Sep 13
Internet, Life, Play Cannonball, Interweb, Life, Web/Tech 2 Comments
For the next few days I am away on the Cannonball 8000, from London to Budapest.
You can see our progress on our Team 30 Cannonball website… http://www.team30.com.
So until I get back I will be blogging there, so pay us a visit and see how we are progressing.
Sep 11
Business, Internet bit10, Business, Interweb, Web/Tech No Comments
Wow who’d have thought that having a great website developed was soo traumatic, especially when you own a company who does web design.
My trauma however is no reflection on the bit10 people doing my project, its more of a reflection on my inability to really know what I want!
We are now on our 3rd major design iteration and probably our 50th minor iteration, and its starting to look fantastic.
The main thing I have learnt from the experience so far is that we employ fantastic designers however they aren’t mindreaders. So unless you are the sort of person who can visualise exactly what you want and convey it in simple terms others can understand (neither of which I can do), then the design process has to be iterative.
Mental note to self ’sell clients far more design iterations’. :)
Sep 07
Business, Internet Cannonball, Interweb, Web/Tech No Comments
Marketing Week have published my letter to the editor regarding click fraud in response to their piece on the subject last week.
Unfortunately Marketing Week, don’t make content available to non subscribers online, so you will have to do with my copy below, or grab yourself a copy of the 7th September issue!
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Dear Editor,
The rise in click fraud is a real cause for concern amongst UK businesses, (Search marketing feels pressure of click fraud, Marketing Week, 31 August 2006) and companies now need to reassess their pay-per-click advertising campaigns to make sure that they do not become the latest fraud victims.
Undoubtedly there are some companies that take great pleasure in clicking their competitors’ links when they first set up a Google AdWords campaign but this is not really a serious problem. The fun soon dies off, especially when companies realise that their competitors are probably doing the same to them.
The real threat actually comes from the automated click-fraud bots which are increasingly widespread, and with more and more PCs around the world now ‘owned’, the opportunities to commit click fraud are significant.
Companies need to protect themselves by limiting their daily spend on cost-per-click campaigns and by undertaking regular trend analysis which will quickly reveal if someone is trying to hurt them. Significant traffic from one region or IP range is relatively easy to deal with if the right controls are in place.
Unless companies start to put more rigorous processes in place to help them analyse and understand the clicks they receive, then the click-based advertising business could soon spiral out of control.
Ben King, Director, bit10, Coventry
Sep 06
Life Life, Politics No Comments
Talking about… BBC News: Blair hit by wave of resignations
Wow what a day in British politics. 8 resignations (as of now), albeit Junior ministers, just because Blair has refused to name his date for leaving office.
Lots of angles to talk about here! Aaahhh!! I don’t know where to start.
Would 1 let alone 8 junior ministers really bother to throw themselves on the sword for such a short term issue?! I suspect there is more to this story… which I am sure I will find the truth out about while watching a 30 second snippet on a History Channel documentary about ‘early 21st century British politics’ in about 40 years time.
However, when will it finally dawn on any parties that general elections are basically a popularity contest?!! As such this always means the popular kid at school will win.
Large amounts of the voters don’t care/don’t understand/are set in the ways to for the current policies of the parties to actually matter.
The labour party I suspect realised this back in the 90s, when they ousted Kinnock and killed off John Smith (remember him?!), to make way for a young and trendy Anthony Charles Lynton Blair aka Tony (I wonder how much of a lead he took, on the naming front, from the famous ancestry denying Anthony Wedgwood Benn aka Tony Benn).
So Is Gordon Brown (who I will let you decide to what extent he does or idoesn’t fulfill the popular kid at school role) the right way to go?!
It took some time for the popularity factor to dawn on the Tories, after the relative success of Maggie aka Baroness Thatcher, they hit rock nearly bottom on popularity with the unbeatable neutrality of John Major.
In an attempt to combat the Blair, they wheeled in William Hague, in hindsight probably a potentially good card played out of at the wrong time, had they thrown him down on the table after his appearance on Have I Got News for You.
Next followed Iain Duncan Smith, I have tried to find something good, bad or of note to say about Iain Duncan Smith and frankly the best I can come up with is that he has the best personal website of all the party leaders I have looked at in this blog!
Next the Tories moved onto Michael Howard, oooh bad move – up until now they seemed to demonstrating some form of iterative improvement, and maybe this was just a step on the path they had to take, however the vampiric image was always going to be a problem!
Now it gets interesting… David William Donald Cameron, the tories (almost) younger play - if I was a gambling man (which I am), I would say this is almost certainly a Blair beater, and possibly very unsporting against a Gordon Brown play by Labour.
The only chance that labour have is to find someone new, young, fresh, charismatic and appealing to the voters.
Anyone fancy a small wager?
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For once I feel obliged to point out that the views expressed in my blog are my own and not those of my employer bit10!
Sep 01
Business, Internet Business, Web/Tech No Comments
Last week saw bit10s first ever appearance in NMA (New Media Age) , for our work we have done in developing, refining and hosting BMG Musicsearch. You can read the whole article here (if you have an NMA login/password), or our press release here.
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