John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Hourly charges by plumbers: 22 May 2006: I've had a sneaky suspicion that my hourly rates are comparable to those of plumbers. I don't know why I felt that. I think perhaps if I say I charge £35 per hour to someone, that feels expensive, but I know it isn't because that person would easily pay that to a plumber or any other skilled tradesperson. By which I don't mean to say I'm better than or more skilled than a plumber, just that that's what's required to make a business work nowadays. Nor am I saying that's my hourly rate (it depends what skills I'm using and the going rate at the time), it's an example. Even if anyone were to attempt to make an argument along the lines of 'IT requires a lot more knowledge therefore it should be paid better', I'd argue that the reason you want to do IT is because you spend your day sat comfortably at a computer and work normal hours, whereas plumbers get to go out in the middle of a Sunday to unblock someone's backed-up sewage system. I know which I'd prefer.; Anyway, last September Which? researched typical plumber's charge rates and found the typical rate is £30-50 for the first hour, £25-40 for subsequent hours. So yes, broadly comparable.; It does raise an interesting question about how much lawyers charge, though. They also work comfortably but in a fast changing environment requiring much attention to detail, and they don't unblock u-bends, but seem to charge much more.; Doctors, arguably, work in a comfortable physical environment but with the same informational challenges AND they have a string of unpleasant things to do and difficult situations to handle so I'd say they're worth more than plumbers, lawyers and IT people. They appear not to be, however.
Behringer KX1200: 20 May 2006: My amp for my electronic drum kit is a Behringer KX1200. Electronic drums require a keyboard combo to get the high range of the cymbals through to the low thump of the bass drum. A guitar amp doesn't cut it.; I bought the Behringer because I preferred it over the usual Peavey. I have a sentimental liking for old German electronics companies, it's a Kraftwerk thing. Plus, they are simply closer. Behringer, however, has a reputation for producing unreliable equipment which they say they've overcome.; So against everyone's advice I bought the Behringer. The other two members of the band bought one each too.; Imagine my surprise when, after about twelve months of light use, the bass end of the sound started cutting out.; I put up with it for a while and then, when trying to teach my g/f how to play drums it was really noticeable, I decided to address the problem.; I spoke to the authorised repairer in the UK, Pro Line Audio Ltd. How to get the amp to them? It weighs 31Kg before I've packed it, and that's above the weight Parcelforce will accept as one item. Sending it by City-Link would cost about £50 both ways. The amp only costs £120 new.; Pro Line suggested I drive it over and they'd fix it on the spot. It's a 3.5 hour drive from here, they're near Malpas on the Welsh border, so we got ready for a jolly with a B&B stopover.; Not so fast. Pro Line had pondered, and here's the point of this blog. If you remove the bass speaker (take off the front panel (velcro, so just pull it)), then unscrew the eight screws around the bass speaker and gently lift it out, inside, fixed to the back wall, is a passive crossover.; They reckon the problem could be two things. Put the bass speaker facing up on the floor, power up the amp and run some sound through it. Then, and they assured me this wasn't dangerous but obviously you do it at your own risk, gently move the copper coil on that passive crossover (you can see it on the picture). For me, it felt loose, and moving that made the bass come off and on again.; The other possibility is to gently push on the cone of the bass speaker. Apparently if it's that that's broken, you'll hear it cutting out.; Anyway, apparently that coil coming loose is common, so here's the remedy. Make a diagram of how those six wires connect to the crossover (or take a photograph) and desolder them to free-up the crossover. Pack it in some bubble wrap, put it in a padded envelope and send it to Pro Line. They will do all the fancy stuff that needs to be done with that coil, send it back to you, and you can refit the whole thing.; Interestingly, nothing I've ever soldered has ever worked. I'm rather hoping to overcome my affliction with this project. I've been here to learn how to solder, here to learn how to desolder and here to buy all the bits (a soldering iron, a desoldering pump, some solder and a multimeter (I've always wanted a multimeter, I'm so excited!)).; So, wish me luck. I post all that, obviously, in case anyone else is afflicted with similar bass dropout issues with a Behringer KX1200.
