My little office in the centre of town is looking a lot more upmarket these days. It’s all thanks to Debbie Osborn, a talented local artist and designer (and blogger) who has provided me with some of her original artwork to hang on my walls. They’re really eyecatching pieces - I’ll bet lots of visitors will be asking where they came from when they drop in to ‘talk websites’.

Keith, her other half, is a pretty fine local photographer. One of his prints – a cracking seascape in the sunset –  is also adorning my office. How bad is that?

So you see, it’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know Thanks very much indeed guys.

Oh look. The BBC news website has had a makeover. More white space. More images. Larger text. More sample items in each section. Looks OK.

I use it all the time, so if anything I spot puts me into ‘grumpy old man wearing trousers up to his chin’ mode, I’ll let you know!

 
FAKENHAM NATURAL HEALTH CENTRE

I promised the owner of a new business in town I’d give his new venture a bit of a plug. This info is gleaned from their website…

Opening this Saturday 12th June at 10am
There will be therapists offering taster sessions for £5, with a wide variety of therapies available on the day. Come and have look round and meet the therapists.

They’re running a competition on North Norfolk Radio too. Prizes include various kinds of massage, hypnotherapy sessions and a Wellness & Nutrition consultation. One of their upcoming workshops is, “How to play Tibetan Singing, Talking & Charma Bowls”. Sounds a bit different!

You can find them opposite Tesco’s entrance, behind the Salvation Army hall.

1 Royal Oak Chambers,
Oak Street, Fakenham,
Norfolk, NR21 9DY.

If you’re the slightest bit interested in how I while away my workdays here in the plush corporate world of Wensum Towers (down that little alleyway in Norwich Street) you can now find out.

I’m experimenting with a new service for my clients where I ‘Tweet’ each job I undertake on their websites. Where appropriate I mention their business and add a link to their site. Twitter is a good way to network for business and hopefully it should be of benefit to Wensum.net and my clients too.

Take a look at Wensum.net to get a flavour of my working day (the latest Tweets are displayed in the right hand column). If you have a Twitter account, please feel free to follow – look for the account name ‘Wensumdotnet‘.

You know how big TV celebrities like Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry get followed on Twitter by hundreds of fans. Well the reverse kind of situation just happened to me!

I run the IT side of a new company called House Advertiser, as you may have seen before on this blog. Part of our marketing strategy is to promote our services on our company blog, which is linked to Facebook and Twitter.

Just now, I recieved notification that our company Tweets are being followed by none other then Sarah Beeny, of Channel 4′s Property Ladder.

Hehe. Funny old world, innit?

If, like me, you use the BBC news website to catch up on what’s happening in the world, you may have seen evidence of the presentation of news items being skewed by external influences. I just saw something on the site today which leads me to believe it’s still happening, despite them being aware of the problem.

There’s a screenshot below of a section of their site which displays the most popular and most shared text news items and the most viewed video stories. There’s one story shown in the most read section, “Beer with 32% strength launched” about a Scottish craft  Brewery called Brewdog who have created a beer which has a very high alcohol content. Trouble is, the story was from November – why is it suddenly appearing as a ‘most-read’ story in the middle of February?

I have a suspicion that this story could be an example of one being bumped up the list artificially. It may be no coincidence that the brewery concerned are skillful in the art of viral marketing (as well as making excellent beer) and they have a share-ownership scheme which is coming to a close and has been widely promoted over the past few days.

OK, so if you like Brewdog (and you think their viral marketing methods are doing this), you may think they’re clever in the way that they’re getting national news coverage for free. However, if nothing else it should make everybody think twice about the way our news is presented and the fact that we’re constantly manipulated by all kinds of marketing and political / religious / commercial  lobbying ploys.

I’ve just pulled the plug on the old Wensum.net website and livened up the new one. Like my blog, it’s created in WordPress - which will hopefully give potential clients an idea of what’s possible using the software.

I’m really liking WordPress. It strikes a pretty good balance between power and useability. The new site doesn’t particularly look like a blog, although it has some elements of one. The layout theme has provided a couple of random glitches, but otherwise it has been pretty well-behaved.

I’ll be interested to get viewers’ feedback.

29th October 1969 saw the birth of the Arpanet network – the US-only forerunner to the Internet we know and love/hate today. Hirsute boffins in bow ties, based at UCLA and Stanford, sent the first data between its nodes… 400 miles across country. When the sender typed in the third letter of the sequence, the system crashed and had to be reconfigured, but since then it has all managed to work reasonably nicely (well apart from Tiscali and the occasional bit of congestion at the BT exchange, that is).

More on the story at the BBC’s website.

I was Googling around, as you do, when I spotted a photo of Fakenham on Google Images that looked familiar. Sure enough, it was one of mine – but not on one of my sites. Looking at the site itself (it was a local accommodation website) threw up several photos nicked off FakenhamWeb without permission. Whats more, the author had also swiped loads of my text too – without so much as a ‘by your leave’. A swift email got the required response and the offending material was removed.

But this had me wondering what else was out there - and this was quite an interesting exercise…  I did a search for a phrase I’d used on one of my pages – “Pretty brick-and-flint faced buildings” – click the link and you’ll see what I found. Cool.