Andy Hadfield

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to ALL!

I'm going on holiday... back in Jan!

I'm on holiday. Don't have the time (har har) or inclination to sum up 2007. When everyone else is doing it so nicely. :)

Here are some cool posts I've read. 2007 in summary.

Best of ProBlogger
As 2007 draws to an end I took a few hours earlier in the week to look back over the archives of this blog and to do an annual review. I do this every year, mostly for my own purposes, but last year also shared some highlights with readers so thought I’d do so again. The year was a big one. On a personal front we moved house (bought/built and sold houses) and traveled in the US for a month as a family (as well as survived becoming parents of a toddler). In a business sense it’s also been massive with considerable growth in this blog and DPS (which has grown considerably faster than ProBlogger), b5 growing incredibly, redesigning ProBlogger and some wonderful opportunities to travel, write, speak etc coming my way.

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Not Just Kid Stuff: Social Nets Struggle and Thrive in 2007

H…

AGH! Doesn't it grate your carrot when people write these wonderfully insightful articles, and then split them across 5+ pages just to get more page and ad impressions.

Take this example. Google gets Ready to Rumble with Microsoft. Bloody good piece of writing. If I see ANOTHER Chevy ad - I might cry.

Someone should do the analysis. Are users MORE likely to click on an ad that gets shoved in their face 5 times during the same article read? Or less.

Show me the maths.

Har har! I must say, I've never really cottoned onto the whole Mac vs PC thing. Mac's are expensive. Therefore most people go PC first. Oooo.

I don't know what the big fuss is about. They've both got their pro's and con's I reckon. Whaddya want? Super style? Or everything "theoretically" should be compatible? :)

Anyhoo - this vid is BRILLIANT. Enjoy!

Opera files complaint.

This thing has GOT to come to a head soon. I really understand where this guy is coming from. If you've EVER tried to manage the development process for cross-browser compatibility... you'll know. It's a nightmare. It's beyond a nightmare. Freddy vs Jason nightmare.

BUT. You know the parable. Where does the big elephant sleep? Wherever the hell the big elephant wants to sleep.

10% traffic going to FireFox. Across our site - that's pretty much the average. It's just not enough to force an action.

How long till we can force an action?

The letter follows. Thanks to Brian Bakker from Geeklist. :)

Over the years I have been an active participant in the ongoing fight for open and interoperable Web standards. I have always opposed those who would force proprietary technologies where open alternatives, often superior, exist. From 1994, I worked at CERN and W3C to help make sure there were good specifications for the Web. In 1999, I joined Opera to mak…

Google Adwords is context sensitive. Meaning it scans your blog posts and displays relevant advertising for your content / supposed audience. This has resulted in billions of dollars for the company. And usually, it works FOR you.


Sometimes, as I saw on my sister blog, All Scrubbed Up...


It doesn't.

Oh dear God this is funny.

I've blogged about another potential bubble before - slightly more serious. This isn't. But funny nonetheless.


Thanks to Doug Hatfield from Geekslist.

Bloody hell. These guys KEEP innovating above the bar in the social media field. They've recently secured a distribution deal with Checkers - nice move. If I'm not mistaken Checkers has created quite a nice store-space display for broad price range wines.

South Africa’s fastest growing grocer has embraced web 2.0 with a little hand from Stormhoek, and is giving away wine.
According to Mr Duarte - part of the deal was to run an innovative web-based campaign. That they did. Go "make a friend" with Stormhoek on FaceBook (poking allowed?) and you stand to win t-shirts and wine for the duration of the campaign.

Ah. So innovative. Check out the story here.

UPDATE: So. Just checked out FaceBook. Found StormHoek Big Love. Added as a friend. Poked away. Grrowwrr.

99 friends so far. Smallish start - but you know how this viral stuff goes.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Social media presents a bit of a chicken and egg situation. You can't pull of ballsy ideas like this unless you've g…

BuzzFuse. A local startup. First glance looks like an aggregator (Technorati-ish). But needs a widget per post, not per blog. Different concept.

More posts if I like it :)

My widget for this post below. I hope.

Warning. This is going to be opionated and pretty much off-the-cuff. (ie. Chickenshit way of saying I haven't fully thought this through - but felt enough to post!).

Are we kidding ourselves with the amount of traffic our blogs are getting? Ignore the Top 100. Think longtail now... All that quality content... All that EFFORT going into regular posting. For how much quantifiable return?

Really?

Was reading the Quirk newsletter just now and came across a link to Decker Marketing - apparently a great blog with some pretty well thought out e-marketing content. Hell yes. It's a FANTASTIC blog. Written by a kingpin in the e-business industry.

Quirk says:

As Senior Manager of Dell Consumer eBusiness for four years, Sam Decker drove the growth in online conversion rates and consumer online sales to over $3 billion. He launched Dell's Consumer CRM & Segmentation team, improving processes for sales call routing, direct mail, email, and customer experience. He's running a great bl…

Greg Gordon's Monday humour... :)

How does Bill Gates change a light bulb?

He doesn’t.

He just declares darkness the new industry standard.