eBay shops: 15 May 2006: A potential new client asked "Why should I have a website? Why don't I just use an eBay shop?" Good question. I've been looking into it.; eBay offers you a customisable page with your own logo, description and colour scheme, your own web address, easy administration, and detailed reporting, and listing an item costs about 3p.; Well, those are the banner claims anyway. In fact, eBay is a little bloated. It's difficult to actually find out what's involved without taking the plunge. Scott Adams calls this a confusopoly. It doesn't sound very ethical does it? Confuse the client into making a purchase. I'm not ashamed to say I'm confused. I've a first class degree in Internet Computing, I know I'm not stupid. I know it's eBay that's complicated.; Software (and websites are) does this. It starts off lean and as it develops, adding more esoteric features as users request them, it bloats until the features that 80% of people want every day are hidden among those that a thousand Larrys from Wisconsin wanted once upon a time.; I also have a theory that, over time, everything becomes as complicated as the human mind can stand. eBay is no different.; So to learn how to sell on eBay takes time and effort. And what have you got at the end of it? The ability to use a proprietary product. You are tied in to eBay. All we really have is time, and we all get more or less the same amount of it. The key is making good decisions about where you invest yours. Learn eBay and it'll turn out you've invested your life into learning how to pull the levers of an American Corporation.; But hey, politics aside. The point is you need to invest in yourself, not in eBay. And it turns out those promises eBay makes are not that great. Choose your own colours. Oh, they mean, choose from a list of predefined colour schemes. Place your own logo; in the top left corner. Add your own description; but nothing else. Get your own web address; yep: stores.ebay.com/yourstorename. We don't even call them stores here, they're shops! And that 3p per listing claim, well the costs turn out much higher overall. So. Do you want to invest your time into a system that doesn't like to tell the whole truth?; eBay isn't actually 'that' easy. The problem is probably that people don't actually know how to do the alternative. Buying a domain name is actually cheap and easy. But if you buy one, you're going to have to know what to do with it.; Now I don't really mean to knock eBay. It's an outstanding resource, I've sold on it, I've bought on it, if it wasn't there we'd have to invent it. It's fabulous. But that's the auction part. That's the core of eBay. What's happening is eBay is attempting to expand beyond its core in order to realise more value for its shareholders.; But it's cheap, right? It costs thousands to develop a website, and it's only 3p to list an item on eBay. No contest.; Well I chose an eBay Store reasonably at random, Rosie's Boats. Let's imagine that Rosie's boats cost her half what she sells them at. I'm just guessing at that, but I thought the rule of thumb was the price doubles at each stage of the chain, from factory to wholesaler to retailer.; If Rosie sells just four boats a month, at an average price of £24.45, she'll make £97.80. She'll pay out £30.00 for her store, £1.56 in listing fees, and £10.72 in selling fees (eBay plus PayPal costs for taking a credit card from a UK customer). Plus she bought the items for £48.90, so she made £6.62. eBay took 43% of her turnover.; If Rosie sells forty boats a month, at an average price of £24.45, she'll make £978.00. She'll pay out £30.00 for her store, £1.56 in listing fees, and £107.20 in selling fees. Plus she bought the items for £489.00, so she made £350.24. eBay took 14% of her turnover.; If Rosie sells four hundred boats a month (that's going some), at an average price of £24.45, she'll make £9,780.00. She'll pay out £30.00 for her store, £1.56 in listing fees, and £925.82 in selling fees. Plus she bought the items for £4,890.00, so she made £3,932.62. eBay took 10% of her turnover. Even at this rarified level, eBay's taking 10% of turnover.; A friend of a friend is making £20,000 a month on eBay and wants his own website because he's spending £1,000 on eBay fees alone; there's PayPal to add to that. At that level, the fees are considerable.; Clearly you can do whatever you like with a website so you can spend whatever you like on it, but a reasonable eCommerce site is going to cost a four figure sum. Yes of course you can buy an off the shelf eCommerce package, but my argument still holds. You'll invest your precious time learning their package and have no skills to show for it in the end. You're the most valuable consideration.; So, here we go. Let's imagine Rosie is in the middle ground selling 40 boats a month, and she invests £2,000 in her own website. For that she gets the ability to load items herself and can take payment online. She has a proper domain name: rosiesboats.co.uk that she can use for her email address. If she wants to stop there, the ongoing costs are approximately £50 per year in domain and hosting charges and whatever she might pay in payment processing costs (I discussed those here). At first glance, those payment processing charges, through Protx, might be £20 + 3.1% x £978.00 = £50.32 pcm, giving annual costs of £653.82. With her investment of £2,000 she's saved herself what she would have paid to eBay over a year: £1,665.12 minus what she is paying out on her new website: £653.82 = £1,011.30, so she will break even in about two years, after which the savings are all hers to spend on beer and chocolate, or to re-invest in the website to make it even better (I'd recommend spending