A perplexed blogger

Source: Indian Book Depot - Map House http://ibdmaphouse.com/Thumb/ITEM_3.jpg

I still cannot comprehend why webmasters of sites would try to spam this blog. It just doesn’t work; Akismet and I just filter them out. A recent one was from DesignsOnline (.) co (.) uk. Not only their homepage boasts an instantaneously off-putting design, it also starts playing a video with sound when loaded. Their bounce rate must be phenomenal, past the 70% threshold.

One of the most abhorrent pages of the site it’s about backlink building. Their package prices range from £150 to £800. These people need to get into good habits.

Now spammers repeat with me: I am an Ideal SEO Boy because:

1. Arrive early to the office

2. Check Google’s TOS just in case they change while I was sleeping

3. Check up the alerts about my competitors

4. Get rid of a few 404’s and redirect 301 a few underperforming documents

5. Fix those surreal URLs the crawler keeps making up on its own

6. Check the most recent patents by Google

7. Carry out a little bit of modelling in R and a few significance tests

8. Participate in a online conversations about international multi-language SEO and Social Media Optimisation

9. Confirm attendance to the next pub gathering with Internet-obssesed guys

10. Patiently evangelise co-workers, providers and clients alike about the importance of not spamming with links as if there was no tomorrow

Think about an organization with deep pockets, with proselitism as its raison d‘être and with a target audience as wide as the Mankind. No, it’s not X-Factor or the UEFA,  it is the Catholic Church and its management, the Holy See. I will be on it soon.

I am reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Laclos, these days, partly because I was looking for any novel in French at home. There are a few Internet users in the US that read books. That is newsworthy surely but the killer statistic is that 20% have at least read an e-book already. Never mind, I will be a late adopter. I am looking forward to the coming war between the Sony, Apple and Amazon. It will push forward the technology, its features and its costs.

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A pothole in West End Lane, West Hampstead, London, made me lose control of my bike a few months ago. Fortunately, a motorist in a Golf a few meters behind me managed to hit the breaks in time. After my visit to A&E, my only injuries were a broken finger of one hand and multiple bruises.

But then this week I got a SMS from some ambulance chasers inviting me to claim compensation for the accident.

FREEMSG: Our records indicate you may be entitled to 3750 pounds for the Accident you had. To claim for free reply with CLAIM to this msg. To opt out text STOP.

Sender: 07517576150

I hope that those two events, visiting the A&E and receiving the SMS, are not connected. If they were, selling my private data would constitute a criminal offence by someone connected to the NHS.

A couple of years after my post about mobile Internet in Spain, a few things changed for those interested in connecting to the Net on the move:

- 3€/day on pay-as-you-go buys you 100 MB a day. You can get that from Yoigo, the Scandinavian MVNO that challenges the three incumbent (Movistar-Telefonica, Vodafone and Orange). Yoigo profusely advertises 29€ for a USB dongle with 5€ credit of data. Their offer cleverly hides two catches in their small print: 1. a minimum charge of 6€ per month, whatever the use and 2. cancellation of the SIM card past 6 months of inactivity.

- Nowadays the number of Wi-Fi access points have multiplied several fold. Cities and towns are densely populated streets in Spain, so your scanning lists dozens of access points.

- The preferred method of WiFI encryption is WEP. Sniffing passwords from hotels, etc. is no longer something anyone can boast about these days.

Why are some shit things so popular – Madame Tussauds and Dan Brown books, for example? The sentence is not mine, it’s David Mitchell’s.

Popularity fortunately does not result in persistence in time. On the contrary, declining popularity seems to grant longevity. For instance, bullfighting, still a cruel, pompous and ridiculous yet legal ‘entertainment’ in nine countries in the world, is definitely not popular in Spain. I am mystified as to why bullfighting still survives at all. Only a few hard-dies do like the tradition. Arguably, their interest in it remains, at least in Internet, unchanged in the last few years. I feel too lazy to research just how many people like ‘los toros‘ in Spain. Or maybe is just that I do not want to know, really.

But I know that the reason why the minority interested in ‘los toros’ it cannot be that they like it. It must something else, maybe it is about status or ideology. Or why not, because it is a subsidized entertainment, by local, national and European authorities. Some British media titles with recognised prestige (that is, among their followers), like the Daily Mail or The Economist, claim that every family in Britain finance this ritual slaughter.

Anything connecting Europe and money is a viral meme with a good start in life among the British. Adding bullfighting in the mix has all the chances of becoming a successful stereotype about the Spanish.

