Thoughts from the Shelf

I came across a nice article that interested me today which detailed plans for towns to adopt driverless Cybercar routes to ease both congestion and pollution in towns.

Instead of a driver, Cybercars as they have been dubbed, are controlled by computers utilising laser technology to navigate obstacles and other cars. The laser guided cars can drive within .5 of a second of each other, a quarter of the recommended two seconds, meaning four times as many Cybercars could fit on the roads. This would combat the increasing congestion in towns, and no doubt create a cleaner, safer environment.

The Cybercar concept is ideally suited for town driving as they are designed for short trips at low speeds in urban environments. Cybercars need only a light track to operate and are fairy easy to implement, meaning that they could be suited for the school run or even short commuter trips into work.

These Cybercars which could be called by pressing a button at any one point on the route, and would go directly to their destination relieving the grievance of passengers on current commuter routes.

A similar concept is already being developed at Heathrow airport to shuttle passengers to and from terminal buildings. The first town to adopt the concept could be Daventry, where already a test track is in use so that the results can be evaluated. The scheme was put in place as part of the local councils investigation into ways to increase the use of public transport and reduce reliance on cars.

Whether the scheme goes ahead or not I think is great to see local councils looking for alternatives to existing commuting lines in order to reduce the reliance on cars in town centres. This will no doubt create a safer and cleaner environment within towns such as Daventry.

If you have friends abroad, keeping in contact regularly can be difficult and expensive. That is why the international prepaid phone cards from Pingo are a great way to ensure you stay in touch with close friends abroad.

Pingo calling cards can be used for both domestic and international calls and can save you up to 90% on international mobile phone calls, and when you sign up you will receive up to 5 hour of free International calls as a sign up bonus.

Pingo also offers a special phone card blog discount coupon: “ppp3” valid for $3 off Pingo. You will also receive $25 phone card for just $17.

Pingo can not only lower the price of your international calls, but strive to deliver the best calling card experience around. With a dedicated customer service team, you can also get more out of your account by creating sub accounts for additional family members, an extra saving on holding multiple calling accounts.

Pingo’s is a service of iBasis, providing a reliable network that delivers over 1.1 billion International phone card minutes a month. Worth investigating if you make a lot of international phone calls.

Following on from yesterdays post detailing how Facebook has now overtaken Myspace in unique UK visits, I started thinking about the impacts of this explosion of social networking across the interweb.

The key factor that people find most luring about social networking sites is that they enable users to seek old/ new friends and extend existing social networks onto the internet. They provide way of communication that fits modern lifestyles; it is convenient, fun and free. But although financially free, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a price to pay.

The catalogue of social networking sites on offer cater for a diverse range of audiences, but the interaction they offer within an online social network is fundamental to all of them. To participate users have to provide a certain amount of personal information so they can become a part of these constructed networks, and this is seemingly a price that users are increasingly willing to pay.

Subsequently there are vast amounts of personal data stored within these sites, protected only by the policies that each site chooses to adopt at any one time, understandably becoming a concern for some. Perhaps more concerning in the short term are the stories of how various established internet brands have, or intend to muscle in on the success of the social networking craze. Recently Facebook confirmed it intends to open up user profiles to search indices, enabling user profiles, and all the personal data within them, to be indexed by search engines such as Goolge. These profiles will then become publicly available to all web users. Currently only members can search the Facebook database, and only then see a limited profile before a friend’s confirmation.

In its defence other sites such as Myspace already do this, and Facebook has put in place the chance to restrict profile access to Google, but by default this is not activated and users only have a month to change their privacy settings. Although this option is provided, it defiantly shows a shift away from the once restrictive privacy policies that Facebook adhered to, and in my opinion was a core reason people opted to use the service over other less restrictive social networking sites.

These concerns can only be further reiterated with the news that Microsoft have also announced it is in discussions for taking a 5% stake in Facebook. This would reportedly cost around £150m - £250m, and certainly be part of an overall strategy to use Facebook profile information in the development of more personalised ad delivery or search engine results. This is merely speculation at this point, but clearly demonstrates how social networking sites may not be as free as first thought for those that respect their right to personal privacy.