half what you're saving, so £500, for a few years more to really get your website sorted).; But it's not just money saving. The magic difference is that you own that website. You own the website, the domain name, the business. OK maybe goodwill doesn't stand for a whole lot nowadays, but this way you are in control. If you, for example, ask me to build your eCommerce website, you'd always have me around to add more functionality (I don't plan to retire for a while, there's a good twenty or thirty years in me yet) and you'd own the code, so you don't have to use me at all, you're not locked in. If you become dissatisfied with me, you can ask someone else to improve your website. That's very different from eBay where you are locked in to using them.; In the end, you can sell the business. You've invested in something that will pay you back. It's quite a lot like the difference between renting and buying a house. OK, maybe buying isn't cheaper, but your money's working for you, not being drained into the landlord's pocket.; But it's more than just money saving, and it's more than not investing your time learning how to pay some other company. It's also about the marketplace.; I'm waiting to get back some data on this (come back and see if I update this bit (so far: 1 response, would use Google.co.uk first, clicking for UK results only and searching for "radio control boat buy", and follow that up with a visit to PriceRunner or Kelkoo if he was concerned about price)), but let's say that half the population looking for model boats goes to eBay and sees all those listed, and may find you in that list, and the other half goes into the wilds of the Internet. eBay isn't all there is you know! Search for model boats on Google, or Froogle, and there's a whole world of people out there wanting to provide for your needs. If you only have an eBay site, you're missing all those people who don't, by reflex, turn first to eBay. So setting up a website when you already have an eBay shop (and vice versa) is a bit like setting up a real shop in a nearby town. Ok you have the extra overheads of driving between the shops to keep everything running, but you make the most of the infrastructure you do have (one accounting package and computer to run it on and one set of book-keeping skills, one stock ordering process, one health and safety policy and so on), and most importantly, you get access to a whole new market. You double your sales.; Another observation. If you sell a few things in an eBay shop you make very little money. If you sell quite a few things, you make a little money. If you sell a lot of things, it's very much worth having your own website. So eBay's market is those people in the middle ground, where they take 14% of turnover. That's a nicely profitable business for eBay. But it also says something. If you're there, aren't you hanging with the also-rans? Isn't it a bit like having a shop in the grubby regions of town, a ten minute walk from the main shopping centre? Maybe you're on your way to being a big success, that's fine, but the majority of people with an eBay shop are making a medium amount of money and paying quite a bit for the privilege. You might want a better image for yourself.; So where do we go from here? Well wouldn't it be nice to have a website that drives your eBay business? eBay has an API (Application Program Interface, a set of methods provided by eBay that programmers can call in order to drive eBay). So the interface you have for maintaining your website could, at the same time, add/change/remove the item to/from your eBay store. That way, you only have to upload products once, giving you more time for your real life.; Now before we get too excited, few of the really nice-to-have things we're about to look at are cheap. If they were, everyone would have them, and you'd need something else to differentiate yourself. That's what this is all about. Differentiation. Making your site the best it can be raises you above the rest. And the more you can do that, the more people will link to you. The more they link, the higher your search engine position, the more they link, ad infinitum: a virtuous circle. If you want to make your website really, really work for you, it has to be the best it can possibly be.; But I think the most important reason to have your own website is soul. The Future Laboratory talked recently about ethnic and real products breaking through into mainstream culture because they link us to a simpler past, one based on authenticity, trust and real people. A website can do that. It can tell your story. It can deliver your skills, your knowledge, your experience. And giving begets receiving. People who trust you will come to you time and again. Where is the repeat business on eBay? People just buy on price and the nearest click. Yet marketers know that you're likely to spend all your profit on getting the first sale out of the customer. Repeat business is where profitability lies. And repeat business relies on quality and good communications and involvement. If a customer feels you love them, they'll come back.; It might feel a little strange talking about soul in a world of bits and bytes. But for me the Internet is about people. Interactions. Discovery. Helping each other. Finding people who can help us achieve what we want from life. People use the Internet; forget about megabytes.; So what can we do on our own website that you can't do on eBay? Take a look at one of my websites, The Tin Shop. It's got quite a simple interface compared to eBay, but it engages you as you shop. Click on any item and you can see we give a number of links to other possibilities. What was it that you liked about this item? Was it the period