Firetop

Since my last trip to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in 2006 the old street queuing system has been replaced with a new staggered queuing system at Wimbledon Park Golf Club. This means that if you get the bus from Wimbledon station (£3.50 return) you’re in for quite a walk away from the ground again before you can even find the end of the queue. The reason behind this change, other than improved road safety, is that all the overnight tent dwellers seeking the limited court tickets have been moved to Wimbledon Park Golf Club. Clearly they need to be first in the queue, so everybody else has to go and queue up behind them before being led in waves down through the golf course, through security and over the road bridge to the kiosks. (more…)

I’ve left my annual Eurovision posting a little late this year but better late than never… I’ve watched all of the song entries in short via youtube and my personal favourites include Germany and Denmark. There are some typically mad Eurovision entries which include a Spanish Elvis/Jimmy Hill, Latvian pirates on ecstacy and a Bosnia & Herzegovina entry which wouldn’t look out of place at the village pantomime. However, when did an entry’s insanity ever mean it didn’t win Eurovision? When did liking decent songs ever give them a head start? To that end I’ve ordered my 2008 top ten based on whether I think they might actually win Eurovision. (more…)

This year I decided it was about time I attended Usability Week, a week of presentations from the Nielsen Norman Group focusing on website design and usability. A whole week would have certainly been overkill for me so I picked the most relevant day (today) – ‘Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability’. I’ve read one of Jakob Nielsen’s books before and receive his regular usability email alerts so I knew what to expect. By lunchtime I realised that the day could just have easily been entitled ‘People are more fundamentally stupid than you could possibly imagine’. Definitely the best day I’ve spent out of the office in quite a few years gaining new knowledge and insight. (more…)

This week I’ve discovered a nice cheap solution for hosting a one-off digital edition of a magazine / brochure. By digital edition, I mean an application which lets you browse a magazine online and turn the pages - as if it was there in paper in front of you. I came across a company called Yudu and was guided by their online salesman Ray (via live chat app) to their rather lovely FREE offering www.yudufreedom.com. I’ve seen a few different ‘page-turning software’ offerings over the years and this free solution seems to offer all the same features as better known paid-for solutions like Zinio. They even reassure you that there really are no catches, just thoroughly lovely people making their commercial technology free for one-offs. (more…)

Made an interesting discovery this week, people aren’t using Google to search for butchers in quite the way one might imagine. Whilst ‘butcher’ is the number one single keyword (as you’d expect), the top butcher based phrases include ‘Butcher’s Bay’, ‘Frank Butcher’, ‘Pat Butcher’ and…. no not ‘Ricky’ but… former England footballer ‘Terry… Butcher’. This is probably quite a good indicator of the demographics of Google, hip young video gamers looking for assistance in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, TV soap obsessed Eastenders fans searching for the dearly departed Mike Reid or his former on-screen wife Pat (and her many online rumours). (more…)

Last week I attended the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London and was a little surprised to find that one or two speakers were still presenting Web 2.0 solutions such as article commenting, ‘twittering’ and peer to peer networking as the must-have for all web publishers. I use the word ‘surprised’ because it is my firm belief that this is not the case; we shouldn’t all stop focusing on a yet to be exhausted Web 1.0 by getting overly excited about some modern web applications which really DO NOT fit all publishing scenarios – especially those in many B2B sectors. (more…)

This week we’ve begun an interesting experiment in my house; the television has been sold, replaced with an LCD HD monitor and a PC laptop. Everything that we watch is now downloaded via 8mb broadband using the BBC iPlayer or commercial offerings such as Channel 4’s on Demand service. Without any means of watching ‘live TV programmes’ from the BBC we no longer need a TV license… so we’re cancelling it. From what I’ve read this won’t go down too well with TV licensing but is perfectly legal, it seems they may wish to inspect our home but I’m quite open to that eventuality if and when it occurs. The BBC are not apparently expecting to see droves of people cancelling their TV licenses, in most cases they’re probably correct, but in an age where mass media is replaced with personalised services we’re definitely jumping on the cheaper, advertising free, optimimal viewing experience. (more…)

About two months ago I began researching environmentally friendly cars, looking at the CO2 outputs of hybrids and low emission diesel engines for something cost effective and ‘green’. Hybrids like the Toyota Prius are still quite pricey and some environmentalists actually believe their enormous batteries are in themselves a contradiction to the word ‘green’ - so I was interested in the VW Polo Blue Motion (low emission diesel). I went to the VW website, I read other independent reviews and was impressed with the reported fuel consumption, emissions and road tax free status… but then I tried to test drive one and guess what? I couldn’t. (more…)

It’s that time of year again where Grand National fever grips the UK population and everybody goes flutter crazy. With a four year winning streak behind me I’ll be looking to make this my 5th year of success with my spread betting technique. Last year I won £145, putting me up £115 after taking off the £30 outlay, a shame that I only ‘bet to win’ using my strategy and not ‘each way’ because I also managed to bet on McKelvey which came in second. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the analysis again this year as usual and thanks to a Wikipedia Grand National winners chart decided to lower my maximum handicap threshold from 11-5 to 11-1. I may live to regret that as it rules out the yet to fall over ‘Vodka Bleu’ but fingers crossed it’ll be a wise move. (more…)

In 2002 email marketing was seeing the march of lovely, ‘exciting’, colourful, image-filled HTML beauties. These new emails were enabling us to A/B test all manner of factors due to their pixel tracking capability – informing us of open rates, click through rates and pass-alongs. However, after seeing years of continually falling open rates, default image blocking as high as 50%, preview windows and consequential problems with graphic ad serving I am going back to the old skool with .txt as a default preference for all future campaigns and e-newsletter templates. (more…)