Ironically, the reason for the decline and eventual extinction of this tradition will not be a cultural one: it will be financial: 550 million euros of taxpayer money is allocated to the bullfighting industry per year.

Stereotypes about something do not have a direct relation to the degree of knowledge about it. Football is not exactly an obscure discipline. Never mind, more often than not you will read that the Real Madrid was the favourite of the General Franco.

So predictable.

One of the most persistent Spanish stereotypes consists in comparing the ‘modern’ Spain with the same country in the time of Franco.

For instance, a film critic in London, Alexander Walker, about the film “Second Skin” in the Evening Standard:

…For quite a time, Spain was one of the few countries where an actor of note would have sooner faced a bull than a play a gay. Almodovar (sic) at least changed all that […] Gerardo Vera’s film looks at the Spanish psyche under stress in the new morality.

The late film critic wrote that deep insight into Spanish cinema on February 2nd 2001, some 23 years after the Constitución Española was law!

Very boring.

Hampstead Theatre is, in spite of its name, in Swiss Cottage. It is, along with the also very active Tricycle in Kilburn, the most important theatre in North West London.

The auditorium holds 174 seats.

Tickets & information: 020 7722 9301 or website: Hampstead Theatre. The venue appointed tickets.com to manage their bookings and ticketing.
Eton Avenue
Swiss Cottage
London NW3 3EU

Nearest underground – Swiss Cottage (Exit 2)

Dirty Martini is made with pressed olives in a choice of Belvedere Vodka or Bombay Sapphire Gin served chilled with fresh thyme & a few drops of Noilly Prat. Noilly Prat is a herbal Marseillan vermouth.

We got there on a Friday afternoon. It is round the corner from the Belushi’s, facing the old market in Covent Garden. The bouncer at the entrance inspected the bag that I carried straight from the office.
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Graphic Bar is the place you take someone to rescue him/her from the from the shoppers of Regents’  Street and the tourists of Picadilly Circus.  Just make up  something to celebrate and splash out on a nice evening out at the Graphic.

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The train trip between London and Paris lasts an impressive 2 hours and 15 minutes nowdays. Eurostar service is the most convenient way of travelling to Paris. The train itsef is silent and comfortable. It even offers power sockets next to each seat for business travellers. During the booking process they even let choose you seat depending on whether your connection is the UK or the European one.

The big but is that Eurostar do not not offer WiFi on-board. It does does offer free access at the St. Pancras International station. You can connect in the waiting area and also on the train until you leave the station behind.

The network SSID is ‘StPancras WiFi’. It is an Open network so make sure that the encryption WEP or else is disabled. The network is provided by ‘Access point only (infrastructure).

I did not detect any network at the Gare du Nord in Paris, so there might be none there.

Booking an appointment to your GP is made difficult in the UK. My local medical centre has posters everywhere prompting patients to register to its online booking service, called Emis.

Two additional problems with the so called EMIS Access service:
1. the “Internet Appointment Booking Facility” will not let you book an appointment at 8:30 am, just when you need it most if you are working
2. it failed to register two of three accounts in one session
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There is a very good swimming pool in Swiss Cottage. It is in the Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre, Adelaide Road, NW3 3NF. The premises are managed by GLL in behalf of the Camden council.

The teaching pool is perfect for toddlers. It has been closed for the most of September and all October so far. The website of the company managing the premises does not offer updates about the closure of the teaching swimming pools. To inquiry about updates, you may phone 020 7974 2012, option 9 to speak with an operator.

Rupert Murdoch claimed that Mountain View redirects users from Google to the BBC web site: “The BBC has been paying US internet search engine Google for the right to use key words and phrases that put it on top of results lists. [...] The BBC paid Google so that people looking up details of the Mercury Prize, for instance, would be directed to a BBC website“. Is this SEO or SEM?

To put the claim in context, News Corp is embarked in a number of skirmishes against BBC for a share of the publicity market on TV in the UK and against Google to monetize the content of news site.

The news could be read as an entirely legitimate purchase of Adwords by the BBC. It is unclear whether paying to put the BBC on top of results for certain keywords is referring to any sort of SEO self-inflicting practice against Google’s own Terms of Service.

I carried out a quick research and the results suggest that SEM is not part of the BBC tactics:

1. The BBC is not buying the kws mentioned in the article, eg. Speech Debelle and Mercury Prize

2. The BBC is a notorious pinch-penny in Adwords spending.

The most plausible explanation is however that the piece of news was written by a journalist that either does not have a clue about the permanent tension between SEO and SEM, or that he/she knew all too well.

