For anyone who’s getting fed up of all those social networking sites out there, take a look at this brand new social network that’s taking the world by storm.

Check out The Original Social Network

From working in PR and updating websites 24/7 (or so it seems sometimes!) I’ve developed a keen eye for typos. But I don’t think it even takes a ‘keen’ eye to spot this striking blunder on a banner outside a Tesco store in South Somerset! A blunder that’s very likely to have been replicated outside every Tesco in the land on New Year’s Eve!

The banner reads: “You’re local Express Store will be open as normal” - but the incorrect use of an apostrophe makes this banner actually read “You are local Express Store…”!

We were amazed that the graphic designers/printers let this one slip through the net! And that Tesco went ahead and used the banner - as surely it must have been detected at some stage before it was distributed to stores, mustn’t it?! You don’t need to be a proof reader to spot this one!

Please note: Any typographical or grammatical errors in this blog article are purely for comic effect.

It occurred to me the other day, just how much affiliate marketing is like playing monopoly! It’s probably the reason I like it so much. Everyone trying to make it around the board, picking up as many properties as they can, in the hope that some will make decent returns.

Trying to decide whether to split investments and grab as many cheap properties as possible, or spend time and hold out for the major cash collectors of Mayfair and Park Lane… Of course we all pay for the privilege of playing, some of us have even sacrificed daylight to carry on the game. Social lives certainly go out the window for the dedicated affiliate gamer. All in the hope that don’t go bankrupt before passing go and collecting our £200. Every now and then we might strike it lucky and land on Free Parking, or win the occasional beauty contest… a trip to Las Vegas perhaps… And sometimes we get stung with ‘building repairs’ in the form of a lawsuit, unpaid commissions, untracked sales, or some other freeloading corporation who grow thanks to our efforts, then dump us at the first opportunity.

Then again maybe it’s more like snakes and ladders, it certainly feels like that at times, and anyone who’s run an SEO site I’m sure will agree! Just when you think it’s safe to relax, the SERPs are turned upside down and you have to start all over again…

I think some people definitely like playing Snap, when it comes to thinking of new ideas and even site designs…

But at the end of the day, it’s all fun and games!

I’m always looking for cool new effects to build into our sites. It can be tricky to balance out supporting older browsers and keeping things interesting, not only for our visitors/clients, but also for myself! I’ve been experimenting with a few cool CSS effects and AJAX widgetty things lately, including editinplace functionality and a very cool AJAX image uploading feature, both of which I’m building into our new small business website software. I’m sure I’ll blog about that some time soon, but for now here’s a link to another cool effect I’ve discovered. Infact it isn’t anything particularly new really. The technology has been around for a while! It uses opacity filters to dim out the background of the page, while highlighting the all important popup information in the middle. I’ve not used this before on any sites as yet, but assuming IE6 supports it I have the perfect application for it in a project I’m working on at the moment… Again, more details to follow!

http://dbachrach.com/blog/2006/10/09/a-cool-css-effect-dashboard/

I’ve just been sent an interesting article about the, now infamous, tv-links.co.uk website. For those that don’t know TV Links provided links to TV shows online and in effect gave people the opportunity to view them. From my understanding they didn’t actually host anything themselves, rather just gave people one central location to find links. Like Yahoo did in the early days of the Internet. The big difference this time, is that by providing links to copyrighted content, they have stepped on a few rather big toes, and made themselves a very big target.

The site has now been raided by the police and taken offline, and from the report I’ve just read, the 26 year old from Cheltenham responsible for the site, has been taken into custody… The extra shocking thing about this case, is that not only the owner, but also the moderators associated on the site have been accused of organised crime and could they could now face a possible law suit of £100,000,000 between them which is apparently the amount ‘lost’ by ‘injured’ companies. The other extraordinary thing, is the scale of the operation, which involved international policing; the site was actually hosted on servers in the Netherlands.

Whatever your view on copyright infringement, I think this case does bring to light a scary reality. That someone can be arrested for doing in a small way, what Google (arguably the biggest player on the Internet) does in a much larger way; by providing people with links to content. Why don’t the big companies chase Google and every other search engine, surely it’s exactly the same. They also facilitate people to commit copyright crime, therefore aren’t they aiding in a crime and should be brought to ‘justice’?

We can’t have one rule for the rich and another for everyone else! Read all about it in the article here.

This follows on from another article I came across last week, where a lady in America was being sued for an enormous amount, having lost her case brought by the RIAA. Where will it all end?

Whatever happened to editorial control? Since when has every Tom, Dick or Harry been an expert on everything and anything!? Sharing information and ideas is a great thing and the internet has given everyone a voice. Web 2.0 has taken this a step further by taking control away from the few and putting it firmly into the hands of the masses, but do we really want to listen to some guy next door with an over inflated ego and delusions of grandeur. Should we even waste our time.

I think social bookmarking is great, I wasn’t sure at first, but now it’s clear to see how successful and revolutionary it’s really been. Allowing people to work as a society and cherry pick the best bits of information to share with everyone else. You would think it’s faultless, how can the masses be wrong… Right!? Well as we know, public opinion is sometimes influenced more by hysteria, emotions and fiction than cold hard fact.

The scary thing about everyone having so much information, is that people actually believe it makes them experts in everything they spend 5 minutes reading about. I don’t know why doctors even bother going to medical school anymore, when you can spend 5 minutes on Google and self diagnose yourself with practically every deadly disease under the sun.

I think we should have a new form of social web order, one influenced by everyone but ultimately decided upon by experts in their fields. Lets make achievement, hard work and qualifications actually mean something again… I would call it Web3.0, but people have already started running away with that acronym, mostly marketing types who jump on every bandwagon they can, so instead I’ll call it Web2.0 +1. I don’t know if anyone else has used that before, but I think it fits well; it’s still web2.0, just with 1 editor to decide between fact, fiction and plain rubbish.

You might be thinking this all sounds very familiar, well to be honest with you, the idea is nothing new, it’s called a newspaper! People lead very busy lives, we are being presented with more information than ever before, yet we have less and less time to distinguish the crap from the creme. That’s why I don’t think newspapers and magazines have anything to worry about.

So that’s my (not so) revolutionary idea!

I thought this was very cool, and as it’s vagely website related, thought I’d include it here

Download it here

Well I finally did it! I read everything on the Internet, it took a very long time and many late nights, but I can happily say that I finally feel a sense of closure. Having digested all the billions of opinions, comments and down right nonsense out there. So here it is for everyone to share… The last page on the Internet.

If you’ve ever read a blog or bulletin board online you’ll know they are a great source of useful, insightful and interesting comments but you’ll also know the majority are just complete rubbish posted by people who wouldn’t normally speak their mind quite so bluntly. It’s basically an excuse for people to not engage their brain before speaking!

Here’s what would happen if a took the online approach to the real world.