Learning from experience and turning failure into success

A lot of business/marketing/webmaster blogs are filled with speculation - sales-speak which defines success with a subject in generic terms.
Success is nothing more than working hard and focusing on your subject. Apparently.
I disagree - success with anything comes from experience, and a big part of that experience comes from doing things *wrong*.
That means wasting [...]

How long before citizen journalism is faked?

The BBC lauds the contribution of user generated media - photos, video, etc, not least in the recent spate of flooding to hit the UK.
As a viewer, it was brilliant being able to access images of places I knew, photographed by old neighbours and published on the BBC website.
But here’s the stark stark warning - [...]

10 reasons why my sites suck - do yours?

It gets just a little intimidating when I read of publishers earning over $1000 a day for a single site, and other sites generating hundreds of thousands of visits per day.
Especially as I’m doing nowhere near either with any of my sites.
So what am I doing wrong?
Just a cursory examination of some similar sites in [...]

Hull and Yorkshire Flooded

Originally born and bred in Hull, East Yorkshire, it’s been pretty shocking to see the images and video of the severe floods that have hit the entire eastern England.
Especially as Hull and the surrounding area seems to have taken the brunt of it.
Even more so that a combination of amazing power of the internet coupled [...]

Google News - getting harder to be syndicated?

For some reason, for the past two years I’ve taken it on board to develop a whole string of news site.
I figure it’s partly because I have a closet desire to be a newspaper publisher for real - it was one of my dreams even before I’d heard of the internet.
The other reason is that [...]

My Business Credit Card has been used for fraud

Just got off the phone with the Royal Bank of Scotland’s credit card fraud division. They wanted to run through a couple of recent transactions with me.
Fine - I’ve done this a few times before, and it’s always a false alarm, but I don’t mind - it’s nice to know people are looking out.
They run [...]

Rats!

So we’ve been living in our new house for over 6 months and everyone was nagging me for a pet.
I don’t feel settled enough to have a dog as yet - especially as I know I’d be the one who ended up walking it twice a day, which I seriously do not have time for. [...]

Madeleine McCann - what about parental responsibility?

What has happened to far to Madeleine McCann and her family is obviously tragic and heart-wrenching.
There are so many campaigns going around to help find her that I couldn’t even begin to start.
But - am I the only person thinking “Parental Responsibility?” Such as you never leave a 3 year old unattended in a room [...]

Windows XP - anyone seeing weird behaviour past few days?

Anyone else had any problems the past few days with Windows XP programs?
McAfee crashed a couple of days ago on an update, and after the PC restarted McAfee wouldn’t load up.
I contacted McAfee, where a technician told me it was a known conflict with Zonealarm.
I unstalled Zonealarm, uninstalled/reinstalled McAfee and it worked fine again.
However, WS_FTP [...]

BBC shows live torture pics - not

Another heads-up on the dangers of too adventurous automation…
The BBC have a page showing the most popular news stories for Scotland in the week.
Unfortunately the automation process of assigning pics to stories seems a little screwy - the story on the payrise for nurses simply has a pic of an empty road.
Meanwhile, a picture of [...]

The Dangers of Romantic Candles

I wanted to make the bedroom romantic, so over the past couple of months I’ve developed a collection of dozens of scented candles.
They’re spread about the bedroom furniture and laminate floor, and when all alight the room is very romantic.
Last night my trousers were thrown off in a moment of passion - then moments later [...]

Ouch! Delisted from SEOmoz!

[EDIT: It was only temporay, due to the changes being implemented, such as the introduction of YouMoz and similar. Either way, no offence or disrespect intended by Rand, and he's been happy to ensure Britecorp were back on the SEOmoz recommended list. :) ]
Rand previously had my company Britecorp on his list of recommended SEO’s.
After [...]

Secret hideout found on property website

So while having lunch I decided to idle time surfing a few property websites.
Found myself looking at Irish property for comparative research, when I happened to note an interesting location on one of the pages:

Someone should inform the Garda about this? ;)
More seriously, though, there are some nasty little formatting errors on the page [...]

Losing out by not using PPC?

The backbone of my business is SEO, but I’ve come to realise that I am completely missing out by not having embraced PPC.
For example, I started my first real affiliate program recently. I can sit and wait for leads via SEO. Or I can push traffic in via PPC and generate instant revenues, and tweak [...]

Someone’s using my brands - time to look into Trademarks

I just tried to sign up with Google Talk in order to chat with Aaron Wall via IM.
A username is required, so my first attempt was for iBrian. Sorry, not available.
Okay, no big deal. It was popular enough to see the .com registered.
So I tried platinax. Sorry, not available. Huh? Platinax is my own unique [...]

British Telecom just doesn’t get it

I received bills from BT to pay my business line and business broadband services.
Telephone support warned of long delays in answering the phone, but mentioned paying online.
Ok, so I signed up at BT’s website to pay both online, set up a user account, set up my billing accounts for both services, then went to pay.
Oops. [...]

When a hacked site isn’t a hacked site

Google News can experience problems with news items if their titles only appear as links. So my news sites always have a h1 header with a separate permalink to the article.
So when developing one news site today, I was shocked to find a couple of posts had links in them to a third party [...]

Blogger hit by autogenerating account bot?

Has Blogger been hit by an autogenerating account bot?
Over the past few days I’ve been receiving a wave of blog spam from SEO lab - all of it to blogspot accounts - and all built around hyphenated money keywords ending in a seemingly random 2 or 3 alphanumeric characters.
For example:
college-loans-zet.blogspot.com
free-slots-lol.blogspot.com
flexeril-huf.blogspot.com
All of them are running a [...]

ArmA: Armed Assault

UPDATE: Okay, played the multiplayer demo. It *is* Operation Flashpoint 2 - more precisely, Resistance 2.
The graphics are better but not by a huge margin, and improving textures does not a new game make.
Playability actually seems reduced - menus are a little different from OFP, but so far it’s neither felt intuitive nor [...]

Pros and cons of working for clients vs working for yourself

When I’ve chatted with more experienced SEO’s, the one thing that becomes clear is that SEO’s start working with clients, but many drop these to work for themselves.
The argument goes that if you’re good at making someone else money, you should be good at making that money for yourself - and much more than you’re [...]