The Birthday Party at Leeds Warehouse in 1982

2010-08-18: Back when I was first a student (Computer Science, Leeds University) I used to photograph bands, so I thought I'd put up some of the pics. I make no claims to their greatness, but I enjoyed taking them and developing them in the darkroom and maybe others might like them too.

Anyway, this is Nick Cave and Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party playing, I think, Leeds Warehouse on the 6 May 1982 (according to this).

The place was full and I got right to the front, Nick Cave sat on my shoulder at one point. When the set ended, someone made a grab for Rowland Howards' effects pedals. When the band came back onstage for their encore, they asked for the doors to be closed and for the thief to hand them back in but afaik they didn't get them back so we got no encore and there was much disappointment all round. I regret not being fast enough with the camera to take the shot of him nicking them. Mind, it wouldn't really have helped because it would have been a few hours before I could have processed the film :-)

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Just a couple of ideas

2010-08-28: Just a quick blog to record a couple of ideas.

I just retweeted "ewanmcintosh Film I'm involved with reaches BBC Breakfast. Like Northern Soul music? Like SoulBoy: http://bbc.in/ci6tH7 #soul #northernsoul #music" (I'd like to know more about Northern Soul) and immediately it got retweeted by "breakfast_bot RT @JohnAllsoppIM RT @ewanmcintosh: Film I'm involved with reaches BBC Breakfast. Like Northern Soul... http://bit.ly/a16cvl , yum, i hope!".

I guess BreakfastBot watches out for any mention of Breakfast and retweets it take a look. Actually, I thought it was the BBC Breakfast team making public the public reaction to their programme, which is kinda cool and would give them a stream of inbound links too. I like that idea. As it stands maybe it's owned by someone who has a breakfast sausage to sell.

OK, here's the biggy. Not yet convinced about online video? Polycell. They sell you the product and you can see a video that shows you how to use it. Fabulous.

Just one thing dammit! That same old problem is still there. It's still everywhere. It's sorted by product category.

If you are going to run expensive ads showing youngish people who don't know how to fill cracks in their walls, they don't know if they want a filler or a decorating aid. What they know is, they have a crack in their wall.

People are goal oriented online. They'll search for "repair crack in wall" and buy the solution they find. They won't search for 'filler' if they don't know that's what they need. If they see the ad and go to the Polycell website, they won't want to click around trying to work out whether it's a filler or a decorating aid that they want.

Golden rule: no-one cares how you categorise your products. Sort your website according to the problems people are having. Completely forget your product categories.

So, I would rip out the products part of the site and instead list common problems (written from the user's point of view) and their solutions with the video and the product. I'd watch the traffic to those problems and only display the 80:20 pareto top ones on page one, but have further pages that cover everything else.

My 2p worth, but if they are targeting DIY novices, I bet that would seriously improve conversion. Mind-you, I don't know how they'd measure that since they are not selling off the page, but guiding people to their nearest stockist (that works well). They could give people a printout 50p-off voucher or similar and track that back, but in doing so they'd probably eat up all their profits. I'm guessing the goal would have to be getting someone to add a product to their shopping list (nice), and using the store locator.

Anyway, don't forget: video. Video video video video. Did I mention how important video is? Video video video. Think video. Do video. Do it now. Do video today. Like .. stop reading (after the next sentences) and then do some video. And the golden rule, write for your visitor and don't imagine for a second (unless you are Aston Martin or Madonna with enthusiastic fans) anyone cares about your product lines. They just want a solution to their problem. Cheers. Cya.

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Using user's dandruff

2010-08-16: Murderers probably use anti-dandruff shampoo because if you're thinking of murdering someone, you care about what you leave behind. One speck of dandruff left on the scene can get you convicted.

Similarly (kind-of) as we wander around the Internet we leave behind information that others can use, against or for us depending on their inclination.

Use the data your customers don't even know they leave

As a white-hat web developer, I'm interested in that data because it means I can improve the user experience for all visitors. What's really beautiful about it is that I'm not bothering the customer. There are no questionnaires for them, nothing to click, no popups, no "where did you hear about us" questions when they enquire. I'm just sweeping up after they've visited, and analysing what I've found.

Actually, that's not quite right. I'm not really sitting and looking at everyone's data, I'm building automated systems that do the job for me.

Use data for a purpose

The other thing that's woven into this idea is that it's guided by psychology. I'm not doing it for nothing, I'm doing it in order to make more money and I'm doing that by providing a better service, or better information, than my competitors.

A simple example

Take a look at the 'rooms' page for this Scarborough B&B. First, of course, we have up-to-date pictures of every room.

Second, I've organised it so people know which are sea-facing and which are rear-facing, and which are up lots of stairs.

Each picture is clickable to see a much bigger photograph so people can have a really good root around.

Now, notice where it says "Our Most Popular Room!" or "Our second most popular room"? That's based on 'live' data. Basically, having established that the number of clicks on a room tallies with bookings, every time someone clicks on a photograph to see the larger version, I'm storing that fact in a database. Every time someone loads this page, I'm querying that database to ask .. which photograph got the most clicks, the second most, and the third most. Then I'm reporting that on the page, 'live'. So this will change as customers' behaviour changes.

What's in it for the user?

Why? On the one hand I'm trying to be helpful. There are quite a few rooms there, which is quite a lot of deciding for the user. It's useful information to know which others think are the better rooms.

Users might also think that the most popular rooms will get booked up earlier. So I'm using two principles of influence here to try to improve bookings and conversion: social proof (others like those rooms too, so I'm safe to book), and scarcity (those rooms are popular, I should book now).

Of course I'm measuring the results of that change and I'll report back later if it makes a significant difference.

User data as a word cloud

In another, perhaps more sophisticated example, I installed a word cloud navigation system on Metcalfe Insurance Brokers' website that shows the most popular types of insurance users want when they arrive.

But there's more. If you click on one, and come back to the home page, you'll find the option you clicked on is larger. That word cloud is now customised for you and is different to others'. That data sticks around for a little more than a year, so that if you make your decision about where to buy your insurance over, say, a week, whenever you come back to the page it's easier for you to find the pages you visited last.

And next year when you come back to renew, the site will remember the pages you want .. it's customised to your needs. This is what I mean when I talk about customisation.

Watch for changes here too

On this blog, I've completed the task of indexing every word. What's next is a word cloud for each blog that takes a mix of the most popular words in my entire blog with the words from this particular blog entry, so you might see 'customisation' as a bigger word in the cloud next to this blog. Since you're interested perhaps in seeing what else I've written on that subject, you might click that word in the word cloud, and see another blog entry. If you click again, I will have remembered the two blogs you've already read on the subject, and I'll send you to another.

What all this does is provide a more engaging, personalised, interesting, embracing, trustworthy and useful browsing experience for the user who may well be more inclined to spend their money with you instead of your competitors. Amen to that.

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Cognitive surplus .. can we be bothered?

2010-08-17: Twenty or thirty years ago I'd have been excited to read Clay Shirky's new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. I'm definitely a glass half full kinda guy.

I would love to live by De Bono's Handbook for the Positive Revolution. Actually more than anything I want George Monbiot's Manifesto for A New World Order to happen. I even tried to follow that through and his 'answer' seemed to be "Oh, don't talk to me about actually doing it, I'm a thinker you know".

People can't be arsed, in a nutshell. If our basic needs are satisfied, there's something good on the telly, and we've got the latest iPhone we're happy. Why would we want the hassle of creating a new world order?

Partly, that's the success (and failure) of marketing. As marketers our job is to discover people's wants (probably before they themselves know of them) and provide for them, with a little bit of an aspirational osmotic pressure added. So we're kinda happy, shielded from what's going on by politicians and companies who tell us what they know we want to hear, and in some ways that's good. Who wants mayhem and unhappiness? Who really wants to leave our sofas and big tellies? By and large we like our lives.

But it's not enough. We know. We all know we're being royally screwed, we just don't quite know how to deal with it. Best to ignore it. These are huge forces of oppression at work, after all. And didn't the feminists die early because of all the stress they endured?

It's Brave New World, basically.

Wondering what to get excited about? Isn't everything basically OK? Here some unfinished lyrics by The Edger, a rapper in Scarborough:

Contradictions

A man who claims hes hard all his life
Then goes home beats the shit out his wife
The law is there to protect us all
but everyone they put behind bars is poor
...Prison works we lock 'em up like a trend
only 96% will then re-offend
the recession working people get homelessness
Those that caused give themselves bonuses
A soldier turning a family of 5 to zero
But when he's injured comes home a hero
Anarchists demanding more choices for their brain
and demonstrate their freedom by dressing all the same
ya can't be a priest if you sleep with men
but you can stay a priest if they are under ten
beautiful intelligent creative people
who make their brain insane in their vain shoving a needle......making them evil

Have a read of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back and realise that making friends, connecting with others, is a revolutionary act.

How does this fit with me being a marketer? I don't see any difference between helping a friend move his furniture and marketing. Both are about perceiving a need and organising yourself to help solve it. I'm pro small businesses. People who serve real needs. For me marketing is the most powerful force for good because it can take every one of those problems above and organise to provide a solution. Your nearest muttlynational burger chain isn't going to do that. Marketing isn't just for business. Money is about money. Marketing is about building a better world. I see a lot of needs. We're not done here yet.

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Support, Truss and trust

2010-08-16: Back to Talk to the Hand, Lynne Truss' book about the rudeness of modern life, and she's talking about the Internet where she makes the point that many businesses have pushed self service too far.

Given that most transactions are mutually beneficial, wouldn't it be nice one day to be met halfway? The Internet, she says is "the supreme example of an impersonal and inflexible system which will provide information if you do all the hard work of searching for it, but crucially a) doesn't promise anything as a reward for all the effort, b) will never engage in dialogue, c) is much bigger than you are, and d) only exists in a virtual kind of way so never has to apologise."

She continues: "Our spirits are .. half broken. We have even started to believe that clicking "OK" is an act of free will, while 'Quit' and 'Retry' represent true philosophical alternatives. Fuming resentment is the result. Everywhere we turn for a bit of help we are politely instructed to find the solution for ourselves."

Now, she writes very effectively for comic effect but I do take her main point and have felt the same way many times.

So the reason for me putting this up is to say that we can get too wrapped up in how brilliant the latest widget is and forget that most of everyone just wants a bit of straightforward human interaction. Service is a differentiator. If that's how people feel about your website and your competitors', that's fine to a point. But you could blow away your competitors with some decent customer service, and get yourself a long-term, loyal customer base.

Incidentally, this ties in with something I picked out of an episode of Big Brother last night. The show is in its last couple of weeks and two different people said at different times of different people that they didn't trust them. The reason? They haven't got to know them as much as the other people.

Remember our old brain and the idea of the self? The old brain is interested in sex, food and danger, and our concept of a sense of self may just be an evolved by-product of our need to understand what the other guy is about to do. We meet someone or something, and we model them in our head. We try to understand, basically, whether they are going to try to eat us, have sex with us, or help us. The fact that we are modelling others means we may as well model ourselves too so we can work out the whole situation, and that model of ourselves is our sense of self.

Anyway, what they were saying in Big Brother is that they didn't trust someone basically because they hadn't had enough interaction with them to build a reliable model of them in their heads. So they couldn't yet predict how they would behave.

Brands are simple people. They're not complicated. Volvo will always prioritise safety and Mercedes engineering. Easy to predict.

But in order to trust a brand (a company) and to buy from it, we need some interactions.

So you could turn frustrated customers into thankful, trusting and loyal ones with some half-decent interactions.

Now, I know that face to face or phone interactions with real people are awfully expensive. You need nice, capable, chipper and well trained people to face customers who ask the same disheartening questions day after day.

Enter social media. If a customer asks you a question on Twitter or Facebook or a forum or in a YouTube comment or on your real-life FAQ and you answer it, others see that you really do react well and answer questions properly and solve people's problems. That stands in for their own questions, their own interactions. Now instead of needing, say, 9 brand interactions involving your staff, say half of those are covered by the prospect seeing your interactions with others in social media.

"Pick your own strawberries" "No I won't bloody pick my own strawberries!"

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Reputation management

2010-08-12: Eeeh, marketers do talk some rubbish sometimes.

Basically according to that article reputation management is a search engine optimisation problem. If people search on your name, do they find the good stories or the bad ones first? That's solved with straightforward SEO skills. If you were an actor or a professor or a manager and came to me for help promoting yourself online, that's obviously part of what I would do. I just wouldn't call it an online detox.

Of course it's a little more complicated for companies where the line that separates customers from staff can (and probably should) become completely blurred. There it's the interactions that form the reputation, so everyone has to act consistently according to the company branding.

