Jail for the poor, not for the rich

It’s depressing to see that our legal system ultimately reserves prison for the poor, while the rich can get away with most anything except violent crimes without anything more than a slap on the wrist.
Remember the recent London Riots? Terrible stuff. Damage estimated to be around £200 million.
And then I read this on the BBC [...]

World will not end in 2012

According to a Mayan elder, the world will not end in 2012:
2012 is not the end of the world, Mayan elder insists
And a nice quote pointing out that it’s just the end of a calendar date:

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 BC, marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a [...]

Cold weather chaos continues

The travel chaos caused by the cold weather continues: Cold weather causes travel chaos
While Gatwick airport only closed temporarily, Heathrow was closed much of the weekend, motorways were closed or subjected to major delays.
The half-mile queue (8 hours waiting) around St Pancras station for rail tickets to Europe was astonishing to watch on the Telegraph [...]

Swine Flu on the rise

A disturbing report on the BBC website about a surge in Swine Flu problems - deaths and critical illnesses - apparently occurring at present:
Over 300 people in intensive care with flu

There’s been a dramatic rise in the numbers of people admitted to intensive care with flu, officials say.
Government figures show that 302 beds are now [...]

The Value of Local Blogging

Originally when I started blogging I went straight into business blogging here at iBrian - not because I wanted to gain business attention, but because I just wanted to share some of the things I was doing or thinking.
The problem is, blogging about business is irrelevant if there’s no goal or return, so while it [...]

BBC releases Nuclear Attack script

The BBC has published it’s script of what would happen in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain:

BBC TRANSCIPT TO BE USED IN WAKE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK
This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with
nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of
casualties and the extent of the damage [...]

Microsoft to buy Yahoo

Microsoft have pitched to buy Yahoo.
I’m gutted.
Last Autumn it was obvious that Yahoo stock was seriously undervalued by comparison to Google, Amazon, and other major internet companies.
However, not only did I not have an investment portfolio, but the promise of the stock markets tanking made it a bad time to set up a portfolio [...]

Now over 200,000 spam comments

Akismet now lists over 215,000 spam comments targeted and deleted at ibrian.co.uk.
I think that says something sad about humanity - that as a species we seek to predate on one another for material advantage.
The internet is such an accurate reflection of the web - the hard working projects that seek to give, the spammers and [...]

How to complain

In business and domestic life I’ve repeatedly encountered issues where I’ve felt as though a product/service has either been not satisfactorily delivered, or delivered at all.
In raising complaints, I’ve learned a few key pointers on how to ensure a reasonably swift resolution of such issues:
1. Ask, don’t threaten
Don’t threaten anything. We don’t know there is [...]

SMX London: November 15-16 2007

Got a really big workload I’m still working through and haven’t had any time to devote time to any in-depth posts/tutprials/FAQs either here or at Platinax for some time - but a few meet requests for SMX London next week means I need to turn up.
I’ll be acting barfly from around 3pm on Thursday, and [...]

Losing out on TV interview requests

Ouch - lost out on a couple of TV interview requests over the past few weeks because of my running a number of news sites.
The BBC wanted me to represent a view on surveillance in society on one of their London programmes, and a couple of days ago Sky wanted to schedule an interview over [...]

Database restore after db failed

The database at iBrian has been acting up recently - I had thought that a “repair tables” in phpmyadmin had done the job, but then came onto the site today to find a single post displayed - apparently everything was lost.
Anyway, I uploaded a backup, upgraded Wordpress, and all seems to be running fine now.
I [...]

BBC news - it’s the details that matter

Richard Porter describes the difficulties in delivering the news when details are sketchy - such as the recent Iraqi truck bombings, and flooding in North Korea.
However, in my opinion, the problem with media in general isn’t lack of details on breaking stories - it’s the insertion of suspect details in more in-depth coverage.
For example, all [...]

Good staff are hard to find

Good staff are hard to find.
I’ve got some good staff on my team - my writers are especially of a good standard, namely because I never went on price, but instead, on quality, hiring experienced writers already working in the UK press industry.
However, writing requires a particular skill - what’s more difficult is when [...]

Netscape going Indonesian?

Is Netscape becoming a multi-lingual social media site?
For some reason a large number of posts from Indonesia - and written in Indonesian - appear to have been flooded into the site.
I can only guess the Netscape people figure on promoting Netscape as a multi-lingual site.
I guess I should start submitting in Gaelic. :)

Getting support calls for news sites?

Been an odd morning - it’s only 10am, but I’ve already had two phone support requests because of news sites I operate.
On HomeMove I wrote an article about NHBC certificates - a form of guarantee that a new build property is built to proper standards. It also ensures the builder/developer will correct faults (snagging issues) [...]

How to make blogs successful

I just got an email request for an interview - the second over the past few months. No idea what happened over the first as I was never updated, so I’ll repost my answers here.
The basic gist was - what makes for a successful blog?
Obviously ibrian.co.uk isn’t a particularly successful blog - but I’m not [...]

Rediscovering link building

Since Threadwatch closed it’s killed off my social respite time, forcing me to concentrate more on work.
It’s sad to lose that social connection with the SEO world, but since then I’ve found myself being creative again with link building, and discovered some interesting new solutions.
Some I know other SEO’s are already using - some I [...]

Archive org - actually useful!

Normally I find archive.org something of a curiosity - it’s fun to see how sites looked years ago, but aside from that, not much use?
Or so I thought.
Recently I’ve figured on setting up a few blogs outside of commercial niches, just to document my personal interests as I see them.
I’m always reading up on [...]

Fancy Dress

What’s really interesting running the Platinax Business Directory is the type of submissions that it attracts.
While not expensive, the £14.95 submission fee is enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there are very few low quality sites that get submitted.
What’s really interesting is how many paid submissions I get from multinational companies. [...]