Stoking the Fire

Do you ever have those times when you are sure you have done something and then discover days later that you haven't? Well, I have just had one. I thought I had posted this blog, but in fact I hadn't. It is probably my age or my tin foil hat getting tight or I've not got the dosage right on my dried frog pills.

I get the same sensation sometimes when I am driving. I suddenly find that I cannot remember negotiating a roundabout or passing through a set of traffic lights. Although that is more a case of having done something and then forgetting.

I'm rambling. Sorry, my prosthetic yeomen, let's give you that post that I promised and then forgot.

Evar popped by last night to show off his recently acquired bronze medal from the extreme ironing championships (in the king size duvet cover and sheets freestyle) and to make sure that we were all aware that it would have been gold had it not been for a 0.2 point deduction for a suspiciously stained sheet.

There were the usual accusations of sabotage by the now infamous Johanus Merkwier, but they weren't all that convincing given that the day before the competition he partied with a trio of his groupies in his Volkswagen camper.

It was during the discussions over where he could purchase new shock absorbers for his van that he suddenly remarked that I seemed to be spending more time on my blogs again.

I hadn't got the heart to point out that the main reason I was steadfastly looking at my computer screen was that he was wearing the new crocheted mankini given to him by one of the aforementioned groupies and what is claimed to have started the mattress manoeuvring in the first place. It isn't just that you can't help feeling a touch inadequate when presented by Evar in a mankini, but it was the fact that Evar has decided to grow, bead and plait his body hair that meant I was determined not to look in his direction.

But Evar does have a point. I have found a renewed energy for my blogging undoubtedly helped by having an easier time of things at work, but mainly down to doing this blogging talk at the Oundle Festival of Literature.

As part of this I have been busily preparing slides and researching some interesting sites to reference during the talk. I have also set myself up a second blog which will be the one that I shall be using to demonstrate blogging and, hopefully, set up an active blogging ring around the Festival.

These, combined with the inspiration gained on my travels around the blogosphere has really got the energy back and I find myself making time at all kinds of odd parts of the day to blog.

I can only hope the energy continues after the Festival!

Size doesn't matter

Let's face it, that is one of the phrases that a man never wishes to confront. It is right up there with 'I see you as a brother I never had' and 'OK, just as long as you don't wake me and pull my nightie down afterwards.'

However, we are talking blogging here, so I should gently divert you back onto matters more cerebral.

The date for my big event at the Oundle Festival of Literature is fast approaching. Somehow I have to find a way of filling two hours without my audience realising that actually I am just an ordinary, boring, old sod. It could be that the secret is already out there as Alexander Mccall Smith has sold out, but so far I have only managed to rattle off a grand total of three ticket sales.

Look my castellated yeomen, it is no good waiting to see if the tickets get cheaper - there are no discounts! Get your bookings in now - the booking office telephone number is on the web site.

Despite the apparent lack of audience numbers, I have been continuing my preparations and the research and the pretty slides are coming along nicely.

Last night, my daughter persuaded me that I should give Twitter a try.

Before you click on that link, it needs a health warning. This Twitter thing is terribly addictive and has the ability to sidetrack you totally from real life.

To oversimplify matters, the principle is that you 'follow' people on the site and you see what they are up to in their daily life in the form of short, 140 character messages and you then have conversations start up rather like sending text messages on a mobile phone.

In my first foray into the world of Twitter was a strange and surreal experience.

I soon started to follow Richard Madeley, who's blog I highlighted in these very pages after I discovered it in the Times Top 100 blogs. Then, much to my amazement, he started to follow me! Just what a megastar of daytime TV is doing following me is a bit of a mystery, but there you go.

Taking the opportunity, I decided to ask the question that has been on my mind ever since I first read his blog 'Do you write your own blog?' to which he replied 'Yes'. So loads of congrats and kudos to the guy. It certainly adds another dimension to the character you see on the boob tube while devouring your afternoon buns.

Anyway, back to the topic in hand. One of the strange phenomenon of the world of Twitter is the number of famous people you can follow on the site. In the real world it would be called stalking, but on this site it seems you can do it all totally legally.

Imagine the response you would get if you sidled up to a celebrity in a restaurant and asked if they wrote their own blog? The restraining order would be the least of your worries.

This Twitter thing is amazing. Next time you find yourself at a loose end and don't know if you want to knit some breasts or try something new on the computer, give it a go.

