So, If you are American, you can pre-order an iPad today. If you live anywhere else, you cant. Not only that, the price STILL has not been revealed for the UK or Europe. They claim a revolutionary price, but dont say what it is…

So what is your guess? Well its $499 (starting) in the U.S. If you were to convert it, that is £332, but we know things never work that way. My original guess was £349-399, i think i will change that to £399-429

I will probably get one, because, it is a cool gadget….But it is nothing more than that. I would never recommend one to a friend, but if i had spare cash and i was in the mood for a gadget, then this may be the one. It is just a large iphone/itouch, but like i say, still a cool gadget.

Its supposed to be coming to the UK in April, maybe they are waiting to see the response it gets in the U.S. before they market and sell it in Europe and the UK, to price it better; If its a big success, they can sell it for more; If its a flop, they can try to sell it for more, but it will fail and nobody will buy it.

ASOS Life, is the community for ASOS, an online fashion community. When they said they were launching such a thing, i was excited, i thought it would be a cool place to go to for fashion and pop culture, a real good community. It launched and i was disappointed. It was a letdown, and really poor. I stopped using it after a week or so.

Last month i tried to give it another go. I tried posting, and getting involved, and still i did not think it was very good. I decided to start a topic on their own forum telling them why it was bad, which got a good response from the people on the forums, not so much from the people at ASOS.

They seemed to try and gloss over any criticism, with ”we are always improving”, “we are still new” and so on…Basically a load of excuses which i dont think were very good.

Whats wrong with it

• Well if you are starting a community/forum then you should read this. The layout and the way there community works is wrong, and not a traditional style which people use. You do not go to a forum, post something and that is that. You create a post first, and then decide about the forum it should be in. This has a whole lot of problems, including duplicate content.
• The way the information is presented is horrible. It is so hard to read and understand by looking at it.
• You cant post in a forum! A fundamental thing about a forum is that you can post things, and you cant! What i mean is, they have filters set up so that if you type something “customer service related” then your post is held in a queue. WTF!?!?
• And on the customer service note: When you go to the community it is littered with topics about customer services…This is supposed to be a community!

The problem they have really is, they have no idea of what they are doing.

The community has a 9 – 5 corporate feel… Allthe little activity there is, is done in work time. This is because the community is not community driven, it is very corporate. It definitely does not have a community feel, which it is supposed to have. They dont seem to understand that an online community is 24/7, not 9-5. They may go home after work, but the community remains online, and people will want to chat and discuss things etc. It seems that the people who work on the forum only “work” on it, i.e. dont use it in their own time. It should be an extension of your life, if you are involved with something like that. You should be the kind of person who enjoys using online communities, and uses them in your own time, which clearly doesnt seem the case.

There is not enough posting, not enough topics, not enough people involved. This is because of a snowball effect. The community is bad, which means less people use it, which means less topics are created.

Whos Fault is it?

Well Ilana Fox was in charge of the community, and she launched ASOS Life. A year on, it is a miserable failure, and she has gone on to other things. She was in charge, so it is down to her. You could blame the developers of the terrible community, but at the end of the day she was in charge, claiming to ‘invent it’. She doesnt seem to have a clue about how a community actually works, and was obviously out of her depth. She worked at The Sun and The Daily Mail on online community projects, which isnt exactly hard considering the amount of visitors those site gets – They were already a home run.
However she couldnt get the 5 million visitors/month which ASOS supposedly gets involved with the community…If you seen the community you would never imagine those kind of figures are for the main site; If you cant make a community on the back of 5million visitors/month you should definitely think of a new career (which she seems to have done).

She since left, and i was going to apply for that job, because it would of been a good challenge and i could do great things…But after i posted a few things on their community, they dont seem to take their own community seriously, and focus more on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they have just given up on it, like its users.

How to fix it

The whole community/platform is rubbish. They need to either completely rewrite it, or use a tried and tested community and develop that; They could modify Wordpress or VBulletin (or both) and make something groundbreaking and amazing; They wont, and it will stay the disappointing failure it has become. For some reason big companies would rather waste tens/hundreds of thousands of pounds on custom made things, when they could spend less and get so much more. They need to learn what a community is, what its for, and what it can potentially do, which is so much!

ASOS – Good @ Fashion, Good @ Customer Services, No clue @ Communities

I got my games! The most important one, NHL 10, after it being out of stock everywhere i finally got it. Thank you to Amazon, who got me the game, and earlier than they originally said

I have only tried NHL and Top Spin 3, both of which are good. NHL 10 is sooo good! It is also really hard, which i knew since the goals in hockey are tiny to score in…But it makes the challenge better.

The control system is so hard at first, the buttons are nothing like FIFA, you use the 2 analog sticks for most of the stuff, and the buttons to do different moves; left stick to move, right stick to shoot/tackle; the shooting is cool, you pull back on the stick and move it forward, which is more realistic than pressing a button.

I am probably doing nothing over the weekend…So i will be playing on these

Hey my lovely readers, how are you?

Are you getting lots of requests on MSN Messenger? I am! For the past 3 weeks or so i have had lots of people trying to add me; These are bots and spammers, whats happened!? I never used to get these, but over the past few weeks i have got so many, and they are annoying.

Whats going on with MSN Messenger?

Hey!

