I think I lack a facial recognition gene.  Yeah, I know nobody finds it easy to recognise people or remember their names. This is not what I’m talking about.

I can remember people’s names, I just can’t tell whether I’ve met them or not.  My recognition techniques therefore include getting into inane conversations with them and hoping that by talking about nothing for a while something they say rings a bell.

My lack of facial recognition skills is highlighted in social situations because I happen to look slightly odd and am therefore relatively easy to remember. Not odd-so-you-want-to-sidle-away-and-put-a-hand-loosely-in-the-vicinity-of-your-imaginary-sidearm-odd,  just odd enough so that most people remember me.  All my life I’ve wanted to blend well into a crowd but it was not to be.

Hanging around with me on a more permanent basis can be even more trying.  My partner claims that going to a movie is a seriously frustrating experience.

“So is that guy in the blue shirt the same guy that was in bed with heroine earlier?”

“Ssshhh!”

“Ok, well just tell me if I’m wrong?”

“Shut up!”

Yep, a change of clothing can be a real problem. If a shirt falls in the forest, and as a movie-goer I do not observe it, is it the same person?

Thank god for the conservatism of studio producers. If they didn’t insist on bankable stars like Julia Roberts etc I would be in real trouble – all you would-be actors out there, your enemy is not moneymen bankrolling films who insist on a bankable star, your real enemy is the facial-recognition challenged (FRCs).

And as for cast-of-thousands epics: forget it! I might just be able to identify Russell Crowe in ‘Gladiator’ (let’s face it he’s fairly distinctively ugly) but anyone with a bit part in it was toast.

To simulate the FRC experience for yourself try walking into a supermarket in an ethnic neighborhood (whatever you consider ethnic) or just take a look at an online crowd scene for some ethnic group different for your own. Now imagine you feel like that pretty much all of the time.

If your current significant other doesn’t seem to like going to parties with you, but is always up for a meeting in a bar, it might not be that she’s an alcoholic, she just might be an FRC sufferer and prefer one-on-one dating to group dates.

If this is all beginning to sound depressingly familiar from your own experience you might be relieved to hear that there is evidence that facial recognition skills depend mostly on your genes and not your own memory issues. Admittedly it’ll probably turn out in a 100 years time, when we understand genetics better, that everything is genetic, launching a whole new century of speculation over free will, identity etc, but by then we’ll probably be manipulating the same genes at will anyway.

All is not lost however for FRC sufferers amongst us: we now have social media to level the playing field.

As social interactions become more and more electronic with the aid of Twitter, Facebook, online dating personals sites and TellMeAboutYourDaySoICanSellProductsToYouAndYourFriends.com, you can interact with people without even having to worry about their faces. I seem to have no trouble with the cartoonified faces cropping up these days in Twitter for example.

My helpful tip for FRC sufferers is therefore this: avoid going out socially for the next six months or so, get online, start texting like Gen Y, and find a decent home grocery delivery service. Everything will be fine.

Also, look out for my new iPhone augmented reality application, ‘Who The F**k Is That?’, where you point your iPhone camera subtly at people you don’t recognise and it looks them up (when I can get it approved by Apple under their app developer Terms and Conditions some time over the next decade).

P.S. For more personal relationship therapy for those challenged in the social skills department see my upcoming article ‘Why tall people in a crowded room suffer a hearing disadvantage but they’re not really deaf or stupid.’

Posted under Hate pets, Self doubt

Imagine as a small business owner you go and buy an office suite, off-plan in some big office development somewhere from those well known property developers Bodgett & Bludgett.

Now imagine that following the completion of your new office suite your property developer plasters large signs on every customer-facing entry point to your office saying  ’Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Your customers cannot avoid seeing Bodgett & Bludgett’s signs no matter which way they enter your building and if they look you up in the phone book just below your details they also see ‘Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Seems a trifle unreasonable already doesn’t it? But we aren’t finished yet.

Now imagine that as your business becomes more successful and you start drawing in more customers, a little bit of your marketing budget (‘just’ half a per cent per month or so) is continually diverted to support Bodgett & Bludgett’s own marketing efforts.

“Kee-rist,” most business owners would be saying at this point, “Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers should be paying me!”

The analogy isn’t perfect but it’s actually what a lot of website developers do on the websites of their small business clients.

You’ve seen it yourself. At the bottom of  the page your friendly website developer places an innocuous piece of text saying something like ‘Website designed and built by Acme Developers‘.

Most web developers will place this text on every single page in your website.

But the more subtle point which the developer usually doesn’t discuss with you is that they also place a hypertext link around this text pointing back to their own website (sometimes with a stylesheet applied so that the link only shows up as a link when you hover your mouse over it).

In Google’s world a link is quite valuable – under Google’s PageRank system (all other things being equal) an outgoing link like this from your own business’s website is effectively a vote for how close to the top in the search results your web developer’s own website should rank in the search results. In particular this is also influenced by the text that forms the link, the ‘anchor text’ – which is why the web developer creates the link around the words ‘website designed and built‘ (on the basis that people searching for website developers may use one or more of these words in combination).

