Writing for life

Published in the Wow! supplement of The Evening Echo

Technology does a lot of things to make our lives easier. Every day we use our mobile phones, our computers, ATMs, credit card machines, POS systems (or computerised “tills” to you and me) digital television systems that automatically record the programmes we like… without tapes. The list goes on and on and on, and everything is talking to everything else over myriad global communications networks.

(image by Homer Township Public Library)

If you think about it for too long your brain would starts to sizzle gently in your cranium… but that’s okay, because you tend not to. Most of us aren’t that interested in how it all works… we’re just happy that it does, because all of this digital wizardry makes our our lives just a little bit easier, allowing us to squeeze more into our busy lives. There are times though, when technology makes life harder, and that can be especially true for parents.

Why? Because technology is everywhere and our children are often better at using it, and embrace it more readily than we do. Mobile phones and the internet are obvious examples… while many parents struggle to understand them, to the children of today they’ve become practically second nature. That’s worrying on lots of levels – but mostly because it means we’re incapable of keeping up with them… let alone keeping track of them.

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This week’s Career Moves is a bit interwebby, so I’ve posted it over on Digital Marketing Success instead of here.

It’s the first in a series of articles I’m doing for the Evening Echo on using the internet for market research when setting up/growing a small business.

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My wife is mad about Prince – and she’s been so supportive and understanding while I’ve been immersed in this Digital Marketing book project, that on the spur of the moment I decided to see if I could snag a couple of tickets for his upcoming concert in Croke Park.

Off I went to Google.ie to search for Prince Ireland. The first entry in the results page that was for Prince concert tickets was this one, from a crowd in the Netherlands called worldticketshop.com. All of the right bells and whistles were there… verified by Verisign, SSL secure server, etc. – but the cheapest tickets on offer were for €265, which seemed a bit on the steep side.

This was going to be more expensive than I’d anticipated… or was it?

I went to Ticketmaster.ie, which of course is where I should have gone in the first place, and bought two tickets for €66.50 each (and before I’m labelled a cheapskate let me just say that I looked for the the €89 category, but it had sold out, and the higher priced tickets seemed a bit on the extravagant side – so we’ll be a little way from the action, but hey, we’re there for the music, right?). Total cost for two tickets including Ticketmaster’s do f**k all fee handling fee (who are they trying to kid on an automated website with e-mail ticket delivery?) €145.70. Or about €120 cheaper than one ticket from Worldticketshop.com. Sorted.

What this really illustrates is that you need to be careful what you search for on Google, and shop around before you buy. Searching for Prince Ireland returned a few results for books from Amazon.com, followed by the rip-off worldticketshop.com site. Had I searched for Prince Tickets instead, two of the first three organic results returned would have been for Ticketmaster.ie.

So buyer beware – and remember that Google’s results are only as good as the queries you throw at it.

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Published in the Evening Echo, 28/05/08

We have a computer in the corner of the living room. It sits there innocuously, switched off for most of its life. This is the family PC – which really means the kids PC, as both of us grown ups have our own laptops these days. It sees only occasional use – but as the kids get older they’re using it more and more.

Computers are an essential part of children’s lives today. Acquiring mouse and keyboard skills are as crucial to them as learning to wield a pencil, perhaps more so. When I was born computers were about the size of the local library and cost as much as a house. By the time I was 11 they’d made it into the home – but although I was a zealous advocate at the time, the truth is they were pretty useless; the ZX Spectrum, Commadore 64 and BBC Micro with their 64K of RAM and games and programmes saved on audio tape. They were less powerful and of much less utility than the average mobile phone today.

Things have developed so quickly over the last couple of decades that, if you had time to stop and think about it, it would make your head spin. Computers have become so ingrained into our lives that our perception of them is fundamentally shifting: they are no longer “technology”, they’re as much part of the furniture as the living room sofa.

What amazes me is how readily children take to computers. Skills that can take adults years to master are absorbed in a matter of minutes. They find things intuitively – click, double click, windows, files – they just “get it” on a level that adults rarely grasp. We learn this stuff… they just seem to feel it. It’s astonishing to watch.

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Glengarriff Lodge,

Glengarriff,

West Cork,

Ireland

A few weeks ago we spent a wonderful weekend at what has to be one of the most enchanting houses in the whole of West Cork, perhaps the entire country. Nestled on its own little island between a fork in the Glengarriff River, this thatched former hunting lodge of the Earl of Bantry is like something straight out of a childhood fantasy.

Set in three acres of beautifully tended gardens, surrounded by mature trees that blend seamlessly with nearby native woodland, the fairytale house sits gently in this idyllic rural landscape. As we drove over the little wooden bridge onto the island I had to pinch myself to make sure what I was seeing was real. This was Glengarriff Lodge… and it was absolutely breathtaking.

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Rated 5/5 on May 8 2008

Vote on Calvin’s reviews at LouderVoice

LouderVoice review tags: Accommodation, West Cork, Glengarriff Lodge, Self Catering, House

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At the Search Marketing World conference last week I picked up a scratch-card entry to a competition from a new Irish search engine company called Vazumo.com.

Apparently this local search engine will help me to find web sites, companies, goods and services in my local area. I haven’t had chance to play with it yet, but it certainly sounds interesting.

I didn’t win on the scratch card, but if you click on the link above or the one below to go have a look at the site for yourself I’ll be with a chance to win their monthly draw for a , so why not take a look, and while you’re there sign up yourself to be in with a chance to win.

It’s an obvious link bait strategy, but hey, last time I entered one of these things I won!

Just had a quick look, and the jury’s out. The results pages are a bit sparsely populated, and I’m not convinced by the user interface… but you decide for yourself.

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 24/03/2008

I’ve published this week’s Working It column — a review of the Internet Marketing seminar “Getting Results in Online Marketing” by Praxis Now — to my Digital Marketing blog, because the subject matter fits.

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I can’t believe it… I won!

The Glengarrif Lodge competition that sparked all sorts of interest and debate amongst Irish bloggers about what does and doesn’t constitute legitimate SEO linkbait is over.

And I won!

I got a phone call late this afternoon from Alan Callender, who owns the lodge, to say that mine was the winning entry.

So the family and I are heading for Glengarrif on the 11th of April. It looks fantastic… I can’t wait!

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 17/03/2008

I’ve started using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) a sort of grown-up social network for business contacts. It’s kind of like the business world’s equivalent to Facebook and MySpace, but it’s serious stuff – no Vampires, no throwing sheep, no movie quizzes and no posting embarrassing photos of your friends for all the world to see. LinkedIn may be an online social network, but it’s all strictly above board.

The reason I mention it is that, though I’ve had the account for quite a while, I only started to use it last week. I uploaded by e-mail address book into it and hey presto, it found loads of people in my contact list who were also on LinkedIn. Great… I invited the ones I actually knew to connect to my network. Some of them even accepted. Wonderful. I looked at my profile. There was nothing in it.

I needed to dig out what I’d been doing over the years, and when… now, where was I going to find that sort of information? Certainly not in the sieve like contraption that serves as my memory. Oh yes… it would be on my CV: that long neglected document languishing somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive.

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I’ve just posted a piece about “Reality Mining” on my digital marketing blog. From a marketing perspective it opens up all sorts of options. From a consumer and privacy point of view, I don’t know….

I’m not really comfortable with the concept that my phone will be better than my friends and family at diagnosing depression.

How about the fact that using data from your mobile analysts will be able to predict exactly who you’re going to meet, and even on which day of the week you’re going to meet them.

Yikes!

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