Now is it just me or is the apparent Liam Nelson’s Well Good Show a bunch of crap? Excuse the language but its true.

BBC Three have some great programmes but this is an awful show!

Recently I became the chairperson and co-founder of the UNICEF Cardiff group (working in aid of UNICEF UK). 

This has been a personal goal of my wife and I and are both extremely excited about it. Our plan is to organise fundraising events in Cardiff and the surrounding area. 

Please show your support by visiting our Facebook page and simply clicking on the ‘like’ button. That’s all we’re asking for right now and it takes two secs!

Or, you can keep up to date with the latest on what we’re doing by visiting the website that I’ve just built, UNICEF Cardiff.

Thanks 

Thought I’d make the most of the lovely weather we’re having and do some photography down the river Taff. 

After numerous shots of ducks, stones and water I decided to turn to wood textures. Let me know what you think?

I received my latest bill from BT and no suprise found a BT Answer 1571 low use charge of £1.00. Since moving to Cardiff we decided that there was no point having a house phone as we never used it and when it did ring we’d never answer it anyway. So what’s the point?

Well according to my phone bill “To avoid future charges make 2 chargeable calls/month or more with BT”. To me, that seems a little unfair and stupid. I don’t want to make two lousy phonecalls from a house phone, I shouldn’t need to! 

What is fair is to say that BT have far too much grip on the phone lines of the UK and are holding us back. Will we ever get to the point where a bundle deal consists of just TV & Broadband package? No phone line just mobile phone calls.

BT Answer 1571 low use charge is just another way of getting their little hands on our cash for no reason and it really pisses me off. Rant over…

If you watched Derren Brown tonight on Channel 4 and live in the UK you are more than likely going to agree with this post about the Bronnikov method.

In this weeks episode of Derren Brown Investigates, Derren looks at how the  Bronnikov method enables a blind person to see through energy which is built up through the genital region of a human. This energy can be collected and controlled through the hands and even passed on to another person. By understanding this energy a person (even one without eyes) can create images on a canvas imagined in the brain.

Within the first 15 minutes I thought bollocks! One of the “experts” ran through the theory with Derren Brown and referred to The Matrix as the example (or inspiration) around how it works. The Matrix is one of my favourite movies and as much as I would love to say it’s true, I simply can’t. 

Throughout the episode there was no clear evidence that any of the participants improved their vision. Instead, I felt embarrassed for these people who spent hundreds of Euros to take the 3 step course and yet many believed that they felt improvements in vision? The only evidence I did see was that of the power of persuasion and suggestion where it wasn’t until something was pointed out that the participant agreed. 

If you become blind then it must be so difficult to come to terms with it and it’s understandable why peoples desperation of seeing again can (and will) disturb peoples good judgement. There are cases in science where people have managed to improve through forms of surgery, but to use your inner energy just seems surreal!

When a founding member refuses to participate in their own technique in front of a camera then questions definitely can be raised and Derren Brown does just that. Instead, Derren finds himself in being verbally attacked. Perhaps Vyacheslav M. Bronnikov should have done his homework on Derren Brown before questioning his intelligence, knowledge and understanding. It’s fair to say that Derren Brown is one of the most intelligent people in the UK with an unbelievable understanding of the mind! 

The Bronnikov method is not scientific and Derren’s programme proved that it is nothing more than a waste of money. I highly recommend watching it if you missed it or if you have a friend or family member who is blind as the Bronnikov method enters the UK. Here is a taster of Derren Brown Investigates Episode 2. Keep up the good work Mr Brown! 

Facebook.com have taken yet another step towards dominating the world wide web. A couple of weeks ago we were treated to some Facebook social plugins which allowed websites across the world to simply embed useful plugins such as like buttons and comment system.

Now Facebook.com are asking users whether they’d like to make Facebook your homepage. Will it replace my beloved Google? No … but I can imagine many would when you consider some of the following official stats about Facebook.com:

People on Facebook

More than 400 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

Average user has 130 friends

People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook

So where can they go next?

The way I see it, Google must slightly worried by the possibility of that nice little search bar becoming not just a bar for your friends etc but a bar for a fully functional search engine! 

May be a little over the top but when Microsoft bought a $240m stake in Facebook.com back in 2007. Could this be the key to Bing catching Google up in the search engine market? Let’s hope not but Facebook.com certainly know how to build for the better! This would give users even more purpose to bookmarking Facebook.com as their homepage.