But the really neat bit is that as your website becomes more popular, for example as you list it in paid directories that link to it, a little bit of your PageRank is transferred to your web developer’s home page from every page in your site. The more popular your website, the more you are promoting your web developer’s site, perhaps even years after your developer last did any work for you (almost makes tied financial planners look virtuous doesn’t it).

Now that I’ve pretty much burned my bridges with all the website developers I work with here’s my suggestion about how you as a small business owner negotiate this somewhat irksome issue with your own developer.

The underlying key point is of course that you are paying the website developer to build your website to help promote your business and not vice versa (unless you want to get a suitable discount).

Your website developer will probably be surprised that you would object to their link marketing scheme - most of their other clients won’t have even noticed. 

“But we always do this,” they’ll say in a somewhat injured tone ( just like the independent financial advisers who have been selling investment advice with 50 year trailing commissions).

You can of course ask them where in the development proposal you are providing ongoing marketing services to them.

But some might regard that as confrontational (something that Drivelry.com shies away from).

Instead, remove the link (you can still leave the ’site built by’ bit) and offer them a testimonial on their own website. You’ll say that they are “the greatest”, “the best”, “the fastest”, and “truly creatively inspired”. 

And, by the way, right underneath that testimonial on your web developer’s own website you’d like a small unobtrusive outgoing link (using keywords carefully chosen by you) to your own website.

You may feel guilty, you might  feel you’ve been pushy, but it’s all a damn sight more transparent. And best of all, given the number of other client websites your developer has already leached PageRank from (which trickles in turn to your site), you’ll be significantly better off from a web marketing point of view!

Go on. Do it!

Feeling faint hearted? Need moral support? Drop us a line to @Drivelry on Twitter (ok – if you’re a developer abuse is fine too).

Posted under Hate pets

If you are a blogger just starting out, there is a bright shiny world of poor blogging advice to be discovered.  It covers the full spectrum:

• how (not to) build an audience for your blog,
• how (not to) to monetize your blog, and last but not least 
• how (not to) choose your blog topics…

At times it may look like the most successful blogs are themselves about blogging and are mainly read (and monetized) by other up and coming bloggers (yep I can see the hypocrisy warning light flashing a bright orange  on the Drivelry editorial floor).

The number of blogs is growing globally at 50% a year

It is also a highly competitive world. 

When Drivelry.com started in August 2008, Wordpress.com maintained a count of the number of blogs they hosted on their home page and it stood at 3.9 million (bear in mind that Wordpress is only one of several free hosting platforms that include Blogger and many others).

In January 2009 (6 months later) Wordpress stopped revealing this information, perhaps because they thought it would discourage newbie bloggers, or because it was information they didn’t want to make available to their competitors.  However January’s (last published) Wordpress figure of 5.2 million blogs hosted  implies a growth rate of over 2 million new blogs a year – or to put it another way that the blogging community (as represented by Wordpress.com) is growing at an annual rate of 50% … 

Although not every blog is active that is still a truckload of text being generated every day to be chewed through by search engines which typically account for 60-70% of most website’s traffic. 

Links to your blog are important: so how do you acquire them?

What makes your blog more important to the mother of all search engines (Google) apart from the text you use? 

Links to your blog, which Google regards as a proxy for your blog’s  importance, aka ‘PageRank’.

It’s at this point that we come back to the conventional wisdom about links.  

Essentially it says ‘give the A-list bloggers links and comments and they will reciprocate’ (it’s kind of like the trickle-down theory of economics).  Well it could be that Drivelry frequently verges on the obnoxious but …. we haven’t seen much trickling down yet.  This might have worked as a technique in the days when people were not so ‘link-aware’  but seems not to be the case in 2009.

The community out there is generally aware that links are valuable and that even leaving comments helps generate indexable text.  And frankly most A-list bloggers have enough of both.

If you think you can get around this by leaving a link on someone else’s blog you need to be aware that nearly all blogs implement the “no follow” directive on their comment links which tells Google to ignore the link in calculating PageRank (and this is also implemented on authoritative sites like Wikipedia).

So what’s the alternative?

Link to (and comment on) blogs who appreciate links and comments!

They are likely to be smaller blogs and they need to be ‘link aware’ so that ideally they will a) notice your link to them and b) allow you to make a ‘followable’ link in your comments on their blogs (it is possible to turn off the standard ‘NoFollow’ that is generated in Wordpress on links in comments).

Sounds pretty logical – so how do you find these sorts of blogs?

Well it’s actually not as hard as you might think.  Bloggers who implement ’DoFollow’ functionality on their blogs are:

1. Obviously aware by their use of ‘DoFollow’ of the value of links
2. Likely to be smaller as the very popular (higher PageRank) blogs tend to get targeted by spammers in comments – eventually causing these blogs to revert back to ‘NoFollow’
3. Often advertise the fact that they are ‘DoFollow’ so that you can find them in ‘DoFollow’ directories or Google Custom Search engine instances which only return search results from Blogs that are DoFollow

Drivelry.com is itself a DoFollow blog.

