William Tildesley

For those that don’t know one of my projects I’m working on at the moment is Ladgeful ((from the Cumbrian dialect meaning, embarrassing or unfashionable) is a link blog full of things relating to geek culture, the web, security/privacy and anything else that takes my fancy.) I’ve been using a hosted WordPress.com blog using the Prolouge theme from Automattic (the makers of WordPress). According to my stat’s I’ve produced over 168 posts using 55 tags (I’ve found tags actually drive traffic to the blog).

Although the setup is good (at the moment) I’m seriously considering moving over to tumblr, but not until it gets some features it sorely needs. These are.

• Import posts from rival services (i.e. WordPress) this has to work, or I can’t move.

• SEO friendly links (currently they look like this: post/28864665/post-name).
• Standalone Mac OS X blogging App supporting tumblr (This is coming with Blogo from Brainjuice (thanks Ben!)).

It might take a while for some of those features to appear (Ben says Blogo should add Tumblr support in 1.2!) but until then I’m sticking with WordPress

The reason I’m considering the move is due to the fact that WordPress is quite closed in what it will allow you to do with out paying money, but the real reason is that WordPress is far to complex for what I need.

First off I LOVE Twitter, in fact you can find me on twitter here (please add me as a friend), I use it every day (maybe not as much as some, but it’s a great place to talk to people I might not have to the chance to anywhere else). However, I’ve had enough with people talking about twitter, to be precise I don’t like it when people talk about it and don’t add anything to the “conversation”. Take Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur’s net@nite (a great web2 tech podcast) It’s got to a point were they’ve talked so much about it that fans are asking them to stop, after conversations with a few TWiT fans about the “twitter problem” most of them ARE on twitter and DO use it, but they told me that it’s getting in the way of good quality content (going back to net@nite the first 10 minutes of the podcast was used to talk solely about twitter and nothing new was added to the conversation).

Maybe it’s time to take note of what people are saying and only talk about twitter when it actually adds context to a conversation. If people like Leo Laporte keep on ignoring the majority of their fan base and keep talking about twitter then fans will migrate to other podcasts (this is the same for major web2 bloggers). I understand that twitter is big news in the web2 world, I don’t doubt it, but it’s getting to a point when I wish I could filter out the word twitter in Google Reader so it doesn’t show those posts (Google, please add that feature).

Please add to the “conversation” add a comment, am I wrong, right? At any rate this is great free PR for Twitter, oh and by the way Leo and TWiT fans, the podcasts are great I listen to all of them. I only used you as an example (their are many more).

Okay so you may have heard that WordPress has recently partnered with Sphere.com which provides possibly related blog posts which have been blogged elsewhere on wordpress.com.  Now I’m fine with that and I have no quarms with wordpress/sphere making money from me (they host my blogs! - which is expensive) but what I think is totally inappropriate is the fact that this new feature was automatically turned on and when I went to a blog post on my site for some contact details I saw the links one titled: “The Great Porn Debate” which incidently isn’t rude (far from it) but I don’t want that sort of stuff showing up on my blog (as I’m sure you understand), I’ve now disabled the feature (go to Design > Extras to disable it) but still I think WordPress should announce these changes to the users and ask them do you want this feature turned on or off?

I think this sort of behavior is typical for “web 2.0″ companies, who implement a feature without a concern for the user base, however WordPress needs to realise that they can’t just do that or users will move to other blogging services (and there are plenty of them).

Frederic has a great post over at The Last Podcast about how PR firms should just over an RSS feed for bloggers to dip in and out of instead of those stupid emails (I have around 20 of the said emails in my inbox) bloggers receive from PR firms. But to be honest, most of the products these emails try to flog are rubbish.

Jason, forgive me, but were you not going to give away a MacBook Air when you got 20,000 followers on twitter?

So their has been a lot of buzz about aggregation service lately, and today at least two popped up on the map.

Of course the father of aggregation services is being heralded as FriendFeed but they’re are many more.

For me though I have use for aggregation services, as a majority of my friends on FriendFeed are also on twitter I get a high level of twitter “noise” through FriendFeed which makes it almost impossible to use the service.

I should say that FriendFeed does give you the option to block your friends tweets from entering the “Your Friend” stream but I’m always afraid that I’ll miss something.

Also with a lot of friends I’m already reading their blog and don’t need to see the blog post through FriendFeed.

