Lisa Bettany posted a great link today on Twitter. The video shows Bill O’Reilly going nuts at his staff years ago when the teleprompter wouldn’t work. Hilarious.

I could give you many reasons why I detest this man but I think Snoop Dogg explained it for me in this video :

A few years ago the website Friends Reunited became incredibly popular in the UK. Over the course of a few months traffic jumped to crazy figures. I remember everyone signing up around that time and people were using it and updating their profiles a lot. For those who don’t know, Friends Reunited is a website which was initially setup for people to meet old school friends. They later let you add your work details etc too.

One of the major limitations of the site was that in order to send someone a message you had to pay a yearly fee. Many did however most people I knew didn’t pay. FR were quite strict on this policy too and removed email addresses etc from profiles of people who were trying to get in contact with a friend without paying them.

I got an email from them the other day telling me about people who have joined up in the last month and I decided to logon to the site. One of the biggest changes they made recently was that they have made it free to send messages to other users. This is a move they obviously had to do due to the success of other social media sites but I do feel that they have missed the boat.

Too little too late

I have no doubt that friends reunited still gets a lot of traffic and still makes a lot of money however I think they waited too long to remove the fee for sending messages. A few years ago it was one of the only social media sites in the UK however since then it has many rivals. In the USA MySpace is very popular however in the UK people mainly use FaceBook and Bebo. I really can’t see why anyone would use FR on a regular basis given most people now contact via these other social medai sites.

What do you think? Do you think Friends Reunited would be more popular today if it had removed the fee to message each other a few years earlier?

* For the record, I’m not really a big fan of any social media site myself and get bored with them very quickly!

My blogging advice blog BloggingTips.com got a new design yesterday

Here’s a preview of the new design

You can read the full announcement here : BloggingTips gets a redesign

Evolution Wordpress Theme Released

To coincide with the new design of BloggingTips I also released a dynamic wordpress theme for public release.

You can read the announcement here and download the theme from this page.

Both designs were done by Design Saurus. If you are looking for a blog design I strongly encourage you to contact them for a quote as they are very easy to work with.
Let me know what you think of the new designs

I decided to have a quiet Friday night last night and didn’t go out. Instead, my friend came round and we spent most of the night playing Grand Theft Auto 4 on the PS3. As I predicted at the start of the week, it’s drained a lot of my time!

Of course, we interrupted playing the game to catch the first episode of the brand new 5th season of Peep Show. It was hilarious and saw Mark once again fuck up another chance with a girl he thought was the one (after one meeting).

British readers will no doubt be aware of the show but I’m not so sure it’s shown stateside. Basically, the show is about two guys in their late twenties. Jeremy is a musician who is coasting through life doing pretty much what he wants. Mark’s a business man who tries to be sensible but inevtibly messes things up all the time, usually due to Jeremy. The show is unique from other comedys as nearly all scenes are shown from the perspective of one of the characters.

Here’s a clip from the episode where Jeremy decides to drug Mark so that he doesn’t ruin his night. Superb!

Any other Peep Show fans out there?

Although the internet has been around since the 70’s, it was on 30th April 1993 that Cern brought the world wide web to the public domain. I didn’t start using the internet regularly til my first year at uni in 1996.

When we first started we were all fascinated by what you could do in the web. There were old C64 roms available, chat rooms had thousands of people abusing each other verbally and Yahoo was just a directory.

It’s kind of hard to imagine some aspects of life without the internet now. I remember starting an office job in early 2000 and at the same time this really really geeky guy started. Infact, geeky isn’t the best way to describe him, he was just plain weird. I know that sounds mean but lets just say he wasn’t a people person. Anyways, whenever anyone asked him what he was doing at the weekend he would always say, I don’t know, I’ll check my emails. At the time this was very uncommon and I thought it was really sad.

Fast forward 8 years and most of my weekends are organised via email with friends. My how times have changed.