Anyway, online reputation management. Yes, I do that too :-) Actually, I've been doing it for a while.

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Confused by owls? Cut your owl confusion by 50%, impress your friends

2010-08-21: If I'm allowed more than one special power (and I'm sure I am), one would be to be able to recognise birds by their song. To that end, here's how to tell the difference between the different owls by sound alone. If you're a mouse, don't worry about it, you won't hear a thing (owls wings make no noise as they swoop down to eat you). Ain't evolution a wonderful thing?

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Our narrowboat plan

2010-08-13: This idea of living on a narrowboat doesn't seem to go away, in fact it keeps getting closer. Here's how the interior might plan out: click for a bigger view.

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Show them pictures of food

2010-08-06: Anytime it's relevant, take the opportunity to show people gorgeous photographs of food.

That's because our old brain, the one that makes sure we eat, drink, stay out of danger and do naughty things with people of the opposite sex, likes to see pictures of food (for obvious evolutionary reasons).

What it likes, it promotes to our conscious mind. It's a bit like making friends with a lobbyist in your client's head.

So, show people pictures of food when you can.

All from Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?

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Camping vlog

2010-08-04: We've been camping, and never being one to miss an opportunity I thought I'd practice presenting to camera by doing a video blog.

Basically the idea was to just be myself and see how that came across and then work from there on anything that needs improvement.

So I'm afraid I'll be uploading videos of my in various states of hair-related distress, but this first one is a shot in the dark. No, really, it was the middle of the first night and pouring with rain. Sadly my capability to record high quality sound failed me (I wanted a recording of rain in a tent .. evocative), so I thought I'd do a video instead. Sound quality .. mic -> Flip -> YouTube is appalling. Oh well.

Anyway, I promise the next videos will be better :-)

(I sound like a dork. Action point #1: get a better voice)

Camping blog: next

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My new Twitter rules now we have 'Who to follow'

2010-08-07: If you use Twitter, you might have noticed a new "Who to follow" section near the top of the right hand column that suggests who you might want to follow.

Presumably they suggest people who are active and are well connected to you. People your friends follow, and so on.

From a usability perspective, there's a cross next to the names it suggests. I'm unsure whether clicking it means they'll never come up again, or if it just dismisses it for now. I've certainly clicked someone's cross and had it replaced by the other suggestion on display, providing me with two recommendations to friend the one person. You'd have thought Twitter would have programmed that a little better.

I saw someone else moan that it suggests people that we've previously unfriended.

Anyway, the suggestions have generally been good and it's made me use Twitter more.

However, from an Internet marketers' perspective, whereas in the golden age you could send out a tweet to your followers and because there weren't that many others tweeting and people were excited, they'd see your tweet and consider it, nowadays people follow lots of others so our messages fly past and are only fleetingly considered. Response rates are lower. That makes it even more important for us to create a genuine dialogue. We were never supposed to be broadcasting anyway (I never was, I was generalising earlier).

Anyway, as a user, I don't really want to switch on Twitter to find a load of stuff from people I don't care about, so now we have "who to follow" I think I'd better also take an active role in unfollowing people who are, frankly, not providing interesting Tweets.

So my new Twitter routine is this.

• Load Twitter
• Consider friending whoever is suggested
• Read through the tweets on the first page
• Unfollow anyone who says nomnomnom or says they nommed some food (eg. "just nommed Cornish Pastie"). The word is 'eaten' and we have nothing in common.
• Try really hard to reply to something
• If there's really nothing interesting there to respond to, unfollow someone on that page
• Do something useful
• In the event of something taking a while to load, maybe check Twitter or make a cup of tea

I also check, once a day if I remember (so, probably once a week), who has recently followed me and decide whether to follow them back. And I probably check who has mentioned me more than once a day, and who's sent me a private message maybe once every other day.

Turn that around and you know what you have to do as a tweeter for business: connect, converse, be interesting, and be focussed.

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Narrowboat tales 10

2010-07-30: Sweatyhocks. That's a name that featured throughout my childhood. Pronounced with a silent 'h'. I don't think I ever met him, but he was someone my dad knew at work. Sweatyhocks because he had the smelliest feet. At my dad's workplace (might have been Stanton) where everyone showered at the end of the shift, people used to try to get in before him because of the smell.

I wonder if it was Sweatyhocks who took a urine sample to the doctor one day, then the day after brought the milk for his tea in the same bottle.

It's not much of a story, but Sweatyhocks is such a great name I wanted to write it anyway :-)

prev

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Sorry about this

2010-07-16: Another quote from the very much recommended Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life about the lack of please, thank-you, excuse me and sorry in today's language:

Janet Street-Porter, filming a documentary about modern education, "tried to prompt the children at a school assembly to grasp the importance of apology. 'Children,' she said, 'in every family home, there's a word which people find it really hard to say to each other. It ends in 'y'. Can anyone tell me what it is?' There was a pause while everyone racked their brains, and then someone called out 'Buggery?'

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Starting a bed and breakfast business

2010-02-21: OK, this blog is all very well but let's make it real. Let's take, over time, a bed and breakfast, preferably someone who is starting a bed and breakfast business near to Scarborough, and publicise it using all the things I know.

How did that idea come about?

As I was writing the previous blog I was thinking, well, I'm not really taking my own advice. The best way I've found to blog is to write the blog, leave it overnight, then tidy it up, add-in key search terms ("start a bed and breakfast business" is one for this article), and then publish it.

So I took the previous blog's text and put it into Google's Keyword Tool. That is supposed to take the text, work out what it's about, and provide other keyphrases that might be of interest.

It can do this because Google, obviously, knows what people type into the search engines. So its suggestions are based on those search terms, and it provides both the frequency of use and an indication of how competitively each term is fought over in Google's Adwords pay per click advertising system.

If you've not seen this sort of tool before, let's be clear how big a deal that is. Type in any phrase (for this, I typed in "starting a bed and breakfast"), and Google will tell you the number of times people are searching for that phrase (320 times per month) and similar ones ("how to start a bed and breakfast", 170), and how keen people are to bid for each of those terms (maybe 6/10). It's nothing to do with your website, it's about search frequency in Google. That's awesome market information, even if you're not doing Internet marketing, even if you just want to know what to stock in your shop.

Anyway, it's a bit imperfect when presented with a lot of text. It thinks the key issue I talk about in this blog is starting up in business. I mention 'startup' only twice and talk about all sorts of other things, so that doesn't really make sense, but the point is .. perhaps in that case my own blogs should be more optimised for keywords than they are.

So wandering down the results of Google's Keyword Tool, a phrase like "start a business" has 90,500 searches per month in the UK, and 10/10 for competitiveness. I don't think I really have a right to be in that space, so let's keep looking.

Marketing a bed and breakfast business online

Well, to cut a long story short I settled on "starting a bed and breakfast" (I kinda like people who are willing to type out "bed and breakfast" rather than B&B). As I said above, that phrase attracts 320 searches per month, so 10 per day, and the competition's maybe 6/10. I've worked successfully with lots of B&Bs so I know what I'm doing .. I live in Scarborough after all .. so I think I have a right to be there when someone types in "starting a bed and breakfast", "how to start a bed and breakfast business" or even "run a bed and breakfast". And if I can get to work with a new startup bed and breakfast business every month, I'd be happy with that.

So I think what I'm looking for is a guinea pig bed and breakfast business, someone who is willing to go through the whole process of publicising their bed and breakfast with me, 'live', even on camera. YouTube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook .. the whole shebang. And let's see if what I say and do works on a real business. It can be a new bed and breakfast business or one that needs more visitors.

So basically, if you are a bed and breakfast, especially if you're starting a bed and breakfast in or near Scarborough and you fancy that, get in touch. First come, first served.

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Rainstorm cometh at Goswick campsite

2010-08-09: The first evening of our recent camping trip at Goswick, Northumberland. This storm came over the hill and stayed the night (20 July 2010).

The correct music to accompany this is P J Harvey's Meet Ze Monsta

Here's the middle-of-the-night raining & camping video from that night.

Camping prev

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Return rates

2010-08-03: One thing we learned from the iPhone 4 signal reception debacle was Apple's return rates.

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said in July 2010 that the iPhone 4's return rates were 1.7%, compared with 6% for the iPhone 3GS. (Source: Guardian 17 July 2010)

Interesting? I think so.

I'm thinking Apple fans are very loyal, and that 6% is rather high, so I'm wondering if the return rates for other hi-tech products are even higher. And then I'm wondering what happens to all those returned products.

It also gives us mortals a figure for comparison.

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How much to spend on SEO

2010-08-03: I have a client who is in position 8 for a search keyphrase and is making, let's make up some figures .. £2 profit a month from sales from 20 visitors. Is it worth putting in the time to get a higher position?

Based on switching around these figures, it looks to me like work that raised them to position 7 would bring in 13% more traffic. At position 4 traffic doubles. At position 2 it quadruples, and in the top position it is times .. wait for it .. 14!

That makes the annual benefit of putting in the work to be at position 7 £3.12, which doesn't pay for a lot of SEO time.

If we can get to position 4, that's worth £24.48, still not a lot of SEO time.

At the top position, it's £316.56. That pays for a fair bit of SEO time. Winner takes all, basically.

Obviously these are small figures but that's the calculation that small businesses have to make .. is it worth paying an SEO consultant to raise my search position? Well, now, we can work it out.

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Reading three books at once & subconscious influence

2010-07-29: I love reading different books at the same time, it shows up real contrasts, ideas and helps me question what I'm reading.

For instance, I've just reviewed a page from Ambient Findability while also reading Influence: Science and Practice.

In Ambient Findability, he runs us through the online buying process for a digital camera, telling us how fabulous it is that we have access to so much information before making our choice. How we can select cameras by their megapixel range, how we can weigh manufacturers' claims against customer reviews. How we can check Epinions, CNET and Consumer Reports (presumably an American swapout for Which?).

Want to know how I bought my camera, which I'm really happy with? I looked at the recommended digital SLR in PC Pro and bought that one. I delegated the decision to someone else who is interested, someone with the skills and motivation to decide.

Choice is a stopper, a confuser. According to Caldini (author of the Influence book above), as the amount of information grows and the demands on our time increase, our need for shortcuts increases. In fact, he all but says we act like turkeys. Apparently they will take care of any bundle of fluff that makes the right cheep cheep noises. Their shortcut is the sound of their chicks. If it cheeps right, it's a chick, I'll mother it. The turkey's brain is then free to consider weightier matters.

Laugh. Absolutely. But basically what he says is we've built a world so complex, we do the same thing. We need our shortcuts or we'd be paralysed by the weight of choice and options available to us. Watch your brain go into meltdown every time you enter a supermarket. That's done deliberately. Watch your choices. They are turkey-brain automatic choices .. we always buy that brand, etc. How many times do you look to the top or bottom shelf for perhaps more rational (better value) products? How many times do you fully consider all the information available to you? You don't. It's all shortcuts.

I haven't the time to weigh up options about which is the best SLR. Will it take good pics? Yes. Fine, here's £500 now let me get on with my day.

So, who is right?

My take is that if you are a hobbyist, you'll take the time to pore over the SLR choices in the camera porn magazines, maybe taking months to work out which model you want because you enjoy doing that .. dreaming about your next purchase is part of your hobby.

Things like cars, holidays and houses get some consideration too .. major purchases. Even then, not always. Moving home .. might be automatic if we are following a job. A new partner .. that's almost certainly going to be a long-considered decision.

Otherwise, things are probably more automatic than we like to think. According to Neuro Web Design this belief we have that we take rational decisions is in the most part a feel good invention of our conscious minds. Most decisions are taken before we become aware of them, hence the importance of the first impression. Rationality just adds reasons around what our subconscious already decided in order to make us feel better.

All of which means, if you design websites right: incorporating things like social proof and scarcity and including things that appeal to the different levels of consciousness you can get more people to buy more stuff from you instead of the other guys.

I'm not saying we should just ramp up all those triggers. It has to be part of the brand, and it has to be true. But used responsibly and professionally, deliberately adding subconscious, automatic buying triggers to a website can make a real difference. I'll be giving you some real-life examples in later blogs.

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XMRV news

2010-07-01: As you may recall, in October last year Science magazine published research by the privately funded Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) (the owners' daughter has CFS) in which a virus called XMRV was linked for the first time with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

XMRV is a retrovirus, which is a virus that doesn't trigger the normal immune response and so once you've got it, you've got it for life. HTLV1 (which comes out as leukaemia) and HIV (AIDS) are the other human retroviruses.

All that said was: in people with CFS there's a much higher incidence of XMRV. It doesn't prove cause, either way.