DoFollow blog search engines

For example here are a couple of search engines that find text contained in ‘DoFollow’ blogs if you want to add these to your browser toolbar as additional search providers:

http://w3ec.com/dofollow/

http://atniz.com/dofollow-search-engine/

http://www.commenthunt.com/

Health warnings about the use of DoFollow blog search engines

It is worth noting three things in relation to DoFollow search engines:

1. these search engines are not necessarily maintained by the providers out of their goodness of their hearts (in many cases they only maintain these engines so that they can use them as a data source to run search engine optimisation link generation campaigns by inserting spammy comments of their own) and,
2. due to the abuse of  ‘DoFollow’ blogs as they become more popular, sites listed in DoFollow search engines may ‘revert’ back to NoFollow so it is often worth checking whether the blog still remains ‘DoFollow’ by doing a ‘View Source’ on their comment page
3. blogs listed in DoFollow search engines typically moderate their comments to avoid becoming a target for spammers – if your comment says something like ‘Great post. Here’s a link to my blog ….’ it is typically going to be rejected by the blog owner as they are looking for you to add comment value with your link.

Despite the pitfalls above it is worth focusing your interactions on smaller DoFollow blogs rather than the A-listers.  Most of these people will value you linking to them and may reciprocate by doing the same, and will reward you for interacting with their posts in comments by enabling links you leave to count towards your blog’s PageRank.

If enough blogs do this it may help all of us find a way out of the cul-de-sac  that PageRank has led to where bloggers are sometimes unwilling to link to good information sources out there. A quick look at Google Trends for ‘DoFollow’ suggests there is hope here.

You may even want to think about making your own blog DoFollow!

Posted under Hate pets

A year ago I wrote an article titled ‘why write another blog‘  (the emphasis being on another if you take a look at the numbers of blogs out there) when I started Drivelry.com. 

Now that I know most things there are to know about blogging I thought it was important to give something back to the community.

So here are the hard-won lessons I learned about blogging that got me to where I am today, thousands of dollars of Adsense revenue every week and regular speaking opportunities (contact me for details on my new Nichesplog™  system, “‘the only program you’ll ever need to make thousands of dollars on the internet with just 5 minutes effort a day.“)

Rule 1: You must post several times a week

The success of your blog will be driven entirely by search crawlers, who read it 97.8%  more frequently than human readers (NB always provide high quality estimates to at least one decimal place).  Search crawlers have limited comprehension (less than that of your average 2 year old) so quantity beats quality every time. 

Better to post drivel than nothing at all.  Drivel is particularly good because incoming readers are more likely to click on one of the advertisements embedded in your page, rather than read your post, so drivel makes you money!

Rule 2: Write posts with titles involving the phrase  ’the 10 best…’

For example, ”The 10 best ways to lose your virginity”, or “10 shortcuts to becoming an internet millionaire”,  or “10 most popular blog topics to make money online“. 

These kind of posts are  scarce so you will be strongly differentiating yourself by doing this. 

With these kind of socially affirming titles you also appeal to the kind of people that read self-help books. These kind of people are charismatic and are bound to virally spread your message to all their friends by spruiking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.

Don’t worry if you can’t actually come up with 10 points. If you skip a point or two ( for example going straight from Rule 3 to Rule 5) most readers are unlikely to notice anyway.

This rule is sometimes referred to in the blogging community as the ‘Number – Adjective – Subject’ rule for obvious reasons.

Rule 3: Focus your blog on a clearly defined niche

For example, ‘Railway Travel’ is a good topic for a blog.

However ‘Railway Sleepers‘ means you’re really honing in on a  clearly defined niche. With a ‘niche dominator’ like that (unafilliated with the excellent blogging software of the same name that I have loosely based Nichesplog on) you are bound to attract most of the keyword searches that companies selling either concrete or wood railway sleepers really want to target.  Pick a market that is growing – clearly train travel is growing as environmental issues make public transport more important.

Sure, it may be a little bit difficult coming up with something that interests you about railway sleepers every week but focusing on a niche will:

a) help keep your posts short

b) you can only be accused of ignorance by other bloggers about one subject, and,

c) always remember RULE 1 (search crawlers don’t care what you write anyway).

Keep at it! Get in a routine by writing at least a  sentence  each day and just copy and paste them together every couple of days to form a post.

If you can’t think of anything to write get angry (apparently this helps).

Rule 4:  Make your blog look like something that isn’t a blog

Out there on the internet many readers do not read blogs because, unlike proper journalism, blogs are factually unreliable, prone to bias and they may be hiding computer viruses that can raid your online bank account.  Readers are aware that there is no quality control.

When you think about it even the very word ‘blog’ sounds kind of unnatural.

For this reason it is best to hide from the reader that they are looking at a blog.

For example always refer to posts as ‘articles’ and if you have control over your hosting template it is best to change things like ‘Blogroll‘ to ‘Sites I recommend‘ and ‘Categories‘ should be replaced with ‘Topics‘.

