12 July 2007 | 1 Comment
I saw (and touched!) an iPhone tonight at the Auckland Web Meetup, and I am utterly sold. The form is actually a bit smaller than I expected, and the screen…mmm, the screen [shivers].
It’s actually kinda lucky that they’re not available down under yet from any local network cause I’d be in like Flynn…the forced wait will hopefully mean that we get a 3G version when they finally arrive (2008 sometime), plus having seen it in action now I can’t help but think that this is totally going to spur some innovation from the big handset makers…I mean it has to, seriously. The thing makes the incumbents all look like a bunch of dullards.
Incidentally, tonight was my first AWM and I am really impressed. John and Karl do an excellent job of organizing the whole show (including Pizza and Epic Beers) and tonight’s meetup (sponsored by Shift) showcased some very cool stuff covering Maps/Gadgets, Amazon S3, Popfly, Events promotion, TV Socnets, and even some local flash game developers making a metric buttload from advertising…sweet. I’m already looking forward to the next one.
11 July 2007 | 0 Comments
11 July 2007 | 0 Comments
I don’t know why this annoys me so much, but this post on Techcrunch is a bit of a wind up. The suggestion is that Seth Godin’s service, Squidoo, is being singled out for punishment by Google due to the large amount of spam pages (or ‘lenses’ in the Squidoo vernacular) that have unquestionably taken hold.
Specifically the writer is suggesting that Google is doing a hand job on Squidoo which has seen their visibility in Google SERPs drop precipitously, leading to a 75% drop in traffic to some pages (as reported by a random Squidoo user) if not actually banning them outright.
Whoa Nelly…If they are indeed seeing a serious drop in organic search traffic I think it is much more likely that they witnessing the result of a broader algorithm change, or have hit some kind of threshold, that is applying a filter to Squidoo pages rather than a domain specific penalty. It may well be that the algorithms are detecting more rubbish on the Squidoo domain (which they can easily do if lots of pages are linking out to bad neighourhoods), and so the whole site is less ‘trusted’ which impacts their visibility in the SERPs overall. But that does not mean Squidoo is specifically being targeted, penalized or banned by Google, and too suggest so just feels a bit sensationalist to me. It just means that Google is getting better at filtering out rubbish which is something that affects lots of sites (as it should).
Let’s face it, Google knows all about the problem of spam on user generated content sites like Squidoo…hello, Blogspot.
10 July 2007 | 0 Comments
2 July 2007 | 0 Comments
To paraphrase Bill Cosby, “Kids say the darndest things”.
I just got done reading Flynn a bed time book. Tonight it was some quality non-fiction covering animals of the Saraha, and when we got to discussing the Wildebeast, he insisted that they live in stone houses and can talk, so naturally I asked what they like to say…and his answer, “Hasta la vista baby!”
I kid you not. Where on earth did he come up with that. I have serious questions about the local Montesorri ;)
Anway, I also felt compelled to blog about his other favorite bedtime story book…New Zealand’s leading trade magazine covering heavy diesel machinery, imaginatively titled “CAM”. Yes, he has a healthy appetite for all things steel and diesel powered. Luckily for him, his Grandfather was a contractor so has many back issues of CAM lying around, and he likes nothing more to browse them checking out all the Crushers, Wheel Loaders, Tracked Dumpers, Graders, Articulated Dumpers, Logging Equipment and assorted Heavy Vehicles, and he knows the names for all of them. Granddad is very proud.
2 July 2007 | 1 Comment
Thanks to Darren I got an invite to Pownce, which I’ve been keen try out for size. I’ve now got a few invites of my own to use so if you’re interested let me know.
If you’re already on pownce then let’s be friends. My nick is surfarama.
