I have saw that Adidas have had some paintings done while in South Africa. They are auctioning off various football memorabilia, which includes lots of paintings. Its a charity auction for Nelson Mandela.

They have a Spain one, which is signed by David Villa, and it looks so good! The biggest problem is the world big…Its 290 cms x 220cms, which is more or less bigger than any ‘open’ wall i have (i.e. i have a door on one obviously and other furniture).

I placed a bid of £252 yesterday and i was highest bidder!! Now i am not the highest bidder, there are some other bids which have been placed.

There is also the Official match ball used, or one of them. The cost? Well last time i looked the auction was over £30,000!

Do you think i should get it? It is history and art, and is just an amazing one-off piece.

Have you seen this yet? I have, and i find it funny

The “band” everyone hates (no really they do, they flopped) Jedward aka John and Edward Grimes were on T4: On The Beach on Sunday, where Edward fell. HAHAHAHA!! How funny!!

I watched a bit of T4 On the Beach, but it was shit so i turned it off. Jason Derulo couldnt sing, his performance was shit and the sound was terrible.

They were talking about this yesterday on BBC, the Brazilian Nickname generator. If you played for Brazil, what would your name be? Pretty funny actually, try it out for yourself.

My name is Michaaça

You can go to the site by clicking here

Hello Blog readers

As you probably have seen, I got lots of Spain things, and lots come from the company Subside Sports. I have bought things from them before, and the thing which is the worst about the company is the delivery.

First let me say the things they sell are great. You can get some things here which you may not find anywhere else, and that is good. The customer service is also not bad, if you send an email you will probably get a reply within a day.

The delivery is what lets this company down. I have ordered from them a few times, so i am aware of how bad it is, but like i say, they sell some good things. Well my order took 2 weeks to come!! This is just not acceptable really when it comes to ordering online in 2010. The bad thing is they do not give you any updates, any tracking, or any indication of when or how long you have to wait for your order. This isnt a one-off, it has always been the case with the few orders i have placed.

I have ordered from other palaces, some outside the UK, and never had to wait this long. It is just not good enough. The items were non-personalised, and they were supposedly in stock, so i cant see the problem.

I only order off them every now and again, purely for this reason. They sell some things others dont, and i dont really want to buy from them but i do, but i just expect it to take a long time. I would order far more from them if they 1) gave an expected delivery time 2) it was within 2-3 working days, like every other company out there!

Its not 20 years ago where you ordered from a catalogue and you would get your things “some day” in the post…Subside needs to sort out its deliveries, or change its name to Substandard Sports.

Now it is around 2 weeks from the world cup, it should be their busiest time, but i wont order off them again, at least for this world cup; You dont actually know if you will get your order in time!

Heeeey Blog!

Its Friday…YEEEAAAH!!!! Weekend baby!!

I love days like today…It was sunny before aswell, its gone all cloudy now tho I was gonna show off the panoramic feature of my Sony HX5 camera aswell Nevermind, i am sure we will get at least 1 more sunny day before the year is out

I really feel like getting drunk this weekend! I havent really got drunk for ages, i cant actually remember when. So, this weekend, i will make it a priority. I still have a full bottle of Jägermeister, its being kept nice and freezing cold in my fridge.

Check out my status on Facebook…I made this up all in aid of today, Friday!!

A little bit of vodka in my life, a little bit of redbull by my side, a little tequila’s what i need, a little bit of jäger its so sweet, a bottle of corona in the sun, a shot of sambucca just for fun, a little bit of absinthe here i am, a little bit of alcohol makes me your man

Good huh?

File sharing, “illegal downloading” and such things are hot topics these days. If someone owns the copyright to something, you arent allowed to share it online, which means you cannot upload or download without permission. The music/media industries want you to believe they are losing money, but i disagree, and will tell you why….

First i want to explain what i am calling “responsible downloading“. This would be the downloading of music in a responsible way, not for profit, for personal use. not downloading 1000 albums a week to sell at your car boot sale. You are free to download what you like, providing you pay for some music which you download (i.e. go out and buy something you downloaded).

OK, the music industry will say, for example, if 1000 albums are downloaded then 1000 sales are lost…This is WRONG! If 1000 albums are downloaded, how many of those would of been bought? I would imagine less than half. OK, so 500 sales are now lost. BUT, out of the 500, how many of those people would download the albums, decided they like them, and then go out and pay for them? There are plenty of people who would, including myself.

The music industry do not want to admit that downloading (legal or otherwise) is a GOOD thing. What happens if someone downloads an album of a band they are unsure of, they may go on and buy that album, or their next album, or go to one of their gigs (which is where they are making most of their money).