Basically avoid anything that is a giveaway to readers that they are looking at a low quality blog post, as opposed to a high quality website.

Rule 6: Blog readers have miniscule attention spans – keep it short

Screen readers only ever read the first two sentences in a paragraph. Use lots of subheadings.  And short sentences. 

The average blog reader spends 32.4 seconds reading a post. Did you notice that there was no ‘Rule 5′? I rest my case.

All posts should be able to be expressed in 3 paragraphs – anything  longer than that is just self-indulgent.

Most readers will never waste good printer paper by actually printing from a blog.

Rule 7:  Blog rules rule over traditional publishing

Because blogs are going to sweep the old publishing empires before them there is no need to worry about grammer – or syntax; or spelling.

Traditional dead-tree based publishers also have this concept of an ‘editor’ who was not intimately involved in writing the piece, who may be able to see where you are making logical leaps that leave the reader behind, where your sense of humour deserted you, or where you just entirely omitted words. There is no need for one of these editors (or volunteers to perform the role) as editors are part of a cost base that is driving traditional publishers to the wall.  Blogs are ‘personal’ (see Rule 9) and readers are well aware there’s no quality control (see Rule 4).

Typography is just a form of Onanism for publishers. Very small fonts that don’t cater to the over-60s crowd do help you to fit more in ‘above the fold’ (an odd term that we bloggers use to describe the screen text that can be seen without scrolling down) and the over-60s are unlikely to engage with the medium anyway for all the reasons cited above.

Think about search engine optimization all the time. Before you write each post work out what keywords you wish to target and then repeat them a lot. Links to other websites fritter away your ‘Googlejuice’ (a term we bloggers use). It’s best to be self-contained (see Rule 9). Use lots of textual emphasis like italics and underlines as this is apparently also good for your Googlejuice.

Rule 8:  Create lots of buzz about your blog

Engaging with anyone else’s content can really fritter away your time. 

Instead, focus on making comments on other people’s blogs that will help get your articles noticed and really get the attention of other bloggers e.g.:

“You’re wrong. See my post at http://railwaysleepers.blogspot.com/etc.”

Use channels like Twitter and Facebook to broadcast your new posts as much as possible.  When you’re emailing each post to your address book remember Rule 4 and refer to your post as an ‘observation’, ‘explanation’, ‘article’, etc – in short anything but a ‘blog post’.

Create 50 Hotmail accounts and then use them to recommend your best articles at social bookmarking sites.

Mail prominent bloggers interesting questions that could concievably form their next blog post like “could defining your fears be more important than defining your goals?” Or  ask them about blogging – navel-gazing is a habit no self respecting blogger can resist.

PS Talking to people on Twitter can really waste your time.

Rule 9:  Personal is everything

Unlike your email, or dinner parties with your friends,  blogs are for letting it all hang out.  Pictures of your children or pets help to add that personal touch which creates a deeper relationship between you and the reader.  Pictures of your babies are a must.

It’s ok to comment about your company, your partner, and your personal habits. This helps you establish your credibility as an individual and not just a corporate stooge.

With the sheer amount of text being added to the web every day it is highly unlikely that any of  these comments are actually locatable by people close to you at your workplace, school, or other institutions you’re involved with, and people will obviously acknowledge in 10 years time that your opinion may change. Most people also lack anything approaching real search skills.

Rule 10: If you paid for something for your blog you paid too much

If you have to pay for something you’re getting ripped off. You’re already investing a lot of time, why invest money as well?

Registering and finding a domain name takes ages and then you’ve got to wait in the ’sandpit’ until Google decides you’re not just some web spammer.

Use default designs and create your blog at one of the free blog hosting sites at Blogspot or Blogger or Wordpress.com. After all it’s the text that matters (see Rule 1). 

If it starts to go really well you can easily move your blog somewhere else.

Posted under Hate pets

Tourism and mental baggage

Travel is an odd business.  The more you think about it the odder it can seem.

We all ‘get’ the idea that it’s supposed to be ‘enriching’ and ‘inspirational’  but we actually arrive at a new city with a whole trolley-full of mental baggage.  After all, that’s why we bought the ticket to that particular destination in the first place…

We bought a ticket to Marrakesh with a dim memory of Laurence of Arabia, we bought a ticket to New York with a mental picture of 5th Avenue brownstones and glitzy department stores, we bought a ticket to Paris to marvel at  French women who were so immaculately turned out they modelled their facial expressions for the benefit of passers-by (or some of us did).

Authenticity

We think we are searching for something ‘different’, something ‘exotic’ but we are also searching for something that is the same as our preconceptions.  We want something that is authentically a close match to movies, books, or just to match some vague recollection of an intriguing relative who once lived there.

Dahab pre-Lonely Planet

There is an also an industry (the travel industry) that sells us authenticity by the bucketload and in the process destroys something (albeit something that actually was probably never there in the first place).   