But it is incredibly important. CFS in the UK is treated as a mental illness. If it turns out it's a virus, people will want to know if you can catch it and it leads to thoughts of a possible cure or at least more effective treatment.

So the next step in the scientific process is to replicate the study to make sure it's really true.

Here in the UK CFS policy is guided by Simon Wessely who has his career staked on it being a mental illness. He sponsored a quick study that predictably found no correlation. WPI say he didn't use their methods so it's not a true replication.

In the last few days the CFS community has gotten all excited again because another attempt at replicating the WPI study came up with the same link. It was all due to be published and we were expecting to wake up the next morning to a changed world when .. what's this? Another study, saying no .. no link.

And the US government has put the publication of both papers on hold pending an explanation. That seems to be unusual.

Why would the US government do that? Because if the XMRV link is proved, if XMRV causes CFS (and possibly a whole bunch of other stuff too like MS), and if 7% of us have XMRV, are we not going to be close to mass panic? All the blood in the blood banks will need to be checked at least.

It does seem sensible to manage the situation. But the CFS community is very worried the truth will be covered up. Naturally, I trust that it won't but I should face the facts: we have Wessely, and he's been blocking the truth for years. In the age of austerity, I can't say I'm not concerned that there might be a motivation to sweep this potentially huge cost under the carpet if we consider the alternative might be punishment by the financial markets if we overspend (pain for few -v- pain for everyone).

I don't know if now is the time to shout loud. But this is coming, and when we understand fully its prevalence and effects, it will probably be bigger than AIDS.

WSJ story

Update 2 July 2010: It appears the negative paper has been published, but there's no date for the positive one (Science).

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BarCamps are great. This isn't a BarCamp

2010-02-14: A BarCamp is a conference with some key differences. What excited me about the idea, realised at BarCamp Bradford, is that it's a user generated conference. It's the delegates who present. It's a sharing of ideas.

The key moment around which a BarCamp pivots is when the empty framework for the day is posted on the wall, a call to action is given, and the delegates, armed with marker pens, volunteer their presentations into empty slots. Ten minutes later, you have a completely planned conference.

Typically that free sense of giving and sharing is complemented by free coffee and pizza (cake, too, at Bradford) and the whole event is free. Also, in moving between tracks (BarCamp Bradford had four) and from presentation to presentation there's plenty of opportunity for networking and meeting great people. This is aided by the fact that these are more or less amateur presentations which sometimes finish early (in one case for me at Bradford, so early that as I sat down the presenter said "so, any questions?")

Because a BarCamp is created by the people attending, they are free to give presentations on whatever they like. So you can have a public transport BarCamp and you'll have a taxi driver, the local councillor responsible, someone from the Green Party talking about emissions, and someone from a traffic planning organisation saying how they could fix it given the chance. In other words, it's a real mix of people with enough gumption to get up and talk about it. Cool, engaged people, in other words. Where else would they mix?

But also it comes from the open source community, the sort of people who brought you Firefox, Linux, Blender, Audacity and pretty much all of the Internet by sharing ideas and working together freely. A BarCamp open-sources its organisation, providing the bare bones of a structure and trusting the delegates to make the conference their own. Good people, people who would share their food and look out for you, like BarCamps.

Other stuff makes it a BarCamp too, here's Wikipedia on the subject, but here's a central place where BarCamps get registered, I mean it's a bloody awful site but if you're into BarCamps (and hey, there's one in Newcastle .. yip, might see you there :-) ), that's how you find out where and when the next one is.

As part of Digital Scarborough, there's (this link has now been amended, see discussion below) BarCamp Scarborough except .. it isn't. It's 'loosely based' on the principles of BarCamp. Well .. which principles? It's free to attend, but that's about it.

There's only one track, so there are fewer mixing opportunities. But crucially, it's no more a user generated conference than any other conference. Eight presentation slots which you have to apply for ahead of time, which implies someone will decide who gets to present. That's the opposite of a BarCamp.

At Bradford Barcamp for most delegates it was their first ever BarCamp. What I'm upset about with the Scarborough BarCamp is that it's not a BarCamp, but whoever has organised it has used the word. Perhaps they thought it was cool. Maybe they don't really get what the point of a BarCamp is. There are plenty of people around who for whom open source hasn't clicked yet. Possibly they didn't think it mattered that much .. whatever it takes to make the event a success. I don't know, I'm just guessing, that's what it feels like, reading the material on the website. Perhaps whoever's behind it has laudable motives that I haven't discerned, if I hear anything I'll let you know.

But I think it takes from the idea, the brand, of BarCamp, without giving. Scarborough BarCamp isn't a BarCamp. So delegates might come away with the idea that a BarCamp is just a mini conference. It's not. Well, Scarborough's is. A BarCamp is a people-led help-each-other mindshare, and that's a beautiful thing. This isn't that.

I'm not saying I'm going to boycott it or anything. I am just very upset that the Scarborough BarCamp organisers seem to have taken the good bit (the name, the buzz and the kudos) without respecting what it stands for that gives it the buzz in the first place. It pollutes the water for those who follow. It has upset me. But, hey, worse things happen in Withernsea.

Update: there's been discussion on Twitter as a result of this:

thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM talk to Richard Askew, he'll explain more about Digital Scarborough 2010 Barcamp http://richardaskew.co.uk/ :)

thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM his twitter is @richaskew 2:51 PM Feb 14th from web in reply to JohnAllsoppIM

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 it is loosely based on the principles of a BarCamp (i've never been to one) with a little more planning 5:07 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 There is no budget - at all. anyone can present, on any topic, its free, its going in the right direction 5:13 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM If we get enough interest then it can run as a normal BarCamp. Numbers are crucial and Scarborough isn't a large city 6:18 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 I take your concerns on board and I will put it to the other organisers. 6:23 PM Feb 14th from web

nipclaw: @JohnAllsoppIM @rah_rah @Charonqc @nooption @LightbulbDesign @Little_Lawyer Many thanks for your good wishes.

electric_angel: @richaskew @sfrost2004 for what it's worth, i think @JohnAllsoppIM is right. a 'bar camp' needs to be a bar camp

electric_angel: richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM don't want to be critical though - i'm excited at all the stuff happening and glad to help promote it

richaskew: @electric_angel @richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM Agreed and it will be if people show - no registratnts from Scarborough yet

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I wanted a true BarCamp originally, but some on the DS10 cttee thought no-one would come. Hence prebooked guests compromise about 9 hours ago from Echofon

richaskew: @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM changed wording on the site. It can't be relaxed anymore people need to register like at Bradford

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I'd love to comment on your last blog post (but can't on your blog)...you seem to make a lot of unfounded assumptions

sfrost2004: @richaskew @JohnAllsoppIM @electric_angel Just to correct a few misunderstandings: #BarCampScarb is totally free #digiscarb

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM #BarCampScarb is open source. All presentations should be made available afterwards, as per #BarCamp philosophy #digiscarb

I sent:

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel since it's free and scarborough's nice, small attendance isn't death, just finish at 2pm and go beach 8:12 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 email me a reply john@johnallsopp.co.uk if you like and I'll add it to the blog, I've appended all the Twitter comments 8:14 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel but I think it's because it's not a BarCamp that people aren't showing interest 8:13 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 by 'totally free' are you providing food too? 8:15 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004

sfrost2004 #BarCampScarb it's the organisation that isn't open source, that's the crucial part. "Places will be allocated" .. by who? 8:17 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb an open list of delegates and a threshold? "will run if >30 book, top limit 100?" 8:19 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb It's partly a publicity job, I hope u haven't killed it by putting off the early adopts 8:20 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew where are you making these changes, I see none here 9:40 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to richaskew

richaskew OK, I see the changes and appreciate the dialogue. about 24 hours ago from web in reply to richaskew

and, slightly out of synch, here's what I got back yesterday:

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Due to funds (none) we have room for 35 people, some refreshments. We need sponsors to do what you want, not enough time. 8:52 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM text has been changed re allocation. Twitter isn't the medium for this discussion. It would have been simpler to email us. 8:53 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM allocation enabled us to ensure we have a full program. People to stand up and be counted or loose out to leeds etc yet again 8:56 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM so now it is a BarCamp apart from we can't provide free food - I reckon that is close enough for the first run. agreed? 9:01 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Well they are there - no mention of allocation now - Refresh Cache? It is how it is now. Either get behind it or don't 10:06 AM Feb 16th from web

So where are we now? I have to say that last Bushian ("you're either with us or against us") comment doesn't sit well, but looking at the amended text I expected it not to address my main concern which is: who decides who is presenting .. it has to be the delegates themselves.

Well now it doesn't mention selection, they just want an idea of numbers so maybe it is close enough. I need to let this settle, but I'm a lot happier with the way it's presented now. I'm making a presentation next week so if that works I'll make a decision.

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Robot World Cup team

2010-07-11: The average life expectancy of a man in Yorkshire is 77, so I've 29 years left, taking me to 2039 which means I might not get to see a team of robot footballers win the World Cup.

That's the goal of the RoboCup, a competition whose aim is "By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, complying with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

Autonomous: that means once you set your players on the field there's no human contact. So these robots can not only play football (see the ball and the goal, stand up, stand on one leg to kick, get up if they fall over, maybe jump and head the ball, anticipate the ball's position), but can think for themselves and co-ordinate intentions with others in their team to attack and defend .. better than the best human team.

Here's the 2009 final:

Did anyone see Titan on Big Brother?

Anyway, I was just thinking. To experience the thrill and motivation of winning, maybe the robots could play against England's current team and build up from there.

Enjoy today. I'll be supporting Spain.

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Value is in the eye of the customer

2010-08-05: Here's an interesting bit of Eisenbergs' (yep, plural) Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results about customer value.

The basic idea is that on the web, people arrive at your website voluntarily and they make a judgment about the value you might bring to them. That judgment exists entirely in their head. They decide what 'value' means to them, and then they look to see if you can provide it. That's another way of saying your visitors want what they want and are goal focussed when browsing.

"The customer", he says "readily must be able to determine your value to them; they shouldn't have to guess".

He goes on to say that 'successful Web site designers' have a high degree of empathy for visitors and their values, and that comes out in that they:

• sell something people want
• entice and coax, they don't coerce
• don't assume their visitors know things, but they don't talk down to them either
• present information as needed
• anticipate questions
• emphasise benefits
• write so the page can be found in search engines
• use hyperlinks that contain benefits and questions/answers

The thing is, those things go into my head and kinda fizzle out. It's no-news.

It comes alive, though, as a checklist when you have a context. For instance, someone arrived at my blog about Facebook ads using the search keyphrase "examples of facebook ad copy". They bounced because it's not immediately obvious that I'm going to provide what they want (they're right, I don't). That's not an issue for me because I feel they are probably not a potential client, but a fellow practitioner.

So that's the point. We need to start with a clear idea of who we are selling to. So that's strategic marketing stuff about your position in the market, your value proposition and yes, a very clear and specific idea about who you are selling to. Then we need to think about what sorts of things they might want help with and how they might search for those things.

Once we know that we can look at what happens when someone searches on our target phrases. On which page do they land? Then, with our target person in mind and with a specific instance of a search (or hopefully a flow of searches) and a landing page to consider, we can decide whether we have satisfied that checklist above and start to look at the customer journey through our website via payment to the thank-you page and perhaps on to later journeys concerned with delivery tracking and support.

So if that checklist doesn't mean much to you either, perhaps the problem is you need to get specific.

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Avoiding PMT using Twitter

2010-08-10: Following the furore over Google's Street View taking photographs of people on the street, Facebook's problems with changing its privacy rules, and myType's summary of iPad owners being part of a "selfish elite", playing devil's advocate I've just invented in my head a new service.

Sign up to it, and it will work out who of the people you follow or friend in Twitter or Facebook are female, and then by monitoring their happiness and/or irritability through their status updates, it will work out who is likely to be suffering PMT today.

It can then provide an 'avoid' list to help you steer clear of trouble. Or a 'target' list of those who are more likely to be open to your advances.

Shocking? Disgusting? It's not too far away from deciding whether people called John are happier than people called Brian, or whatever.

I bought a pack of sandwiches from a petrol station yesterday and the sales assistant said "congratulations, you've won 25 Nectar points". I don't know if everyone had won 25 Nectar points, but it could be that I'd been diced and sliced by Nectar's database marketing department according to my buying patterns and some assumptions about how I was currently feeling about Nectar and whether giving me some free points would be to their advantage.

Basically what I'm saying is that Twitter, Facebook, and Google having published their API (Application Programmer Interface .. a way of programmers getting to the information they hold) have provided us .. you, me, everyone .. with a glimpse of the sort of access to mass population data that supermarkets, government and big businesses hold on us.

