Something Annoying
Hat tip to my good friend Nige for this one
Hot Butter – Popcorn 1972
Uploaded by Leroidukitch. – Arts and animation videos.
Archive for March, 2010
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When adding links to websites should you force links in to a new window or leave the visitor to decide? If you do force the link in to a new window should you make it clear that the link will open a new window, either by adding a note at the end of the link or using the title tag or a cover all notice somewhere on the page that says all links open in new windows?
Arguments for:
Forcing the link in to a new window will mean that the visitor will still be able to see your site. If the link you have provided is interesting (the purpose of providing it should be that it is interesting should it not?) then the visitor could be several pages in to the linked site or even on a site linked from the original site and may just close the browser and forget about you. There is an argument for the handy Back button on the browser, but how many times have we clicked though a link and a couple of pages and a link then you are maybe 20 or 30 clicks away from the original site. Yes you could right click on the back button and look for the site in there or go in to your internet history, but how many novice users know about this?
Arguments against:
You are taking the choice away from the visitor. If they want to open the link in a new window or tab there are any number of ways for them to do this.
I’m indifferent as I usually right click and open links in a new tab anyway but what are your views?
/discuss
Customer Service By Twitter
I had forgotten about quite a nice tweet exchange from a couple of weeks ago until I saw @Jasonhall tweet a link to this story about someone tweeting about a problem with their mobile phone provider.
A couple of weeks ago Mrs R and I went to London for a wedding. We booked in to The May Fair Hotel, who I now know are also on Twitter as @TheMayFairHotel. As ever and much to my wifes consternation I tweeted and checked in using Gowalla and thought no more of it.
After a night out in the big city I checked in on Twitter to see that The May Fair Hotel had seen my tweet and taken the time to respond.
Now as far as I am aware The May Fair Hotel were not following me and were unlikely to know I am a Twitter user, so they are actively searching Twitter for references to their hotel and responding to them. My experience at the hotel was positive so it is quite an easy thing to do but I would imagine given the level of customer care in the hotel generally that they would deal with negative tweets as well, or certainly use them as a conduit for making contact with an unhappy customer and dealing with the issues off-line.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would tweet anything particularly negative about this hotel,
1, it is a very good hotel and nothing was too much trouble.
2, if a guest did have a problem I’m sure they would address it directly with the staff before tweeting something.
A simple lesson is to be learnt from this, if you are going to use twitter in your business for marketing or whatever, make sure you run searches for your brand & keywords. Not all your customers will be following you or even know you exist on Twitter and unless you look for them and what they are saying you can’t hear them..
Shiny Happy Shoppers
We had a press release from the council mailed to us over at Pits n Pots yesterday about the new Inward Investment Team.
Along with all the PR guff about this new team and the trip to Cannes for some trade show, there was an image attached. This images was untitled but shows what we think is a mock up of the interior of the East West Centre, soon(?) to be built in Hanley.
We didn’t bother publishing the picture as it wasn’t really relevant to the story, but one thing struck me when I looked at all the shiny happy shoppers in this cathedral of retail, all the faces were white, I could not see one person who could be unmistakably be from an ethnic minority .
Have a look at the image, see if you can spot anyone who is not IC1, to use the Police identity codes, male or female.
I have had a good look around the image and apart from the host of celebrities, as reported by the BBC, shopping in the East West centre, it does seem to be a lot more west than east.
The Bluetooth Question
I have just asked this question on Twitter,
Anyone got any experience / views on Bluetooth broadcast of information? Is it any good what’s the hit rate etc?
In my mind, bluetooth messages may have a use in certain circumstances, like at sporting or music events or where there are large groups of people. I think that it may work if it is from a trusted source, @BostinBloke pointed out his local ice hockey team use it during breaks, people who go to the hockey will know that they use bluetooth and will accept the messages & information. But just having messages being fired out to essentially random people is this a good investment?
I suppose you could say Twitter is just messages being fired at random people, the difference being that users have to opt in (follow a person) to see the messages and if they don’t like them they can opt out by un-following while still seeing messages from other people With Bluetooth it is sort of an all or nothing scenario, you either have Bluetooth on or off. You can’t decide that you don’t want to have a message from the childrenswear shop because you don’t have children but you want it from the pizza shop because you like pizza and you get special offers by Bluetooth if you are passing.
The other issue is security, how many people know of the security risks of having bluetooth on and visible? What are those security risks? A quick Google search shows that there are significant risks depending on what you store on your phone, which with ever increasingly smarter smartphones is quite a lot of personal information, not just about you but also your friends, family & colleagues.
So to expand on that what I would like to know is,
- should organisations invest in Bluetooth senders to engage with people?
- do you personally accept Bluetooth connections when you are walking round a shopping centre or wherever?
- do you even have Bluetooth enabled and visible on your phone?
The biggest thing for me in all of this is, Bluetooth messaging is not social media it is just a way of pushing information out, it is not a conversation like social media should be.
Why I dislike local papers
A bit of a sweeping statement, why I dislike local papers but if you look at the thoroughly good working over that the Hull Mail have given to Paul Smith of the excellent hu17.net you will see why.
I don’t know Paul but I do hope he comes along to the Talk About Local Un-Conference in Leeds in April because I would love to hear him give his version of events.
Paul it seems is a web developer, who has, due to market demand created some ‘adult’ sites. At no point does it say that Paul has run these sites, just that he has designed and published them. I would guess that he has done this as paid work, we all have to do something to earn a crust.
Adult sites exist due to demand, personally I have no problem with them in general, the adult sites you can find by doing a search are fine, consenting adults and all that. Anything more seedy than that then yes I have a problem with but that is not the point here.
It seems because Mr Smith has designed a number of adult sites, the Hull Mail does give some site titles, then it is fair game for them to have a pop at him. Now if Mr Smith had just been going about his business the paper would not have bothered with this story at all, let alone get one of it’s female reporters to play the part of an escort girl to get prices for creating her website out of him.
I can only think that the reason why Mr Smith was so interesting to the Hull Mail is because he runs hu17.net a hyperlocal news site, which could be seen as competition to the Hull Mail or more that it has taken a share of the market that Local People venture was hoping to clean up.
For those of you who don’t know about Local People they are local websites that are being set up by AND part of the same company that owns the Hull Mail.
The more you read the Hull Mail article the more you can see little prompts to make you add 2 & 2 together to make 5.
An example,
Launched last year, the site features photographs of junior sports fixtures as well as news events.
However, the Mail can today reveal Mr Smith has designed thousands of hardcore pornography sites.
So the HU17 site is doing what a good hyperlocal site should do and covering junior league sports, something that local papers really can’t be bothered with. But read it again, photographs of junior sports fixtures quickly followed by hardcore pornography these two phrases are put together to conjure up and image in the readers minds that is thoroughly distasteful.
The editor can’t make accusations about Mr Smith but he can word the article in such a way with leading phrases like those above that people could maybe misread or make a totally incorrect assumption about Mr Smith. At best it could ruin his reputation at worst, well lets not even go down the route of people being beaten up or whatever because of misinformation fed to them.
John Meehan editor of the Hull Mail has tried to defend the actions of his paper by saying that it is ‘in the public interest’. Personally I think it is part trying to discredit a local website and part just a cynical way of getting some traffic on to the Hull Mail site.
Are hyperlocal publishers journalists? Some are most aren’t and I would think that those who aren’t are quite proud of that fact and would never stoop so low as the Hull Mail.
