Although in the UK you wouldn’t believe it’s the first day of autumn 2008 as we had two days of sun over the weekend up here in Manchester!

So let’s hope the first day of autumn 2008 continues this warm and sunny trend until winter!

If you want to see any of the older Google logos then take a look at their logo page here.

According to the official Google Blog, Google have developed new algorithms to allow their search spider to index Adobe Flash pages. While I do understand that they want to index everything on the web, I’m personally not looking forward to having lots of “skip intro” results in my search results!

Adobe Flash is a great technology and can add great multimedia capabilities to a website. However, “web designers” have taken it and used it to build whole websites with. If you know anything about user interface design then you’ll know having a website which doesn’t use standard conventions that everyone is use to is bad.

Can you cut and paste text on Flash sites? Nope!
Can you deep link into a page? Generally no!
Should websites fill the whole browser viewport and then scale as you change the window size? Nope.

In my opinion, Flash should be used minimally to improve the user experience on the site. Use it to nicely scroll your header images. Use to imbed a music player if you’re a music site. But don’t make me click on a webpage which says “skip intro” because you want to show off the fact you’ve learnt how to rotate some text and image layers from your “Adobe Flash for Dummies” book!

I’m hoping that Google will throw out the crappy Flash results (i.e. “skip intro”) when it parses these websites but I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

I was an old school 80s hip-hop kid so I grew up on a diet of funk and soul sampled beats and bubble-style graffiti. I still admire a lot of the true art work that writers throw up on walls now but it always amuses me to see what kids write on walls. So this morning on the way to work I was amused to see two great lines of graffiti, written in the dirt on the back of a van.

Av U got the washing-up liquid Jonny?

R we avin chops

No punctuation and written in SMS text-speak but pure genius!

“Now then, now then. What have we here?”
(Say it in a Jimmy Saville voice for full effect!)

After another gripping episode of The Apprentice we turned over to watch The Apprentice: You’re Fired as we often do. One of the pundits was Carol Thatcher but what on earth was she wearing? My wife pointed out that she looked just like Jimmy Saville! Being the geek that I am I had to grab a frame from last night’s show from the BBC iPlayer and see how similar they looked. Seperated at birth?

With the threat of a world recession around the corner it’s time for us to all tighten our purse strings. So to make sure I’m up to date on money issues I decided to subscribe to the Radio 4 Moneybox podcast.

Having listened to the show at the weekend I thought I’d share with you something that I didn’t know and could have been useful a few weeks ago. The main topic was credit reports and the information contained within them. In case you don’t know what they are, these are the reports that financial institutions use in order to determine whether you’re a high financial risk or not. If you’re not then they’ll happily lend you money (…and then send you a million letters, pre-filled in credit card forms and the like offering you more loans for the next ten years and hence exposing you to identity fraud but hey, that’s another story altogether!) So this became pertinent to us because we were applying for a loan a few months ago. Given the credit crunch crisis that has been happening in the US and UK, banks are more reluctant to lend money to people who haven’t banked with them before. In this case we were refused a loan and this caused us to question our credit reports.

The two main credit report companies in the UK are Equifax and Experian and both companies offer services to help you to view your credit reports. But here’s the rub; you can see your “free” report if you give your credit card details and hence sign up for a monthly fee. It’s the classic tactic that big companies use in order to tie you into a monthly fee which you quickly forget to cancel. But did you know you can get a “statutory credit report” for only £2.00? No, neither did I until I heard Paul Lewis from Moneybox talking about it. The don’t really make this clear on their respective websites so that you end up signing up for a recurring fee. Obviously, they have to make money and their argument is that the £2.00 fee was set by the UK government over ten years ago and now doesn’t cover costs. While I do appreciate this, I can’t help but feel that they hide where these cheap credit reports are in order to make more people sign up for a monthly fee, as was discussed by Anna Fielder from the National Consumer Council on this episode of Moneybox.

So to make life easier I thought I’d deep link into the sites so anyone who has found this website looking for statutory credit report information can easily find the pages.

Here is the link for an Experian statutory credit report.

And here’s the link for an Equifax statutory credit report.

Hope it helps someone out as I could have done with this before I signed up for a monthly fee!

Picture by Austin Evans under Creative Commons licence

The graph above is tracking talk about the film Juno. Unfortunately, it seems to be down at the moment so I haven’t had a chance to properly test it.

So why’s it useful then? Well, Facebook has around 70 million users so you’re getting realtime information on an extremely rich dataset. As the demographic of Facebook strongly skews towards the 18-24 year olds you’ll end up with a rich source of information for what’s hot and what’s not for the youth market. This is definitely very useful for finding new products which haven’t come onto your radar for affiliate marketing purposes. In the similar way to Google Trends, Facebook Lexicon allows keyword comparisons so this could also kick start some useful Pay Per Click (PPC) keyword research for comparing different keywords and which are more popular. I’m hoping to get a better play with it once the masses have finished hammering their servers. Oh and Facebook assures us that it’s not linked to any personal data so don’t worry about talking about things you shouldn’t on your Facebook profile!