I wonder what the web will be like in 15 years - I doubt many aspects of it will be unrecognizable to todays web. Hopefully I’ll still be making a living through the net regardless

BBC Story

Microsoft released XP Service Pack 3 yesterday but it was quickly pulled back and delayed. It seems like you can download XP SP3 from the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Overview page. Apparently it was delayed because of a glitch in the way it works with MS Retail Management Systems (RMS).

Chris Keroack announced in the Microsoft forums :

In the last few days, we have uncovered a compatibility issue between Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience, we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to the web.

To help protect customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to the web.

We are also testing a fix, and will make it available once that process is complete. Once they have installed the fix, Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers should be able to run both service packs.

Until then, we advise Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers to not install either service pack. Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers running Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1 should contact Microsoft Customer Support Services for additional information.

At the moment I’m using Vista on my main computer but I’m planning on putting XP on the laptop I get in the next month fro travelling so it’s good to hear the best version of Windows just got better

…because I got this delivered this morning

Is anyone else intending to get this for the PS3 or the 360?

4 days ago I asked what laptop I should get for travelling. When I wrote the post I had a few laptops in mind however my mind is now pretty much set on the HP 2133 Mini Note.

The basic model has a 1.2Ghz Via C7 processor, 120 GB 5400 rpm SATA hard drive, 8.9″ screen (with a native 1280 x 768 resolution), webcam, bluetooth and 2GB of RAM. One of the best things about this laptop is the keyboard. HP have extended the keyboard to the end of the chassis so it’s 92% the size of a regular full sized keyboard (I actually think thats bigger than the keyboard I had on my old sony ultraportable and that had a 10.6 inch screen). After seeing one of my favourite blogs JKOnTheRun give it a rave review I was sold.

Currently, it’s due for a UK release on 27 May 2008 through HP’s sole distributor RM. RM target the education sector so will be selling this laptop with XP but they also provide an upgrade license to Vista if you want. From the videos I have seen it seems to run OK on Vista but XP should run a lot smoother. They also provide a 6 cell battery however currently they only sell the 1.2Ghz version for £457.79. HP are releasing a 1.6Ghz version as well in the USA so hopefully they will release that too in the UK (which is the main reason why I haven’t placed a pre-order as yet).

If you want to see the mininote in action, check out the review on JKOnTheRun as their video lasts around 30 minutes.

I wasn’t going to write about the Joel Comm saga which has developed over the last few days but I’ve read about it on several blogs I read on a regular basis and the reactions from some bloggers has surprised me to say the least.

To summarise, Joel Comm has been promoting his new Adsense Secrets 4 ebook the last few weeks with such high profile bloggers as Darren Rowse recommending the book. Across the board bloggers were raving about how good the ebook was but 4 days ago Mark Wielgus noticed that Joel Comm was actually scamming his customers. You see, in his badly designed 10,000 word sales pitch he had one small sentence telling readers that by paying $9.95 for his ebook they would also be subscribing to a $29.95 monthly subscription. Mark hit the nail on the head when he said that this is ‘deceptive nonsense’. I read the sales page a few times when Mark wrote his post and I only found the subscription text by using the search facility in firefox.

A few days later Joel was forced to issue a grovelling apology on the site for his actions. He has also promised to give two weeks of profits to Hearts and Hands International.

You know what, I think I would have more respect for Joel if he put his hands up and just shouted ‘OK, you got me’ rather than issuing an insincere apology. For Gods sakes, how can you believe an apology from a guy who puts a sales pitch at the end of it to buy the same product he ripped people off with!!

Surprised by bloggers response

I mentioned at the start of this post that I wasn’t planning on writing about this whole saga but what forced me to say something was the response from some bloggers. I have been really surprised at how quick some bloggers have been accept his apology. Joel Comm is only human and we all make mistakes but you would have to have your head in the sand if you think Joel didn’t know what he was doing when he decided to sign his customers up to something they didn’t want signed up to. It’s not like he accidently set this up, he consciously made the decision to mislead people into a monthly subscription payment 3 times more expensive than the ebook which he is trying to sell.