in which it was made? Do you collect this brand? Are you interested in items from this place? Or are do you collect this sort of item? Either way, we can show you everything we've got that has characteristics similar to what you liked in the first product. That's polite. It's like having a knowledgable shop assistant helping you find what you're interested in, using dialogue to iterate towards the perfect sale.; Then, if you like what you see, let us know what you're looking for, and when we find it, we'll email you. That's polite too. But it also builds a loyal customer base. It brings people back, to look at an item they've specifically requested notice of.; The Tin Shop isn't heavy on navigation, it's all hidden. It's soft, easy to use. You can easily spend ages just exploring.; Back to Rosie's Boats, one thing we could do on our own website is host a discussion list. If we can become the place people come to to discuss boat modelling, then we're going to get a whole lot more traffic, not just because the participants will be our supporters, but also because the search engines will find all sorts of things in the text people write. And what people write about is what concerns them at the moment, which is the same as what people are searching for.; What about getting customers to score the different models? That could influence your whole business. Maybe you end up ditching a manufacturer and expanding on another. Or if people start buying Japanese manufactured models more than others, that's where you'll go for new stock. And your new customers will feel valued, having been asked their opinion.; You could rank your models by sales volume and/or by their score. Why would anyone buy from a shop that doesn't do this if you do?; What about getting really funky. Do you think older men would prefer authentic models of tallships, while young boys would want something fast and whizzy? Well, let's get people to tell us a little about themselves, then store details of what they buy, then when someone new comes along we can say, without actually saying it of course, people like you tend to like products like these.; So you see, goodwill may have been downgraded in the valuing of businesses, but if you build a business like this, you're building value whichever way you look at it. You're not paying the landlord any more, you're buying your home. And good as eBay is, using it, you will always be part of the pack.
The word: 15 May 2006: Through the whole weekend there's only been one word that's kept popping up over and over. That word: Topmiler.
My Morphy Richards 43058 kettle: 15 May 2006: I'd been getting the smell of burning plastic in the kitchen for a while which I tied down to the kettle, a Morphy Richards 43058, which we bought from Argos on the 10 July 2004. When I looked at the base part of it was molten and a bit of wire seemed to have melted through. We bought a new kettle but, because the old actually kept on working we kept using it until it, finally, stopped working and I decided to take it apart to see what had happened.; What appears to have happened is one of the cables to the element has heated up and melted. My limited knowledge of electricity says that it must have found some resistance at that point. I don't know whether it's right to say that the other connection to the element must have dealt with the same wattage, so the fact that one side has burned out proves there was something different about that side. Perhaps all it took was a small nick in the wire.; The burned coating of the wire to the right of the central pin in the last photograph is the part that had melted through base. I could touch that.; Anyway, I thought it could possibly be evidence of poor quality control and resolved never to buy Morphy Richards again. But then I started to think. What if we all did that? What if such incidences (there was my Chrysler Neon with the faulty paint job from the factory that never got satisfactorily resolved by Peter Stockill in Hull; well, not until we went to the small claims court anyway; and there's my Behringer KX1200 combo that's less than 18 months old and where the bass keeps cutting out) were recorded in a central database for all to see?; Is that fair? Would I like it done to me? No, obviously not. But there's a difference. The difference is I've read The Corporation. Public limited companies have no soul, no morality. As a sole trader, I do. I care. You can resolve issues by talking to me and I'll understand your point of view. The structure of a public limited company means that no employee, not even a director, may do anything that doesn't promote the growth of the shareholder's funds. Companies don't care. Even Anita Roddick sold out in the end. So if a company can get away with shoddy workmanship, it will. You can't hurt a company with moral arguments. The only thing that matters is money. So communicating things like this has an impact on a company's reputation, which affects sales. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a website about problems with a particular product before you spent your money buying one?; I suppose if I built a website out of it the corporations, like terminators, simply would not stop until they'd wrapped me up in so much legal nonsense I'd have nothing left. Again they wouldn't see it as an opportunity to improve as anyone who has a soul would, they'd just look upon it as an attack. So maybe it's not worth it. Or maybe it is. Hmm.; Update: see what happened to the new kettle
Old computers are irritating: 10 May 2006: Working on old computers is irritating, it's official. More to the point, it appears it's a false economy to retain computers beyond an absolute maximum of five years.
