UK online reputation management
** Theme reconstruction / tweaking in progress **
I love German, don’t you? A real ‘say-it-like-it-is’ construction kit of a language. They don’t piss about with euphemisms and veiled descriptions for things. They just bolt together enough words to get the job done (in the order that they think of them).
Business directory scams? “Address book swindlers” more like!
Fantastiche!
So says the Evening Standard headline I spotted at Paddington tonight. I love headlines – especially when they’re so deliciously over the top.
‘Swine flu kills healthy people’ is ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’ as Basil Fawlty might have said. It’s also the journalistic equivalent of ‘Defcon 4′. Logjcally, there’s only one place to go after that headline. “Official: End Of World”.
But it’s not just the apocalyptic that amuses me but those damn headlines that catch your eye like a virus you can never quite get rid of. Ones like the surreal and inexplicably pleasing “Fish Spillage”.
Years later, I still find myself trying to picture that event. 
Skype Spammer exhibits manners and sense of humourI got interrupted with a Skype IM spammer earlier today. You know, one of those guys who happens to be holding the countless millions of dollars left to you by the brother you never knew you had?
I thought I’d send a quick response summarising my feelings. So I did – and got a chirpy reply back. How nice. Who said these scammers don’t have at least a sense of humour!
And that name rings a bell, too.
I picked this piece up on the NASA site via Twitter (following Astronautics).
Moral of this story is: don’t give up, you’ll get there eventually.
When Alan Shepard was asked what was going through his mind sitting on the launch pad at the Cape in his Mercury capsule, his answer was ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.’ (Interestingly, John Glenn also said the same thing many years later after his return to space aboard the Shuttle).
What would be going through my mind? That my spaceship’s been put together by people who can’t spell meteorite.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
This animation is one of the best things I’ve seen online. Brilliant. A spellbinding way to show the greedy, self-destructive madness of selling risk onwards for bigger an bigger profit.
There are parts of this animation that I think might be slightly inaccurate but I don’t think it detracts from the power of the piece. I’m not a financier, but when he talks about leverage, I think he misses the point that leverage isn’t just about getting the same level of profit from more volume but using volume to achieve a better buying price – and hence making more profit.
Details aside, the animation still hits the issue right between the eyes. Watch it and tell me you didn’t go “Yesss!!!” at some point.
Take one talented 65 year-old woman (my mum) and point her in a different direction where her skills can make a difference. Result? The Silicon Granny. She’s web-savvy, digitally-equipped and mad as hell that older people don’t get to enjoy all that technology has to offer. Yet.
We’re going to have some fun with this site. We might as well. Life’s too short. Given her age – and I don’t mean to be insensitive about this – SiliconGranny is something of a time-limited proposition
Like we didn’t already know there was a world recession?Last year I podcasted a sort of ‘Dragon’s Den meets Question Time’ event in Plymouth. Four out of five people on the panel expressed the view that we were all at fault for talking ourselves into a recession.
I know that banking is built on the idea of confidence – something without weight or substance. But the idea that the media can really push the global economy into recession is… is.. well, a kind of cultural delusion of grandeur, if you ask me.
Well, you didn’t. Anyway, I heard somewhere on the radio that we were in a recession – official. So if, like me, you weren’t afraid to say ‘recession’ last year you can consider yourself well and truly responsible.
**Ignore the rest of this post and head on over to Spotify!! **
That’s got me thousands of visitors. And something like a hundred or so Spotify invites to give out – so far.
Ok – so someone gave me an invite and I blogged positively – and carefully – about how much fun it was and how clever their marketing was.
So there’s proof of how effective your honest-to-goodness WordPress blog can be. See trend, blog trend. Only in my case, there’s something missing. Yes, you’ve guessed it. A way of making money
Look, I’ve always hated AdSense. I know, I know, I’m playing with the power of Google just running a blog. But I honestly do hate what AdSense is doing to the thing we used to call knowledge. I’ll spare you the middle-aged academic rant.
So, hard though it might be to believe (and even stupider though it might seem to any of you online marketers) I’m passing on Spotify invites day after day for no other reason than its nice to give something away that makes someone else happy.
Spotify don’t mind – after all, even as I write this I’m doing their marketing for them. So everyone’s happy. Aaaah.
Without a doubt. A truly awesome toy. So what if 3 in every 4 pounds spent in the UK goes to Tesco? This is 17.99 of those pounds well spent.
This little flyer has trounced all the other gifts in our house. It is the most satisfying little flying machine ever. It’s a technological marvel – with two motors (front and rear) and a powerful little rechargeable battery in a unit that weighs almost nothing.
The left hand lever on the r/c unit sends power to the main rotors for lift. The right hand level cuts or boosts power to the independent tail rotor to counter or increase rotation.
What it doesn’t have is a control to tip the nose forward to produce forward motion but somehow, it’s so damn satisfying as it is that you can overlook that fact. Launching it by hand with the rotors full on and the nose pointing to the ground produces a wonderful ‘Airwolf’-style swoop, pull-up and return that more than makes up for it.
You must have one. Or two. Or three.
A few years ago, I was away from home on a personal development weekend. I remember texting Clare from a cold, rainy supermarket carpark.
‘I’m sitting here in a miserable gay pain’ I wrote.
At which point, I collapsed in a fit of lunatic giggling. Ah, predictive text.
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