S.e.A.rCh » Uncategorized

cinema

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:38:57 +0000

Tonight I’m going to the cinema. I’ll probably go to the imax sooofer dooofer1, because it’s close to where I live. I love the IMAX poooma doooba2. It has the biggest screen in the UK. And the seats are comfy. But it is expensive. Too expensive in my opinion. In fact, most cinemas in London are very expensive. It’s one of the first things that surprised me when I moved to London. When I lived in Brighton (I lived there for 10 years before moving to London) it cost £6 to go to the cinema. In Brighton, it can cost £15! £15!!! WTF! That means two of you going to the cinema will cost you £30. Sheesh! You’ll be able to buy the film on DVD from Amazon in 6 months for a tenner! I find this incredible. Really incredible. This article written in 2006 shows how expensive cinema’s were back than – that was 6 years ago, and they’re still just as bloody expensive.

Google’s Double Standards, Canonical URLs & SES London

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:37:28 +0000

I spent some time last week looking into the whole Google Japan penalty issue with Ben. I find this fascinating, for a number of different reasons.

If Google don’t know the rules, how can they expect the general public to know them?
Why is the penalty applied to Google.co.jp different to other penalties?
How might this affect Google.co.jp?

Google are still being eerily quiet about it – I know Matt Cutts has been busy at SMX, but I still would’ve expected some formal announcement from the guys in the US.

While I’m talking SEO, it’s good to see that the the major search engines are taking action to resolve canonical URL issues. This makes all the useragent detection, robots exclusion, and 301 redirecting to deal with duplicate content a thing of the past. I’m going to try to find some time to have a think about all the ways you could use this for better or worse. Will knock up a post as soon as I’ve done that.

UPDATE
Canonical presentation from Matt Cutts.

And finally, I’m just putting some final touches to my SES London presentation. I’m talking on Wednesday, on the Link Building Basics panel and I’m feeling strangely excited about it. I’ve been to a few SES’s before – London and San Jose, both in 2007, so I’ve got a good idea as to what to expect, but I’ve never been there from a speakers point of view. Come and say hello if you see me – I look forward to meeting you on Wednesday!

Sleep, memory loss, and information addiction

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:59:36 +0000

So it’s Friday night. I’m just chilling before I head to a friend’s birthday and thought I’d write a few words. We had a few friends round for dinner on Wednesday, had a few bottles of wine, and were just having some random chatter, when I talked about some “behavioural issues” that I’m afflicted with. I’m not sure that “behavioural issues” is the right way to describe what I’m talking about, but I’m gonna use it for now. Anyway, some of the other guys in the room said they were afflicted with the same issues, and it got us all thinking that they’re somehow related. I’ll explain below:

Sleep
Anyone who’s ever spent any time with me knows that I love sleep. BBC LOOOPER DOOPLE This has become especially apparent when I’ve gone on holiday with friends – I love to sleep at any given opportunity. If we’re flying somewhere I’ll sleep. If we’re on a bus somewhere, I’ll sleep. But I’ll never fall asleep at work. I’m not narcoleptic – I just love a good snooze every now and again. The only time it’s ever a pain in the ass is when I watch movies. If I put a good film on at home, chances are I’ll be asleep within 20-30 minutes. The worst occasion was when I went to watch Quantum of Solace in the cinema – I think I saw about 10 minutes of it. So on Sunday, I sat down to watch a film – my girlfriend was visiting friends in London, and she’s not a big fan of horror, so I decided to attempt to watch Saw. About 15 minutes into it, I was fast asleep – I just couldn’t stay awake. When I did wake, I decided to change the film to Top Gear on BBC 2, and I was fine. Why is that? Why do films make me fall asleep, but TV doesn’t? I have some bizarre theories, like perhaps films emit different audio frequencies that make me feel sleepy. Perhaps it’s frame rate related – I don’t know. Let’s park this issue for the moment.