The day of my event approaches.

I'm pretty sure that there was someone famous (who's name I have forgotten) who said something like "stealing from a single source is called plagerism, but stealing from multiple sources is called research."

Whoever said it was obviously some smart fella who knew his stuff.

It is all pretty appropriate at the moment as the sands slip through the glass towards my session at the Oundle Festival of Literature. If anyone is actually reading this still, this takes place at the Sir Peter Scott Building, Oundle School on 7th March 2009 at 13:00 (thats 1pm in old money.) See the web site for booking details.

With that session on blogging rapidly approaching, it was with great fortune that one of my contacts from the days when I was interesting on 360 surfaced on Multiply. It seems that Neil (aka nomadtraveller) is not only well travelled, but he gets time to read the weighty Sunday papers. I guess you have to find something to do when you spend so much time in airport departure lounges.

It seems that there is a huge aid to my research published in this week's hernia inducing edition, part one of the 100 top blogs by Bryan Appleyard.

Very useful and very interesting - probably the kind of thing that Yahoo 360 had in mind when they started their interesting list and instead they got me! Never mind, I guess that one day they will learn!

It looks like there is a useful mine of information there just waiting for a claim jumper to devour.

As my lunch hour is almost over, I hadn't got much time for additional research, but suffice to say, I had a little surf. Have a go, you'll like it, not a lot, but you'll like it. (I'm sure it used to be his catch phrase, but if it ain't he'll never find me).

Also, I learned something. I wouldn't have believed it, but Paul Daniels is 70! He doesn't look it. Hasn't he worn well? (No, wait, that catchphrase was somebody else).

Welcome to the Ecosystem

Find your place in the Ecosystem.

I know I said I was running away, but I thought I ought to explore a strange phenomenon that seems to be going on around Yahoo! Although I haven’t been around that much, I have been popping in now and again to see what is going on. On each of these visits, I seem to find a 360 friend who is baling out or an email pointing me to some petition blog.

It seems that we are all involved in some evolution. I could have decided to sit down and check if I was to retain my reversible thumbs, see if I was growing some extra appendages or find out if I could imitate the cat by licking my important little places. Instead, I decided I should explore what was going on. (Note 1)

It seems that the 360 community is being stirred up by whispers from the Yahoo ivory towers as Jerry Yang and his merry band of faceless pixies announced Yahoo!’s financial results for Quarter 3 2007.

Given the rumours and the various mails and messages going around, I thought that I should see if this all made any sense. (Note 2)

With any set of corporate results, the raw measure of how good or bad they are is the effect on the share price. On Wednesday morning the share price jumped - but as it says in that CNN article “The results won qualified praise from Wall Street analysts, though most acknowledged that Yahoo still has a lot of work to do to revive its business.”

It seems that as far as the Wall Street analysts are concerned, all is not well inside of Yahoo! (Note 3)

The problem is that Yahoo! has seen the amount of money it is making falling over the last year or so. While other rivals appear to be powering ahead. In particular, Google appears to be going from strength to strength. Two days after the Yahoo! Results, Google announced a massive 46% leap in profits.

When you look at the history of the two companies, you will see that both started off in the Internet search engine business. It is in this area that highlights how Yahoo! has got left behind as in August, Google powered more than half all internet searches.

Yahoo!’s income stems from advertising and from us ‘users’ (Note 4) and from our willingness to pay for their ‘premium’ offerings like the Flickr Pro account. Either way, they require that we keep coming and keep eyeballing the ads and patronising their services.

Now, my flavoursome yeomen, this gives us two very interesting observations.

The first stems from searching my friends list for Wall Street billionaires. Although I didn’t find any of those, I did notice that there is an interesting demographic. Unlike some sites, you would care to mention, Yahoo! 360 appears to attract a large number of older people – with disposable income. There is also a large number of women. In advertising this would be considered a profitable market segment – but also a segment with conservative traits that would not react well to change – especially if they didn’t feel part of the process.

The second is how Yahoo! appears to have forgotten that it is us and our willingness to provide content that generates the hits on their pages. The level of communication between Yahoo! and their clients has been incredibly poor. They have also been slow to react to feedback they receive. While they busily work in the background to develop the ‘new and improved’ Yahoo! product, what is already in place has become neglected and plagued by performance and technical issues.

