The World Through My Eyes

Hello everyone!

First of all - wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - you won’t be hearing from me for a while (ugh, exams…) but till then, happy holidays!

In the meantime, below are some of my favourite posts of the year, enjoy (or at least try to!)

• The Day I found out that X-Factor was actually a singing competition - I mean, who’d have thought that?
• What the rusting dollar means for web junkies
• Google Analytics for n00bs - Part 1
• Work Experience - My days there
  
• Pizza Hut’s Crunchy New Menu
• It’s time you got yourself a McJob

So that’s all until whenever I get some free time and something worth saying,

Enjoy the festivities!

So you’ve had Adobe Photoshop for a while and your effects library consists of cool grungy stuff, immaculate reflections and you’ve just about mastered the air brush. Great, but you could be doing so much more useful stuff! Messing around is great initially, you learn a lot of new techniques - but isn’t it about time you learnt something you could really use?

This tutorial details how to use effects and techniques you’ve learnt in real life scenarios - in this tutorial we’ll look at creating birthday/greeting card text effects in Adobe Photoshop.

Click for bigger image

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I’ve just been thinking how the worlds population is growing so rapidly will affect the internet. One of the things that struck me were domain names - if there are more people in the world - there are likely to be more people called Viraj. If there are more people called Viraj, demand for domain names (such as www.viraj.info) would increase tremendously - pushing the price of domain names up.

So will people start giving children different names or will the internet produce a solution (which is sort of happening with some very odd - AKA Web 2.0 - domain names (del.icio.us etc.) and new domain extensions such as .name)

On a less random note, I’d like to say a big thank you to all the readers - over the last few weeks, some of you have been coming back for more and this has resulted in the popularity of this website increasing by around 2 million places! It’s jumped from being the 6.5 millionth most popular website in the world to around the 4.4millionth most popular website - thanks a bunch!

Oh, if you’d like to help even more, I could do with some more RSS Subscribers so please subscribe if you like what I post - just to give me an idea!

This is just about all I’ve had time to do today, but stay tuned for:

• An update about AdRoll and perhaps some beta invitations
• Information about my latest page
• Hopefully something meaningful on the ‘About Me’ page

Over and out…
(Wow, that sounds so cheesy)

Every once in a while, someone comes along, takes what appears to be the best of both worlds, puts it together and bang - you’ve either produced something great - or if you’re not quite so lucky something that’s going to be laughed at (like the Seat Toledo - A Volkswagen at the front, A Renault at the back and well, just messed up along the sides).

This has happened a lot in the online advertising market. Here’s another one…

What’s this one got over the rest?
AdRoll claim that they bring together the concepts of targeted advertising and social networking, the CEO Jared Kopf says they use a “social networking style matching system to enable publishers to create their own networks.” Interesting…

What this means is that people with small websites with similar content can get together in the hope of attracting an advertiser. So niche publishers organise themselves into communities of interest - an advertiser comes along and will hopefully be persuaded by the fact that this group of websites combined have enough potential to be advert-worthy.

To give you an example, 3 similar websites (A, B and C lets say) all receive 1,000 visitors per month - no one really wants to advertise with either because they’re too small on their own.

Site D on the other hand, has 3,000 visitors per month and gets a fair amount from advertising revenues.

Together Sites A, B and C have the same amount of traffic as Site D - so advertisers are likely to consider advertising with the 3 websites combined whereas they wouldn’t even have dreamt of advertising on either A, B or C individually.

Flawless, isn’t it?
I’m not in the best of positions to answer this as I’ve only just applied for a beta testing invitation - get yours while they’re still hot!

However, there are a few potential problems I can forsee…

• What happens if one website is holding the rest back? An advertiser comes along and likes the majority of the websites in the blogroll but there’s a few he doesn’t want to advertise on - will the community stick together or ditch the weaker websites? Can the group lose out on a deal just because of one or two websites?
• Will each website in the group receive an equal amount when it’s pay time? How will this be determined?
• Will similar websites want to participate - after all, aren’t the fellow advertisers the ‘competition?’

I’m pretty sure that they would have given these some thought and it will be interesting to see how these potential “issues” are dealt with.

What I think…
AdRoll definitely has a lot of potential. It’s a new take on advertising building on the ‘Safety in Numbers’ concept. It must be able to provide the push new bloggers with little bargaining power so desperately need.

I’m particularly eager because I blog on a variety of topics which makes it a lot harder to get targeted visitors. If AdRoll can bring similar websites together, maybe, just maybe there’ll be advertisers out there who will want to advertise on such a group of websites.

The key for AdRoll will be to build a diverse and large catalogue of advertisers and publishers alike. It’s just a matter of how well the service takes off and if any of the key players participate in it. It’s not going to be easy, the company faces the threat of Google and various other estbalished players, but their concept might just be good enough to cause some upsets in the online advertising market.

Welcome to the first in hopefully a series of posts in this ‘for n00bs’ section

First of all, a brief introduction this post is aimed at those of you who are just getting to grips with Analytics, you have a vague idea of what everything means. What I aim to do is explain how you can apply GA’s analysis to your website.

First, let’s cover what each statistic means…

Visits and Pageviews are pretty straight forward.