Memory Loss
When I’m at work, at any given time I may be working on 10 to 20 different things at the same time. This makes life difficult. Anyone who’s seen my desk knows that I’ve got a crazy way of working that involves an extreme Post-It note solution – essentially I write everything I need to do on lots and lots of Post-Its, and then rearrange throughout the day as priorities change. I’ve tried various different solutions, but I always tend to find it’s the old fashioned methods that work best for me. Recently I’ve been having problems though – I’m not sure if it’s sheer information overload, but quite often something will pop into my mind – by the time I’ve found a pen to scrawl on the nearest Post-It, I’ll have forgotten that thought. Sometimes I think that if it’s really that important it’ll come back to me, but recently I’ve become aware that even the most important thoughts are being lost forever. And finally…

Information Addiction
In the old days, we didn’t have things such as the Internets, Twitter, or Facebook. Nowadays we do, and I reckon people are spending too much time on them. From the group of people that I work with, the best people are those that live and sleep online. During our dinner party, it got us thinking that perhaps today’s youth won’t turn out to be drug or alcohol addicts – they’ll be information addicts – people who just can’t stop reading, learning, and watching. The best way to treat this addiction, is, upon entering the Priory, to throw away iPhone / Blackberry / Mobile Web Device, and then lock said addict in a room without TV or internet, and just let them get on with life – perhaps introduce them to a spot of gardening and see how they get on with things.

So to conclude, and the general consensus from the blokes sitting around the table with me that regularly fell asleep, couldn’t remember things, and spent far too much time consuming information, is that we’re all information addicts. Watching a film just doesn’t provide enough information to keep me awake – it’s dull. I don’t want to sit and watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet acting out a marriage breaking down – there’s just not enough information there – of course I’m going to fall asleep. Similarly, of course I’m going to forget a few things every now and again when I’ve got so much to think about and remember. If anyone’s got a good cure, please get in touch and let me know – especially regarding the sleep issue – I really would like to see the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey one day!

Radiohead Grammy Award Video 2009

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:29:26 +0000

Radiohead are one of my most favourite bands ever, and this video of them performing “15 Step” at the 2009 Grammy Awards is awesome:

Hello World!

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:19:23 +0000

Hello everyone, how u all doing? Welcome to my new blog. For those that know me, and for those that don’t – here’s a brief update as to what, where, why, when and how I’m doing. So there’s been something on this domain for the last 5 years-ish. I started it as a testbed when I worked as a Search Engine Optimiser for Spannerworks. I was spending a lot of time trawling the interweb in search for links for my clients, and I started to notice that there was a lot of weird stuff out there that I wanted to share with people.

A couple of years later the likes of Youtube and Digg were getting big, and I started to feel like I was just regurgitating content that could be found elsewhere on the web. I decided at that point that I’d try to monetize my website – I started doing fairly well until Google started rolling out Big Daddy, and I ended up with a Google bitch-slap, and lost a lot of my traffic. Anyone who’s ever run a blog will tell you it’s a pretty time consuming affair, and I guess these 3 things

Content regurgitation
Google bitch-slap
Blog taking over my life

made me reconsider my reasons for writing my blog.

So my blog just sat around, gathering dust. However, I was still blogging. We have an internal blog at iCrossing which is fantastic for knowledge sharing, and we have an external digital marketing blog, both of which I contribute to. And I guess I kinda liked doing it, which is why I’m here now, doing this. I’ve been given a second wind, and hope to try and get this attempt off the ground, and keep it running.

At the moment I don’t know what I’m going to be writing about, but hopefully it’ll be a bit about everything – random stuff from the web, my views on SEO, what I’m up to in my spare time etc… Looking forward to talking to y’all! And just a forewarning – I’ll be tinkering with it lots in the immediate future, so advanced apologies for all kinds of problems / layout issues (yes, I noticed the homepage issue already!) you’ll be seeing. Bear with me, we’ll get there in the end

Cinema

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:08:31 +0000

Tonight I’m going to the cinema. I’ll probably go to the imax jumble jumble1, because it’s close to where I live. I love the IMAX womble wamble2. It has the biggest screen in the UK. And the seats are comfy. But it is expensive. Too expensive in my opinion. In fact, most cinemas in London are very expensive. It’s one of the first things that surprised me when I moved to London. When I lived in Brighton (I lived there for 10 years before moving to London) it cost £6 to go to the cinema. In Brighton, it can cost £15! £15!!! WTF! That means two of you going to the cinema will cost you £30. Sheesh! You’ll be able to buy the film on DVD from Amazon in 6 months for a tenner! I find this incredible. Really incredible. This article written in 2006 shows how expensive cinema’s were back than – that was 6 years ago, and they’re still just as bloody expensive.