Villa Oasis, Lanzarote case study: 8 May 2006: I've a new case study for you.
Nightmare PC: 7 May 2006: I've had a nightmare PC on my hands. A friend wanted to run Linux and I wanted to help her get set up. We simply couldn't get sound to work. I bought a new Creative SoundBlaster Live 24 bit SB0410 that gave me a Wheeltappers and Shunter's Social Club effect (as if using a microphone with a dodgy connection). I tried loads of distributions, eventually even installing Windows, which also failed to recognise the onboard AC'97 sound chip on her ASRock 939NF4 motherboard.; One time it also dropped off the network, and my Linksys router light for that connection gave a regular on 1, off 2 3 4 flash, whether the PC was switched on or not. Linksys didn't seem to know what that meant.; I've worked with my colleagues in the Scarborough Linux User Group on this and we tried all sorts of stuff, but eventually over Sunday lunch one friend (hello Dave again) said "maybe the motherboard's fried".; The owner of the PC had accidentally caught the setting for the power supply while furtling round the back of the PC and had set it to 110v. When she powered up for the first time, she got a bang, a flash, and a cloud of smoke. The supplier Golden Electronics gave the classic line "We'll send you a new power supply, it's easy to fit". So you know what to do folks (don't buy from Golden Electronics). Just to underscore that, the D on this new keyboard often doesn't work and the keyboard feedback is bloody awful.; So I fitted the power supply but didn't know the motherboard was fried and disappeared into software hell. After Dave's comment, I bought a new motherboard, the PC Pro recommended Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9, installed that, installed SUSE, and hey presto, it found the AC'97 sound chip.; Following the motherboard installation it said to remove two jumpers to get front sound to work, which I did. I got no sound at all. Super Dave said to put the jumpers back as he'd had lots of trouble with front sound before. I did. I got sound. Thank Christ for that.; SUSE 10 still didn't play DVDs, which is what my friend wanted the machine for, primarily. A quick Google turned up this article which runs through how to get SUSE to do just that. Registration on that site, btw, is free. It didn't work perfectly, but I got DVDs, MP3s and RMs working. Wow.; So after an amazing 30 hours I'm almost done with this machine. I guess I've learned a lot so maybe it's worth it.; Linux: prev
Walking around Stamford Bridge: 6 May 2006: I had a day off yesterday and went for a walk with my partner. It wasn't the best walk in the world but the terrain was flat, the weather was sunny and the shandy at the end was very welcome.; We started out with a walk into Millington Wood just North East of Millington which is North East of Pocklington. There's a viewpoint at the end.; I don't know whether it's normal everywhere but around Scarborough is the only place I remember seeing wild primroses, they are very common around here.; You don't often see a natural monoculture but wild garlic seemed to have taken over much of the ground.; After that we drove to Stamford Bridge, parked and walked about half a mile west along the A166, almost to the very very nice (and award winning) farm shop and cafe, then headed South down the cycle track towards Scoreby Farmhouse, keeping to the footpath nearest the river. This view is of Scoreby Wood from the West.; Scoreby Wood contained pretty blue things.; After that we joined the A1079 at Kexby for a second, headed East, and joined the riverside and walked back North again along the bank. The May blossom was out.; If you're scared of cows, we got herded along by loads of them. Slightly scary, but also very cute.; For those who are not fans of man's yappiest friend, the walk provided convenient dog guillotines every quarter of a mile or so.; There were absolutely loads of crazy tree flowers. Sorry it's not in focus, my twattish Pentax Optio 330GS seemed incapable of working it out.; The Viaduct was a welcome sight towards the end. If you look closely you can see a young person swinging from a rope.; Stamford Bridge itself looks like this.; Now, according to the story on the pub wall ten minutes after I took this picture, in 1066 250 longships full of Norwegians sailed up the Humber. A third of them stayed with the boats while the rest made their way towards York. King Harold came out to meet them at Fulford and they hit each other with sticks for a bit until the English retired hurt.; The Norwegians didn't want to take York, they wanted the place for winter accommodation and if they'd wandered in it would