The quality and interest of a web site has no correlation to whether it is optimised for search engines or not. Some of the best sites I visited recently have a very poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of them is Lucy Moose’s stuffyourdoodles.com. Is is an e-commerce site of handmade stuffed figures made to look exactly like children’s drawings.

The site has testimonials with feedback that most of businesses can only dream about. Clients write about how impressed they are with their stuffed textiles.

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An article of opinion by Andrew Neather on the Evening Standard in August 2009 compared the NHS with the Medicare scheme in the US. Mr. Neather came to say that we are better off in the UK than in the US where 15% of the officially resident US population has with no healthcare insurance at all. But then it contains the understatement of the century: ‘Of course, the NHS is far from perfect‘.

My GP practice only takes calls to book an appointment from 8:30 am from Mondays to Fridays (*). The number sounds busy for 10 to 20 minutes on average, no matter how often you dial it (usually non-stop from two mobile phones). The only available slots left by the time you get through are usually 10:00 am onwards. Booking your appointment doesn’t prevent waiting times from 20 to 60 minutes or ever longer.

Visiting your GP where I live in London results in my wasting a minimum of four working hours.

Employees contribute proportionally more than the Companies Tax to fund the NHS. What I see at my medical centre is that very many patients visibly have less pressing daily schedules than tax-payers with a full-time job: the retired and everyone living on benefits. Would not it be more efficient and sustainable to dedicate an early slot for workers and leave the rest of the day for the rest?

(*) In my area in London a doctor of Camidoc is available during weekends and public holidays.

LinkedIn used to be probably one the best open social networks out there. Occasionally I paid for their non-free accounts for very specific purposes and for brief periods of time. When I got what I needed I cancelled the premium subscription The web site does not offer a menu to cancel the premium subscription. However a simple email to customer services used to sort out the problem.

I kept a premium account for three months and then I sent filled a form as they instruct in their help section:

To downgrade to a lower premium account, follow the steps below:
1. Click Downgrade Your Premium Account.
2. Complete the form and tell us which premium account level you want to downgrade to (e.g., ‘I would like to change to Business account’).
3. Click on ‘Continue’.
A request to cancel your premium account switches your premium account to a free account. Cancellation will end billing and remove access to any premium features at the end of your current billing cycle.

To my surprise, they did not do so. Instead, they sent me this email:

Response (LinkedIn – Name) – Date – Time
Dear Name,
Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. We are happy to assist you, however prior to moving forward I would like to review your account with you please contact me at the number below or provide a phone number and convenient time to reach you. I look forward to speaking with you.
Sincerely,
Name
LinkedIn Subscription Services
402-452-XXXX

WHAT?

Do I really have to speak with someone in the US in order to stop paying for a service that is, basically, a monthly subscription of $31?

I did call them, I spoke with the operator and answered her two or three question. One day later, they downgraded my subscription back to free. What is wrong with LinkedIn?

The share of Bing in the US, where Google captures 75% of all searches, increase at a monthly rate of 1%. In Europe Google is yet more dominant with more than 85% of share.

European SEO watch the growth of Bing with some interest. Doing SEO for Bing is probably more boring than doing it for Google. Bing takes longer to index, it is over-sensitive to popularity of links and the occurrence of keywords in the URI.

Many online businesses need SEO to survive or exist. The dependency on SEO is usually in more than one way:

• upstream: traffic acquisition
• downstream: revenues from Adsense

Those who celebrate the advent of Bing are in fact hoping to not depend exclusively on Google to make some money with Adsense.

However, doing SEO for another significant search engine presents a few problems, among them:

• duplication of the resources to obtain and analyse data
• decision making would become a dilema without a clear cut evaluation outcome
• the ROI of the incremental SEO would not be directly proportional to the investment

This is no ordinary installation. The visitors are expected to play not a music instrument but a whole building. An old organ in the middle on the huge roundhouse connects to all the pillars of the dome. The sounds of the organ are in fact emitted by the structure of the building.

I was surprised to arrive at the Roundhouse on the first day of the interactive sound installation and find a short queue waiting to sit at the organ and “play the building“.

The crowd at midday was composed by some “culturally active” and straightforward arty visitors and a few parents with kids. The sound itself didn’t impress my 2 years old son. The keyboard of the organ is divided in three sections: motor, pipes and percussion. The sounds are too grave, dissonant and too metallic and acute respectively. The result is a bit of an resonating cacophony, even when the building is played by musicians.

The stage is however spectacular and dramatic. The organ looked like the brain of a crazy scientist connected to the building by the multicoloured axons of its neurons.

Thank you David Byrne for the experience. The installation is hosted by the Arts Council and Camden for the experience.