So there are three things here:

• If a supermarket wanted to market to women based on their monthly cycles, they would be pilloried if they went public so I guess they'd do it in secret if there was money in it. With you and me, if I wanted, I just could write that PMT app. I think I'm right in saying there's no law that says I can't, yet what woman would want her menstrual cycle writ large on everyone she know's computer screen .. it would hardly help the cause of feminism and equality would it? (Interestingly, that shows the power of consumers to keep businesses in line. That pressure doesn't usually keep geek developers in check.)
• It's not really possible for us to understand the full extent of what our social media streams reveal about us to people for whom it's worth digging. We just blurt stuff out.
• There's real power in this social media mallarky, it's only just beginning.

I wonder how many of you male readers are thinking .. "I would download an app like that"?

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Utter bloody rudeness

2010-06-30: As documented before, I kinda love Lynne Truss, author of the best selling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves which tells you how to start a war by using the wrong grammar.

Her follow-up Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life is equally entertaining.

One thing that made me laugh out loud was her saying that, and I really hope this is true, "For some time now, I have been carrying a Sooty glove-puppet on shopping expeditions, so that I can at least have a decent conversation when buying stuff in Ryman's. 'What's that Sooty? That will be £3.99? What's that Sooty? Thank you very much? What's that Sooty? Goodbye?"

Interestingly, she also offers this insight into this sort of thing: "The once-prevalent idea that, as individuals, we have a relationship with something bigger than ourselves .. has become virtually obsolete. For this reason, many people simply cannot see why they shouldn't chuck their empty burger box out of the car window. They also don't see any reason to abide by traffic laws unless there is a speed camera advertised. 'That's so selfish!' is a cry that has no judgmental content for such people, and little other meaning either."

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The Yorkshire Mafia

2010-02-26: I got a strong feeling that many business-people's new year's resolution was to use Linked-In more. On mySpace you can talk about how awesome club nights are, on Facebook your Auntie's probably on there so you share your holiday snaps, recommend scented candle shops and wonder aloud about whether you should get a pet piglet. Twitter is for live chatalong with reality TV and updates about the morning's commute, while on Linked-In you wear your suit .. it's business only.

That was tongue-in-cheek btw, I've had lots of business from Twitter. I'm just reflecting back people's views of the different services. I spoke to a friend and business colleague yesterday and he honestly can't see how Twitter would be useful to him.

Anyway, at the start of the year I did get a sense that people in business had gotten the measure of Facebook, tried Twitter, and were now ready for LinkedIn. I was one of them.

So I'm trying a few things out and one prevailing means to success is, apparently, to help people out and give things away. I'm concerned that what will happen is that will become a popular and then trite way of carrying on as the recipients begin to recognise an 'is there anything I can do to help?' as the beginning of a sales process, that once you accept help you also accept an obligation to reciprocate. What may well be a genuine offer to help may become poisoned by becoming a known sales technique. Sad, because I always feel genuine. Maybe everyone does.

Anyway, apparently Linked-In groups are a great way to connect with people, and answering and asking questions are too, so I got invited to join the Yorkshire Mafia which appears to be a networking group aiming to promote the doing of business within Yorkshire. There's a lot of this about, I see it when working on TweetCloser, lots of Chambers of Commerce activities promoting regional business. But this is a genuinely popular group promoting the real strengths of an area so, nothing wrong with that.

Yesterday was a Mafia meetup in a hard-to-get-to hotel in a bit of Leeds reminiscent of the bit where Corro Roy was nearly drowned then saved, and preceded by an unprotected bit of canal in the middle of the plaza area in a direct line from where you enter the plaza to the entrance to the hotel (honest, lookee see for yourself (obviously it wasn't built yet when that aerial shot was taken, but that canal is completely unguarded and unannounced. Could easily text-"hello love, finally found the hotel, aaaargh"-phone-amble yourself into the dark waters of the canal, I'll have nightmares about that)).

It was full and hot and friendly and contained so many tall people I thought I was in Amsterdam. Perhaps Linked-In promotes growth. Being a Linked-In-driven group it had a higher proportion of Internet marketers than exists in the real world. So, it was nice to meet other likeminded souls but it might have been nicer to meet people I could trade with. There was the chap who ran The Devil's Guide to IT in a black suit, red tie, and sunglasses, and the man with the best Twitter tale I heard all night, Dan Sumption who, working on iPlayer programming for the BBC, was able to tweet a bug-complainant to say "I fixed it, try it now". How cool is that? You're sat at home watching i-Player, something goes wrong and you report it, then .. not customer services, but the actual programmer, tweets you and says "thanks, try it now, I've fixed it". That direct connection and immediacy is, for me, the essence of Twitter.

As for Linked-In advice from a roomful of Linked-In users? One devotes an hour a day to using it and has lots of work from it. Seems like a lot of time. The social media guru lady at VentureFest talked of maybe a quarter of an hour each morning. That sounded optimistic at the time, though.

So yes, a good gathering, certainly popular, and everyone's genuine about working with each other. There's certainly a lot of reason to, and with such talent in Yorkshire very little reason to look to London for anything much .. Trooping The Colour maybe. I'm pleased to be part of it and I'll keep you informed.

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Narrowboat tales 9

2010-07-07: It's been a while, but I thought I'd write about something nice and relaxing and try to finish off the blog about my holiday with my dad on a narrowboat. Here's a story from that:

One of my dad's Stanton workmates called Big someone, let's call him Big Bob, was cycling home one evening on his usual route along the canal on his bike: a frame, wheels, no brakes, no gears, no lights.

Nighttime. A pea-souper fog like you used to get, fed by Stanton's chimneys.

Anyway, he couldn't see where he was going and cycled straight into a lock. The water was out, so down he went, 15 feet or so.

Dazed and in fog, he couldn't get out for ages but finally climbed up, I think, one of the gates and walked home to get a telling-off from his missus "where have you been?" It would have killed a lesser man, but that's why he was 'Big' Bob.

prev - next

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The very beginnings of a blog index

2010-07-29: The very beginnings of a blog index

Obviously there's some tidying to do, but the basic mechanisms are there, word splitting, stoplist, simple display. I'll tidy it as I go.

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Laurie Anderson's inheritance tracks

2010-08-01: For those who haven't caught it, Radio 4's "Saturday Live" (9am Saturdays) features a lovely idea called inheritance tracks where they ask someone in the public eye to choose a piece of music they feel they inherited from their parents, and one they'd like to pass on to their children. Isn't that a fabulous idea?

Anyway, this Saturday's I loved. Laurie Anderson, famous sound and performance artist, recently married Lou Reed. Imagine. Lou Reed! What inheritance tracks would Laurie choose? I loved it.

Find out here.

It seems to be playing up for me atm but I think it's around three quarters of the way through the programme.

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Online marketing UK

2010-08-08: As you might imagine, getting to the top of Google for a phrase like online marketing is pretty difficult since the people going for that phrase are the best of the best at search engine ranking. Something like online marketing UK is a little easier though.

But there's doing things right, and there's doing the right thing, and that's what I'm toying with at the moment.

Unless you are William Gates Jr you have limited resources. There are only ten natural search slots on page one of Google and you can't just get the position you want. If people are making money there, they will defend their position. You get into a resources war, with both of you spending money and effort in being on page one and it's a matter of who blinks first.

However I have some new software that provides a quick way of working out which keyphrases in a market offer the best chance of success. That is, keyphrases that have traffic but low competition. Keyphrases for which you could get a page one position that will make you some money.

In my market, 'online marketing UK' seemed the best chance so I thought I'd just butcher my home page and see what gives.

I'm presently in position 122 in Google, from nowhere. Whoopedoo. But I've risen nicely for Scarborough for that and other related phrases too.

Oh, and you might have noticed there's a new picture at the top of the page. Half of you will, half of you won't. It's a split test. Right now, there's a slight preference for 'without pic'. Could just be a bad pic :-)

Anyway, that's what's occurring :-)

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Adsense earnings up 10%

2010-07-16: Well, these are exciting times. Probably to the left of these words are some paid-for ads via Google Adsense.

Adsense provides an income stream for people like me who write content. So as a blogger I put up Adsense ads.

Advertisers can then buy ad space and pay per click (Adwords). Their ads are matched to my blog content, so hopefully now I'm talking about PPC ads you should see ads about PPC and when I mention bananas you should see banana ads. They should (really) be relevant to each blog entry.

When you, the reader, click on one of those ads, I get some of the money.

Anyway, put the flags out because my income stream from Adsense ads on my blog pages is up 10%

Yes, in June I made 9p, and so far in July I've made 10p.

(Err, hang on, 11% isn't it? Even better.)

I'll send you a postcard.

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PPC thinking

2010-07-15: I have mixed feelings about some training I just listened to.

It covered the idea with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising (eg. Google Adwords) to test small and roll out big. So, if you can spend $10 and get back $12, then ramp that up to $100. If you get back $120, then try $1,000 to get back $1,200, and if that works go for $10,000 spend to get back $12,000 and make $2,000 profit. "Why wouldn't you ramp it up?" they say.

Cashflow? Well they say that you'll get paid on the sale, and pay for your advertising each month so that's no problem.

And they say basically you need to watch that campaign every day and make sure it's profitable every day, that's how you reduce the risk.

That's kinda fine, but there are four places where this sticks in my throat a little.

Firstly, I'm used to companies that spend maybe 10 +/- 5% of turnover on their marketing. OK, those companies have premises and overheads and manufacturing costs and so on, but to have a marketing spend of 83% of turnover puts you in some specific industries like affiliate sales of information products.

Secondly, that's fine, but wasn't the Internet supposed to put you and your customer together for next to nothing? Paying Google 83% of your sale price just doesn't feel comfortable to me.

Thirdly, when you stop your ads you've nothing. The only way to gain a sustainable business from this is to make sure that you build your lifetime customer value: keep their data, stay in touch, get them to buy again (and again) and turn them into loyal customers who recommend you to others. Well, if you're doing that, people will beat a path to your door anyway. But perhaps PPC gives you speed.

Fourthly, $10,000 a month is quite a budget that could be used for SEO and social media marketing which otherwise brings you free traffic, and those methods tend to be for the long term. So you could use your PPC budget for, say, 6 months or a year of SEO/social media work instead. It would take a little longer to take effect, but the payback would be much better .. you'll be a lot more profitable.

I think what's at work here is delayed gratification. Basically, unless we do the maths and stick by the numbers, we are programmed for instant gratification. PPC is built to take advantage of that: create your ad and it can be generating traffic and business for you within an hour. Good job I'm good with numbers.

The rewards from SEO and social media start small and grow over time. Actually that means you may need sufficient cashflow to get over the hump (which is why I suggest spending a monthly amount that you can comfortably sustain for a year, not saying it'll take that long, but to set expectations). The payback is much greater, but some people can't wait.

The people who play for the medium term and have the resources to sustain it will be significantly richer than those who want it all now.

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How does the web know I want to learn the tabla?

2010-06-28: I don't care (even the slightest bit) about the World Cup, Wimbledon, or the new iPhone4.

I'm a drummer, but Rhythm magazine is likely to profile the drummer from Muse or some mainstream American rock band, so I don't buy that. Actually, if I ever live anywhere near an asian community again, I'd love to take the opportunity to learn to play the tabla.

I like butterflies, but can't help if one of the blues is dying out on the Suffolk downs (no idea if that hangs together).

I'm enraged by human trafficking but I'm not really in a position to help.

If I'm going to go on holiday, it'll be camping or somewhere that speaks Spanish.

The Internet is supposed to help me get the things I want. It was supposed to explode the one-size-fits-all approach of broadcast media such as TV, and help us find exactly what we want online.

Plus, we are supposed to have intelligent software robots that work all that out for us. Through the semantic web I'm supposed to be able to say "Morning robot, could you find me a place in Spain where it's not too hot, where you can't buy an Engligh breakfast, that I can get to with my partner, from Scarborough, next week, spend a week there, and maybe do that for under £600.". My robot is supposed to scuttle off wander around the Internet, find all the information it needs, make some judgments based on what it already knows I like (organic food mebbe), and come back with a recommendation.

It's turned out to be a very difficult thing to set up, but greater minds than mine are working on it so maybe it'll come out in the end. However, one issue standing in the way of ubiquity is that everyone will have to mark up their content so the robots can understand it as well as us humans. It's a big ask, but I suppose people will if the business benefits are there.

There's a thing called Calais which appears to be a web service to which you provide your text and it gives it back marked up in RDF. There's even a plugin for Drupal. So far so good.

