Redswish - carefully crafted banter

Haggling on the web

I’ll give you £20, £30, £25, Deal

The web is great for virtually everything (and I mean ‘virtually’). In a post I wrote a long, long time ago (in relation to the age of this blog), I proposed the age-old question of ‘What can’t you do on the web?‘. Well I’ve thought of something – Haggling.

In the West, Haggling doesn’t play much of a part in every-day shopping, eg:

Checkout Clerk: That’s £38
Customer: Oh no, that’s far too expensive
Checkout Clerk: Well you’ll have to put some back then, hurry up there’s a queue forming…
Customer: Well, how about I’ll give you £25 for it all?
Checkout Clerk: What? No… you can’t do that!
Customer: Come on! OK, £30 – that’s as high as I’ll go…
Checkout: Fine… Security!

… there’s nothing wrong with exaggerating a situation to make a point. It doesn’t really work. Sometimes it’s possible to get a free piano stool or cheese grater thrown in with the deal but generally, down to the forces of commercialism and capitolism – a price is a price is a price.

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The ALA Survey 2008

I took it! The 2008 A List Apart survey. Jeffrey’s been ranting on about it on Twitter and his blog so as I generally get some benefit out of the result of these things – it seemed only fair to take part.

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Is Cuil all that cool?

Cuil is a new search engine service set to rival Google, ironically created by a group of previous Google employees. The search service, pronounced ‘cool’, claims to index over 120 billion pages (which if I may say so myself, is a staggering amount). Various sources reckon this is almost 3 times as much as Google, however Google state otherwise, although not revealing any actual statistics.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

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The new site is alive!

New design, obviously not straying too far from the old one. Additions include Twitter and Flickr feeds, Gravatars and a few more features still to be added, including styling up the pagebar and adding social bookmarking links. But aside from that it’s here!
www.nathanbeck.co.uk will be up at the start of August, unfortunately it’s currently down [...]

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Google Pagerank finally updating!

Get on the edge of your seats people! Matt Cutt’s announced on Thursday that the latest Google Pagerank updates will become visible ’sometime over the next few days’.
Well I’m waiting… ‘anxiously’!

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I'm getting all twitterish

I’m on Twitter! I made a step forward in my life this week and finally reactivated my Twitter account to… err… do whatever it is you do on Twitter. Don’t forget – it’s all about the social networking!
So – find and follow at www.twitter.com/redswish
Let’s hope I keep it up, when the new site goes live [...]

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Large Blog Site Navigation

With my ever-growing fondness of blogging, I’ve wrote an article for the Flame blog on the subject of Navigating Large Blogs.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise [...]

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New site launch delay

Hey all, today was supposed to be the launch of the new Redswish/Nathan Beck site but unfortunately, due to a high workload and the small inconvenience of a hungover weekend – the launch is being pushed back till next Monday.
So… 7 days and counting!

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Narrow Stairs

Well, actually my only gig of the year so far! I just don’t think the first half of 2008 has been particularly productive for film or music. The only new album releases that I can recall (off the top of my head) that have inspired me at all so far are the new Sigur Ros [...]

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Google looking at more social approaches to searching

In the attempt to continuously improve their already dominant powerful search service, Google are now looking at more social approaches to the way results are displayed and utilised by browsers.
A video from Tech Crunch shows a user interface being tested, demonstrating new features Google are looking to integrate into their search including the ability to [...]

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