I have added a new feature to the blog a few days back and have been testing it out. It is located at the right side of the page, and is called “Most Popular Posts”. This does exactly what you would expect, and displays the most popular posts, i.e. the posts which people are reading the most. There are over 250 posts at the moment, so you can see the 10 most read; That is the 10 most read of the week.

As you can see, some are quite old posts, but still get a good read because of their position in search engines and because people enjoy reading them.

At the moment it displays a little pic next to the post, i may remove this in the future if it slow down the site or something.

Have fun looking at what others are reading

Hey everyone!

So, Facebook. We all use it (well most of us), and threre has been loads of changes in terms of who you can let see your profile, which means either more, or less people can view it. This is because the regional networks have gone, so you can no longer make it viewable to only people in your region, which i think is a shame.

Now, i used to not allow everyone to view my profile, because i didnt really want everyone to have access to it. I have now fliped this, and made more or less my whole profile available to everyone excluding the ones i dont want to see it.

This is done by using the block feature. There are plenty of people out there who i wouldnt want to read my Facebook, and are sad enough to do so. Fuck the haters and sad people!!! So the way you can get round this, is to block them. They will not know you have done this, if they search for you, then you simply will not show up. Now, there are a few ways around this, but the way i look at it is if people try to get round me blocking them, JUST to see my profile then they are a bigger loser than i thought!

On another note, i cant believe how people can manage their profile with 100s of “friends”. On my business account i have over 100, and i cannot keep track of them! I know people with 600 and even over 1000 so called “friends”…Why would you want this many? I would love to hear one of them people tell you something about each person, or even say as many full names as they can.

There was some sad person who i went to school with, who has over 100 “friends”. The thing is, 90% of the people are just randoms who he used to go to school with, in most cases who he didnt even know. I actually know one of them, and asked her about him, she said recognised his name and that was all. What a sado! Oh, he did add me…And i deleted him! LOL

If people want to add me and talk to me then fine, if they are adding me to get their numbers up then i will delete them soon later.

The Apple store in Newcastle opens tomorrow. I dont know if i should bother to go. I was going to go, and wear a “I’m a P.C.” t-shirt, which would of been funny

I am not sure if i want to go, the first 1,500 people get a free Apple t-shirt, but they are saying that thousands of people from all over the country are coming, so that sort of puts me off. It is the first Apple store to open in the North East of England.

Its also the opening of the new part of the Eldon Square, where it is situated.

Hey everyone! How are you today?

Yesterday i tried to upload a video to YouTube, i never do this usually, i only use YouTube to watch videos. I am aware that WMG aka Warner, are the WORST people for having clips removed which contain music, but until yesterday i didnt realise the extent of the problem.

It seems that YouTube have an algorithm which can go through the start of a video/music and detect if it is in the Warner database, and immediately removes the sound from the video. The video remains, with no sound, and you have the option to choose some free music, leave it as it is or upload a new video.

Now, my video was just a funny, valentines video. It has 4 or 5 clips of songs, which lasted around 25 seconds each. It was hardly distributing their music for profit. The purpose for the video was for 1 day, for fun.

Companies like WMG are killing the music industry. They will have you believe that its the pirates which are doing this, when in fact it is their own ignorance towards new technology, media and how we are all now interacting. I completely agree that people who go to car boot sales and sell copies of music/DVD is wrong, very wrong. It does harm the people making the music/film, and should be stopped.

HOWEVER, using music in a funny YouTube video is completely different. Now, people will say “its still copyright infringement” blah blah blah. But these copyright laws were written a long time ago, for a different era. There is no way to really enforce them, you cannot stop every person in the world uploading a vid to YouTube which contains copyright material. I have seen so many clips taken down, for example clips of people using Singstar. If you dont know, Singstar is a karaoke game and you can record yourself singing songs.

The music industry, in particular WMG needs to wake up! Its not the 80s anymore, we arent recording off the radio (which people did and you could never stop them). If someone is using a clip of music in a video it is promoting their music, but more importantly it is not being used for profit. There needs to be a “fair use” style of copyright law brought into force, if you are using music under certain circumstances it should be allowed.

I am going to keep an eye on the WMG situation and see what happens

Hello dear readers

Have you used Google Auto complete on their web searches? I imagine you have seen it…

For a few months Google has had autocomplete on in the web searches. So basically the idea is you start to type, and Google “guesses” what you are going to type and gives you options.

But you can type in some very normal things, just one or two innocent words, and the suggestions it gives you are hilarious, in some cases very, very strange and weird; just goes to show there are some weird people out there. Most things which are thrown up are sexual, there seems to be alot of focus on pregnancy, all from 2 innocent words, check it out…

Is It wrong to sleep with your sister? errrr?? 

Can i get pregnant from a dog…ooooooook!?!? 

How Do You Finger Yourself; How Do you get pregnant…errrrr

I want to die….oooook?!

haha! So many funny things here!

So many things wrong here…

I had to write February 2010 as Facebook keep changing their layout, permissions, and other things. Anyway, here is the new Facebook. If you have already had this layout for a while i am sorry, i just got it today. If you dont have it yet then this is what is to come.

To be honest, not much has changed. The bar at the bottom no longer exists, which is a shame since i used to use it to get to groups and pages. What is strange is that on my monitor in the resolution i use, it doesnt look like the main centre column is actually in the centre.

What do you think of it? It’s probably just a matter of time before there are some more changes.