' too, almost like a friend. I feel his days. I've seen his house, and his computer setup. There was the evening he got home to find that builders had put a scaffolding pole in front of his wine cellar door and he had guests coming round for dinner in two hours. He collects wine, so that was important.; There was the insight into Good Morning the morning of the snow, when an hour before the programme was due to go on air there were six people in the studio. He couldn't get in, Ferne did it on her own, and Lily Allen (am I right?) turned up having not gone through make-up as .. none of those got in. See, that makes these programmes interesting to a guy.; So now, he's someone I like, and I feel good towards him. I'll look out for him. He has about 50,000 followers on Twitter now. That gives him a direct link to his fanbase he didn't have before. It probably raises his salary because he'll bring those fans with him to whatever he does.; Schofield is pretty much an expert at Twitter and I've learned a lot from him. For instance, Mr Tweet watches your feed and suggests new people you might like to follow. From that I've got a couple of media movers and shakers from the BBC who have been up to Scarborough before, a journalist, and so on. No-one does Twitter like Schofield though, not that I've seen.; I was almost able to watch the progress of the Australian bush fires recently through an Australian chap I follow. Almost because .. well maybe the links he posted didn't quite work out. But at least I've got a sense of what it means to Australians. His old school got burned down, I think. I heard about the fires first, actually, there, before it hit the news here.; My problem with Twitter was this. Nowadays there's a whole world of Internet marketing people watching for the next big thing, and they got the hots for Twitter early on. So much so, it seemed that everyone who followed me was an Internet marketing guy with something to sell. A bit like hanging around at a used car salesman convention. I didn't follow any of those (that's the technique .. follow someone and they'll come to your page to see who you are and they may follow you. For that to work, your page of Tweets at that moment has to contain stuff they want to read).; Anyway, now that Twitter is becoming mainstream, normal people are getting it. The sales people have someone to sell to.; OK, two things. Firstly, nice college idea, but is Twitter sustainable? There's no income model here. Twitter is operating for free. How are they going to pay for their servers? Something has to change somewhere, sometime.; Secondly, I still wouldn't get too excited. Facebook is growing by the total number of Twitter users every three days.; It's early days and there's still a lot to work out. But currently, I'd say for business it's useful if you're the sort of person who sits at a computer all day anyway, and if you can provide a stream that's 'on character'. For instance, if I were marketing my services I might talk about Internet marketing things on Twitter. Blue Tree Services could talk about GPS location tracking. Putting up useful links, hints and tips, current concerns and thoughts and so on. It's a case of being useful to your market.; There's a lot of Twitter buzz (cheeping?) right now, but also a lot of people who come onto Twitter and say "what's this? I don't get it" and you never see them again.; By character I'm not mainstream, I like to be out of the crowd. So I tend to either be in early or in late if at all (I still haven't got a DVD player or an MP3 player). With Twitter I'm both. I was in early. But I'm watching and learning, still not entirely convinced. But Schofield's brought me a long way forward. You can follow me if you like. For reasons that have been lost to history I'm WSJS in Twitter.
Thai festival: 11 February 2009: Normally I don't follow links people send me, but this is outrageously beautiful.; Although wasn't there some fuss from the RAF recently about someone letting one of these off near Fylingdales?
'Live' GPS tracking: 9 February 2009: I just published the first 'live' GPS web tracking page on Blue Tree Services' site. It shows the location of all the demo units. It's 'live' data at the point the page is loaded, but you have to keep reloading to get movement. It's a start, I'll work on the other stuff.
Google's Image Labeller: 9 February 2009: This is fun for a couple of minutes. Basically, over a two minute period you're given random images by Google, and you have to 'tag' it (one by one) with words that match what you're seeing. You're partnered with someone random in the world who is doing the same thing. When your tags match you get points. And points means bugger all in this case, but you are contributing to the Internet while you're doing it. And that's a good thing.