Do you think that Facebook.com will take on the search engines? Should they build their own or re-skin Bing.com?

Twitter made a pretty exciting announcement yesterday with the launch of their first official app - Twitter for Android.

As I read this post, I began to get really excited as you just know it’s going to be a great app for Android (and one of very few in my opinion). But then reality struck with the closing paragraph:

(The Twitter for Android app is available for phones running Android 2.1 and above

You could say I’m a little pissed off with HTC, an opinion shared by many. Last week the Tiawanese company confirmed:

“HTC will be providing a free update to Éclair for European HTC Hero variants. Starting in June, anyone owning an HTC Hero will receive an initial preparatory update, shortly followed by the full Éclair update. “For the full update, we would recommend using a free Wi-Fi hotspot or an unlimited data plan, otherwise standard data charges may apply.”

Let’s hope they can keep their promise this time and stop trying to piss people off enough that they will get fed up and by their more recent phones! Here’s a photo of Twitter for Android.

A few days ago I posted my birthday wishlist to Tumblr highlighting a five things I would like to see improved within Tumblr. 

I’d like to add another to my wishlist please (which I feel is a rather important one for SEO). Can you set your tagging system to either force uppercase or lowercase please? I’d noticed with my last post that one of the tags was ‘twitter’, however, a couple of earlier posts used ‘Twitter’ - a little bit of a canonical frustration there.While it doesn’t take much to be a little more careful. Surely it will give your users a better experience. 

If you are from Tumblr, would be great to get your thoughts. If you’re not, them can you reblog or RT this and try grab their attention?

P.S Tumblr, can we also have a little more control on our tags (such as delete).

Thanks

Smashing Magazine is one of my very favourite websites on the internet. Whether at home, work or on the move I find time to have a read of the very latest post.

It was only today I realised that something was missing after reading the brilliant post Extend Wordpress With Custom Fields. There is no share functionality on their mobile website. Now I’m unsure whether TweetMeme have created a mobile RT button yet but Smashing Magazine could really do with one in my opinion. I was reading this post on the move and all I wanted to do was retweet it on my HTC Hero!

Using backtweets.com you can see that this has become a pretty popular article with 589 retweets since I started writing this post (you can find the backtweets.com results here - and yes I did just use the anchor text here so any SEO reading this feel free to criticise). Thank you @randfish of SEOmoz.org for pointing out backtweets.com on another great post this week called 30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them.

I don’t want to criticise Smashing Magazine with this post but personally, I think that by using the TweetMeme RT button at the top of their post would provide far more benefit than their existing button at the bottom. I feel that the familiarity & popularity of this button (especially with a target audience that Smashing Magazine have) would attract more people to RT their posts. 

It would be great to hear the opinion of a Smashing Magazine fan or employee on my thoughts. 

Keep up the great posts! :)

On the 21st of April 2010, Facebook announced “The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform” at their third f8 conference. With this announcement came three new toys for all to play with; social plugins, the Open Graph Protocol & the Graph API.

The most noticeable of the three will be the introduction of social plugins which allow you to integrate your website with Facebook through just a few lines of code, these are;

• Like Button: The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click.
• Recommendations: The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like.
• Login with Faces: The Login with Faces plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.
• Comments: The Comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site.
• Activity Feed: The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.
• Like Box: The Like box enables users to like your Facebook Page and view its stream directly from your website.
• Facepile: The Facepile plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site.
• Live Stream: The Live Stream plugin lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event.

How do Facebook Social plugins affect us

Out of the eight listed above, I am most intrigued by the like button & comments. Prior to Facebook Social plugins I would automatically look to embed TweetMeme and AddThis. Now I wouldn’t discount either of the two, instead I would provide more prominence towards the new like button along with TweetMeme, lowering AddThis to avoid clutter of social tools. 

The like button is a guaranteed winner for any website as it offers much exposure with minimal ask - which is one of the big factors as to why TweetMeme works so well. AddThis is a little bit more complicated and beginning to get a little too busy for its on good, however, at least it covers all other social platforms if needed.

When you consider that there are over 400 million active users on Facebook, the average user has 130 friends and users spend over 500 billion minutes per month on the worlds largest social network. To offer such an easy solution to like a page or a post is simple yet genius.

Furthermore, it wouldn’t surprise me if comments were to take over too. Whether it Wordpress with its built in comment platform or Tumblr making good use of Disqus. Facebook comments could far outdo the two combined but be cautious - consider your target audience. 