Whatever the new offering we are promised in 2008 consists of, someone in Yahoo! needs to start engaging with their clients. Already people are beginning to experiment with alternatives and some are moving away already.

Yahoo! takes it’s client base for granted at its peril. There are alternatives out there. We use 360 because it suits our style and that are likeminded people here. When those people will move on, the trickle of leavers will turn into a flood.

On the Yahoo! Q3 2007 Earnings Call, Jerry Yang described the Yahoo! offering as an ecosystem, saying “We determined that to win in this marketplace, we must take advantage of our unique assets to drive value across a broad ecosystem of users, advertisers, publishers and developers.”.

Well, Jerry, listen to your clients. You and your people may consider that we are mere plankton in terms of our contribution to your fortune, but without us plankton, your ecosystem will collapse. Listen to your clients, make us feel that our views are important then perhaps your broad ecosystem will start to thrive

NOTE 1: as you probably guessed, I haven’t discovered any extra appendages or the ability to lick my own important little places. To be honest, if I had, I would probably to busy to contemplate working on this blog. Click to return

NOTE 2: And I will have to keep some of my natural political instincts in check as I do. It would be very easy to go of on tangents about the dealings between Yahoo And China – but I should let you go discover those for yourself. Click to return

NOTE 3: I’ve checked my friends list on 360. As far as I can tell, nobody there is a Wall Street analyst. Somehow, I don’t get the feeling that Gordon Gecko would relax by rattling off a blog entry or uploading a series of photos of his latest financial killing to Flickr. Click to return

NOTE 4: I still detest the term ‘user’ when applied to a person who displays loyalty and devotion by visiting an internet site or brand. The term ‘user’ has a derogatory air, it likens us the customer to a drug addict who visits the site to get a fix and that despite everything will come back again and again unable to break the habit…..

…. Errrm…. Maybe this is a dangerous analogy. Maybe there is a certain amount of habit in the way we use Yahoo! – I just don’t like being reminded of it. Mind you, Yahoo! isn’t the only dealer in town… Click to return

Making the Habit

Knowing where to stick it.

Yes, I admit it. I have run away. In the end it all got too much. As the friends list grew, I found myself with more sites to visit and read and comment – and I slowly got further and further behind.

There comes a point where you are so far behind that you just don’t know where to start – so you just don’t. I reached that point and in the end, I just had to let it go.

In one of those strange twists that life serves up, I saw a man wandering through the town this morning and I suddenly felt the need to capture the image. I needed to write.

He was at the vegetable counter, picking up carrots in manicured hands and inspecting them with glinting, grey eyes. It was the mustard yellow suit that made you notice him, before his confident gait air of authorative confidence made you take notice. Once drawn in , you couldn’t help but feel in the presence of a man with eccentricity that almost verged of rebellion.

In contrast to the white hair, neatly trimmed around a tanned and gleaming bald pate and round face with the minimum of wrinkles, he wore a daffodil yellow waistcoat stretched over a slight paunch. Under the waistcoat with a livid red and white checked shirt and a royal blue silk bow tie.

I moved to select some mushrooms and he strode of into cold meats. Our lives had touched and I knew that there was something I needed to record, ‘just in case’.

So now I have to get back into the habit. (Note 1) The positive habit of writing something every day.

Some time ago, a teacher told me that the secret of establishing a positive habit or breaking a negative habit was to make a conscious effort to do it for a month. The theory being that after a month it you will have established a habit and you will do it without thinking.

I can’t remember the teacher, but I have tried it before with other things. (Note 2) It kind of works so it is worth a try.

However, just in case, I think I shall practice my habit somewhere quiet, somewhere away from the temptations and distractions – and this time I shall not get carried away on a tide of ‘interestingness’, nor will I struggle finding pictures and formatting. I do this to write after all…

NOTE 1: That really should be easy. I have some humdinger habits that I have managed to keep for years! I still bite my nails when I am bored, I still crave tobacco (although nowadays I just follow smokers in the street until the craving dies or I get slapped). I talk to myself when I am trying to thing through a complex problem – which if I am also resolving my tobacco cravings can cause a few problems. Click to return

NOTE 2: Whatever the judge and the ‘gentlemen’ of the press says it was a valid experiment and I wasn’t lurking in those bushes and the camera was purely to photograph wildlife. Click to return