Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Last night Britain’s got Talent rewrote the rules of auditions for itself by allowing Hollie and her mother to get another, undeserved, chance to perform her act. Well, her second act I suppose you could say.

That’s really no surprise as the judges this time around seem to be completely biased in favour of the “cute & vulnerable” where a child performer was involved. Hollie merely took this advantage much further than the other children on the show already have.

Whilst it wasn’t a surprise that they’d do this, it does show just how much the show can get taken in by that cute & vulnerable label. That would be fine if the child concerned was very good but Hollie just isn’t. Whether she’s got the potential to be, I don’t know, but at the moment it just looked like a pushy mother wanted her little girl to succeed regardless of anything else.

Although it’s notionally all down to a public vote in reality the judges by their comments can exert a lot of influence on which acts will go forward. They’ve made no allowances for lots of very professional acts in this and previous editions of the show but then they didn’t fall into that cute & vulnerable category.

Sadly this time around a poor performance from Hollie knocked a very good one from Greg Pritchard. That’s just not right.

Let’s face it, many people would love a job where they could sit out on the beach and claim that they were working.

Whilst it’s clearly not an option for everyone, there’s getting to be quite a growth in information jobs which would let you do exactly that. Well, in principle anyway: as always, it’s rarely so simple as it might appear.

If you consider the very popular route of blogging, you’ll find that the vast majority of blogs don’t make any sizeable amount of money. Why? Well, the normal route of using adsense doesn’t work particularly well with sites with dynamic content as it usually takes adsense a couple of days to get the keyword targeting right by which time your blog will have moved on and a different set of keywords would be relevant. Secondly, you need major traffic or very well targeted traffic for affiliate schemes to work.

However, there is the option of doing sponsored posts which can be profitable even with relatively low traffic volumes. Typically you can make around $20 per day on a site with PR2 or above by writing three or four articles each day of, usually, 50 to 200 words each. If your blog gets to PR5 or over you can do really well with this option.

Other potential options are selling e-books or charging for subscriptions which are popular with some making money online blogs. There’s even SubHub which might eventually evolve into a worthwhile venture for the participants although at the moment it’s mainly an article repository for Internet business articles with a sideline in running up and hosting custom blog templates (at a rather exorbitant price).

Naturally, you don’t need to choose one single route to making money online. Personally, I do sponsored posts on blogs and also have a range of adsense funded sites with subscription options.

Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors (on the assumption that at least the mark #1 time machine would be a fairly sizeable piece of equipment).

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

So long as you haven’t chosen a gite buried in the depths of rural France, chances are that you’ll have a great selection of nightlife to choose from. Naturally, the very best selection is in Paris and, of course, there’s the daytime attractions too.

You’ll naturally want to see the Eiffel Tower (take the stairs to the first level then the elevator to reduce your queuing time) although the views from the top don’t look much like Paris as obviously the Eiffel Tower itself isn’t in them! Museums are incredibly thick on the ground and the best are the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay and the Pompidou Centre. Whilst, in theory, you could do all three in one trip you’d be crazy to consider it as after a few hours even the finest Matisse just gives you an “oh hum” feeling. There are just too many magnificent works of art to see to do justice to even one of the museums in a single day.

In Paris, hotels are all over the place and with prices ranging from around the EUR 30 range way up to thousands depending on where you choose and how fancy the place is. Don’t neglect “serviced apartments” either as they are often in very well placed locations.

Since the Paris Metro system is fantastic you can easily choose hotels in the suburbs and be at the centre very quickly. They’re usually considerably cheaper than hotels right in the centre and often in much quieter areas. The only time when you can’t do this is on July 14th when a number of key Metro stations are closed.

Although you might not think there was a whole lot of scope for advertising in a medium that only gives you 140 characters to play with, there are a growing number of ways to advertise through Twitter although whether or not they’re actually effective is an entirely different question.

The means for handling the advertising varies quite a bit as you’d expect for a fairly new type of media. For instance, since the tweets themselves are rather fleeting affairs on the tweet streams of the more prolific twitterers, Twittad takes the approach of using the background image to place the main advert and uses the tweet stream to announce that the twitter account is sponsored. The system works in a similar way to blog sponsorship platforms which is to say that you write up a little profile of your twitter account and advertisers can choose you based on that or alternatively you can choose some advertisers. Payout seems to be around the $2.50 a week level which is OK in that you don’t need to do much for that.

Another service that’s possibly more interesting to the advertisers than the twitterers is Twtad which works on the pay per click model. The problem with this one is that the payment is typically 5 cents or less which would be alright for a system that was entirely automated but this system isn’t. Since click-through is typically quite low this system isn’t really worthwhile unless you have LOT of followers (10,000 or more perhaps) and if you have then you should be able to pick up more money elsewhere.

A more comprehensive version of this is Be a Magpie which is an automated service offering pay per view, pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale. You can set it so that you have to pre-approve tweets but leaving it on automatic seems best and will put a Magpie tweet every 5 ot 10 (you set the interval) of your tweets. All else being equal this one seems by far the best bet for the twitterers in that once it’s set up it can be fully automated. It’s good from the advertisers point of view too in that it offers the four different payment methods.

The latest entrant seems to be Betweeted which I gather operates on the basis of the twitterer choosing advertisers to tweet about so is quite similar to the usual blog sponsorship services. So far it’s only for US bloggers and nobody else can even register to look at how it works.

So, you can advertise via Twitter, but the question is: should you? If you followed the original principles of Twitter ie that it’s a service for “friends, family members and co-workers to stay connected” then the answer is probably not. After all, you wouldn’t hand out advertising leaflets to these people, would you? However, the service has moved a long way from that and most people have followers who are complete strangers and lots of others are tweeting to promote themselves or their business, in which case the answer is: why not? Aside from advertising third parties, more and more companies are moving on to Twitter to promote their products and, of course, there’s always been the self-promotion of bloggers tweeting their posts (some cross-promote their tweets on their blog) so advertising is very much a feature of Twitter that seems here to stay.

Finally, there’s the question of effectiveness of Twitter advertising ie does it actually work? Well, I’ve been tweeting my own blog posts for a while now and it would appear that it’s quite an effective way of gathering new readers for the blog so presumably it would be equally effective for advertising tweets, or at least those that fit in with the general interest of the followers.