Foreign Perspectives

I run a series of interlinked holiday accommodation listings sites which started as something of a sideline for me but which is slowly becoming a significant income generator for me.

Now, in the early days it was quite clearly a straight listing service. I typed up the entries as they came in and they were displayed on the site as a great big list. Nice and simple if somewhat time-consuming.

As it grew, I figured that a database was the way to go and in the second year that went live. By then the original 20 properties had grown to over 100. Mark 1 of that simply replicated the original hand-produced site and a version of that is still around to this day because the hand-produced format is much more effective in SEO terms than a written for database site is for various reasons.

With the dramatic reduction in the work required from me to actually add the information, I broadened the amount and variety of information that the property owners could add. That increased so much that I figured after a while that I should write a new-generation version of the original site to run alongside the original version but targeted at a different market. The increase in information meant that properties now had a little website each with several pages on it.

Interestingly though, I’ve recently come across a free accommodation property site that has come at the problem from the opposite direction. What they do is get the property owners to add a whole lot of information and they produce a little website for them which gets listed by them.

What’s clear is that we’ll both likely meet in the middle several years down the line as I’m in the process of souping up the mini website that my listing service generates and already some people are quoting that address as “their” website address which presumably will become more common as time goes on. In fact, it’ll become more and more of a website generation facility over the months to come as that’s my main area for development this year.

The question next year though will be: how do I promote it to the owners? The listing service aspect will clearly remain but there’ll also be the aspect of building almost custom websites for the owners (surprisingly easy to do). In fact, thanks to the recent change of hosting service I’ll even be able to let each owner use their own domain to point to their “mini” website (which will potentially be larger than many “proper” websites).

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?

We were all assured just two months ago that we’d seen the last of the building society emergency takeovers with the demise of the Dunfermline but now it seems that we’re starting on yet another round of emergency takeovers as West Bromwich seems to be in its final days as an independent society.

The snag now is that Nationwide appears to have more than enough on its plate already and notably declined to take over all of Dunfermline which was a change to its previous approach of absorbing troubled societies in their entirety and merely took on the savings and regular mortgage parts of the society, leaving the part that caused the trouble well alone. Whatever society takes over the West Bromwich that seems likely to be the approach that they will take as otherwise those problems could well pull down the new owners as well.

Aside from the Nationwide which is probably too busy trying to integrate the societies that it has already picked up, the obvious choice would appear to be the Coventry although that seems likely to involve a number of branch closures over time given the similar geographic spread of the two businesses. The other problem is that the societies have a similar number of branches thus a takeover would pretty much double the number of branches to be looked after which could stretch the management a little bit too much in what are already difficult times. My bet is that, if it is a building society takeover, it will be a toss up between the Chelsea and the Yorkshire who will do it.

But what about the remaining building societies? Falling foul of the recent downgrade were West Bromwich, Chelsea, Britannia, Coventry, Nationwide, Newcastle, Norwich & Peterborough, Principality, Skipton and Yorkshire. Of these, only Chelsea appealed and Britannia is currently being taken over by the Co-Operative Bank.

As always, the safest place for your money remains National Savings.

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.