Lonely Planet had a nice little writeup of a page or so on an ‘unspoilt’ beachside town in the Sinai called Dahab where you could get fish cooked on an open fire. A year or so later (see photo at right) and it could pass for any Mediterranean resort. 

It can all be quite annoying this dearth of local authenticity. 

There you are, sitting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in a building that smells more of Cairo than it does of Europe, and  a car cruises past outside playing the same song that you were listening to in London 12 hours earlier. Why bother coming?

You go to Australia with an image in your mind of wide-open spaces and people in Akubra hats on horseback with corks hanging from them (the hats I mean).  How trying is it that a higher proportion of the population lives in the densely populated urban coastal fringe than in the UK, or that Australians are the highest per capita consumers of books in the English speaking world? 

Re-framing of tourist destinations by travellers

Re-framing of tourist destinations by travellers

 At a literal level we tend to simply re-frame our travel destinations to ignore those parts of foreign cultures or experiences that are inconsistent with our preconceptions. 

We arrive at a place and we immediately begin looking for the vantage point for the ‘perfect’ shot (an artist I know refused to travel with a camera when she realized she was doing this).

Framing can be as simple as choosing to photograph iconic sights to exclude inconvenient objects in the foreground like hotdog stands or whole cities (don’t tell me you weren’t surprised to find the pyramids ensconced in a suburb of Cairo rather than the open desert), or it can be as complex as creating theme parks like Disney World where you can experience all the cliches of foreign countries without ever leaving your own.

Travel ‘orientation stress’ and travel ’option stress’

We shouldn’t blame Disney World or package tours for trying to make things easy.

In parts of Oklahoma where I lived for a while it was pretty unlikely that you had been out of the state (Texas being the possible exception), travelling to the east or west coast was considered really avant-garde, and leaving the country was unheard of (estimates of the number of Americans holding passports seem to range between about 7% and 20%).

Travelling  imposes ‘orientation stress’ as we try and get used to different languages, currencies, geography and transport modes.  Worst of all we’ve got to make decisions about what we see every day (for an ‘all option evaluator’ such as myself who has understand the full gamut of choices before making one this is terrifying) aka ‘option stress’.

Buy your $1000 airfare & I’ll sell you a blindfold to wear on your trip

And thus we come to the travel guide, a way of reducing both our option and orientation stress. It tells you a) what to ’see’ (because travel is like… errr … a visual experience apparently) and b) how to get there.

Problem solved? 

Well … errr… no. As a friend of mine notes there is a very good case for banning travel guides. Right now, in the southeastern quarter of Barcelona, 7 people are standing in a queue outside a bicycle rental shop clutching a heavily-thumbed book noting to ask for Peter, their experience of the city completely mediated by a red travel guide with a million print run and a few Almodavar films. All big cities are now for sale to anyone without making any more effort to communicate than that involved in forking out 10 bucks for a copy of ‘Let’s Go’, or the Rough Guide. 

Sure you’ll ’see’ a bunch of sites but not have to make the effort to communicate with the locals to find them, or even understand what the locals themselves recommend (hotel concierges excluded). When was the last time you went round the top 3 tourist spots in your own city in a day? Most of us would rather eat sand.

The travel guide is just a further disconnect  that robs you of any understanding of the place and culture at which you’ve arrived. Increasingly you get there by plane in an experience that is like timetravel- you wake up in a different timezone after being shut in a metal tube with no context of how you got there.

And even for the ‘independent‘ traveller once you arrive at an airport there is often the temptation to book hire-cars and negotiate freeway systems that use largely the same conventions the world over.  The old question of the journey or the destination comes to mind: getting from point A to point B the fastest stops you developing a gradual understanding of the differences between them, like negotiating a city by bicycle as opposed to taxi (you have not experienced Shanghai for example until you’ve got on a subway train simply because a lot of western tourists never go near it).

It gets worse. Technology is rapidly reducing the amount of interaction you have with locals even further. Why not load an audio description of the city before you go from hearplanet.com so you don’t actually have to hear anything; why not look up your current location on your GPS phone so you don’t have to ask directions when you’re lost?

If you didn’t photograph, blog & twitter it you were never here

“From that time on he began to pay careful attention to all his thoughts and ideas, and to admire them.  For example, it occurred to him that if he were to die the world in which he had been living would cease to exist.”

Milan Kundera – Life Is Elsewhere

Try meeting someone in a hostel these days who is available for conversation and not a) tapping away at a laptop or b) sitting in a corner with headphones on listening to MC Hammer.   Want a list of the electronic devices for today’s traveller ? It will take up quite a chunk of your weight allowance.

