Tom Blogs » Websites

XKCD reaches 1,000

Tom — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:54:41 +0000

Today the cartoon blog XKCD posted it’s 1000 cartoon.

Here’s six favourites of the previous 999:

Positive and negative Google Plus hyperboyle, it’s all the same.

Tom — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:50:28 +0000

These opinion pieces are everywhere.

Why Google+ Pages Isn’t Good for Business
4 Reasons Google+ Brand Pages Will Be Better Than Facebook’s
Google Plus Finds Sweet Spot Between Facebook & Twitter
Google Engineer Calls Google Plus a ‘Complete Failure’; 5 Reasons We Agree
Why It is Wrong to Call Google Plus a Failure

Google Plus may be “not ready” for business, but it isn’t “not good for business”. It’s a beta product, the future is far from clear.

It would be foolish to right off the provider of the biggest search engine, video sharing and blogging platform. But equally daft to claim you must join in now or you’ll miss out.

Articles which launch with attention grabbing headlines like “Why Google+ Pages Isn’t Good for Business” are just as bad as the confusing rhetoric they criticise other of.

All any of these pieces needs to say is “Google Plus is interesting, but it’s not there yet, watch this space”

The last two articles linked to at the top of this peice are from the same website, so at least there’s some other balance out there.

24 Hour experiments in Twitter

Tom — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:27:05 +0000

Companies are always looking for new ways to raise their profile and market themselves on twitter, but sometimes its the charity and even public sector that lead on innovative ways to raise awareness, forced to try news ways on limited budgets and powered by enthusiasm to make a difference.

One example of this is the 24 hour twitter experiment which gets a new look today. This has been tried a few times before with varying success:

Manchester police - kick-starting the idea was Manchester tweeting every incident over a 24 hour period to show the breadth and depth of their daily workload. The BBC wrote up the experiment: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11537806
Walsall Council – following Manchester’s lead, Walsall also spent a day tweeting what their staff got up to over 24 hours. This got a rather mixed response as the comments on the Guardian website illustrate: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/03/local-government-twitter-walsall-24
Today: WaterAid – the international NGO is tweeting it’s activities from across the globe, taking the idea to the next level and really showing the world wide communication opportunities that are available.

Best of luck to WaterAid.

Adam and Joe return to 6music

Tom — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:11:23 +0000

And about bloody time. They resume service in April, Adam writes on their official blog:

“I can’t wait to get back to our show on Saturdays, I’ve really missed doing it. Not that I haven’t been every bit as busy as Joe. I’ve created several new filing systems for my CD’s and DVD’s, successfully reunited over 20 odd socks with their partners and learned to understand the language of ants (though I’m finding Decs more of a problem). It’s been fun but I’m looking forward to talking rubbish and playing brilliant music with Joe again.”

Visit their blog at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamandjoe/

Did you mean “how kmy next bill chang?”

Tom — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:56:11 +0000

Have you ever searched for something on the O2 website?

I have.

I tried searching for “how my next bill will change”. The website helpfully suggested I may have meant to search for something else:No, I did not mean “how kmy next bill chang?”. The rest of the results weren’t helpful either:

Got love for Lorem ipsum? Love this

Tom — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:14:23 +0000

I am often reliant on the Lorem ipsum genertor site when creating some design concepts, and thanks to Swiss Miss and Chesley I’ve found a supercharged version – the Dummy text generator. This gives you all the features of the Lorem ipsum generator but adds some extra touches such as adjuusting the size of the preview window, choosing different text instead of the usual Lorem ipsum and being able to specify CSS styling. Give it a go!

Basics Of Social Media ROI

Tom — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:59:09 +0000

Thanks to Carl Haggerty for posting up this presentation by Oliver Blanchard, something which cuts through the social media crap and shows obvious ways to tell if all your social marketing is actually doing anything. And of course what’s key to any good presentation, it has excellent graphics.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

GTI scalectrix online racer

Tom — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:30:54 +0000

After a few text heavy posts here’s something less brain demanding. Thanks to the London Advertising & Design Group blog I found this site for the new VW Golf GTi. Take control of your own GTi and drive it round the track as fast as possible for your chance to win a golf for 3 months (Only three months? Then what?). It’s been very well put together and plays well, and if (when) you take a corner to fast your car goes flying off and you have to wait for an scientist to pick you up and place you back on the track. Good attention to detail there.

Go and have a play and take a look around the ladge blog, one worth keeping an eye on.

3 sites which inspire you

Tom — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:36:24 +0000

For a team away day we’re all given the following task:

bring a screen shot of 3 sites that inspire you for a warm up discussion: 1 information giving site, 1 income generation site, 1 other

Which is something I thought would be worth sharing here. So here are my three:

Information giving

For infomration giving I’ve picked google reader. I refer to it many times a day, have a reader on my phone and use it as my main tool for keeping up to date with the web world and beyond. At last count I subscribe to over 200 feeds and I could never track all those sites without a robust feed reader

Income generation

I shop a lot online, as much as possible. One site I am happy to recommend for their online and offline service is photobox. Their service is quick. Very quick. Place an order in the morning and chances are they’ll be delivered the next day in a hard backed envelope. You can share photos with other people and let other people order copies of your photos, even changing the price so you can make a profit in what is sold. The site has a clean and clear design and is simple to use all that an online shop should be.

Other

For this I picked a section of the London 2012 website. I’ve covered this in an earlier post and my thoughts havn’t changed. It’s still a great example of location based media content. And the time slider gives a great historical view of information too. Winner.

60 free desktop wallpaper designs for May from Smashing Magazine

Tom — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:42:26 +0000

Smashing Magazine have their usual monthly wallpaper showcase, and this month there’s 60 to choose from, with some really strong entries.

This month I’ve picked the “creative spark” design by Vinod Batus from India. “The entire concept of this art came out when i was playing around with various photoshop brushes. The effect came in so beautifully that i instantly named it Creative Spark.”. Many thanks Vinod andof course to Smashing Magazine! Maybe one day I’ll submit my own entry…