Yesterday news broke that Facebook has overtaken Myspace as the most popular social networking website with 6.5 million unique visitors in the UK recorded in August 2007. Launched originally as a US college social networking site, Facebook went live outside of the US a little over a year ago, and was founded as an social networking site solely for American colleges.

Although other popular social networking sites such as Bebo and Myspace have also showed similar growth rates Facebook currently tops the tree with over 200,000 more visits than Myspace and dwarfs Bebo’s 4.5million visitors. Together these three sites attract a larger share of user’s time than all other social networking sites combined, and account for a fifth of the UK web population.

Surprisingly however neither of the aforementioned sites recorded the biggest growth rate of UK social networking sites. That accolade goes to PerfSpot, which recorded a 756% growth rate amongst it unique music loving audience.

Although the user bases are relatively small compared with longer established social networking sites, the fastest growing sites in this sector are those that are being developed to cater for niche audiences. Specialising in such topics as travel, business and music the growth rates of these sites demonstrate how even in its infancy, social networking is changing, and what we can expect from the future of social networking on the web.

As demonstrated in previous posts on The Shelf I am always on the look out for new media players that come to the market. That being said, I recently stumbled across the new iAudio 7 multi-function MP3 player from Cowon and was impressed with what it had to offer.

Marketed as the ‘Extreme MP3P –iAudi0 7’ I was interested to find out what made this MP3 player so ‘Extreme’ in a fiercely competitive market, so I done some investigating and compiled some of my thoughts.

Having looked at a range of MP3 players in the past it seems that the two golden qualities of a successful model are the time of playback capability provided by the devices battery, and the storage capacity. Other attributes of portable music players merely act as additional extras that often highjack customers, but these fundamental capabilities provide the foundations of any model and as such are the first things I look at. After all a portable media device needs to be playable for as long as possible without a mains electrical supply in order to remain ‘portable’, and the diversity of content within the player is parallel to the capacity options available.

With the iAudio 7 player these features were competitive with other players around, and so provide a good foundation for the range of additional extras on offer. The iAudio 7 offers 60 hours of continuous playback and comes with up to 8GB fast flash memory.

The unique selling point of the iAudio is the JetEffect facility, and with the iAudio 7 launch this now includes an enhanced EQ filter to improve the quality of stored music files and manipulate them to particular user’s tastes. This portable MP3 device also comes with touch sensitive controls and a smooth pad interface that allows users to scroll through stored media libraries.

The iAudio 7 ticks all the boxes as an MP3 player, but also takes steps towards becoming a complete multimedia player. It supports MP3, WMA, ASF, OGG, FLAC and WAV formats, and with a 1.3 inch LCD display allows for video playback too, supporting additional video formats as well. One feature I liked about this device was the provision of a TV output so users can watch stored video files on a range of televisions.

Lastly the iAudio 7 allows for DAB and FM radio, along side a voice recording facility. This means it can also be used to catch favourite radio shows that it would otherwise be inconvenient to listen to, or used as a Dictaphone when at work or studying.

Some great features included within this device, and it ticks all the boxes for a high quality MP3 player. Even more impressive is the way it braches out into the market for people looking for a complete portable multimedia device.

The next Spurs trip is planned, and currently we have a bus of 14 travelling up to the lane to watch the home fixture vs. Blackburn on the 27th October. With the current goings on a Tottenham I am not looking forward the match as I have done in the past, and our start to the season does not fill me full of confidence in getting a result.

The last trip was to Derby at home, where two early Steed Malbranque goals set up a thrilling 4-0 win, the biggest win I had seen at the Lane. The trip acted as a pilot run, as we have a plan to make the trip to the Lane several times this season. As it turns out the minibus was easily booked and costs were kept low between the ten of us that travelled that day.