This kind of tactic disgusts me, it really does. He is no different to the webmasters who infect your computers with spyware, no different from the webmasters who sell your email details to other parties and no different from any other scammer on the net whose only motivation is money, regardless of how ethical the methods they use to get it are. I emplore you not to give this guy another penny. I agree wholeheartedly with David Peralty who said ‘Don’t but Adsense Secrets‘.

Clearly not everyone shares my view on Joel’s apology though. John Chow and Mark Weilgus gave Joel kudos for apologising, Zac Johnson is giving away free copies of the book and Shawn Collins has went as far as saying that he applauds Joel’s response. I have a lot of respect for these bloggers but I have to disagree with them on this one (* my respect for Mark certainly went up for warning bloggers about this scam in the first place).

I hope I don’t sound like a mean bastard with all of this. I’m sure Joel is a nice guy and I have no doubt he has realised he has messed up in a big way. I always try and put myself in someone elses shoes but I just can’t this time. This is someone who understands how the internet works and he has been working online a long time to know how things work, in short, he knew what he was doing. That is why it’s difficult for me to believe this apology is sincere.

Consider this scenario. How would you all feel if next week someone finds out that I placed a spyware worm in this page which got me $10 for every computer it affected. Would you accept my apology when I was caught? Would you believe that I made a mistake and that I’m only human? More importantly, could you ever trust me in the future?

You see, integrity is a big part of writing on the web, particularly for guys like Joel Comm who are selling themselves as much as their product. Daniel Scocco talked about this today. In particular he said that :

I am pretty sure that those Internet marketers are nice guys, the only problem with them is that sometimes they put their desire to make money above their principles and above integrity.

And therein lies the main point of this whole debate, can you ever trust someone who has tried to scam his own customers in the past, can you have faith in their product?

I’d love to hear your view on all this so please leave a comment if you have time

Ryan from Love Inventions left a comment a few days ago asking how my online shop is coming along. I haven’t spoke about it in a while and Ryan’s comment reminded me that I haven’t updated all you guys.

E-Commerce is Flaming Nuts

Myself and my friend Eddie started working on our ecommerce site at the start of the year. The name of our site is FlamingNuts.com. We picked a generic non product specific domain name so that we didn’t limit the type of products we sell in the future.

We decided to sell ipod accessories at first, the reason being that the value of the stock does not drop much over time so we don’t need to worry about the logistics of selling within a certain timescale. Long term I was keen to sell electrical devices like portable laptops and UMPC’s because I’m interested in them but of course, the value of that type of thing drops very quickly and you have a short window to sell them in.

We got our stock in February however we quickly realised how saturated the market is. Our initial plan was to sell on ebay for a few months until sales picked up on the main site however there are people selling the same products as us for less than what it cost us to ship it from China. The problem is, all of these sellers are shipping direct from China so we highlighted this in our sales and told potential customers that we can do next day delivery. Unfortunately it seems that most ebayers are happy to wait 2-3 weeks for their ipod case if it means they save 3 or 4 pounds.

We did of course realise that this was a competitive niche however we didn’t realise just how much.

Does this mean we are giving up? No, well, not just yet. We are looking to sell off the stock we bought and we are still getting a few trade magazines delivered so we are keeping tabs on what we could sell and how we market it. We have also started working on a few other projects. Eddie is trying to get more involved with online work and as well as landing a blogging job with a real estate site, he is working with me on our new humour blog.

Long term, I’m not sure if ecommerce is for me. I do sell things on ebay from time to time and selling is essentially a very easy thing to do - I mean it isn’t hard to box something up and ship it to someone. However, a successful ecommerce site would make a big difference in my lifestyle as I currently have a great amount of flexibility with the hours I work and can work more one day so that I can can go away the next. Although I want to make much more money, I do not want to sacrifice quality of life.

I’ll let you know what we decide to do with the site but one things for sure, I don’t regret starting the site as it’s good to try out new ways to make money online