Where now for Facebook?

With these latest developments, Facebook will just continually grow and grow. The more exposure the like button will get on the web the faster Facebook will grow. Having such exposure on some of the worlds largest sites will more than likely pick up the pace towards a few new users! 

One question I’d like to know, is it possible for Facebook to reach 1 billion users?

I received an email today from the loving TumblrBot letting me know that one of my posts had been reblogged.

A short but sweet automated email, but interestingly included after the HQ address a rather peculiar signature.

“Sent from my iPhone 4G”

Now I know that anyone can change a signature to whatever they want but why would TumblrBot use an iPhone to ping emails? Strange…

On the 10th of May I will be one year older and potentially one year wiser (depending on the speed of gaining new knowledge compared to that of killed braincells due to being a dedicated fan of alcohol).

There are few things that I really want and when asked “what would you like for your birthday?”, I find it difficult to answer. This year, I know I want a watch - surprised myself with that one considering that I haven’t worn such a device for over 10 years!

One thing I certainly do want (other than being able to stop time) is to find a perfect CMS to power my blog. Having tried numerous systems in the past for my personal blog, Tumblr has been the one I’ve spent most time on. There are just a few things I think are missing that aren’t really asking for much:

1. Meta data - Allow users to define their own meta titles, descriptions & keywords.
2. Image editor - Yes, I can just edit using Fireworks but what about those who don’t have it? A nice little editor the can crop & resize. 
3. Improved HTML editor - I’ve had a couple of issues in the past when trying to embed Javascript code into a post. Maybe it’s just me but I’m sure there’s an issue as the code is just removed when saved.
4. Improved titles - It would be great if the titles on all themes were to use <span> on the blog homepage but change to <h1> on the post itself with the link removed. I’m sure this can be done (if I were a programmer) but it’s left my blog homepage with numerous <h1> tags which isn’t great from an SEO point of view - one per page is best. 
5. Sharing the love - while I think it’s great that you have introduced integration with both Twitter & Facebook but that’s just a ping service as oppose to a social sharing tool. Can you please strike a deal with the likes of Tweetmeme or AddThis to allow easily integration of these tools? I’ve had Tweetmeme on one theme but struggling to find where to place the code with this current theme. 

I can’t think of anymore for now but still got a couple of weeks left before my birthday. 

Thanks Tumblr! 

A personal blog is supposed to be a place to post your personal opinions. Whether it be a specific topic such as technology, finance or just what is on your mind, each post follows a similar style.

Unfortunately, each time I look at my posts I can’t help but think that they never read very well and that the unfortunate people who stumble across my blog may read the first paragraph and get bored. 

So I am now asking the question of how can someone change their writing style? What am I doing wrong? How can I improve?

Please feel free to comment on here and offer tips, or, you could submit a post on my blog. 

It’s funny really - I have plenty of experience on Social Media and can offer advice yet I can’t put my own advice into practice!?!?

@globodave - if you’re reading this, fancy providing your thoughts on copywriting or journalism?

We may work for rival online companies but that’s not going to stop me promoting the work of a good friend of mine (he has invited me to his wedding after all). 

What is Globocation.com?

From what it sounds and what I believe - globocation is a mix of the globe and education. Dave has travelled the world and experienced many places, cultures and even tropical bites! Many times I have enjoyed listening to his stories on what he seen and where he went. Globocation is a mix of his experiences, travels, opinions and knowledge.

So if you are interested in travel or if you are looking for a backpacking budget travel blog then I highly recommend subscribing to his RSS feed and reading his posts.

Venus Marketing Cardiff Scam

My wife and I moved to Cardiff due to my job therefore leaving Sarah unemployed in the process. After years of PA work in the public sector, she decided to change career and look for something new. So this post is in response and support of Sarah’s own blog post about the company called Venus Marketing.

Who is Venus Marketing?

It’s a good question to ask as apparently they are also (according to a scam forum);

• LMC marketing
• JTM Solutions
• Machina Marketing

It’s very tempting to criticise every aspect of venus marketing, but that would just be too easy plus I wouldn’t want to waste my time on a company based on lies. Venus Marketing Ltd is just one big scam and would appreciate my readers support by sharing this (especially if you live in the Cardiff area). 

For more information, you can read Sarah’s blog post Venus Marketing - Management Trainee Scam.