So I looked at FeedTrace, which is a showcase application of Calais. I think it drinks in Twitter and provides the 'most tweeted links' and the tweets about them.

It didn't work for me (did it for you? I mean, let me know if it did). In my heart .. the last thing I want is the most popularly Tweeted link. What's it likely to be? iPhone4. World Cup. Wimbledon. Someone firing themselves over a house using only bicarbonate of soda and a space hopper.

I'm not saying it's good to be outside the mainstream. Today is not the Monday to turn up exuberant to an English workplace. One needs to keep a wary eye on mainstream culture. But isn't everyone outside the mainstream?

The point (and the danger) of the Internet is to allow us to follow our own path, find our own way, and to find others who share the same ideals.

Technology, however, has an irritating habit of coralling everyone into an ever larger camp. The Windows effect: if you don't use Windows, you're just damned weird and no-one else will be able to read your documents.

Once a technical environment clearly gains the most users, it wins. Facebook over Friendster. Who would join Friendster when all their friends are on Facebook?

Anyway, I'd like to see a semantic web application that did what the semantic web promised: gave me a robot that successfully and trustedly (without favour to any supplier) found answers on the web to things that I otherwise couldn't be bothered to do: cheapest way to travel from a to b, best performing hand drill, where in town stocks good value risotto rice. And if my robot popped up one day out of the blue and said "hey, you know that tabla learning thing you once wanted, did you realise there's a chap on the next street who would be willing to teach you, and he's not expensive" .. that would make me happy.

FeedTrace might excite those who get excited by the re-arrangement of information, but for me it doesn't sell the semantic web. It's a hell of a lot of thinking for something that's not compelling.

Compelling is my favourite word at the moment. Basically, online unless you can grab someone's attention and connect, it's all for nothing. And that didn't connect. I gave it all of about 2 minutes of my attention, that felt like a lot, and now I resent the fact that they wasted my time. Amazing isn't it?

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Mirror inspiration

2010-07-14: It's been a while since I've taken inspiration from the Daily Mirror (John Pilger's revelations on Idi Amin come to mind) and I'm not given to liking page layouts, but I have to say I rather like the Daily Mirror's.

It's based on a grid of squares forming six columns (you can click the above pic if you want a bigger version to look at) or of course you can look at the real thing (but it might have changed since I wrote this blog .. it will be interesting to compare).

The very top line has some stuff I don't understand, so we'll skip merrily over that. Next is a bit of centering and localisation: date, time, weather. Of course once you enter your location they have some demographics and localisation stuff about you which helps them target their business.

Then we have the masthead followed by a top level menu which divides the newspaper into the themed pages .. so if you're the sort of person who reads a newspaper from the back (ie. sport first), then you can do that with the top menu.

After that, hot topics, so some quick links to where the buzz is. It's a newspaper after all.

Next up, some squares which function a bit like ads .. graphic tempters to get us to click and dive in to the newspaper. The text is nicely formatted, nothing fancy, and the button style is straightforward and anchors the eye nicely, even though it exists in various colour combinations it's always in the same place, and always the same shape.

Those colours are themed. Yellow is news, cerise is celebrity, and green is sport.

On this screencapture, the yellow headline and the text underneath is rather obscured and doesn't work well. When I decided this layout was working well (on a Mac) those yellow headlines stood out more so I wonder if, on my browser, I'm missing a transparent background maybe. There are a few varieties of this text, the 'porn addiction' headline shows one variation, and the Holly Willoughby one another. The 'football challenge' one looks a bit wayward.

Yeah, here's how it looks on a newish Mac: . Testing, my friends (it works lower down so it's not a lacking capability of my browser).

The main news item has a variation all of its own using the striking classic combination of black, white and red for impact.

The first three columns seem to contain hard news, the 4th column more lifestyle items and the final two columns contain ads, which is also where the ad is in the masthead. This allows the user to filter that content out until they want it.

So given those graphical rules, those items can be delivered by software objects, and the re-arrangement can be automated according to how many clicks. That might be how we would do it, but I'm tempted to think that newspaper people would want control of that. They know what they are doing on the page, they do it every day.

After another row of ads, we have six squares of celebrity news .. this time the headlines and copy do have a background colour.

After that, six themed columns. Again these stories' positions could be automatically calculated from clicks or placed there by whoever's in charge of those pages. Each has a small image for the eye to land on, and a few words of link text. Check the text .. is it tempting? Do you write your headlines that well? What tricks do they use to tempt us in?

Then we are into another space .. it's a bit like passing through a hedge at the end of a long garden to find the vegetable patch. Here we have three double columns, one which is explicit about showing the stories that readers are interacting with the most. Then it's popular videos. Then popular pictures.

The hot topics menu is back again (it's the same as the one above), and then we are into the links for specific parts of the newspaper and website .. here's where you would go if you want something specific, the crossword or agony aunt, for instance. Interestingly, they are happy to break the six column layout here.

Finally there are links to, I presume, co-operating businesses or businesses the group owns: 'find a job', etc. and then then usual page 'furniture' links.

In terms of user journeys, part of the function of a newspaper is to provide us with interesting news so, perhaps unusually, we often go to a newspaper site in order to be distracted, to see what's happening. However for those who are there for 'sport', 'politics' or specific sections of the paper, those links are available. Other desired journeys will be linked to news stories: "have they caught the killer yet?", "what's the cricket score?", "why was the M4 blocked this morning?" and will often be satisfied by those graphic news links.

I just think as a way of organising an awful lot of information (the output of 554 editorial staff working over three publications: the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People), it works rather well.

It appears some of the journalists' judgment is being automated, according to this story about redundancies at the Mirror group.

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What is this car?

2010-07-28: I snapped this (really, it drove to the lights, I took the pic, it drove off) in about 1980 or so in Paris. Then t'other day I got the urge to find the pic again and here it is. Anyone know what the car is? It says things like Renault, & 8CV on the handwritten for sale sign, and kamouh or similar on the badge just up from the front wheel .. not sure of the last letter.

Update: Damn. Taken in by a faux retro car

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The Karmic web, you get what you give

2010-07-13: Reciprocity is the idea that if you give people something, they will feel indebted to you and at some point in the future, will give back to you.

You can think of giving as being like saving. As you give out, so you shall receive. I've always admired those who have the strength of character to give their time or income to others. There are those who give away 10% of their income.

It's become almost a standard way forward for Internet businesses. Google spent years developing its whole search business before working out how to make money from it (Adwords), and they still give us search free of charge. Oh, and Google maps. Google maps free of charge. We take it for granted, but Google maps free of charge, and the street view thingy. Isn't that just completely amazing?

So we feel some warmth towards Google and what they get back is that we use them over other search engines, and that means they can dominate pay per click and earn the money to give us more free stuff.

But is that a really good example of reciprocity? If Google's search was even slightly worse than Microsoft's or Yahoo!, we'd have walked. When Google launched Street View there was an outcry about privacy. We didn't say "yeah, well, look at all the great free stuff they give us".

When you go to your local deli and they put in a free sweet, that triggers reciprocity. It's one-to-one giving that does it, and if they remember that you prefer dark chocolate, that could make you happy for a week! It's the idea that the business thought of you personally, and did something special for you.

That dark chocolate trick won't work on your girlfriend btw. That's your expected level of service. The only way is down (if you get it wrong). It has to be over-and-above service to trigger reciprocity and it has to be true giving, not when you want something or to atone for previous wrongs (BP can make it right as much as they like, but we won't forgive in a hurry).

This was the last time we went to Ikea. We swore never again. Prior to that (so over six years ago), I'd bought two CD cabinets and only assembled and used one. The other day my partner decided to assemble the other and discovered there were no nuts and bolts inside the pack.

I tried to dissuade her from calling on the basis that the experience would be painful, exasperating and a waste of emotional energy. She ignored me and called anyway. Despite the item being six years out of date, the person she spoke to knew the unit, could see what she needed, pieced together a package of nuts and bolts and spares just in case, sent it by post, we got it after a couple of days, she assembled the unit and it works.

How's that for service? I'll tell you: it wipes away the majority of the previous pain.

And look what just happened. I blogged about it. I could have Tweeted, or mentioned them in my Facebook status. Giving great service or giving things away is link-bait: it's something you do to encourage people to link to your website (and so give you traffic and raise your position in the search engines) .. Karma y'see. It's a link building strategy.

Previously I've tried giving away 'free' reports, but it's not really worked in any big way. In Internet marketing, information and advice is ten a penny, so I'm not perceived to be giving away anything at all, even if it's a neat and hard-won set of key to-do's borne of years of experience.

As a sole trader, I could spend my days giving away my expertise but there comes a point when I have to pay the mortgage. Much as I would love Internet marketing to be the strongest driver of your business, there are others with different views: the accountant, for instance, and their view is equally strongly held, valid and hard won.

Radio Four is doing a series on London and in one programme they talked (as I remember) to a market stall greengrocer who had inherited his stall from his dad who, seeing a flow of Indian immigrants to the area advised him to learn Punjabi (or was it Hindi): "they'll love you", he said. He did, and he's now a key part of the community and the stall is still successful.

So, reciprocity. Give to receive. Or in other words, give great personal service. How can you apply that to your business? No .. more than what you just thought. How could you turn it up to eleven? Make it your differentiator.

I recently got slightly irritated with Aldi because I couldn't email them. Having the potential to be a pompous old git, I wanted to email my local shop manager to ask if they would consider replacing one of the three types of white rice that they sell with a risotto rice as I'm often having to go to another shop to buy that. Aldi don't do email. So I felt a little rejected, I was only trying to help, but I guess what they do is what they do and they do it well. It's the Ryanair of food retail: total efficiency. They don't want to field customer emails. They want to be great at what they do.

What I'm saying is: reciprocity might be your thing or it might not. It has to fit with your brand and your marketing strategy. But you could argue that Aldi's constant fight to deliver low prices encourages reciprocity and loyalty and we customers accept that there are no bells nor whistles.

Whatever reciprocity means to you, it's all about how the customer feels about your service. If they don't feel they are getting value, or appreciated, they'll walk. So it's a do or die thing, but you have to work it out for your business, and do it within your means. It's good karma. We need a bit of that in these tough times.

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Here's who I'm going to vote for and why

2010-05-04: I'm a classic swing voter. I've voted for almost all the parties in my time (barring the obvious BNP, UKIP, etc.).

This time I believe Gordon Brown works hard for fairness, and I don't believe a thing David Cameron says: not one word. He's a PR guy, a mirage. He'll tell you whatever you want to hear.

I played the Thatcher Tory game of "by setting up in small businesses and owning shares you can be rewarded for your efforts". I mixed that with "and be nice to your staff" and didn't make a lot for myself in the end. Guess I'm just not hard nosed enough. Just not exploitative enough. So I'm not up for the Jaguar car and the little place in Crete anymore. Are any of us? Hasn't the world changed? Bit weird the guy in Cornwall who sells wind turbines in "The Age of Stupid" considering flying off to France because he's been invited to a party. I don't recognise that life.

This global financial rebalancing that's just happened, I don't see it entirely as the Americans financing dodgy mortgages, I see it more as a global power shift as China and India develop and American power wanes. This new parsimony, we'd better get used to it. We've been used to repressing workers in the east to make our luxury goods almost for free, to using those products until something shinier comes along, then dumping the polluting carcases back on those same countries. That's fuelled our belief that we can keep buying because things are getting cheaper. That's changing. We need someone who can work globally and do those big deals. That's Brown, not Cameron, the man who doesn't really want to even be in Europe.

I used to be a free marketer, to believe that the problems of the free market were because it wasn't free enough. The Americans protecting their agriculture, yet buying and controlling huge tracts of Africa. Now, I'm a bit scared of corporate power, of money. See how it's breaking Greece now. People who have worked all their lives having their pensions taken and taxes raised because the money markets don't trust the country. Money just slides around en-masse and wherever it leaves, dies. Cameron wouldn't control that, he'd love it: "on your bike lads". Brown both knows more than most how to control it, and has the driving desire to be fair. I can forgive him a curmudgeonly nature.

I think we've gone beyond the free market thing now. Sure, we absolutely need business. But business needs to be responsible, to bring in its externalities (costs to the environment, health and well being that it currently leaves us to pay for). It needs a strong regulatory framework. As we saw with the Bretton Woods agreement, self-interest can create awfully rigged systems and condemn whole countries of people into third class for decades without any chance of escape. If the money men create these systems, only the money men will benefit. I trust that Brown can be the world's conscience in those meetings.

