So I like to run a shortcut bar at the right of my screen, I find that at the top it’s interuptive and the quick launch toolbar is just too far for my poor eyes to travel.

Most of those shortcuts all look the same, or some variation of the standard windows folder images.

Then, today, a thought struck me! How about taking website FavIcons and turning them into folder icons.

A little searching later I find these two tools:

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.paulmaddock.com

This is a little easter egg URL that was listed on some website for identifying a websites FavIcon file, you just have to change the www.paulmaddock.com bit to whatever the website is that you want the icon from.

Then save this as a jpeg. Jpegs don’t work as .ico files, so:

http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

This little website helps you out there, browse and add and bam! you have an ico. file waiting to be used as a shortcut image.

You just need to remove the white background with a transparency setter and you can right click your short cut, select change icon and you’re done.

Lovely.

Which is an interesting resource for the latest insights and facts. A quick browse will show you any facts based on 5 categories:

• Consumer Trends
• Macro Economic Trends
• Media Consumption
• Technology
• Media Landscape

This looks like a really useful resource, from presentation ‘voxpops’ to looking for new angles to target a PPC campaign. There’s alot of food for thought there, I’m not sure how it will integrate into my daily life but I certainly have a feeling it will be valuable to me.

I really don’t like it when something is so subtley off kilter.

http://www.monopolycitystreets.com/

It looks rather interesting, and is yet another amazing use of Google maps.

I’ll be interested to see how the game format goes, I hope it’s a casual format of the game, I don’t have hour and hours to sit and play a board game any more.

Well except for that game of scrabble tonight :)

But on a serious note, they could have done so much better. I assume they’ve sent out early access for some journo’s today/yesterday to create abit of hype pre-launch.

But they could have done so much more for free, if the blog which is linked on their webpage had maybe more than two posts, you know – abit of information or preview then the internets would have done 80% of the work for them. There are very few articles older than a day on it, and their first post was on the 27th August.

Without that build up in interest you’re much less likely to get a longer body of popularity. If you have a look at this article by physorg, then you can see that the fall in popularity mirrors that of it’s rise to popularity.

Thinking about that now, I think that’s reflective of the structure of the item, but that might be another post.

In the short of it, this game looks interesting, but I’d have liked a little more warning, and I think they would have benefitted from that.

Basically summarising that you don’t have to type anything that isn’t a letter in the captcha box (facebook only I suspect). Including dashes, colons, semicolons, apostrophs, characters with umlauts.

While some may see this as a short cut for bots, think again, a bot program would still have to be able to identify the characters in which it could and could not type in.

Contrary to my last blog post, I’m now employeed. I’ve been putting off blog posting since I now read a fair amount specifically to keep up with PPC/SEM – I don’t feel I have a valid voice any more.

My goal has always to become an authority voice, and now that I have exposed myself to so many strong voices I feel I am the learner again, rather than posting my ideas and being the authority.

Copyblogger released a free e-paper on authority a few weeks back that I definitely feel is worth a read: http://authorityrules.com/

Also, with reference to the title of the post, I need to start thinking about generating content again.

Speak soon!

But because of this I’ve come to realise something that’s been nagging me for a while, search enginges, and by that I mean I mean Google, don’t help if your searching for popular terms any more.

For example, let’s search for temporary job agency manchester:

• We get a list of local business A through J of businesses. They are all incredibly specialised, I’m not after specialist legal/cooking/cleaning vacancies. There are also some other job listing sites (to me that isn’t a temporary job agency).

One deserves special attention – HBS (UK) SERVICES Home. It’s bit mean to single them out, but I love the gif on their site of the suited lady fingering her mobile. Took me right back to the ninties web surfing right there. Anywho,

• The other searches below are job listings. Not Temporary job agencies. There’s also a great mix of sites that are just lists of job websites that I personally feel have only compiled those listst to get a better google ranking.

SEO, good or bad? Google is still great if I want to find specialist things that might only come up here and there on a website, but the general terms that people still attach to their idea of what they want to find have been fought over so much that the search results are now everywhere.

Oh well,  back to the job hunt (I did find one good listing on that first page..)

It took me a moment to wipe the shared smile off my face and to realise that I wouldn’t enjoy afternoon tea. Why? Because I drink tea all day.

This is exactly like marketing & advertising. I am immune to all the ‘clever’ marketing these days simply from over exposure. That part of the brain that blocks out everything so that you can have a normal day, the bit that makes seeing the world dull when it should be as beautiful as the first day you saw a building over 30 stories high.

I make a point of acting engaged with marketing that I enjoy or is especially well done, but everything else out there is just noise.

Advertising is abit harder sell than this, in that they are quite pushy and recently are trying to squeeze for every sale. This is fine when you have an existing relationship with the customer from a previous sale, and you can connect on the level to appeal to the customer to repurchase.

But cold calling, and pushing for a sale is damaging. No one wants to be interupted any more at all. So first of all you interupt this nice marketing person, then push and give a negative impression of yourself.

Instead advertising should be evolving in this new market to really connect and offer companies something they really want, to connect with their customers through theadvertising. Not insisting that you have their target audience untapped and ready (unless you really, really do) but offering an extended campaign, helping to connect on multiple levels.

This annoyed me quite alot as you can imagine. I often find myself revisiting data on a project when I don’t believe that I have done it to the best of my ability. But when I finally ‘got’ a part of this project that I knew I understood it confused me. So now I’m re-evaluating my approach to future projects.

Sometimes you can understand what your being told, but it takes a different level of knowledge to put that understanding into action.