The latest Lady GaGa video was put on YouTube by her record company, within a few hours it got over 300,000 views, and the day later it had a few million!!! The single went on to be number 1. This is not a coincidence. Without YouTube you would not be able to reach that many people that quickly!

The real reason why the record companies do not like this is simple, they have no control, and are thinking they are losing money. They know they cannot possibly stop EVERYONE downloading illegally, and its such a long and costly process for them to even take a person to court that they cannot do it on a mass scale. They try to guilt people into illegal downloading, its the only weapon they have.

The Music Industry need to learn they cannot control the Internet. They cannot say “oh you can download this because we want you to” one day, then the next “oh you cant download that, its illegal”.

There is now more music out there, more choice, and more to listen to. This is a great thing for the industry. This is purely down to the internet, music sharing and downloading. The idiot from Scouting For Girls got interviewed about this argument, and what a douche he is. He thinks its a bad thing, why? “there is too much choice“. What a fucking moron!! He thinks “his friends band” cant get signed because of this. Well, they cant get signed for 1 of 2 reasons: 1) They are shit, or 2) they are unlucky, and also stupid. The Internet is the biggest platform to launch yourself! Good bands have not got signed for years, way before the Internet. Now you have the opportunity to get yourself a worldwide following, to put yourself on the map, and the dumbass from Scouting For Girls thinks thats a bad thing!?

Now, you SHOULD SUPPORT the music you like. You SHOULD buy their albums if you like them. What i hate is people who claim to like music but never pay for any. I do believe this is wrong. Its the same for movies, software, whatever.   They are not real music fans.  Support the Aritst/developer if you are a fan.

The copyright laws need to be changed, and updated. It is illegal to change the format of something, so that means if you download a MP3 from iTunes (legally) you cannot put it on a CD without breaking the law, and vice-versa; You cannot buy a CD and make it an MP3 for your computer. Its counter-productive!!! If i buy a sweatshirt i’m not told, its illegal if i cut the sleeves off or dye it a different colour! I paid for the thing!! They could not stop people taping off the radio, they cannot stop this. Its the Internet, its only getting bigger!!!

What are your thoughts on this?

Hey,

Well i searched Google this morning, and now they have revamped their site! Slightly changing the layout on the homepage with new graphic buttons, but its the results pages which are most interesting…

There is a new bar on the left, which lets you filter your results further than ever before.  A new feature seems to be the filtering of shopping websites. You can now decide to either show fewer or more shopping sites. This could be a good thing, or maybe a bad thing for shopping sites, will this improve people buying?

I have tested this a little, and i have seen that if you select “show more shopping sites” some sites which i know are shopping sites do not show up, but appear in “less shopping sites”.

This new filter seems to not be working very well, i am not sure how Google is going to determine how a site is a shopping site, other than a webmaster telling the big G that they are/are not a shopping site.

Hey its 1st April, maybe its all a big joke doubt it though.

Tried to get onto YouTube before and for the first time i have ever seen, it is properly down.

Its not just down for a minute, its been down a good while, maybe 10 minutes (for a big site thats eternity) so far, people on Twitter are talking about it.

Wonder whats going on…..

Update 1: Its not just from their site, all videos hosted there seem to be down too, which is expected i suppose.
Update 2: Still down, over an hour later….
Update 3: It come back after around 2 hours

Hello Readers!

If you dont know, i own a few domains/sites (like this one). So, i got an interesting email yesterday. Apparently a “professional intellectual property right consultant organization” contacted me, because someone was going to register domains like mine with different extensions (.org, .cn etc). They wanted me to email them back…

The scam is that they try and sell you domains, either by selling them direct to you, or registering the domain themselves and then selling it to you at a premium.

The email claimed to be from:

Dean Hu
Audit Engineer
3A, Units 20/F, Far East Consortium Bldg.,
121 Des Voeux Road, Central,
Hong Kong
T: + 852 95660 103
+ 852 95660 489
F: + 852 30696 940

If you own domains or websites: BEWARE OF THIS SCAM!

There is no real need to have multiple domains, that ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe have a .com and a country level domain (e.g. .co.uk) but you dont need to have ALL the extensions for your name/keyword/trademark/whatever. Domain squatting or whatever you wanna call it doesnt really work these days, because what you want to do is have a domain name, have a website on that, and develop and promote that. It will always be more prominent than someone who is trying to sell you a similar name which has no website on it or has not been properly optimised.

Web tip!

If you want a website then buy a suitible domain for it. If you are worried, buy the .com version and the country TLD (e.g. .co.uk for a UK site; .es for Spain etc.). Only use 1 domain and redirect the other. Promote the domain you are using, use it for the site, for emails and everything. Dont be fooled into buying more domains than you need, you really only need 1 for a typical site, if you want different sites for different countries, then you can use separate domains (or subdomains, or directories).

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