FYI, I believe in marketing. If marketing is "organising yourself to solve a problem", then helping an old lady across the street is marketing. Marketing in business knows its strengths and seeks out problems to solve. That sounds like a huge force of good to me. Sounds like progress. So I am absolutely pro that. Money doesn't do that though. Money just wants to be bigger. It doesn't work to solve problems, it just slips around wherever the numbers seem best: Burma? GM? I'm pro business, pro drive, enthusiasm, innovation. Pro marketing. Anti big money.

I know something about the fairness thing too. As most of you know, my partner has chronic fatigue syndrome. In my view, she's been treated fairly and understandingly by the system. Sure, there's no research going on into curing it. Sure, the NHS is being misinformed about how to deal with it. But we got well treated by the job centre and that whole system, by the NHS, and yes we think we are entitled to more from the DLA, but we get something and it feels good that it's hard to get the higher levels. We didn't fall too far. We were caught by the net. It's not our fault she got CFS. Disability comes to us all in the end. A fair society will be fair to us too.

We've just got rid of Bush, we really shouldn't bring in our own version of partisan politics. Cameron is out of step with the times.

I did write previously about the proportional representation thing to say that actually I take the Tory line on that .. that we don't really want coalition government, our system is better because we get to hold our governments to account on what they put in their manifestos. But I accept that we've probably passed a tipping point. Most people seem to believe that has to change. I'll bow to that. Here in Scarborough, a vote is worth only 7/10ths of a vote. But still, do it. And if you vote Cameron & Tory, the voting system won't change.

Finally, I do believe last time I voted it was on a single issue: to ban fox hunting. I can't tell you how angry and disappointed it will make me if Cameron brings that back.

And Labour hasn't been all Iraq and Brown's miserable face. Peace in Northern Ireland, NHS and school funding, Sure Start, and yes, I do feel safer.

Whether you agree with me or not, please vote. It matters.

Oh yeah. Clegg. I just think that's been an accident of television. Cameron must be kicking himself for allowing the LibDems equal TV time. But if that's the power of it, then what about the Greens? It needs a serious looking at. For now, Polly Toynbee seems to make most sense. Sure, there are reasons not to vote. Labour have made plenty of mistakes. Brown isn't perfect. But you should still vote because someone will be governing this country on Friday. Choose. And if you don't want the Tories it looks like you'll have to play the system. Which in Scarborough seems to mean vote Labour. So thats my vote this Thursday.

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A bit of social validation adds 22% to onsite time

2010-07-02: We all want to belong, to fit in. It's an unconscious drive in everyone.

That's why testimonials and onsite reviews work.

It works even better if there's some immediacy.

So just above the footer on The Paragon's page, I wrote the code for it to say "There are 3 people viewing this site right now, looking at: prices ~ find-us ~". Now, I know it's a mess and I have to tidy up all that stuff in the footer, too, but it still does the job: 20% more pages viewed, 23% more time on the site. And it took maybe a couple of hours to write.

Now, social validation works better if you think the other people are more like you.

So imagine when we work out how to fully integrate Facebook across the web, we'll be able to see what our friends think of sites. There are big movements in this direction, Google is working on it too, so watch this space .. the Internet is set to become much more crowdy.

The beauty, though, of the Paragon paragraph is that visitors don't have to do anything. Asking people for a review of your site is a non-starter, people aren't in that mode, they want what they want and are adept at clearing away obstacles. But the BBC had a nice idea about how to improve the navigation on their site .. they wanted automatically to watch users' navigation patterns to adapt the site's menus and links so that people 'wear a path' through the site much like the way ancestral forest pathways formed. It's not quite social validation, that, but gets close if people realise that they are using popularity-driven navigation.

From your point of view today: get a coffee, a biscuit, a pen and some paper, find a quiet corner and take ten minutes to think how you can use social validation on your website. Comments? A forum? Facebook button? Twitter button? Navigation improvements? Word cloud? Forget whatever limitations you think there are on your site, just let your mind wonder how you might harness social validation. If it improves your website by a quarter, it might be worth spending a little on getting it implemented.

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FourSquare is pants

2010-06-13: They say Foursquare is the next big thing and in principle, they are probably right. Basically, it's a geography driven interactive space where people can leave notes for others who arrive at the same location later.

I think it's got people's attention because it's clearly usable by businesses wanting people to leave messages to future others about buying, for instance, expensive menu items. In other words, it seems easily spammable by those into using social media for gain and where business sees gain it pours resources, so Foursquare rises on that.

I really want it to be great. Wouldn't it be good to be able to see where your friends are of an evening?

But it plain doesn't work. It doesn't work so very badly that I'm amazed anyone's talking about it at all.

Foursquare says 'find people, places, tags [search]' so I enter 'Scarborough' and it says 0 venues, 0 tips, 25 people, 0 tags. Sorry no results found. You're near Salisbury.

For those who don't know, Salisbury is about 400 miles away. The Salisbury it thinks I'm near is in Canada. That's a few thousand miles away. It didn't ask me. I have to click on it before it asks where I am and I can set it to Scarborough UK. OK. For a geographic system, wouldn't it be nice if it either guessed right or asked that most crucial bit of information. Are you in Salisbury? No, I'm in Scarborough, but I forgive you. Fabulous.

So now we are over that, there are 16 locations on FourSquare. For a town of 60,000 people, 16 locations and 3 tips isn't going to turn anyone's business around.

It's a serious issue. Now the Web 2.0 revolution has happened and there are multitudinous ways for people to contribute to the Internet, to share their lives and make everything better for everyone, it turns out no-one can be arsed barring a few people who would probably rather be in the future than their present.

Following the latest thing is all right, but as a marketer, I need to be where the mass of people are. For now, that's Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. I wish FourSquare well. Might even play with it myself.

Update: I went to the Woodend Creative Workspace to see Jehan for Open Studios and that wasn't a location on FourSquare so I added it. Got that? Scarborough, most enterprising town in Europe, with a university department pouring out maybe thirty Internet graduates every year .. the place designed for them to work in .. no-one there had registered that location (I'm criticising FourSquare, not you guys).

There was no FourSquare client for my phone. That despite me not being awkward with my choice of phone: it's Windows Mobile, a mainstream phone acquired so I could run someone else's software.

Then I went to the Golden Ball pub on the harbour, and I checked in on Foursquare Mobile. Earlier for Woodend on my desktop it wanted their postcode, address, phone number. For the Golden Ball it just accepted my checkin. I thought it was being clever, knowing that on a mobile it's harder to get such data.

When I got home, it had checked me in at the Golden Ball, York. Unless I had a jetpack, for a geographically based site, I'd have thought it might know there was no way for me to get from Woodend to a pub in York in such a short time. Anyway, that was wrong, so I deleted it.

Now FourSquare is showing I've been nowhere and done nothing.

This is a screamer for task analysis. Either that or the application of common sense. I mean, come on guys if this is meant to be the future, software that doesn't work 100% of the time, we seriously need to talk.

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This blog entry will self-destruct in 30 seconds

2010-07-12: Urgency is a big sales motivator. We don't like making decisions. I was looking at the quote "If I had to choose, I'd rather have birds than aeroplanes" (among a load of anti BP t-shirts on a site that wasn't this one) and I thought .. we really don't like choices, we'll do anything to have both.

We dislike loss more than we like what we might gain. Making a choice means saying 'no' to something in order to gain something else. If we can somehow avoid making the choice, it means we get to keep both options open for longer.

In sales, we need to force that decision to be made, preferably while we are around (otherwise the next salesman will force it) and a time limit is one technique we can use.

If we are presented with a one-day sale, well, the decision has to be made today. So here are some ways to bring some urgency to your website:

• Use phrases like "click here now", "last day", or "special time-limited offer" in your copy
• Cross out the old price before putting the 'offer' price.
• Be clear about the deadline: add the date, a countdown, or an 'ends today' flash.

Whatever you do, make sure the reason to buy now is clear.

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The problem with 'design' and websites

2010-03-06: Here's a video that illustrates perfectly what's wrong with web development led by graphic design (it's a bit flaky in it's delivery, btw, so hit refresh if it doesn't work first time).

I've not got a problem with good design, who could have? That would be like having a problem with tasty food or great music.

Many people are lazy about how they think about design. Perhaps designers encourage it. It's nice to think you're cool, and if you're going to be a designer you really ought to embody your practice. That leads to choosing great products like cars, clothes, and phones which .. is kinda cool. So maybe it's just part of being a designer. And perhaps people think if they knock around with designers some of the cool might rub off on them. So, designers look cool and have lots of people to hang out with. What's wrong with that?

The book I'm reading at the moment talks much more about design for the uncool, the disadvantaged, the poor, and the disabled. So now I'm more interested.

Let's give that video some hassle. Looking at how the user interacts with that screen, poking and gesturing, I get irritated. Do any of you use a screen like that? Do you like working that way? It really looks like I'd feel it was an effort to use a screen by poking at it. I think it's because moving your hand and arm like that requires a shift in musculature throughout your torso. Whereas with a mouse, your hand is already rested over it. Subconsciously, it's a big deal to move your whole arm just to turn a page. So you won't want to do it. So using a tablet is irritating, not a pleasure. Which puts you in the wrong frame of mind to browse lifestyle articles and magazines.

This, though, is the big, fundamental issue with the video. He talks about the user interface (UI), and it's clear he's a designer, perhaps a graphic designer. But it's as if the UI is a higher level of graphic design .. and it isn't. Human computer interaction is a huge field where huge disciplines like psychology, information architecture, and usability and accessibility stuff meet.

For instance, he keeps demonstrating the horizontal scroll to more content, but half the time he ends up at that car ad. There seems to be nothing on the screen that tells you what you're scrolling to. That breaks a fundamental rule of usability, that the user should know what will happen when they choose an option, and when they arrive on the next screen, it should be basically what they expected .. no surprises.

The demonstration seems to imagine a Halifax CardCash kinda world where people have the spare time and inclination to sit with a gadget and try to read a magazine on it and the brand of the magazine they are trying to read is so trusted that we'd pore over every page, letting the editor and publisher lead us wherever they want. That's an advertising person's dream, but it's not real.

Let's strip out the idea that someone would sit and read some glossy lifestyle magazine on a tablet like this. We'd be more likely to browse YouTube or Facebook. I mean .. we absolutely do sit and browse through stuff on our computers, letting the wind blow us wherever it may, but .. and here's the thing .. underneath both of those experiences is a whole heapload of programming that provides us what we want. "You like that? Then you'll love this." He makes no mention of the enormous amount of work and yes, design, that goes into making that happen. Do you think YouTube would be as engaging without it?

There's personalisation. People new to YouTube may not have seen Maru the cat, but for others they've seen the top 100 funny videos on YouTube and they want something more. Two users, two different desires. YouTube presents them both with different content because it knows something about what they like. That makes it engaging .. because it's showing each of us what we want to see.

So what's groovy about carrying around some form of handheld computer is that it provides what we want, when we want it.

When I went to that meeting of the Yorkshire Mafia the other day, I prepared by checking where the hotel was. The postcode in Google Maps puts it at Leeds Railway Station, and I used to live in Leeds so I thought no more about it. As I drove in at night in the rain from an unfamiliar direction, I got lost. When I found the station, I couldn't find the hotel. The static station information didn't tell me. The interactive screens didn't tell me. Tourist information had closed for the night. There was no-one from the station who looked like they might help. The WiFi seemed to need a login. And I couldn't see the hotel nearby. Turns out it wasn't really nearby at all, and it was a new-build. I had to ask four people to reach it. That's what you want a handheld computer for, and if it took you by a route where you were less likely to get mugged that would be nice.

What if I were in Japan? I'd need internationalisation.

I haven't got a problem with aspiration, and I understand that advertising has to appeal to our lizard brains in order to work, that's absolutely fine.

But this video isn't an ad. Actually, maybe I'm wrong about that. Perhaps it really is. And in that context, fine, advertise what you do, it's a great ad, so long as you make clear what you're doing isn't really user interface design in any whole sense. You're designing the look and feel of a user interface. That's not the whole story by a long way. It's not even the hardest, most heroic or most interesting part. It's the way you've painted the house. I'm much more interested in the house, its location, its services and its community.

So if it isn't an ad, my fundamental problem is that this doesn't seem to be addressed to any problem anyone's actually got. It's a top-down, brand and business-led imagining of how corporations might be able to sell to us in the future. More than that, it's a design company's pitch for how they might help corporations use new technology to improve their business. It depicts a cosy world where business calls all the shots and we just spend our money on Porsche branded sneakers.