On the trip to watch Spurs vs. Derby we had planned to stay in a bed and breakfast in North London so there was no rush back and we could make a complete day of it. We used
Trusted Places to look up a suitable bed and breakfast in North London so that we didn’t have the hassle of finding one once we had arrived in the capital. Having only ever stayed with relatives, I was unfamiliar with places that a group of us would be able to stay but through Trusted Places this was soon rectified.

After the success of this trip we were eager to plan another, and after booking the tickets as soon as the club released them on general sale, we hear less than a week later that Mr Jol may not even be in charge for the fixture. Lately there have been a string of managers linked with his position at Tottenham, Ramos, Lippi and most recently Jose himself. As a Spurs fan I think the back door grooming of managers by the club that has been going on lately is unfair on Mr Jol.

People forget he has delivered two fifth place finishes in two seasons, unprecedented for Tottenham in the premier league. Now that we get somewhere near the right track we want to replace him from as early as the second game of the season. People forget the run of fixtures we opened with and the fact we started the season with £100 million of talent on the injury table.

All I can say is that I hope Martin Jol is in charge for our next trip, giving him a proper chance to turn the clubs season around. After all I love Martin Jol, Martin Jol loves me.

With the increasing number of homes with broadband access there has been a stark shift in the amount of online gaming sites available this new audience. But over the last decade has the increase in online gambling sites had a direct effect on volume of people gambling within the UK? The answer, apparently not.

A study by the Gambling Commission was published this week that concluded that since 1999, the number of people gambling has not increased. The report goes even further to claim that if lottery sales were included the number of people who gamble on a regular basis has actually fallen from 72% to 68%.

The report concluded that 68% of the population, that is about 32 million adults had gambled in the last year. The most popular forms of gambling in terms of number were The National Lottery (57%) Scratchcards (20%) Hourse Racing (17%) and Slot Machines (24%).

These figures are very refreshing in terms of the number of people who are regularly gambling, but I would like to see how this study looks when compared with how much money people are spenting. The UK gambling industry now is now a £42bn industry, so although not as many people are gambling, they are certainly spending more.

The report concluded positive news for the UK, and the figures have not shown as big a shift to online gambling as one would have expected. Out of those surveyed only 6% of people used the internet to gamble, 3% accounting for online poker and bets with an online bookmarker.

Although relatively small, the report does however reflect a changing culture when it come to gambling. People are beginning to bet online, but although there is over 3.5million people who now regularly gamble online, a six fold increase in five years, this still remains a small percentage of overall UK gambling figures. In my opinion this simply demonstrates how deeply gambling is engrained within everyday British culture.

I look forward to seeing the next report planned for 2009-2010, and how the UK gambling industry will inevitably change after the enactment of the 2005 Gambling Act.

There are a number of plugins available for Wordpress blogs with more continually being developed to help bloggers get exactly what they want out of their blog. Lately I have been experimenting with popular plugins and am interested in getting any feedback from others who may have stumbled upon useful add-ons themselves.

When it comes to blogging with Wordpress, perhaps the most important issue for serious bloggers is the SEO of your blog, and subsiquently there are a range of plugins that can help. For those who may not be aware, the default install of Wordpress includes no robots information. This essentially means as well as the desired post pages, your blog achieve (as well as other things) can be indexed effectively duplicating the content of each post.

As well as this, and something I was not overly clear on at first, is that without any robots exclusion rules each post can also be duplicated with within each category that the post is tagged too. For example a post about a new IPod could correctly be tagged under the relevant categories Music, Technology and the Internet, but this provides three duplicate pages of identical content, one within each category as well as the original post page.

Such duplicate content issues are exactly why SEO should be the first port of call for anybody who eventually wishes to monetise their blog, or desires optimal search performance. To combat these issues I used a selection of plugins as well as some of my own graft.

Initially I put my own robots.txt file in place to combat the indexing of both archives and category listings. I have now altered it to be specific to Google and use a range of page specific meta robot tags through the All in One SEO plugin mentioned later. There is also the KB robots.txt plugin available for robots control but has limitation depending upon the directory your blog in placed in.

