Dangerous Thinking

I have a confession to make.

At 5pm I went for a walk into town, just for a break, as I was at my desk at 8 this morning, and I still have some stuff to do this evening.

Anyhow, and this is the core of the confession, I bought myself a Maltesers choc-ice on a stick – I don’t know what the ice-cream industry jargon is.

It was very good – recommended, in fact.

But the bizarre thing is that the lolly stick has been branded with the Maltesers logo. Are they mad? Is a rather badly printed brown Maltesers logo or two going to increase my loyalty to the Maltesers brand?

I’d love to know the story behind the decision. Did the marketing department really dream the thing up, or was it a creative sales pitch from the lolly stick company?

There are a lot of sites out there offering SEO services and software that major on the wonderful things they can do with META tags.

But that’s out of date. Search engines ignore them these days.

So, I asked myself, what are META tags now for, if anything?

Here’s a great piece from WebMonkey in July that answers that very question:

“…today Google and other search engines essentially ignore META keyword tags.

In the pages that follow, I’ll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web.”

So, we can forget about META data for SEO, but we can have fun with a lot of other stuff. However, for most sites, it does seem like having no more than fun at the current state of play.

Worth a read, though.

Metadata, Mark II

After rubbish service on Dangerous Thinking for the last couple of weeks, following my laptop problems, this week should be closer to business as usual.

That’s one good thing about blogging. I’ve made a public commitment to writing about proper stuff, so I’ll get it done, starting from tomorrow.

I’ve finally got my blogroll straight after all these months.

There it is – what I really read.

Summer 2001

I normally find myself in London at least once a week. But each time I go in, I have the debate of whether or not to take my laptop.

There’s plenty of Wi-Fi – mostly paid-for – in Central London if I have the laptop. And there’s the increasingly down-at-heel EasyInternetCafe right next to Victoria Station if I don’t. I also have the excellent GoToMyPC installed on the laptop so I can get at everything if I don’t have the machine with me.

But there’s a problem.

GTMP runs too slowly on the antiquated hardware at Easy to allow me to do much more than use Outlook. It’s not GTMP’s fault. I’ve used it from more powerful hardware and it runs a treat.

So I need some alternative Internet access. But have you tried to find an Internet cafe recently? In London, they’re as scarce as hens’ teeth.

The only alternative I’ve found in SW1 is the facility in Victoria Library, but it’s not a cafe, so it’s nowhere to spend any amount of time between meetings.

I’ve said before how I find it very difficult to keep up with blogs that don’t have an RSS feed.

At the same time, we’ve had all the debate about how RSS feeds will supersede permission-based e-mail marketing.

As you perhaps know, I’m rebuilding my blogroll following my Windows XP wipeout. I’m amazed how many blogs about marketing don’t have an RSS feed.

What were these people thinking of?

Singer Robert Palmer died of a heart attack in Paris earlier today.

He was only 54.

His latest album, Drive, was an astonishing return to form and his musical roots.

We wuz robbed.

BBC News

My laptop is now up and running, but I get more and more annoyed by the fact that XP falls over for no good reason, and that there were a few holes in my backup strategy.

SharpReader’s data file somehow never found its way on to the backup, so I’ve lost all the RSS feeds I’ve assembled, and somehow Outlook messed up the copy of my PST file it should have archived. I now have a gap in my e-mails, as the last usable backup in my archives is so old I don’t want to share the date with you.

So this evening I start rebuilding my collection of RSS feeds.

I wonder if there’s anything better than SharpReader, while I’m at it? No, David, don’t make life any more complex than it need be.

Occam’s Razor, isn’t it?

Since my laptop ate itself earlier this week, I’ve been using my standby machine, a 600Mhz Celeron with 160Mb RAM, running Windows ME. A step back in time!

A while back, out of interest, and having run out of licenced copies of MS Office, I installed the open source Open Office on it, and never really tried it out.

This week, it had its baptism of fire, and I can honestly say I’ve been bowled over. It’s easy to use, full-featured, stable and feels thoroughly professional and pleasant to use. Oh, and the price is right!

The only real annoyance is not having a flexible word count – something I do use quite frequently. But I’ve found another piece of freeware that does the job, albeit rather clumsily.

It’s not going to elbow Office XP off my laptop, but I’ll be keeping Open Office fully updated on the machine I’m using now, and installing it on any other spare machines we find ourselves with.