Or as a friend put it: "it's like annoying electronic doors and windows where a door knob and a hinge would have done nicely. 'We're doing it because we can'. Beyond that, no justification nor use. Will it 'save the planet', less paper, less ink, less chemicals. No, just even more south africans and koreans down pits searching for precious metals to power the computer, more wars, more instability, on and on .. so .. it's bollocks really. But it will happen because it can. And for someone returning from one of the war regions full of precious metals with all their limbs blown off, I guess not having to turn pages in a mag will actually, one day, be of use after they have stopped weeping".

If it's design, if it's business, surely it should address a need. That's the whole point .. we come to work every day to solve people's problems in a way they can discover and afford. Their problems. We solve people's problems. That's what makes for a better world. That's the promise of free market capitalism. It spots a need and solves it and thereby improves society.

There's no reason I would want what's shown (even if it were free), it would be irritating to use, I wouldn't use it the way they want me to use it, it doesn't do what I want, and it appears to corral the design of a user interface as a graphic design job (which it absolutely isn't). But it looks nice, so that's OK then.

Incidentally, I'm not trying to kill all graphic designers here, I'm just tackling that video. Funnily enough as I was writing this I did keep thinking about Electric Angel, the efforts Adrian's made .. with Chart Scarborough to understand urban navigation and in the railway project looking into the history, to try to look into things more deeply. Of course, you have to deliver something that looks nice and the budget probably doesn't usually provide for much research, but I actually think Adrian's got soul, does the right things. So I'm really not knocking designers. I'm knocking that video.

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Solid Rock Cafe video

2010-04-24: If you needed any persuasion that video is a crucial part of online marketing, search for the Solid Rock Cafe on Eastborough in Scarborough.

They don't appear to have a website, but early on in position 4, among the directory listings there's are two videos including this one:

Neither are professional, high cost productions. The video above is just one guy, a low-grade camera, no lighting, a bit of preparation and gumption and some video software, the other is a series of stills. It's had well over a thousand views.

And does it make you want to eat at the Solid Rock Cafe? Absolutely (it is one of our favourite cafes here in Scarborough, anyway, but I'm sold on the video). Maybe more so than a website. Video is more emotional, there's music, there's animation, there's (almost) human contact.

So don't just think about having a website. Think as much about online video, and you don't even have to do it yourself. Try running a competition for video entries, like we did for Retro 36, you might get a gem like this:

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TV news' budget impact reporting is wrong

2010-07-02: Since the broadcasters decided to sex-up the news, budget reporting is all about us. How would the family fare? The single mum? The student? First problem: me and my partner don't fit into any of their classes.

Second problem: by talking about that instead of the actual measures, they prevent us having a deeper understanding of the budget and working out for ourselves how it affects us. The coverage is dumbed down to a simple "am I better off?" It encourages selfishness where the reality is, under current circumstances, most people are willing to shave something off their lifestyles so long as others do it too.

Third problem: the calculations are wrong, the outcomes are wrong, it's all nonsense. As usual, it's not deep enough. The Guardian reports a study that shows, and I suggest you be seated for the shock of it, the poorest will pay most.

That's because when you take into account spending cuts, it turns out those who benefit most from public spending are the poorest.

News coverage can't possibly calculate all that, and not within hours. So they shouldn't be trying to present the impact of a budget on us because, simply, the figures are wrong. Or at the very least, they should tell us the limitations of their calculations. And I'm talking about Channel 4 News, probably the least dumbed-down TV news programme.

You might say that study is biased. It certainly comes from the left. But it's probably only people so inclined who will bother to make that impact assessment.

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Your search traffic is much more diverse than you think

2010-02-20: I've never met a new client that has a real idea of the breadth of the keyphrases that will be, or are being, used to find their website.

Usually if I ask what keyphrases they'd like to be on the first page of Google for, they say "Bosch power tools" or similar. Which is fine, but many of my clients are startups or are struggling for their first main search engine position. On page one for "Bosch power tools" are established businesses.

To give you an idea, for "taxi insurance", I know others are spending £6,000 a month on search engine marketing (SEO (Optimisation)).

Locally, a chain of plush hotels are employing a full time SEO person. So even if they only pay them £15k that's probably £25k of costs or £2k a month .. and is that level of salary going to give them great SEO?

For a client of mine who gets 1,000 website visitors per month, 81% of those are from natural search and there were 11,379 different search phrases used to successfully find their site. So there are probably many more keyphrases they could get traffic from but where they don't have a good search engine position. That's more than twenty completely different keyphrases every day for a year. That client doesn't even blog and isn't on any social media sites ("too busy, don't believe in it"), so that's just from the content I created for their website.

So, as a startup business, how do you get a foothold?

You could pick a longer keyphrase to target: "mobile phone GPS tracking software" seems long enough to give you a chance at the first page, if that's what you sell.

But the problem is, with those longer keyphrases there are almost infinite combinations. For mobile, try cellular or Nokia. For phone try PDA. For GPS try satellite. For tracking try location. For software try download. That's 48 combinations before we start. How can you manage all that?

The best way might be to start blogging. Or at least Tweeting. Or at least changing your Facebook Page status every now and then.

Because if you blog about what you do with half a mind towards your keyphrases, you'll naturally write about the things people are searching for and long search phrases will exist naturally in your writing. That's true because those long phrases aren't particularly competitive, so even just one mention could get you onto page one of Google.

It means you can just write, not worry about keyphrases at all, and it'll all fall beautifully into place (given time).

Perhaps someone will find this blog who has £6k a month to spend on SEO for their taxi insurance business. Particularly now I've mentioned it twice.

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The consistency principle

2010-07-09: We want to believe we are acting consistently with our past acts and statements, according to our own life rules. Acting outside of our own principles makes us uncomfortable.

People live up to what they have publicly stated and to what they have written down.

How many times have you followed a self improvement programme that asks you to write down your goals or tell your friends what you're doing?

In sales and marketing, we use this principle in a number of ways, one of which is the thin end of the wedge technique.

If I can get you to ask me a question about Internet marketing .. what's behind that? Or even just to follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook. It's the first step. It's easy to do. But you've set up a path of consistency.

So if, later, I say I have a free download, you might think .. well, why did I follow this guy if I didn't want his free downloads? It's fine to download his report because obviously I think he's an alright guy or I wouldn't have followed him.

Later if I want you to pay just, say, £5 for a course, again, that would be consistent with your earlier behaviours .. and on it goes. Of course, I have to provide value all the way.

Watch out for the aftersale "do you want batteries with that?" and realise what's going on. Once you've made the commitment to buy that lovely new iPhone, why wouldn't you also want a carry case for it, and a car charger? And now you're in iPhone world, you'll obviously want apps and since you made that commitment to buying the coolest phone on the planet, you won't want to be left behind when the next version comes out because that would be inconsistent with your publicly visible i-image .. i-imagine the shame!

Is this something you can use in your business? Have you ever ordered a Mac from the Mac store? Fine, the Mac is, what .. £599 or so .. then there's page after page of: software, insurance, extra memory, cards and accessories, iLife and so on that could easily double your purchase price. You've committed to the initial purchase .. the rest is consistency.

Have a think about how you could use this in your business. Are you showing accessories alongside products? Once someone's bought something from you, what else might they buy from you .. in the moment between saying they'll buy and paying .. on the thank-you page (sign up for our mailing list / follow us on Twitter) .. in the days afterwards .. in the years afterwards? What is your programme for keeping in touch with your customers?

Apparently the toy industry uses this. That hot, must-have Christmas toy that you promised for little Jemima is out of stock in the toyshop .. you can't get it, so you buy something similar, maybe from the same manufacturer, that just happens to be in stock and on display in the shop. But you promised her the must-have toy. Come Boxing Day, like magic, it's in stock. So you buy it. Because you said you would. Hey presto, you just bought two gifts where before you were only going to buy one.

I'm not condoning that. If I hand you a pen you can write a love letter or a hate letter. I'm just giving examples of the principle in use. One of my principles is that I stand by marketing as a force for good.

Anyway, I have my copy of Influence: Science and Practice on order, I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, why not follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook.

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Planeta Moscato Di Noto 2004

2010-08-04: I'm clearing up in my office and that means the empty bottle of wine that's been on my desk for probably over a year waiting for me to have a moment to blog about it .. hang on, 24 December 2008 is when I bought it .. needs to be blogged and binned so here goes.

Basically it was possibly the nicest bottle of wine I've ever tasted. It's a sweet dessert wine that's plumscious, syrupy honey but layers on layers of fruit tastes .. it's just delicious, we got distracted and spent most of the evening sniffing it and trying to name the tastes. Expensive (can't afford it nowadays), but worth it if you want to make an impression, there's a 2007 here.

At last: bottle->bin.

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Double enquiries from an hour on technical SEO

2010-07-30: Many of my clients are small, local, Scarborough businesses looking to improve their online prospects and for many of those my service is a case of covering the basics of SEO: keyphrase analysis, on-page SEO and link-based off-site SEO and the bigger cause of creating online content that's worth linking to.

That's fine for local businesses where the competition isn't usually too strong. But as the general awareness of SEO and Internet marketing grows, so the techniques required to get onto page one for a competitive phrase .. where the money really lies .. become more sophisticated.

One way forward is to get down to really analysing the competition. With an hour's work I was able to raise the search position of a client for a search key phrase group by 7% and enquiries on those phrases more than doubled based on competitor analysis.

The idea is that, having done suitable analysis to identify the most profitable keyphrases to target, and having identified the landing page on your website that you want to direct that traffic to, you type in your keyphrase into Google to see what the top ten results actually are.

Enter each of those competing web page addresses into one of the many keyword density analysers available out there (this is the one I used), put it all into a spreadsheet, and include your own site too.

There's a lot of variation in the results, so I averaged the figures for the competing sites, and then worked out how my site fared against that average.

That analyser provides keyphrase densities for all the parts of the site, whether it's the page title, the image alt tags, body copy or whatever. I took the parts of the site where my site performed worst compared to my average competition, improved them, and ran my site again to check I'd improved.

After waiting a couple of weeks I checked the site's position for those phrases and I'd made those gains: 7% better position, 2x enquiries.

Not bad for starters. You just have to be sure you're optimising for profitable phrases.

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The story of me, Marigold and customer loyalty

2010-02-23: I've never been a fan of dishwashers. I don't like the smell when you open it up to put more dirty dishes in. I don't like the 'extra' job of bending down to load and unload it. I don't like the feel of crockery washed in a dishwasher, and I certainly don't want to pre-wash my pots before I put them in the washer. Then there's the maintenance, the scary limescale buildup and having to care and maintain the dishwasher, and the electricity and water it uses.

So I'd like to say I wash up but obviously I just leave the dishes around the kitchen until it looks like some industrial plant that closed down a decade ago, then I wash up.

Detergent dries my skin and gives me a rash, so I've taken to wearing rubber gloves. Incidentally according to Wikipedia these were invented in the 60s by William Halsted who also removed his mothers gallstone on the kitchen table, turned himself and his colleagues into cocaine addicts by experimenting with its anaesthetic properties and performed the first radical mastectomy.

One day I bought generic rubber gloves. They were slippy. It turned washing up into a risky business, every pot and glass needed a two-hand transfer to safely make it from bowl to drainer. So I decided, only Marigolds would do. They are non-slip. I became loyal to Marigold because they offered something others didn't.

In the meantime, we have rather taken to shopping at Aldi. It's quick, simple, the staff are happy, and the other shoppers are, by and large, polite. However, they don't sell Marigolds.

So yesterday after my thumb had poked through my existing pair for long enough, I set out for the corner shop to buy some new ones and they didn't sell Marigolds, but they did sell Happy Shopper gloves with, according to the packaging, a non-slip grip. Happy Shopper bad, non-slip grip good. I thought I'd take a punt.

Back at home, I'm back to the two-handed transfer. The gloves said they had a non-slip grip, but, well, they may have, but it's nothing like that provided by Marigolds.

Customer loyalty

So where does all that get us? It gets us to the complexity of reputation, branding and loyalty. Clearly I have a strong loyalty to Marigold gloves because I've found I break fewer pots when I use them. I've found them to suit my needs better. Perhaps if people want to clean the toilet wearing Happy Shopper gloves, it matters less if they are non-slip.

Happy Shopper .. well I've never had a good relationship with that brand. I don't think I need to elaborate.

My loyalty to Aldi, of course, has gone down a notch for making me go through all that fuss. And the local Costcutter too .. I'm only loyal to that because it's my closest shop.

But here's the big deal, and it's happening a zillion times a day every day for all of us. I lost a little trust in being sold to. I'd love to think that sales people were primarily good and there to help me find a suitable solution (dream on Allsopp), and that when a package says it has a non-slip grip that means what it contains has a non-slip grip. But it turns out non-slip grips are relative and I bought a product that disappointed. I feel bad about that. And that feeling is transferred to my customer loyalty or otherwise to Happy Shopper.