Some more results for you: 8 February 2009: Google doesn't want search engine optimisation (SEO) people like me to have any effect on the results they show because frankly sales and marketing people are a selfish bunch and would have us consume advertising messages to the exclusion of all else. If we could control what was on the front page of Google, we'd have it talk about how fabulous our products are so we can sell a lot and retire to the Bahamas, and hang the consequences.; Google's ranking calculations are secret, and the formula changes every day. Honest .. 400 changes to the algorithm last year, apparently.; Now, there are people out there who sell web traffic systems. I knew a chap once who bought such a system. I think it was based on the butterfly method where you buy a load of web hosting and you put up website after website of, well, junk, frankly and the magic secret is in the way those websites are joined up ... how they link together. Because a web page has some Page Rank (PR) (Google's 'points' that represent how good they think our page is), and when it links to another page it passes some PR on, so if you can do that en masse and get enough PR all gathered onto one web page, the page that you actually want to sell from, then that page might rank well in the search engines and you have a business.; That might have worked, but the clue is in the selling of the system. If it worked, why would you sell the system? Because Google watches for patterns, it works them out, and it slaps them down. So what seems obvious is .. this method worked, then Google slapped them, so they decided to sell the system using previous figures as proof that it works.; My friend worked for months, polluting the Internet with junk sites, and maybe sold a few pounds of stuff before Google recognised what he was doing and slapped him into oblivion.; So good practice is to do this stuff under the radar. Act natural. Don't use a rigid system. And that's what I do.; Part of that is not to go gung-ho for one keyphrase. Let's say we have a zoo and we figure out there's a lot of interest in the Bahama Llamas. If we set out exclusively to get links for that phrase, Google will spot what we're doing because that's not how it works naturally.; I'm not saying there are people in Google watching what we are doing. I'm saying they probably use artificial intelligence to spot patterns. That's just my guess. We are battling a robot.; The way forward is to work a bit on Bahama Llamas, a bit on the Zoolander Pandas, a bit on the Sanguine Penguin, and maybe come back to the Bahama Llamas a bit later.; All of which makes the whole thing irritatingly woolly when it comes to working out whether any of this works or not.; However, I've just worked out for one client that over six months I've presided over an increase in traffic of 71% for the keyphrases I've been working on. The ones I haven't have risen by just 1%. That means an extra 35 customers a month for that client (where a client is worth well over £1,000). And I'm still going.; So when I say I'm like an ion drive and sales and marketing people look at me and you can see them thinking "but .. we want to push hard towards our targets because we're sales and marketing people" .. this is why. It's the Internet. It doesn't work any other way. But it does work: an extra 35 customers a month, every month, after just six months.; I like to think it's quite a female approach (although I'm not one). I like to think Google has something that spots testosterone fuelled, goal oriented behaviour and slaps it down. It's good to think there's something powerful in our society secretly doing that. Quietly lifting the subtle. I'm very probably dreaming now, but hey, don't wake me just yet.
Webcam fix: 7 February 2009: I think I've fixed the webcam slideshow so IE users (and hopefully Mac ones too) can run it. Try it. If it falls over for you, let me know your setup.; The idea, not sure if I've got it exactly right, is that you press the play icon below the webcam image, and it'll run through 24 images from the last 24 hours, an hour apart. So if you hit the button at 17:57, you'll get images starting from 18:57 the previous day. If you count the images you can probably work out what time things happened, and if you run it, see something and tell a friend, unless they run it really really quickly and you're lucky, they'll see a different set of images (eg. 17:58 et al). But that does make it more interesting for you too, different every time.; One thing I've got to fix is that if you load the page and then the phone rings or whatever and then you press the play button, the page itself refreshes every minute, so that'll interrupt and stop the slideshow. So reload the page first, then press the slideshow. It'll probably end fine with a page reload.
Payback: 6 February 2009: A client just wrote to me saying he'd been wondering if my work had really made a difference so he compared his website stats to those of a year ago. I've been working on this site for about six months or so (so the improvement's been in six months). Remember this is against the backdrop of the credit brunch.; Compared to last year his website sales from the things I've been up to rose by 77%, and for every £1 he spent with me, he got £108 in additional sales. And that's just taking the value of the first year of a new client, when the reality is a client is more or less for life for him. After just six months. That's printing money, no wonder he keeps coming back.; What I really need to do is turn that on myself. Hence I'm not really advertising myself any more. I'm trying to get space, but new clients keep coming in! Think it's time to put up my prices.