Pages/visit - This is the pageviews divided by visits.
Bounce Rate - This shows how many visitors came to your website and went away without viewing any more pages (i.e. they only looked at the first page they saw and went away after that).

Average Time on Site and % New Visits are also self explanatory so let’s now look at how each of these should influence decisions you make as the webmaster…or administrator of the website.

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The dollar has been on a long downward spiral in recent times. Whether it will be revived or not is a different story but right now the US housing market is being held back by the cold America seems to have caught and the euro is pummelling the dollar on the foreign exchange, so it’s all looking a bit gloomy at the moment.

A few years ago (2002ish I think) there was the whole “OMG, OPEC’s [the cartel of the oil producing countries] gonna switch to euros! :O” thing for the reason mentioned above. It’s argued that America decided to invade Iraq just to make an example of them (because if OPEC did switch to the euro, the American economy would be in even worse a condition than it is now). So America went and bombed Iraq on the basis of there being “weapons of mass destruction,” terrorism and all that sort of stuff.

They say history repeats itself, I don’t actually know who ‘they’ refers to but, they sure are right. America, it would seem, is laying the foundations for another war, on the same basis. This time however, it’s not against another country.

It’s against the internet. Read more

What’s the point of the whole runners up thing?

Is it just for them to congratulate you and then sort of rub it in your face that even though you’ve put all this effort and time in, you’re still only second best? Or that you were so close - but not close enough type of thing?

It’s not fair, we were miles better! (As any of the losing teams would say…)

I still feel we outpresented the other team but there’s no point arguing about it now. If at this point you’ve got no idea what I’m on about, let me fill you in…

Target 2.0 (or T2 as it’s fashionably called) challenges teams to set interests rates to control inflation.

Our team, unlike the 6 others opted to cut inflation by a quarter percent to 5.5% - the judges didn’t seem like our decision and this, fundamentally, is why we lost!

Hopefully this blog will be up Novemberish next year so I can use this post to remind me, but what we needed was a stronger conclusion, to sum up argument for changing and arguments for keeping the interest rate as it is. I guess we could also have used more documents/data released by the Bank of England rather than other external sources.

So, a little harsh that we lost it on just one area but it’s been a great learning experience, my real-life economics knowledge has increased by leaps and bounds! I guess there’s always next year and we’ll be going in with the experience of having taken part in this years competition.

rssHugger. I like the name, it conjures up images of teddy bears and has a nice warm glow to it, and that’s what it should all be about.

Not really - it should all be about helping new bloggers (like me!) get some exposure. Don’t get me wrong though; if you can conjure up images of teddy bears while you’re at it, that’s an added bonus.

So, what can rssHugger do for me?

Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together.

Seems great on paper, but does it work?

First things first, the user interface - it’s great! Clean, easy to navigate and super-fast. As for the actual service, I’ll have to wait and see how many interested readers the service refers to The World Through My Eyes.

Update… Wow, had a reply within the hour saying that my blog as accepted - link here. You can’t explore a website properly in a few hours, especially with a new one like this - I’m sure there will be many great features added as time goes by. But right now, it’s great for me - it only has 70ish blogs added, I can nose around the categories to find any that interest me and network with other bloggers who are in the same boat as me - not 100% original, but very useful!

High School Musical… Love it or hate it (I fall somewhere in between) but one thing you can’t deny is that it has been a huge success. Maybe not musically (in my opinion at least) but from a business perspective.

And admit it, these days everything is about the green, well brown (UK money :D) stuff.

And that so called “singing” competition everyone talks about these days? You know..the one sponsored by pot noodles… X Factor, that’s the one!

Do you know what the ‘X’ stands for in that? No, neither do I but i have pretty good idea. It’s all about sellability. Ok, I’m no expert (even though I pretend to be) but take it from me now - Rhydian, even though he is the better singer by far, is not going to win. It’ll be those fairy tale duo, “Same Difference” that performed the high school musical song a few weeks ago. They’re just so sellable (High School Musical = Little (hm, even big I guess) kids + Xmas just around the corner = have a guess?)

Actually, they’ve been sold already. All they need to need to do is piggy back on the success high school musical has had. After millions of little kids have seen them perform the HSM hit, they’ll be flocking to buy their single. and when will it be released? Just before christmas… Coincidence? Er…no, I don’t think so.

Britan is the world’s most hated country. Ever. Well, I think so anyway. Think about it - when the Japanese invent a new hyperduper deconfibuliator, we’re the last country to get it. Every blue moon when the Americans make something remotely useful (it’s usually made by Apple) they sell it to use for double the price. And I won’t even get started with how much the rest of Europe hate us.

So it comes as a surprise, to me at least, to see that General Motors have blessed us with the presence of the Hummer H3 in the UK. And it’s even more of a surprise that the economy of the H3 is in double figures. If like me, you find that last bit of information rather disappointing, you’ll be happy once again when I tell you about it’s carbon emission - around 341 g/km - beat that! Seeing as we are on the topic of surprises (we are, right?); here’s another one…it’s costs only £27k - that’s cheaper than the Mercedes M-Class, better off road than a Toyota Land Cruiser and buckets sexier than a BMW X5. First reaction - “Awesome, Dad, your job of buying me a first car just got easier!” (I wish…)

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