OK – i’ve worked my way through the rest of the templates, tested in the three browsers I have and from what I can see it’s working OK. Thanks to everyone who commented – did I miss anything?
Oct
04
Monthly Archives: October 2005
Oct
04
Snippets 4 Oct
Astromoners display their TV preferences with the discovery of a moon orbiting Xena, the 10th ‘planet’. Predictably, the moon has been called Gabrielle.
Yahoo reveal their input into the digitisation of the world, supportting the Open Content Alliance in creating a digital archive. Unlike Google, Yahoo’s offerieng is opt-in, so they may avod beign sued by the Authors Guild who seem to miss the point about having their works searcheable for anyone instead of languishing on shelves.
Digital Music revenues triple, but the industry continue to crack down on piracy. With the number of people downloading increasing, how many of them are hitting the barriers created by DRM meaning that the music is restrained and it cna only be paid on certain devices.
The South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is encouraging his dozen secretaries to blog on an official group blog. It’s currently only availalbe in Korean. Definitely think we should get a blog from Number 10 now.
The Web1.0 do tomorrow night sounds interesting!
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
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Read the comments from the last meetup to get a feel for how interesting this could be…and if we can get the secret list of 1998 wiords that trigger a drink, we should hold one in London.
Oct
04
Spam Comments and Poor Judgement
Tonm Coates has a tale about spam comments appearing on his blog. But this was not one of the usual random comments offering financial advice, chemicals or various recreational activities, it was a seemingly genuine comment related to the post but placed by a completely fictional character who was created for Cillit Bang advertising. The link posted on the comment went through to this character’s ‘blog’. Instead of deleting it, Tom went throught he effort of tracking the comment down, the trail eventually leading to a marketing company associated with the brand. Now the company has apologised.
The Barry Scott character has appeared in a number of spoof websites and weblogs, created by people unconnected to the Reckitt Benckiser brand. The weblog posting on your site was not endorsed by Reckitt Benckiser or any of the advertising agencies that are mentioned and was a one off error from which lessons have been learnt. We are sorry for any offence it has unwittingly caused.
I’m reading this to say that the character created is no longer in the brand’s control; that people have picked up on the concept and are creating content in that character’s name, either as a spoof or as a facade to hide behind. The lesson learnt could be that you no longer control your creations. If that is the case, who’s next? The alternative is that they ignored a series of comments across blogs created as part of a guerilla campaign until someone seriously called them to task. I think the latter.
Oct
03
Solar Eclipse
There’s an annular solar eclipse today, which will probably not be visible from much of the UK due to cloud. The BBC are again requesting everyone’s photos, a cheap way to get photo stock as well as incuding people. Meanwhile you can watch the eclipse over the web, instead if damaging your eyes, via various national scientific societies.
Oct
02
Dilbert and Blogging
Oct
02
ReStyle time
I’ve been playing around with the templates and the style-sheet for the blog. So now, hopefully, the layout works in IE. and the colours are a little warmer. I’ll probably continue to mess around for a few days.
Oct
01
Snippets 1 Oct
Audi branching out on BlogAds. For a recent award winning campaign, Audi spent 0.5% of their media spend on a Blog Ad promotion. This led to 29% of the visits on the campaign homepage, which is a pretty astounding number. For me, it shows the use of blogs as an advertising channel can tighten the targeting, providing ads that are far more in context with what is being looked for.
Another brand that has won awards for its ads gives a sneak preview of the new UK TV ad online this weekend. The new Guinness ad can be found here (I work for the parent company).
The third space tourist blasted off today to spend 10 days in the International Space Station. At a rumoured £11million, not the cheapest of holidays for soemthing that is definitely not 5 star but something I think a fair few people would love to give it a go.
Rollyo is a great tool to find new resources. The team have put a new front end on Yahoo! search, allowing yoiu to create custom searches of up to 25 blogs, creating a node of excellence for subjects you are interested in. The key is that by allowing you to look at the searches created by others, the tools bring authority and recommendations to search. Using one of the search rolls, you know the results are from pages that someone else has found trustworthy. It introduces a higher level of searching – how do I find a cluster of trusted searches in the subject I want.
Oct
01
Fnd all you need on the web?
Bosch don’t think you should be able to. My dishwasher is having trouble as the water has stopped draining out of it. I can;t find the brouchure to give me some ideas, but no problems I though, it’ll be on the web. Searching for Bosch and diswwaher led me, after a few false click, to the bosch.com customer care page. And apparently, having a small amount of water left inthe bottom is perfectly nomal. Nowhere on theis site could I find detailed info and nor could i find my model. I evntaully tracked the model details down to the UK version of the site. And there is no help at all available here that I can see. Plenty of sales information, but nothng to help me now I’ve bought the appliance. I can re-order the manual, or order service, but nothing to give me a clue to what is going on.
Googling for help led me to a message board, from which I find that this problem is not unusual and that I most likely need to clean out the pump. That may be a little beyond my skillset, so there’s always a plumber.