Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

In times gone by saying that you were involved in a “cottage industry” meant that you were doing something like making quilts at home or perhaps making cute little craft items. Essentially, working with your hands by and large.

These days a cottage industry is quite a different beast.

Yes, there are still many people around making those quilts and craft items but you’ll see them sold online these days. In fact, that aspect gives you more contact with the original maker of such items than most people would have had in the hay-day of the cottage industry. In the past, they’d have sold most of their items via buyers whereas now they can sell them to you directly.

However, these days there is a whole new class of cottage industry. It’s not uncommon to come across an ebay seller in the most unusual places. I’ve bought several items from a place based in the Shetland Islands myself which is about as far from “civilisation” as you can be. Likewise, there’s a number of places based in Point Roberts, the little bit of land forgoten about when the treaty definining the border between Canada and America was signed.

Similarly there are the likes of myself making something of a living from writing. There have, of course, been writers pottering away for a long time but the Internet has made that much more of an occupation open to everyone than it ever was in the past. After all, realistically I’d never have had a hope of getting 35,000 readers a week for my writing yet that’s the number I’ve had in the last week for this blog.

Some might say that these Internet based efforts aren’t a cottage industry. How could they be with so much technology? Yet, that craft item you bought also used technology, it’s just that the technology used to produce it was older.

Every time that the issue of ID cards comes up in the UK, there are questions asked about how securely the information collected will be held and every time the government says “trust us”.

Well, today we’ve seen just how much we could trust the government with our information. Not that far at all as it happens as they’ve just managed to lose the complete ID records of just about everyone in the UK. Had it been anyone other than the government that had lost it, those places providing ID theft solutions would be advising everyone to change their bank accounts. When you’re talking millions of people, that’s not really a runner of course.

Still, there are encouraging signs in this fiasco. For one thing, it’s a great example to refer the government to when they say that the ID card information will be perfectly safe. And, of course, it’ll be a brilliant excuse to use when your bank claims that you’ve overspent on your credit card as you’ll be able to say that your identity was stolen.

Perhaps TNT aren’t the best company to use if you’re sending really valuable items in the post!

Googles long awaited pagerank review started working its way through the sites over the last few weeks but still doesn’t appear to have settled down.

It’s quite a confusing picture going by a number of sites that I keep an eye on. A friends key site for instance has dropped from PR5 down to PR3 for no good reason and is particularly worrying for me as he does far, far more SEO than I ever bother with. My thinking is that if it can happen to him, then it’s sure to happen to me sooner or later.

Wendy’s site has gone from PR2 to PR2 to PR0. Again, no good reason comes to mind. In fact, she’s been upping the ante with the SEO over the last few months so it should have gone to PR3.

This site is, for the moment, steady at PR4. I’ve not done any SEO on it over the last few months but was sort-of hoping for PR5 in that there’s a lot more content on it now than there was.

Meanwhile, our Whole Earth Guide has gone from PR0 to PR2 on a site which doesn’t, yet, have a whole lot of content.

Actually, as I read that, the one common factor in drops is that SEO has been done on the sites. Could it be that Google have somehow managed to negate all that SEO and look instead through to real value in the sites? Although, that would beg the question: is this blog of “real value”?

As it’s the start of the B&B/self-catering marketing season, I’ve made a start on trying to drum up some more entries for our various listing sites.

Usually, the rule of thumb is that you get about 1% return on any marketing so, in theory, I need to send out 100 invitations just to get one new entry. That’s certainly been the case with any previous e-mails I’ve sent out but for a variety of reasons the return on this particular e-mail has already passed 3% and there’s probably another week or so before the responses will start to really peter out.

How come? It’s combination of reasons. The listing is free which should improve the response although it hasn’t done so in the past but perhaps the bigger reason is that I gather that a lot of people haven’t had a great year with their properties so they’re probably taking up more marketing opportunities now than they would do otherwise (funnily enough, the sites have been pulling in much more business than expected this year).

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good freebie listing for your B&B/inn or self-catering place you can sign up at Our Inns.

Most of the time you just assume that the Internet runs 24/7 and that it doesn’t have a timezone as such.

That works fine for most people except that obviously many of the new “live chat” support services are generally only online during the business hours of the company providing them which, at the moment, usually means either the east or west coast of America which ain’t too handy for us folk in Europe. In fact, I’ve only once seen one of those services online when I was looking for it.

However, for me the bigger problem is that the paid posting outfits are generally on the east coast of America which is five hours off for us. Although in theory the opportunities are there 24/7 in practice the folk in the office put them on during their business hours of something like 9am to 6pm which, for us, means 2pm to 11pm although it looks like at least some of their staff work later than that as some opportunities come on after our bedtime. Net effect of this is that naturally the folk to the west of them get the majority of the high paying ones and in the morning we see all the great payouts that we missed during the night.

Sadly we’re a long way from it being economic for us to relocate to America or at least somewhere in their timezones so we can just gripe about it for now.