The Budget News doesn’t make good reading

Alistair Darling’s first budget didn’t make good reading for anyone who drinks, smokes, drives cars or goes shopping. If you’re a 90-year-old clean-living, self-sufficient hermit, though, you’ll be OK as you’re getting a heating handout. Year in, year out Chancellors produce budgets that we all moan about. And every year …

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Morning Advertiser to feature me…!

Pub landlords will wake up to my comments soon…! Just had a lovely interview with their trade magazine, The Morning Advertiser, all about the benefits social networking can bring to the pub trade.

Spent the morning at BBC TV Centre

I spent this morning at the BBC TV Centre being interviewed for the programme “Click!”, which is the technology show that goes out at the weekends on News 24. It will be broadcast on 22nd and 23rd March and it’s all about the cashless society.

Is your face on your web site?

Is your face on your web site? Mine is. However, I’ve started to worry about that. The other day, somebody told me that they rated a web site on whether or not the faces that appeared on it were “smiley”. If the faces were serious looking business types, they didn’t …

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Trust – it’s all important on the Internet

How much do you trust the web sites you visit? You trust the BBC perhaps? Or you could trust Google to deliver the goods. Or maybe you trust Amazon? But whichever sites you trust, you probably have a “gut instinct” for some sites you visit that makes you doubt their …

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BBC Tees and scam emails

Had a lovely chat with Alex from BBC Tees on the whole problem of how do you spot an email scam. Nice lively interview; hope it helped people.

The World has changed: did you notice?

Two new pieces of research confirm what we probably already knew: younger people see the Internet as their primary source of information. One study, reported by Reuters, shows us that the Internet is the main source of news for people aged under 30 years. A second piece of research by …

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Your Mum is frightened of the Internet

Mums all over the UK should have had a peaceful and enjoyable day yesterday – Mother’s Day, of course (hope you didn’t forget!). Many of the nation’s Mums will have received flowers and chocolates, of which a sizeable proportion will have been ordered online. Indeed, without online florists and present …

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How not to succeed with online media

A stunning decision by one of Britain’s top publishing companies provides a perfect example of how not to use the Internet. The Hearst Digital Network is closing down several web sites of magazines published by the National Magazine Company. The magazines that are to lose their own web sites include …

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Social networking is market research

Many businesses are put off social networking sites. They feel that such sites distract staff from getting on with work. They think that social networking sites, like Facebook or MySpace are some kind of security risk for their business. Or they just think these sites are for bored teenagers and …

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Several local radio interviews

Spent most of today in a studio in London doing a round of local radio interviews for broadcast tomorrow on the subject of fear of the Internet amongst the over 50s.

What’s wrong with Facebook?

Facebook is in trouble; or so it might seem from stories in the specialist press, such as New Media Age and subsequent mainstream follow-up coverage. It seems that in the UK, Facebook has started to lose users; it is down by around 400,000 over a month. That might seem a …

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