Status-Q

I launched a new web site on Sunday, which has the potential to transform your marketing materials. It turns any ordinary idea, product or service into an award-winning idea, product or service! Just like that! Visit Awardify.com, the internet's premier award-granting service! OK, in case you're wondering, this was partly to make people think more about meaningless marketing phrases, and partly to experiment with how quickly and easily I could something like this using Drupal!

BestCourse4Me.com is a very interesting site which has just been launched by my friends Ros & Steve Edwards. It lets you compare different UK degrees and universities to see what their graduates actually went on to do afterwards, with the aim of allowing students - for example those from poorer backgrounds who may not get much support from their schools or parents - to make more informed choices about whether to do a degree, and if so, which one.

So, for example, you can find out that, six months after graduation, Computer Scientists are paid more than Architects or Lawyers - hurrah! - but they're more than twice as likely to be unemployed. On the other hand, over 8% of Law graduates are soon afterwards employed as 'Sales Assistants and Retail Cashiers' - that's nearly as many as for History! Oxford graduates earn a bit more than Cambridge graduates, at least initially, but then I guess they need some kind of compensation.

The site raises lots of questions - but that's a good thing - even if all it does is start discussions about what's behind the numbers. For example, Oxford graduates earn less and are much more likely to be unemployed than graduates of the Open University, which might be surprising if you didn't know that OU graduates are generally quite a bit older and often employed at the time they take their degrees. Even the numbers I quoted above need some interpretation. They refer to a point six months after graduation. So law graduates may be employed as cashiers, and earning less than their hacker contemporaries, but that is massively skewed by the fact that 6 months after graduation, lawyers are still qualifying - perhaps they're paying their way with an evening job, or perhaps they didn't get a place at law school and have a temporary job until next year.

The site could be a valuable educational experience in itself on how to interpret statistics. I hope that kids get that kind of education before looking at it. Otherwise they might become computer scientists under the mistaken impression that it's a better-paid profession than law. Trust me...

My friend and colleague Garry has become something of a poster child for the project, as he has achieved an impressive career path from a rather disadvantaged background - so much so that he appeared in The Sun today - see the section on the right-hand side of this page.

This means that he has added to his list of achievements perhaps the greatest accomplishment yet: to appear in the Sun and yet emerge with your dignity intact!

The House of Commons report into the Evidence Check on Homeopathy has now been published and sounds most encouraging.

We conclude that placebos should not be routinely prescribed on the NHS. The funding of homeopathic hospitals--hospitals that specialise in the administration of placebos--should not continue, and NHS doctors should not refer patients to homeopaths.

Lots more good stuff summarised on Andy Lewis's site.

Lovely walk this morning around Landwade. No, I didn’t know where Landwade was, either.

Photos here, trail and photos here.

A frosty morning.

I never feel quite comfortable without a camera… and I don’t really count the one in my iPhone, which is useful for quick snaps of things I want to remember, but I’ve seldom got a really good image from it. So for much of the last year I’ve had a Canon Powershot G9 strapped to my belt. It’s in many ways an admirable little beast, being built like a Lilliputian tank, but that did mean one needed a certain amount of dedication to carry it on a daily basis, and I wasn’t always up to the challenge. I’m not sure, either, whether I’ll be up to the challenge of paying to have it repaired after it suddenly expired last week, just two months after its warranty did.

So its successor is the new Powershot S90, with which I’m quite delighted so far. It’s substantially smaller and lighter than the G9 – it will slip in my shirt pocket – and it shoots RAW, has a better sensor than the G9, and boasts an F2 lens, though it seems to have a greater depth of field than most F2s I’ve seen.

Definitely much more pocketable, and, in the words of Chase Jarvis, the best camera is the one that's with you.

All in all, a very pleasing, if rather pricey, toy. The only thing I need to fix now is the rotten British weather this week, which has given me only the gloomiest light in which to play with it. You see, once a bad workman can no longer blame his tools, he has to resort to the failings of the climatic conditions… but I was quite pleased with my first few shots:

Nothing earth-shattering, but I could only manage a few shots before the factory charge on the battery expired, and I had to go home and unpack the charger!