Because, as we all know, travel is about documenting it.  It used to be done with a couple of postcards and a camera but now we must emulate our travelling literary heroes ranging from Jack Kerouac to Alex Garland. It’s so darn busy there’s barely time to read a novel by a local author…

Travel is also about self-discovery and we need a diary to do that.  It’s not just about ‘seeing things’ it’s about ‘getting away from me’.  We all have met f**ked up people in hostels ranging from young foreign Zionists in Israel to I-participate-in-medical-experiments in Denver.  So many travellers out there are just getting away from a bad relationship or some other huge negative in their life; the cheaper the destination the worse the problem they’re trying to overcome.  We have all in the active or passive voice been part of a conversation where we explain to a boyfriend or girlfriend that … cough … “it’s just not a good idea you join me here …”  Yep, it is difficult to be with you, whom I have known for years, when I am trying to reinvent myself.

It’s not that we don’t all have a travel story to tell but it’s also the case that (because of  many of the reasons above like travel guides) we also all often have the same story. We’ve been to the same must-see places, been ripped off by the same vendors, and have the same bank balance damage to show for it.

New ways to understand travel

Ok, it’s not the end of the world. It’s hard to buy an argument that  people who travel or live outside their own culture “is bringing with it the condition that the Greeks called ‘anomie’, the losing of all moral and social guidelines to behaviour that go witha traditional way of life.‘ (in a delightful irony I read that a couple of years ago in a Virgin travel magazine). Travel probably does make you more tolerant of ‘difference’ but it seems to be the case that travelling as a recreational activity might seriously benefit from being re-thought.

Otherwise we have knowledge but not understanding of where we’re going.

Maybe the answer is couch surfing?  Maybe it is thinking more about how we move from place to place as in ‘Blue Highways’?

'Experimental Travel' by Rachael Antony & others

 Maybe it’s the new “experimental travel” genre, where destinations are picked  with dice, hitchiking,  exploring suburbs rather than city centres, or variations?

 Maybe we even should envy my work colleague’s father who is British and has never been on holiday anywhere further than Wales (no airline related carbon footprint issues there!). Isn’t it good that he’s happy with himself and his own surroundings – what more could we all wish for?  

 What do you think the answer is? It would be genuinely good to know.

Posted under Hate pets

We all like to think of ourselves as plugged into the zeitgeist. The web? Was there in ‘95. LinkedIn profile? Got one years ago? Skype? Tick. Blog? Tick (you’re looking at it). SecondLife? I’m there. 24 x 7 online gadgets? Got them in spades.

However, I have to confess to at least one embarassing form of personal failure up there with sexual inadequacy, I don’t have a Facebook account.

Why? At base, it comes down to a liking for anonymity. Surely one of the most wonderful things about the web when it first came about was the sense of freedom: you could write whatever you wanted and be whomever you wanted to be. Facebook, Myspace, and some other forms of social media are the very antithesis of this. It’s about setting down a version of yourself in stone. Forget re-invention, it’s about demonstrating how popular you are by the number of ‘Friends’ you have and creating a spider’s web of links that to me are something to be trapped in.

My generation Y late 20-something sister doesn’t understand my squeamishness about Facebook.

She doesn’t understand why I don’t like her posting photos of my small children in Facebook, “after all people have to be my Friends to see them” (well they aint necessarily my friends). And if she has got to grips with Facebook’s labyrinth of privacy settings it sure seems to be the case that other people (including the New York Times) haven’t.  And that’s before I mention my friend whose girlfriend was signficantly underwhelmed to see him in a photo that had been tagged with his name on Facebook in a nightclub in closer embrace than his girlfriend thought was proper with another girl.

It doesn’t matter whether only your Friends can see your pictures and other content. We’ve got to remember that this is the digital age and anything once digital is w-a-y more transmissible than it ever was before. Just ask the copyright owners of digital music. All it takes is a right-click and copy and it’s out of your hands!  It’s not that I object to all forms of digital recording, for example I routinely record my Skype conference calls for work as the easiest form of note taking there is, and have been told off for doing so by colleagues, but I don’t post these on the web!

As more and more websites open themselves to the all-seeing scrutiny of the Googlebot we need to realize that your online footprints don’t  just stop with text. We are not far away IMHO from ’similar image’ search where for example you can put in a photo of a friend and have the search engine find digitally similar images wherever they are. Check out, for example, the GoogleLabs ‘Similar images’ project, or for that matter the image technology that will recognise photos of your aunt once you’ve tagged her in Picasa. Sure you can get Google in some cases to remove something but typically only with regard to a site  that you control. And even once removed we have things like Alexa’s ‘Wayback’ machine to show us pages as they were BEFORE they were deleted.

My own children are going to be exposed to totally different forms of bullying at school, someone who doesn’t like them taking a nude photo in the lockeroom using the camera in their phone and putting it up on the web (and if they have a reasonable understanding of search engine optimization knowing enough to use the name of my kid in some anchor text pointing at the link to improve it’s PageRank on Google) AKA ’sexting’.

And call me paranoid but I wonder how many people on Facebook realize that it provides  a great resource for hackers following social engineering strategies? How many people out there have passwords which are the name of the dog or their children or spouse? And that’s before we get into the issue of people using the same password on different accounts (by various reports over half of us do this). If I make a phone call to your parents at your house how much can I find out by name-dropping a few names of your friends?

