SWT Fail

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Nightmare journey home this evening – a trip that usually takes 45 mins took me 2hrs 30mins!!! It turned out that there was person hit by a train at Wimbledon, which is very sad I agree, but the cluelessness of the staff at Waterloo was a little maddening. To be fair they did probably know as much as I did, but what does that say about the communication issues between the controllers and the platform staff? I can only imagine (with dread) how this will be handled during the Olympics as I am sure a similar situation is likely to come up.

I was sat on a train for 20mins before being told that it was cancelled, how frustrating!

Anyways, I am home at last and now time for bed.

Apple Tablet…

Been a few days since my last post, and all the news and blogs sites seem to be talking about is the official unveiling on the iPad / iSlate. I am actually looking forward to see what it looks like and what it is capable of. As a Kindle user, I am not sure if it will ever replace the simplicity of the eReader… It will have a colour screen…thats great for graphical novels, but not really a concern for reading a novel. Would be great if there was an app, like Instapaper for reading blogs offline. I guess it depends on how big this thing will actually be. 10 inches seems a little big to trawl around with me on the train, etc.

I wait with bated breath…

Seesmic Look

Seesmic today released what techcrunch is calling a Twitter Client for the Oprah crowd – “http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/21/seesmic-look-tablet/

Robert Scoble has given the product a quick review  (http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/21/review-how-should-twitters-design-shift-seesmic-gives-us-a-look-at-how/) and as suspected and indeed marketed as it is a twitter client to the masses.  Its pretty, and allows the user to view what the latest trends without having to have a twitter account themselves, so I guess it can be seen as a trend timeline for the uninitiated twitter user. Loic Le Meur – founder of Seesmic, described it as for people who had no idea what a #tag or RSS is and never will…

I think it would took fantastic on a tablet pc, or even on a game station, like the Xbox and PS3 or even a default / screensaver screen on an internet TV.  Its a pity that it is not supported on Mac, as it would have looked super on my 21.5 widescreen! Also it would have been great to have an iPhone app, but the good news on that is that it would be available in a few weeks!

Advertising and the web…

So the company I work for is going through a transition that I guess many companies are these days…a former online subscription business now trying to make sense and money on the “open” web. I sit through powerpoint after powerpoint and all that seems to be being discussed is advertising products and how important they are to the future of the organisation. This is fair enough as at the end of the day your business has to turn a profit or it wouldn’t exist for long…but when you have declining UV & PV’s on your sites, how can you possible hope to draw in the premium advertisers???

Sometimes I think that companies are in so much of a panic in gaining as much advertising revenue as possible, that they forget about attracting the users to the site in the first place! In this day and age you do need original / relevant content to draw in the crowds, but the first step is to identify what customers you are trying to serve…being all things to all groups cannot be a strategy. A strategy has to have a compromise of sorts – it has to have implications on the non-target market…

I think I will read more about this and see what I can learn…maybe I am missing something.