One of the preinstalled options I altered was the permalink URL structure that is in place by default. I changed these from dynamic URLs to a format that is easier to hack, yet more optimal for search. Another good SEO plugins I used was the SEO title tag that optimises the title of blog posts. In addition to having this I also used the head meta description plugin that dynamically generates a unique meta description for each page of your blog. This replaces the one single meta tag that is used as default across an entire Wordpress blog upon installation.

These plugins are all great at doing there individual jobs, but if you would prefer one plugin to do all of this through one manageable interface then the All in One SEO pack is the plugin for you.

Social bookmarking tools also account for a range of different plugins available for Wordpress blogs. In the past I have, and still use the Chicklet Creator plugin that allows the blogger to easily choose which social bookmarking sights they wish to make easily accessible on their blog. With a nice admin interface, the selected bookmarking sites are then displayed via an icon on your blog.

I have also included Digg and Del.icio.us links on individual post pages so that the content within each post can be spread across the blogosphere.

Lastly there is a nice popularity contest plugin that I have used that helps me to keep track of which posts are most popular amongst readers. I am currently looking for a nice keyword cloud and top blog plugin if anybody can recommend one.

Keeping a car tidy can be a real challenge. There is no greater frustration than investing in a new car and seeing general wear and tear lead to a significant drop in the resale value. With the very nature of the motor industry the price deflation of a purchased car is expected, but I recently heard of a service that can help reduce this to an acceptable level.

A close friend tried a mobile valet service recently on his new VW Golf GTI and was extremely impressed with the service they provided. Although his vehicle was by no means in desparate need of attention, it was typical of a small family and as such had been neglected since its purchase. There were a few stains on the back seat and the time for a thorough wash and wax had passed.

A quick call to the PCC boys resulted in the scheduling of an appointment time convenient with him, and the subsequent arrival a smart mobile valet van with a selection of valet options on offer.

This mobile valet was a service I hadn’t previously heard of. The idea of bringing a valet to the car owner seemed a fairly simply one, yet was the grounding of a service I didn’t realise even existed. It seemed logical that those who didn’t have the time or energy to clean their own car would benefit greatly from it.

The valets on offer started at an Express valet which entailed a wash, wax, wheel clean and leather dry, to a Premier Plus valet which included services such as an upholstery and carpet shampoo and Roof lining clean.

Very good service at very competitive prices, and would recommend them to anybody who doesn’t find time to pay that extra bit of TLC to their car.

After a hectic week in the Hip-Hop world, I am pleased to read that the album Graduation by Kanye West, this week outsold 50 Cent to debut at number one in the album charts. It seems in the run up to the release of each album everybody has had something to say about the head to head, with 50 Cent even stating that if out sold, he would no longer perform as a solo artist. On reason the outcome pleased me so much.

Estimates based on sales as early as Wednesday stated that Kanye was outselling his competitor by over 150k copies. There has been a long running feud between the two artists for some time, and this joint album release date has simply thrown any past differences of opinion into the media spotlight

It is a long standing tradition in Hip-Hop that rappers have antagonistic beefs with other artists. The east coast west coast divide has been labelled as a reason for some famous Hip-Hop rivalries in the past, for instance Biggie and TuPac, but that fact is these rivalries are more fabricated to generate record sales than they are based on real life differences.

Used as a promotional tool, the same day release of ‘beefing’ artists is a great way to send loyal fans more promptly to the shelves, and undoubtedly the main winner is not the artist with his self proclaimed bragging rights, but the record labels behind each artist. One thing is for sure, the increased media coverage generated by feuding artists certainly hasn’t slowed record sales for either artist in the past.

The silver lining in the hype generated by the launch of these albums this week, is that Hip-Hop as a genre has been thrust into the limelight, and that can only have a positive impact for fans of the genre.

As a fan of Kanye I was glad to see him have a top selling album, however I’m afraid I didn’t buy into the beef and go running to the shop to buy his album. For those of you interested in what’s up next? A joint release date in November for albums from both Mary J Blige and Mariah Carey. No thanks ta!