have been trashed, so they waited outside for the English to come out and negotiate their surrender.; Harold, meanwhile, took a 180 mile round trip of the local high spots, picking up his due soldiers and creating an army. The Norwegians for some reason were now at Stamford Bridge where the bridge you see didn't actually exist, it was smaller and wooden. The Norwegians were on the East side. They were washing their socks and buffing their nails and because there were no mobile phones at the time, they had no idea the English were coming until they saw a cloud of dust on the horizon and the glint of the sun on the English army's shields.; No matter, one giant Norwegian held the bridge for ages, cutting down with his axe any English soldier that tried to get across, until one English chap stabbed him in the knackers from a boat underneath.; The Norwegians ran away, grouped, interlocked their shields and stayed like that for a while, like you do, until we managed to bludgeon our way through. Eventually the Norwegians were defeated. Apparently only 24 longboats were required to send the remnants home.; As if that wasn't enough, the French then invaded and the English army had to do the Battle of Hastings. And if we weren't so damned knackered, we would have won that too.; The real story starts here.
Sci-Fi: 4 May 2006: According to The Cathedral and the Bazaar (a really fantastic book, very different to what I imagined and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand open source development and the psychology and economics behind it) if you want to be a hacker (note, hackers are the good people who build Linux and all the open source software, crackers are the ones who break into systems and wreck them), among other things, read sci-fi.; I've never been into sci-fi. I read Dune once. 1984 was good. Brave New World too. I think that's probably it. Oh, I borrowed Donovan's Brain from Long Eaton Library once too.; So I was discussing this with a friend (hi Dave) on the way to the local Linux meeting last night and I think two things.; Firstly, I think the reason sci-fi is popular with geeks is that it encourages you to consider whole new worlds and the interactions between the different systems. What will a race with super fast running legs do when its water runs out? (Can you tell I'm really not into it?); Anyway, there are two good things about that. The first is that technology builds new worlds, so it's useful to be able to think about what could be without real world constraint. The second, and here's where I think it really scores, software systems are built from abstract, interacting components, rather like the planets and races in sci-fi. Imagining the interactions in sci-fi's races, planets, armies and so on is great practice for thinking in the abstract, which is what you have to do as a software system designer.; That abstract stuff still surprises me. As I was taught, object oriented software design involves creating software versions of real life objects and then making them interact. So, for instance, I might create a log cabin 'object' in software, and then write procedures to enable me to ask my log cabin object how many windows it has, how many it can sleep, how old it is, and so on. If I ask for the log cabin's rooms what I should get back is a list of room objects with their own set of possible queries, floor space, plug sockets, etc.; All very nice, clear, obvious. Except, when software developers get their hands on this, they create all sorts of abstract objects unrelated to anything you'd encounter in real life that do things you've never imagined. So object oriented development loses its advantage and the systems become just as complicated as any other because you have to know what these fantasy objects do. Here's where the sci-fi skill is used.; Secondly I think I'm not into sci-fi because I get that thinking practice in other ways. I'm quite into economics and, strange to say, also into people, our motivations, what makes us tick. But also I'm into marketing, so all of those glue together to give me plenty of interacting systems to think about.; I do like reality too. I don't play computer games because I think, if I'm going to perfect a skill like that, and take up that amount of time, I'd rather do something useful like learn to play an instrument, trade stocks and shares, or play a sport. So I think that puts me off sci-fi a little too. I really think of reading sci-fi as a waste of time.; But my frustration with abstract software objects exposes my weakness. Maybe it's because I don't read sci-fi that I find them hard to work with. Who knows the truth?; Oh wait, no, I do. It's 42!
