David Leigh

During the 30 Day Challenge, Ed Dale was fond of comparing internet marketing to American Idol. The theory is simply that the aim of American Idol is to sell the audience the record that they want to buy and to do that the audience votes each week to knock one contestant out.

This whole idea originated - I believe - in Spain with Operacion Triunfo some 6 years ago or so, and at least one singer from that first series went on to great things. Although he didn’t win, David Bisbal won at least one Grammy a few years ago.

However, it is interesting to watch both American Idol on UK television and Operacion on Spanish TV at the moment. While American Idol is nice and slick and lasts a maximum of 90 minutes, Operacion Triunfo is a bloated monster. To continue the internet marketing analogy, if American Idol is marketing the way Ed Dale tells us in the 30 Day Challenge, Operacion Triunfo is one of the spammiest sites going, with poor content and popups all over the place.

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Since I was lucky enough to be best man to my brother last year I know a thing or two about giving best man speeches. It went down extremely well, which was a relief, but I did enjoy it in the end. Nothing like a captive audience who are actually laughing in the right places.

This morning I’m recovering from seeing The Cure at Palau Sant Jordi, where they played for an amazing 3 hours 5 minutes and performed 38 songs! Although there were problems with the drums drowning out everything else for a period, many of the songs were The Cure at their best, something akin to being run over by an express train.

The concert kicked off with a couple of numbers from Disintegration, which do benefit from the band’s stripped down sound owing to dropping keyboards from the lineup, but the highlights for me were the earlier songs. (more…)

The other day I blogged about how Telefonica sucks due to the abuse of their monopoly. I also blogged about Stompernet spoiling the ride for many internet marketers, which Andy Jenkins took exception to, but it has drawn some negative comments in Immediate Edge and at least one internet marketer who is a member of the Stompernet faculty seems to agree in an email pushing the latest Stompernet product.

After my night of insomnia I got up really late yesterday - yes, much later than usual. After a couple of hours with internet access everything suddenly shut off - no phone, no internet.

Telefonica sucks. Worse than Stompernet.

Tuesday night I didn’t sleep well. I’m at home on my own with the cats for company, and so maybe it was them disturbing me - I really can’t remember. Last night I kept being woken by one of the cats, so decided to get up and work for a bit. I went back to bed at 2:45 and slept until another cat decided he didn’t want to sleep.

And now tonight, just when I was dropping off to sleep I was woken up by a beep. Mobile phone? Cordless phone? PDA? Nope, so back to bed. BEEEEP. Drifting off. BEEEEP - every three minutes.

So I tried to identify in which room. It’s loudest in the bedroom but doesn’t sound like it’s in there. Listen to the neighbourr wall - not that either. Try and sleep. BEEEP. Drift off. BEEEEP. And then a cat started.

So it is now 3:50, I haven’t slept properly since Monday and I’m feeling a bit the worse for wear for it. Part of me says get a coffee now…

Black 332 Bakelite Telephone

Originally uploaded by Old Telephones

At the end of last year my parents, who live on the Costa Brava, decided to take the plunge and subscribe to ADSL. They’ve been signed up to Direct Telecom for a few years ago, mainly because they have fantastically cheap calls and my sister lives in Australia.

They signed up for ADSL with Direct Dial and received the equipment, and waited the four weeks they were told it would take for Telefonica to connect them. Unfortunately on the final day my parents received a phone call from Direct Telecom telling them that Telefonica couldn’t install ADSL. Anyway, Direct Dial reapplied to Telefonica; another month later the same result. So my parent’s Spanish friend phoned Telefonica to find out what the problem was.

The answer; since my parents don’t use the telephony service from Telefonica, they wouldn’t connect them to ADSL, simple as that, clearly an abuse of Telefonica’s monopoly and illegal under European law. Last year they were fined €150 million - I hope the bastards are fined again.

Last year I finally got around to reading some books that I should have read years ago. One of those was Neuromancer by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, and I recently bought the two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The prose is pretty dense and so they’re not exactly for the fainthearted, but great reads all the same. In many ways it is remarkable how Gibson foretold of a massively internetworked world and it was he who is responsible for the term cyberspace (as well as ‘the matrix’ please note). Although I can’t quite visualise what Gibson’s cyberspace looks like, it doesn’t seem all that distant in some ways from virtual worlds such as Second Life.

One of the aspects that I find interesting is the way in which AIs (artifical intelligences) are born and evolve in cyberspace, appearing as voodoo gods to some, as well as the consciousness of people being captured in in a biochip so that they survive beyond death, questioning the nature of existence.

A couple of things that date the novels somewhat - Neuromancer was written 25 years ago to be fair - is the number of times that faxes are mentioned, the amount of smoking that goes on (although in a post-WW3 scenario perhaps smoking in public has become accepted again), and that nobody seems to use a mobile phone.

Thoroughly recommended, if you haven’t read the trilogy yet go and buy on Amazon now.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, william gibson, neuromancer

Well, I’m back. And it’s an interesting start to the year.

First I forgot to renew one of my domains. The website isn’t important to me any more as it has had a Google penalty for around 18 months, but almost all my email goes through this domain as I’ve used it since 1999.

First of all I thought that people weren’t back at work yesterday, until I looked at the website. Thinking it was my server, I checked another domain; it was fine. Finally checking the DNS details I found that to all intents and purposes the domain no longer existed.

Re-registering the domain was no problem, and the website was up and running within a couple of hours. But when I found no email this morning I began to worry. After multiple reconfigurations it might be working - it was throwing out a 550 - no relaying error earlier, but I’ve received some spam which at least is a good sign

The second interesting thing is that I’m no longer on Digg. Digg+blog has been a powerful combination in getting articles to rank in minutes, but I admit that I may have overdone it with Digg. They clearly think so as my account is no longer and my IP address seems to be blocked.

I’ve been using Digg regularly since about May for StomperNet SIMPLE; then the 30 Day Challenge; and just recently with Immediate Edge. I’ll take it a bit easier with other similar sites as I’ve been hitting them too, but it will be interesting to see how much my rankings suffer by being bigtime undugg.

Oh, the shame of it - what would Ed Dale say?

Technorati Tags: digg, immediate edge, stompernet simple, 30 day challenge

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The presents have been bought, if not wrapped, I’m just busy backing up data and working out what I need to take away with me and then preparing for departure tomorrow. I’m headed for the Costa Brava, so as well as the normal turkey I hope to get a dive or too in at the same time, although the weather isn’t looking fantastic.

Anyway, here’s to a merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous 2008!

3 presents waiting……… Originally uploaded by paper by design

Only a few more days before Xmas and I’ve still got to think of some presents. I keep meaning to spend some “quality time” to daydream myself into action, but it just isn’t happening. Weirdly enough I can’t find a website that helps choose presents based on your relationship with the person and their own likes and dislikes. So here I am working at SEO/Internet marketing and wondering what I’m going to do when I hit the shops tomorrow.

Any ideas?