I drove to Swindon the other day. It's good for the soul. I hope. It's also good for catching up on audiobooks and podcasts.

Anyway, sitting in slow-moving traffic on the way back, I found myself behind a van which had on its back doors a list of bullet-points setting out the services that the company offers. I forget the details; it was an engineering company doing things like 'high-speed diamond cutting'. But one service did stand out.

"Robotic Demolition"

Oh, boy - I've no idea what that is, but I really want to do it!

I don't have children, but just imagine what it would be like as a school kid, when asked what your father does, to have that as the answer... instant playground admiration...

Thankfully, in recent years, email spam filters have improved at almost the same rate as spammers. I've been getting relatively little junk, despite the fact that my mail system gets a very great deal. And I imagine most of us humans now have a pretty good built-in filter for the ones that slip past: messages which claim to be from 'Kate Smith' but have an email address of angie99@hotmail.com don't stay in my inbox for very long, for example.

The big effort by spammers these days has gone up one level - they're less concerned about getting humans to follow links than they are about getting search engines to do so. Email spam doesn't help much with your Google juice, and I gather, young reader, that the youth of today doesn't use email much anyway? So 'comment spam', where people try to get a more connected web presence by posting comments on all sorts of blogs and forums which include embedded links to their site, is today's weapon of choice.

A common example arrived this morning - I wrote an article a while back about the Sony eBook reader and somebody tried to post a comment which seems banal enough: "Nice blog adding this to my twitter now". The punctuation is somewhat sparse, but I can imagine many would be taken in by such a comment and allow it through - not noticing that the link associated with the name (which would appear on Status-Q), would take you to a commercial site. The rogues no longer try to put compelling advertising or even keywords in the message, they just try to make it inoffensive enough that site owners will allow it to be attached to pages with a relevant theme. It's highly unlikely a user would click it, but search engines might well follow it and so form some conceptual link between eBooks and the originator's accursed site.

Another example a couple of days ago said something like, 'Great post - very useful. The page doesn't finish loading correctly in Opera 9, though'. I might have been tempted to let this through or waste time investigating, if they hadn't also tried to post a second comment on another page claiming, in the same format, that it didn't load correctly in IE8...

This morning's one, though, was yet one step further removed from the spam of old. It was spam linking to a site about SEO - search engine optimisation. (This is about helping search engines find your site when people do relevant searches, in the same way that advertising is of course about helping people to find your product even when they don't know they want it yet.) What's more, this post wasn't even about SEO, but about books about SEO! A comment, on someone else's page, pretending to be about twitter, and in fact linking search engines to a page about books about how you can get people who are searching for eBooks to find your site... How many levels of indirection can you get?

Of course, the fact that the author of the post was someone named 'SEO eBook' was a bit of a give away...

In the early days of Facebook, I found it rather annoying - there were just too many invitations from people which would have involved installing applications in my account. So I focused on the more streamlined Twitter, and many of my friends seem to have done the same.

But I'm definitely in the minority. Facebook publishes detailed statistics about their users, presumably because they are rightly proud of the numbers. 350M active users, of whom, on any given day, 50% log in, and 10% update their status at least once.

Twitter doesn't publish any stats, but even the most optimistic estimates suggest they have less than a tenth of these numbers. For all the recent attention, it does seem as if they have a long way to go to be anything like as influential as Facebook, and such graphs as I've been able to find suggest that usage has declined over the last six months.

Anyone know of any reliable stats?

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For some time, when I've posted something here, a notification has been put on my Twitter account, and since my Tweets also go to Facebook, it's been visible there too.

I realised recently that the final stage had stopped working: while my manual tweets get copied to Facebook, the remotely-posted updates weren't doing it any more - some change in the FB Twitter app, I guess. So I'm now investigating Wordbooker, a Wordpress plugin that will post directly from here to FB, and also claims to be able to synchronise some comments between the two systems - let's see if it works!