I realize that Facebook provides an easy way to keep in touch with a large bunch of scattered friends but most Facebook related studies show that in fact no matter how many ‘Friends’ we have we really only actively communicate with a small number. Why not simply email your friends an electronic Christmas card once a year with what you’re doing? You don’t have to be a genius to use Word and Outlook in a mail merge.

And for work who on earth would want their Facebook profile to come up in Google before say their business related information from their company website, or their LinkedIn profile?

I realize that all of the above may just label me (correctly) as Generation X (those born between ‘61 and ‘81). Perhaps it really is the case that I’m just too uptight and lack the perspective of a post-1980 digital native as expressed in ‘Born Digital’ by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.  On the other hand maybe a lot of those digital natives are just young people like there have always been young people, who do not fully comprehend the impacts of what they’re doing online, and will only do so in about 20 years time.

 PS. It was pointed out to me that my whole argument is well and truly undercut by having a blog. Well, yes and no. My blog is hosted using the ‘Domains by Proxy’ service so that you cannot directly query the details on the domain owner. It’s not failsafe, there are a number of ways you could really track down who I am, but as per the above paragraphs if I it would be ruinous for me to have my identity made more public than it is then I need to still be a little bit careful about what I write on the blog.  A lot easier way to do it is to just set up a blog on something like WordPress.com using a Hotmail account!

Posted under Hate pets, Unanswerable questions

Occasionally, as an information technology professional (if that is not an oxymoron) I feel that the criticisms applied to us are totally unwarranted. 

Many is the time in a project I’ve been told we need a ‘user requirements’ professional to translate to a senior analyst/developer the needs of the project sponsor and it has been completely obvious that this ’translator’ was merely a piece of lint in the flywheel of life, and the project would have been better off without them. No wonder such a high percentage of software projects fail!

To get to the point of being a senior analyst/programmer in many cases you are going to have better communication skills and in many projects you will probably end up with a better understanding of the nuances of the business than a senior manager.  Why? Because you’ve got to produce a model of the whole thing in your head to then translate into software (and work out where you can do it better). 

If you want to really work out how to improve your business go talk to a developer after they’ve done the analysis on your project and ask them, “so if you weren’t doing what we are telling you to do, how would you do it instead?”

So it can be pretty sickening to watch someone speaking in a meeting in pidgin English to a developer who probably has twice the brain and communication skills that the speaker has. 

The other thing that is blindingly obvious is that there is often a ‘weight for age’ handicap we’re missing here. A lot of developers are young – a lot of the people they’re talking to are much older, with much more time to understand the internal politics of the workforce in general and that organisation in particular.

That said, some techies on occasion not only make no attempt to reach a non-technical audience, they seem to go out of their way to bullshit them with TLAs (three letter acronyms). Check out the following that I received today from an internet service provider that hosts a website I’m involved with:  

“[omitted] will be upgrading our router and switch core to bring the latest OS online as well as implementing some patches for the BGP daemons in order to help minimize the cascading effect during BGP4 convergence. We will also be restructuring our router core in an effort to simplify their interactions and increase the speed of convergence while making a failed uplink a more resilient condition.

This will occur in multiple phases, with an expected full network outage which should last for a maximum of five minutes…

The rest of the work will be focused on each of our routers which in turn will cause sub-optimal routing as a by-product of BGP4 convergence. If you notice a hiccup, then please wait around 30 seconds for the ingress paths to stabilize and try again.

The last phase of the work will be turning up our new 100Mbit Savvis uplink and bringing it into full production.

We will do our best to minimize the effects of these upgrades and hopefully the work done tonight will ameliorate the resulting growing pain problems brought to the forefront in the last couple weeks…”

It’s stuff like this that gives techies a bad name …

Posted under Hate pets

Expect this item to expand over time…

But here’s a couple of recent classic bloopers suggesting by implication how not to run a website.

1. The gift voucher which costs $10 to ship to you

Go into Woolys Wheels website and try and buy a gift voucher. Choose, say, the $100 gift voucher and their shipping cost is $10 … (-: Then ring them to point this out and speak to an unhelpful employee who then tells you he can’t do anything about it.

Result: customer goes to another bike shop.

2. The supermarket that deletes your laboriously compiled shopping lists

Coles upgrades their online shopping database. Decide that irrespective of the fact that many of your customers may have spent a couple of hours laboriously putting together the contents of their standard shopping lists, you will just delete all shopping lists where the customer hasn’t bought anything recently (even where the customer has only registered one week prior to the upgrade). 

Result: customer goes to Woolworths.

3. You can buy anything at our store provided you pay with our credit card

You’re one of the biggest online auction sites out there. Decide to force all your sellers to offer Paypal as a payment method, and then, take it a step further by insisting that all transactions will be paid for using Paypal on the basis of “improved buyer experience”. Assume that neither the market or the relevant competition authorities will realize that you are just trying to increase the takeup of Paypal – as if you force every Ebay user to have a Paypal account they are increasingly using Paypal on other websites (and in fact in your own publically released financial results Paypal just happens to be the fastest growing area of your business …).

