For UHI Perth College and Perth & Kinross Social Economy Partnership, I’ll be doing a talk at NewBiz ’12 in Perth on 7 February. If you want to come along and learn about how to improve your online presence from a searchmarketing perspective, then make sure you make your way to Perth Concert Hall from 9:15 onwards. Stick PH1 5HZ into your Google maps if you’re not sure how to get there! I’ll be posting the presentation I do on here after the event too so be sure to check in and say hi!

If you want to be cool, off-the-wall and appeal to the demographic that

A) can afford a smartphone
B) is tech-savvy
C) fancy themselves as some sort of elite class

then QR codes are the thing for you. Like some sort of futuristic digitial fingerprint, QR codes are simply square “barcodes” that can hold any amount of information. Most commonly, they’re used to hold web addresses but realistically they can be used to hold any information. However, what they’re not is something you’re always ready to grab. Try telling that to upmarket supermarket Waitrose, who in their infinite wisdom, has stuck one on the last frame of their Christmas TV ad. Designed to take you to their new iPhone app, it fits the above criteria. However, given that it’s there for barely a second it’s hardly time for you to pick up your phone, never mind launch the QR reading app (usually quite slow), take the picture and so on.

And given their complexity, even if you “skyplussed it” the picture compression renders it nothing more than a strange grey square. Am I really that desperate to see what it is or will I just Google it like everyone else?

So, AOL wants to shut down or sell Bebo. No great surprise there. it did nobody any real favours and visually got stuck in the late 90s. And now, another social networking platform feels the strain of nobody paying for it and, likely, few using it.

Ning is/was a great experiment in micro social networking. So great that most of us couldnt really understand what it was for. Started by the man who created Netscape, Marc Andreesen, he obviously takes creating internet companies that become fragments of history as a hobby. Over at my favo(u)rite tech site Wired, they give the lowdown and make the point that I think many of us forget with the internet. Free is great and free gives us so many things but free doesn’t often last forever. What if you’ve invested time and effort in populating your free social network platform with photos, videos or other content and one day they decide to pull the plug? They can, you can’t stop them and what’s your fallback?

Backup folks! Whether it’s to another free service like Google Docs (remember there’s always the chance this could go too) or to one of the increasingly free portable hard disks you can by, remember your data is fragile and as less and less of it takes a real form you need to consider how you retain your life when all it exists as is a series of ones and zeros.

I am living the dream – or at least practicing what I preach. My mum has got some self catering accommodation (vacation apartment if you are American) in Largs on the Ayrshire coast in Scotland. I am helping her build the site, optimise the site and get it in Google Local. Talk about bringing your work home with you. Well, I’ve got her in Google local, Yell and the first page of Google for ‘largs holiday home’ after a couple of days. Now to take down the competition. Raaaaar!