To be honest I think that services like FriendFeed are a waste of time and are highly distracting. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t care for tracking my friends across the web and would rather ring/IM/talk to them and find out what they’re up to.

I’ve re-posted this from my business blog (their I talked about how businesses should take this as a lesson and communicate with customers! But I felt this belong on my personal blog.

A few days back I ordered a new Dell Monitor, to be precise it was a Dell UltraSharp 1908WFP 19-inch Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor, the total price of this monitor was £176.25 and of top of that I had to buy the necessary cables totaling around £20 (not bought from Dell).

I ordered the monitor on 31st of March (two days ago). The email I received from Dell said that that the order would be “released into production as soon as your Bank has cleared your payment”. Normally this takes a few hours and I was expecting to find an email in the morning from Dell saying the money have been cleared and the monitor was on it’s way, this of course didn’t happen.

At the same time I’d ordered a cable from the Apple online computer store I again received a receipt email and a confirmation order from Apple as soon as package was posted (April 1st) this morning I woke up to find that the cable I had ordered two days before had arrived via UPS. Throughout that time I was able to track the order through an Apple branded website.

Through out this I had received no email from Dell at all, no confirmation email, etc. I was slightly concerned so today (March 2nd) I went to my bank HSBC and asked them if any money had been requested from Dell, apparently not. I decided I’d give Dell another day, as my personal banker (what a great title…) had told me that sometimes they take up to three days to process an order and request the money.

So tonight I’ve been periodically checking my email and the Dell Order Status page which gave the message “Your order will be released into production as soon as your Bank has cleared your payment”. Not very helpful.

I decided to check my email and order page for one last time tonight only to be told “We apologise if you did not request for your order to be cancelled. Please check your e-mail* for more information about why your order was cancelled and should you still need assistance please e-mail Customer Service.”

My first thought was that Dell had run out of stock or was having some sort of problem with clearing funds from my account. I logged onto my Gmail hoping to find an email explaining the situation but surprise, surprise, I hadn’t received any email from Dell.

Now, please don’t get my wrong, I know mistakes can happen when it comes to eCommerce software and having too many orders for the amount of stock you have or if it wasn’t a problem at all with Dell but with my bank, but at least let me know what’s happening and what you’re planning to do with my order, don’t just say my orders been canceled and thats it, at least use the contact information I gave you to contact me, you could have done so either via my mobile number, home phone number, email address or home address.

But please don’t leave me and other customers in the dark, thats not the way to gain credibility in the market especially since I was led to believe that Dell had changed itself since the “Dell Hell” Days (http://www.thisistrue.com/dellhell.html).

As of 21:05 on the 02/04/08 (British Date Format) I have received no email from Dell explaining why my order was canceled.

Google is one of the best search engines around, and too be honest It would be hard to sway me to any other search engine, not only do I use Google for search but also for Images, Maps, News, Price Comparison, Mail, YouTube, Calendar, Documents, Photos and my Google Reader.

According to my Web History (Google keeps a detailed record of all my web history) I do around a 150+ searches a day and in total I’ve made around 11778 google searches. If you looked through my Google search results you’d see an interesting pattern, I don’t just use Google as a search engine per-say but also as a calculator, spell checker, currency convertor and clock.

Here are a few examples:

Google Spell Checker:

Google Calculator:

Google Currency Convertor:

Google Clock:

Something that I wanted to start and I want other people to pickup and blog about.
So here goes, tell the world how the internet has effected you - in anyway you like.

What with online shopping (I use amazon a lot!) I get frustrated with local physical shops, I hate the fact that If I want to buy something I have to go down town (i enjoy walking! - I’m not lazy) at a specific time on a specific day (wtf I can’t buy cheese on a Good Friday! why?).

It’s 5:12pm and I need some sticky notes but I know that all the shops are closed so I can’t buy sticky notes!

It just frustrates me, that’s all.

Hey everyone just wanted to remind you all about The Cumbrian Social Media Meetup which happens on the 29th of March, this Saturday!

For anyone who interested and hasn’t read the original blog post you can find that here.

Just to go through the info again (for you forgetful people)
It will happen at 1:00pm at The Narrowbar Cafe, Penrith, Cumbria. (click the link to see a map).

You’ll find me and the others upstairs on the comfy couch - i’ll have the laptop out.

The menu can be found here and if you know what you want please email me so I can let them know!

If have any special requirements, let me know before hand via email: williamtildesley@gmail.com.

If you have any other questions please let me know.