How do you, as an online business person, get a grip (har har) on the ebb and flow of your customers' loyalty? Most people, even if you asked them, would just grunt "they're shit" at you if you asked how they felt about the rubber gloves they bought last week. Yet, it's really, really important information for you.

Customer loyalty and usability

One way would be to do a usability test. Get a group of people to use your website and report back to you how they felt. Usability tests are amazing. No-one believes me when I say that .. it's something I offer that no-one buys. I think it's because my sophisticated clients think, well, "what can a bunch of ordinary people tell me about my website that I don't already know?" And the answer? I promise you'll be surprised. I promise what they tell you will change your business. I absolutely promise it make your business more profitable. Usability studies make my jaw drop by pointing out what is in retrospect blindingly obvious. But only in retrospect. It gives focus to your efforts to build customer loyalty by reframing your efforts from the customers' perspective.

Anyway, since you still won't do a usability test even though they are quick, cheap, I have usability testers waiting for your business, they'll revolutionise your website and cause peace and harmony throughout this land, you might like to build customer loyalty by checking your numbers.

Building customer loyalty by playing the numbers game

OK, the local Costcutter might be tied somehow to Happy Shopper, but let's imagine for a minute they are not, and they are selling online. They'll be able to measure whether people buy their rubber gloves twice, and compare that to the average re-buy rate for products in their shop. So, what if they try to build customer loyalty by creating a policy of taking the ten products in their shop with the worst re-purchase rate and either replacing them with a different brand, or even better, testing them alongside another brand.

By selling two types of rubber glove and checking what percentage of customers bought the products again, then in the end keeping the winning glove that had the best customer loyalty, they are not just improving the sales and profitability of their rubber gloves, they are improving their brand by providing their customers with what they want. And it may be they clean toilets with their rubber gloves so they want the cheaper glove. We don't know. But we can test and find out.

In supplying what the customer wants, we get fewer bad experiences linked to our brand, and more good experiences. And the customer will be slightly more willing to pop into the shop .. more loyal, in other words. Perhaps they come back for that particular brand of rubber glove they know works for them, and while they are there they buy some other stuff too. And if those other things have been tested among the shop's customers too, we are starting to build customer loyalty.

OK, zoom out. What have we done? We've harnessed our customers to help us improve our shop. Our customers don't know it, we haven't gotten in their way, we haven't asked them to complete a questionnaire or phoned them in the evening or asked them to ring a bell on the way out of the shop. We just watched and learned from their behaviour.

Websites allow you to collect information on your customers like never before. So use it. It's a massive force for good.

It's consistent with the whole social media thing because it blurs the boundaries between us the business and them the customers. Here we've roped in our customers to give us feedback so we can improve our business and build loyalty, and they don't even know it.

I think this comes before pushing into social media. I might, in my Facebook status write "I'm a Marigold man", or "pah, Happy Shopper non-slip gloves are slippy". I might even start a tongue in cheek group called "I use Marigolds". The good and the bad get talked about. Marigolds get my vote. Happy Shopper and Costcutters don't. Better to be doing a good job before courting social media.

Of course, social media can be used to get feedback too, in fact the best way to use social media is to listen, rather than to speak, but that's for another day. For now, two things. 1) Every customer experiences you differently, and you can manage that if you 2) watch the numbers and test everything.

Or you could do a usability test. But you won't. Even though it gives you special powers your competitors won't have.

I am right about usability tests, you'll see.

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Twitter follow everyone who uses your chosen hashtag

2010-06-24: Blastfollow does that. Enter your chosen hashtag and your Twitter handle and you get to follow everyone using that hashtag. Simple as.

Just don't expect it to be around for long in that form. Either swamped with users or no longer free. They are giving us a lot of bandwidth for nothing atm.

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Downtime

2010-05-18: OK, well, my site's been down for a few days along with 18 others due to an 'unprecedented' data loss at my website host.

Apparently what happened is this: "Your server was running a RAID 5 array which normally offers robust data protection (the array can stand a hard drive failure without any data loss). Yesterday the server suffered a hard drive failure and a new drive was fitted. The server has since been rebuilding the data array. Unfortunately, and without precedent in our ten years of web hosting, another hard drive failed this afternoon. The server had not yet finished rebuilding the array and the array has become degraded and the data is corrupted beyond repair."

Now, I trust my hosts and have a great relationship with them. However looking at RAID 5 it has to be said this risk was known.

So I'm looking to them to react accordingly and improve their systems.

I have to say I didn't realise so many of my clients were on one machine, so I'll be looking to spread that more.

I will also be looking to my clients to see if they'd like to share the cost between them of me setting up a secondary backup system. Bet no-one wants to, though.

In the meantime, you'll probably find a load of images missing off my site. I have to re-copy them all across sometime when I've not got client work to do.

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Facebook ad example

2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I placed a Facebook ad for a client to promote their Facebook Page about one of their products which, interestingly, ranks higher than their product page on their website.

Back on the 27 September they had 5 fans and now they have 32. The ad cost £74 for over half a million displays (impressions), 208 click throughs and those extra 27 fans (if all came from the ad) so costing £2.74 per new fan. I didn't optimise the ad, it was just a quick, cheap test. The client pulled the idea before we'd made enough to test the numbers. Ideally I'd want more like 200 new fans before we could say whether it's worth working on or not.

People who visit my client's website from this Facebook page are converting into enquiries at a rate of 10%. The volume's not there, but that's a good rate.

We've had interaction on that Facebook Page. And those 208 people who saw what we do and over half a million people who possibly saw our ad, they must count for something in the same way as you think when you place an ad in a magazine about the circulation. Even a classified ad in a 500,000 circulation magazine would cost more than £74.

I doubt ads that cost ten or a hundred times as much get subjected to this much scrutiny. I know there's always pressure to tie marketing spend to results, that was there even back when I started in 1981, but it sometimes feels like those systems that can be measured by their results aren't given their due. They are quickly and easily dismissed by the results they willingly show. Whereas a magazine ad .. "ah, well, you can't measure the results, but look how many people we reached with our message".

For my money, if you can measure the results in this detail, you have a fighting chance of making it work because you can improve it, see the difference, and keep improving until it's profitable, then keep improving until it's very profitable while starting other ads and campaigns using the income stream you've generated.

There was always the rule about magazine ads that says someone has to see your ad nine times before they buy, and they only see one in three ads in a magazine. Ergo you have to print the same ad in the same magazine twenty seven times (over two years in a monthly) before you can begin to measure the results. I don't know if anyone thinks that way any more. But I certainly think that if you put a marketing activity in motion, part of the benefit is what you learn from the results. If you plant an apple tree, then change your mind and want a lawn so cut your tree down before it fruits, the fault isn't in the apple tree, it's in your approach.

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Keyword density and you

2010-07-08: Search engine optimisation, the art of getting a good position in Google's natural search results (as opposed to Pay Per Click paid-for sponsored links (ads)), can be looked at as an art or as a mathematical exercise. I tend to prefer the former, after all, if you have a great business people will beat a path to your door, but once you get into an area with any sort of competition you really need to employ both techniques.

Here's how it works in principle. You have a website, and you're selling things. Therefore sometimes you are selling things to people who have entered a search term into Google, found you, and bought something. That forms the beginning of a revenue stream, particularly if it's not a one-off.

Those people follow a path from Google to a particular page on your website, through a series of other pages on your website to the payment pages and beyond. You'll be wanting to optimise that customer journey so as to convert more visitors into customers. It's called a funnel, and using Google Analytics you can see which are the problem pages where people fall off.

60% of traffic on a Google results page goes to the top listed natural result. If you can convert visitors to customers on a phrase for which you have the top listing, and that phrase has significant traffic, well, you have a money tree. So everyone wants that, and the competition nowadays is fierce.

Google wants to provide the best results to their customers for any search term they request. It spends untold resources trying to keep out the spammers and ensure the results they show are really satisfactory. Part of their calculation of which sites to show on page one comes from the keywords on the actual web page.

So if I'm selling Scarborough sea shells, my customers might enter that into Google and I should mention that phrase on my website so Google sees that, matches the two, and I should appear on page one of the search results and make loads of money.

But what if a competitor opens up who also sells sea shells? And what if they mention Scarborough sea shells twice on their web page where I only mention it once? They'll appear higher in the results. So we start a race. I add three mentions, they add four. In the end, our websites just consist of hundreds of mentions of "Scarborough sea shells".

The next day, neither of us is on Google's search results for that phrase because Google thinks we are trying to spam the system.

So we reign ourselves back and try to find the sweet spot where Google thinks we mention that phrase enough to be confident that that is genuinely what the page is about, but not so much that it's clear we are trying to game the system unfairly.

Where's the sweet spot?

Well, you can probably assume those who are already on the first page have found it. So we can use analytical tools to look at their keyphrases and work out their keyword densities.

It's not even that easy, because Google today might think the page title is really important, and image alternative tags are not. Tomorrow Google might change its mind. It's a moving target.

Plus, every website on page one has a different set of keyphrase densities for its title, its body text and so on. So one way forward would be to take every result on the first page for your keyphrase, and average out the figures, then compare to your own and make suitable changes.

Remember: this is just for one keyphrase, and one search engine.

And that's not the only thing you need to worry about, Google also takes account of your inbound links and the keywords used in those. But that's for another day.

Good job I love analysing data.

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Brown win

2010-04-30: Here's a bunch of stuff I'm not hearing said. And my prediction for the election: Brown will win an outright majority.

OK, here's why.

Apparently, on one of the elections which Thatcher won (I assume when she first came to power), the polls failed to predict it, and the reason was that there was a social stigma against voting for Thatcher. So people didn't tell the pollsters they would vote for her, but when they got into the booth, they did. It's the same for Brown today. It's embarrassing to say in public that you're going to vote for him .. imagine the flack .. but when people get in the booth, they may well vote for a safe pair of hands for the economy.

Secondly, when John Major (former chancellor) succeeded Thatcher, I seem to remember him winning when, really, people wanted the Tories, the incumbents, but didn't really like Major particularly. But he was annointed by Thatcher, so we kinda went "well, she knew what she was doing" (ignore the fact that what followed was a dismal period of "not on our lawns" and the cone hotline and the Tories falling into a wilderness from which they are only just recovering).

Thirdly, no-one really wants any of them. So, better the devil you know, especially if the Greek financial thing keeps adding economic uncertainty.

Fourthly, Brown has shown himself to be a bit accident prone, but Labour itself .. at this time when capitalism has shown its ugly side .. seems to offer solid, comforting government. The Tories would open us to the market, and the market is a flailing, out of control beast right now. Labour would be perfect for our times if it wasn't for the problems with Brown.

So I wonder whether people will think: vote Labour, sort Gordon out later.

Fifthly, there are a lot of people who really don't want Cameron.

Sixth, Britain loves an underdog.

So that's my prediction, a Labour win.

I was going to post this on the eve of the election, but thought, in the unlikely event that I'm actually right, I'd get even more kudos if I posted it earlier.

I was going to put a bet on, the first in my life, but at 14:1 the odds aren't high enough to motivate me to make that first step into a betting shop.

So, vote.

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Scarborough v Tenerife

2010-06-04: Google Trends shows search traffic going back to 2004, and you can select by country. I work with a number of B&Bs here and trade is down so far this year so I wondered if it was me or if it was Scarborough.

It appears that despite the Renaissance Scarborough is on a downward trend (I'm not saying the Renaissance has been a failure, its benefits will come over the medium term).

In 2005 searches for 'Scarborough' from people in the UK dropped 2.5%. In 2006 with bird flu it dropped 6.2%. 2007 was a good year in that it rose 3.5% on the previous year because of foot and mouth (people couldn't get out in the British countryside). Then in 2008 it dropped 0.2% and in the recession years in 2009 it was down 4.6% and so far this year it's down 7%. Overall since 2004, traffic has fallen 16.6%

Last year, the press talked up the 'staycation' which was irritating because a staycation before that meant staying at home, where they interpreted it as staying in the country as if that was an unusual thing to do.

Anyway the feeling now is that the percentage who did go against their heart and stay in Britain last year for their holidays are now gagging to get away from the place again, so I checked out search trends for Scarborough versus Tenerife.

Funnily enough, Tenerife has fallen 27% over the full period, meaning Scarborough did rather well against that and maybe Scarborough is actually beating the trend. But this year so far, Scarborough seems to be down 16.6% whereas Tenerife is up 12%. So maybe people really are desperate for an escape. Pity, the weather's been terrific here in Scarborough.

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