My ideas: 3 May 2006: You know that feeling when you receive a mailshot from, for instance, the Penny Shares Guide, which talks about how to make money from Penny Shares and you think .. well, if your system worked, you wouldn't go to the trouble of printing a magazine about it, surely. You'd just run your system. You wouldn't need the income from selling your story.; I've a feeling my business is the same. If I can take any business and convert it into an online success, and that, in a nutshell, is my claim, then why don't I just create successful online businesses from scratch?; I've lots of good ideas, I've just been waiting for the opportunity to give them a little time. The first idea is budding now. Watch this space.
Yorkshire Times: 2 May 2006: Against my better judgment I placed an ad and editorial combination in The Yorkshire Times a few weeks ago. Yep, great website.; As you probably already know I used to be a marketing consultant. I'd never recommend a client advertise in such a publication. 1) I've never heard of it. 2) It doesn't have an audited circulation (and I had to explain what one was to the telesales lady). 3) The call was opportunistic, which means it's not tied to any kind of strategy I might have, but instead, satisfies only that of the publication. 4) The publication is distributed free of charge, which yes means it reaches everyone in a market (unless, of course there's no audit to say so in which case for all you know they throw them all in the Trent), but it also usually means readers don't value it. People read things they pay for. Reading free things only happens in free moments when they are to hand. There are quite a few exceptions to that, however. Publications such as Computing and Computer Weekly are very well regarded and are distributed to those who qualify for a copy, so they get their legitimacy by tightly controlling their circulation and by fulfilling the purpose of an industry newspaper. There are usually equivalents in all the major industries. Then there are the whole 'trader' series of free local newspapers. That works too, again, it provides the 'news' function to a demographic. I don't think the Yorkshire Times does either of those things.; But there's an imp in me that wants to do these things as an experience, and I let it. This once.; The sales pitch was that there was a forthcoming special feature on 'promoting your business', it generates lots of enquiries for those who advertise in it, and I can have an ad and editorial combination.; In my opinion any publication that offers you editorial tied to advertising is not really worth a light. Any switched-on reader knows the editorial has been paid for, and knows it's near worthless. The value of editorial is in its independence and in the knowledge and experience of its writer and editor. Editorial placed by PR and marketing people is clearly biased and aimed purely at selling products or services to you. Readers know this and read, if they do, with appropriate mental filters.; After the sales lady had thought about my challenge to the lack of circulation audit they came back with "my boss says if you're not satisfied you can run the ad/ed again and again until you are". Which seemed fair. I should have known better.; So I spent time on the ad and the editorial and placed it and nothing happened. Nothing at all. Except a couple of weeks later I got a copy of the publication which comprises just 8 pages of ads and editorial. No sign of a 'promote your business' feature. And a bill for £178.60. Payment due by 19 April. I'm sure I only received it last week.; If I'd had one enquiry, maybe it would be worth repeating. But I got nothing. Not a sausage. That makes it not worth repeating. So they won.; Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe my copy wasn't persuasive enough.; The invoice, by the way, comes from Curzon Street, Derby. When I ran my PR company in Derby these people were a right pain in the arse, publishing 'editorials' on some sort of charged-for basis (I can't remember now how .. oh yes, colour separation charges .. a way to charge for printing colour photographs to accompany editorials .. a way to charge for editorials yet claim you are not) in all manner of small local publications .. there's a partial list of them here.; I suppose I was a pain in the arse for them too because they used to be really hot on chasing for money and I used to resent it and hold on as long as possible. If I'd known it was them I'd have said definitely no. I can't work out, either, what I'm dealing with. The invoice is from Yorkshire Times, published by Journal House. No company number, no Limited .. is Yorkshire Times a sole trader then? The company seems to be Journal Publishing .. no mention of that on the invoice.; But anyway, I thought I'd put this up as a warning to all and get my revenge that way. Ha!
Weight: 2 May 2006: Not that I really need to lose weight, but I seem to be starting my running training this year (a half marathon, hopefully) seven pounds lighter than this time last year. So the running programme worked, overall, as a weight loss programme too. Groovy.
Phishing: 2 May 2006: I came across this while reading Computing Which?. A phishing email is one that is trying to trick you into revealing personal information such as bank details or credit cards. Can you spot which are phishing and which are genuine? Take the test; I got 90%, my partner got 70%. How did you do?