Result: Competition authority rejects your approach, begins examining other parts of your business, and you create thousands of annoyed sellers and buyers. Your stock price crashes as every news item that mentions you triggers dozens of responses from annoyed sellers talking about their poor experience with your business.

4. As an auction seller you can leave any feedback about a buyer – providing it’s positive

Seems unfair I know to mention Ebay again, but with this much recent management talent you just can’t avoid them.

You earn most of your revenue from sellers (basically unless they use Paypal buyers are worth nothing to Ebay). So to “improve the buyer experience” disable the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers, whilst buyers can continue to leave negative feedback for sellers. Better still, disallow sellers from trading (even with a previous track record of thousands of items from which you earned thousands of dollars in commission) if they have a few recent negative feedback items.

Result: thousands more responses from annoyed sellers anywhere Ebay is mentioned on the web.

5. Use our web form to submit a sales enquiry – but don’t expect a response 

Clarence St Cyclery website. Currently 5 days and counting. If it was a technical query you can sort of understand this – I mean, like, that’s a cost  centre. But a new business enquiry? Most people expect a response in 1 day. Many prospective customers will submit an enquiry and keep looking at your competition until you respond – so it’s best to respond within hours.

6. Use Skype subscriptions for your business – you just won’t be able to renew them

There are a number of great features in Skype which make it ideal for a small business. Free integration with Salesforce.com to allow incoming caller id based popups for example, free global conferencing with other Skype users etc. However if you’re running a small business you want to be able to coordinate invoicing and control expenses. Enter Skype’s ‘Business Control Panel’ where you can allocate credit to multiple users and perform various other corporate functions. 

But there’s current a big trap for BCP users: if they purchase a Skype Subscription through the BCP (which gives you both a set of incoming phone numbers and free calling to standard phone lines for various countries as well as voicemail etc) you cannot actually renew it at the end of the term of the subscription! Nobody of course tells you this in advance so at the end of your (say) 3 month subscription for your employee they are left with a set of phone numbers which you may well have given out to clients that cannot renewed as part of the subscription (the only way – and it’s an expensive way) around it is to individually extend each phone number (when the numbers come with a subscription anyway).

Result: each individual Skype user must purchase their own subscription with all the lack of control (the subscription and phone numbers belong to the employee and not the company) and lack of expenditure tracking involved.

7. The downloadable takeaway pizza menu that you can’t print

Christos Pizza website. You just want to order a pizza. Great, there’s a takeaway menu you can download. Only problem is someone has failed to explain to their graphic designer that a lot of printers don’t support inverse printing well (where you have white typeface on a black background).

Result: the printed version of the menu that you would to take to your friends downstairs and get their orders from is totally unreadable.

8. The books for sale on Amazon that you cannot buy

Amazon. I am surprised that Amazon could make a list like this but their Marketplace (3rd party sellers) book sales can be the most frustrating experience on the planet if you are shipping outside say the UK or US. Essentially you choose a book from the MarketPlace section, add it to your shopping basket, go all the way through the payment process, including putting in credit card details, and finally as the last stage of the half dozen steps in the buying process you are told that the MarketPlace seller does not ship to your country. Buy half a dozen books at a time and you can waste 45 minutes taking each MarketPlace seller through the whole process. Amazon support tells me that their shipping information indicates which country MarketPlace sellers ship to: it most definitely doesn’t.

What’s your classic ecommerce blooper experience?

Listening to a Bloomberg podcast commentary the other day, the commentator noted that he was old enough to remember the last few bad recessions. Times where you walked into a store and were literally mobbed by sales staff, times where restaurant staff would pull out your chair. If you’re running an commercial website ‘times are a changing’.

Posted under Hate pets

The mysteries of cultural transmission are propelling “perfect storm” up the cliche charts at the moment. Presumably Mr Clooney and the 2000 movie of the same name is at least partially to blame but it’s interesting how 8 years later it suddenly seems to be catching on.

Whilst nowhere near as popular as the teeth-grating conversation-stopper “at the end of the day” (17.4m mentions in Google) “perfect storm” is still clocking in a quite respectable 3.5m Google results.

To put this into perspective “in the final analysis” only registers 1.5m times.

“Perfect storm” is already being nicely mangled in things I’ve been reading “because … like ‘perfect’ means ‘good’ doesn’t it?” So, I read some corporate guru talking the other day about how for his commodity supply company there was a ‘perfect storm’ of influences coming together to increase sales to China…

I don’t know whether it’s my monocle getting in the way or something but it is interesting how a lot of these phrases are kind of conversation-terminators.

The original meaning of ‘perfect storm’ of course was talking about a freak-convergence of various totally unpredictable factors coming together – “I mean, it’s not as if I could predict any of this credit crunch fallout, it was a ‘perfect storm’.”

And likewise it’s not as if I expect you to respond to my summing up because once the day has ended it’s like-kinda finished you know? Just as my analysis is ‘final’.

Posted under Hate pets