Digital Futures talk @ CIM – Glasgow 7 February is a post from: Digitalis

NewBiz ’12 – search marketing talk is a post from: Digitalis

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?

QR-ious way to get you to a website is a post from: Digitalis

Well, those days are over. After working on other people’s sites, building sites, buying domains, SEO’ing their ass, it’s now time for me to focus inwards for a bit and allow Digitalis to project outwards a bit more. After poring over thousands of blog themes, getting into overcomplicated portfolio sites and trying to do more than my precious time will allow, I’ve now settled on what you see here (well, as at November 2010 anyhoo). I fully intend to update this blog at least once a week, stay on topic (digital marketing obviously) and generally make something worth reading if internet marketing is your bag.

So, do the right thing, bookmark me, blogroll me, link to me, comment on my posts and it’s fair to say I’ll return the favour. That is unless you’re a Canadian pharmacy, have the secret to a bigger manhood or an Delhi-NCR based spamhaus – it’s the bin for you!

Other people’s gardens is a post from: Digitalis

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.

Ning nang gone – another social network buckles under debt is a post from: Digitalis

Working on Largs Holiday Home is a post from: Digitalis

Are Google Chameleon & Spellmeleon trashing your results? is a post from: Digitalis

The great unknown will be how will the owners make money out of all this themselves… Stay tuned!

Corporate Twitter – Tweeting from big company land is a post from: Digitalis

Take the one I am using right now. You’re either looking at a silver-green one or an eerie black one depending on whether I’ve got my act together or not. Both of them I have paid for in some form or another. The black one is the Revolution Pro theme. I would link to the page where you can buy it but the guy who made it barely acknowledges its existence, leaving only a tawdry forum to give you details on its use. Shame, considering a copy of Apple’s kickass OSX Snow Leopard is cheaper to buy than the theme and comes with full support. My friend Colin Boyd knows more about this theme than the author as far as I can establish. Given that the theme relies on a number of contrived plugins as well as a specific routine for posting and manipulating the homepage content, you can’t just get stuck in from the WordPress console and I’d rather get on with the blogging than fiddling with PHP and CSS. I have people for that, after all.

And then there’s the other one, called the MoneyMaker theme. I will bless them with a link as, strictly speaking, the thing was free. However, if you want to do something elegant with it, they offer Photoshop PSD files as a paid for thing to allow you to dress the thing up and make it nice. After all, if it’s live you’ll note an irritating dollar logo I want shot of. At least make it a pound sign or something a little less shallow. Either way, I paid for the PSDs and they’ve never turned up and nobody’s answering my calls.

So, the moral of the story is blog theme creators, in my opinion, shouldn’t be considered to be the panacea of software creators. You want to know how to work the thing you’ve paid for. You want get the things you paid for in the first place.

Heck, you could be less lazy than me, find a really good free theme and then, if it works out for you, donate to the author. You’ll get something you know works for you and that you value and I bet you’ll feel all charitable and good about yourself when you cough up some beans to the guy who made it for free.

WordPress themes – why bother paying? is a post from: Digitalis

Welcome to my Online Agency Marketing Blog is a post from: Digitalis