Foreign Perspectives

We were thinking of buying our car in the UK this time in that we’re sort-of expecting to be there fairly soon.

Then we looked at the prices.

How many times have there been European investigations into the overlly high car prices in the UK and yet still the price difference we found was around 30% or more on exactly the same car. Well, perhaps not exactly the same. Sure, the steering wheel is at the other side but then we bought a Japanese car and seeing as they drive on the left themselves, the European version should cost more as clearly it needs to be modified into a car for driving on the right.

Last time we bought a car there were differences in the specification in that the French car didn’t have a CD player nor radio whereas the UK model did. However, adding a CD/radio would have added, at best, £200 to the car (the French car was fully wired for it) yet the UK model cost something like £2000 more.

Must be time for another European investigation into UK car prices.

One of the hardest parts of blogging when you’re starting out is the complete lack of feedback that you get.

In many ways, at the start it feels very much like you’re writing to yourself because of that. The other problem is that with the lack of feedback, many new bloggers lose the initial enthusiasm leading to the massively high rate of attrition that blogs have in the first three months.

Once you clear that three month hurdle, it seems to get easier though most blogs still aren’t getting much feedback even by that time. What’s different is that by that time you’ve just become too stubborn to stop writing regardless of whether or not anyone seems to be reading it.

However, if you do want some feedback, the easiest way to do it is to mention one of the main blogging sites. The likes of technorati and feedburner do read blogs, or at least the posts that mention them. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that somebody from Feedburner replied to a post I made months ago but then, if you think about it, blogs are their business so they need to read blogs.

The computer we bought today will be the last major purchase on our part for a while although I imagine that I could talk myself into getting Office 2007 for it rather than using Office 2003 that we already have. The new computer comes with a limited time edition of it so I’ll likely have a look into the cost of a student upgrade as they’re usually sensibly priced.

We’ve a slide scanner and digitizer pencilled in as our next IT purchases.

The slide scanner will let me use the massive library of slides that I’ve built up over the years rather than having to license photos for Whole Earth.

The digitizer is to let me improve the quality of maps used on our listings sites and to bring them all in-house. One limitation that we have at the moment is the totally over the top price to license maps for some countries: no license and you’re stuck with the very basic maps that the CIA put out in their World Factbook.

Snag is that a decent digitizer can run to hundreds of pounds and it’s something that we’d use relatively rarely: after the initial burst of usage, we’d probably only be getting it out of the box once or twice a year.

As you know, we upped the ante with the camera a few months ago. Up until then the computer was doing fine as the image size was around the 600k mark but now each one is more like 5mb which obviously eats up the storage space somewhat faster.

In tandem with that, we’ve both been using the computer a whole lot more than we had in the past so a) we’re fighting over it and b) it’s filling up much faster than expected.

And that’s before you even consider the usual expansion into other websites that happens over the Winter. We’ve been plugging away with Whole Earth Guide as you know and today Cultured Views was born.

Finally, we have pencilled in a slide scanner so that we can mine the slide library that I have which will, of course, eat up the storage even faster.

Or, in short, we’re in the market for a new computer.

As usual, prices have dived and performance have soared since we bought this little guy last year. Whereas our £650 bought us 60GB, 1.5GHz, 256k cache and XP Pro, this year our £600 will buy 200GB, 1.86GHz, 2GB cache, DVD writer and Vista Business. It’s even possible to weigh in at the £350 mark for 120GB, 1.86GHz, 1Gb cache and Vista Home but somehow I suspect that 1GB cash and 120GB disc plus Vista probably isn’t a long term option.

One big plus this year is that the new member of our computer family is being paid for entirely out of our Internet income whereas last time it had to be paid for out of real-world income.

Although the vast majority of the paid posts which we do are accepted without any problem, now and again you get a rejection, usually because we’ve missed something or other in the requirements or simply because we’ve mistyped a URL for one of the links.

Fair enough in those cases, and they’re generally easy to fix and resubmit.

What’s becoming more and more common though are rejections because the advertiser decided after he’d bought the advertising that really his criteria for acceptance weren’t those that he had stated originally ie he changes the goalposts. Now I do accept that it can be difficult to know in advance what you really want from a blog based advertising campaign but what’s not acceptable is to put a “ban” on someone who has written a post in good faith.

For instance, I recently received one of these “bans” which stated that my blog wasn’t hosted in the UK and didn’t cover female topics. In fact, it is with a UK host and this just goes to show that the advertiser doesn’t know that 1and1.co.uk actually hosts sites in Germany; regardless of that it is a UK hosting company. No, my blog doesn’t cover female topics but then the advertiser didn’t ask for blogs that did in his requirements, so why should it?

Or what about the one on plastic surgery who decided to pull the advertising after everyone had written about it in their blogs? Why loudlaunch agreed to let them do that, I don’t know.

Finally, there are the advertisers who choose not to approve posts for a very, very long time. This gets them free advertising all that time and they may well not approve the post at the end of it. Both Wendy and me are sitting with a number of posts for well over a month with no pay for them yet. Interestingly, sponsoredreviews only requires you to leave a post online for 30 days, yet how will the advertiser approve such a post if we, as we are allowed to, have deleted it once the 30 day limit is reached?