Unrelated to that, I've got myself a new job as digital Product Director at Trinity Mirror, concentrating on stuff like who won Strictly Come Dancing.

I'll keep my blog going - so DON'T WORRY (I'm sure you weren't). But I probably won't be posting as often (as you may have noticed by now). And it'll probably be a bit more newspapery and a bit less SEO-ey.

Apologies to those I was a twat to over the last few years. And thank you to all those of you who've read the stuff I pumped out. Sorry about the Pippa Middleton stuff as well. Really.

Twitter - from the past!

Ever watched a recorded TV programme and wished you could see what the reaction was on Twitter? Now you can!

Together with the brilliant developers at Raak, I've (beta) launched Tweet Rewinder.

It's a mobile web app that lets you rewind your Twitter timeline and see tweets from the past unfold in real time

So you can jump back to the time a TV recording had actually been on, and then watch what people were saying in sync with the programme.

You can do the same thing with certain hashtags (there's a list anyone can use or users of the paid-for service can choose their own hashtag to capture - whether it's a TV programme, news event or conference).

Anyway, if you go to www.tweetrewinder.com, you can watch a video that explains how it works and sign up for the beta version (which works best on a mobile phone right now). But here are some screenshots. (You can follow Tweet Rewinder on Twitter, too).

Going back in time

Choose your timeline or a hashtag, then choose the time

Tweets from the past in real time

Then watch tweets from the past unfold in real time

There's also a write up at The Next Web.

Let me know what you think!

Conferences: expensive

Update: Andy has replied in the comments below. Although I stand by my criticism of the pricing model, the £100 gimmick does look a bit blackmaily the next morning. So apologies to him for that. It seemed a good idea at the time to avoid the accusation of not putting my money where my mouth is.

Original post: Andy Budd has written an impassioned defence of "big, expensive conferences" - describing criticisms as nonsense - which I'd like to take issue with.

Coincidentally, I'd already drafted a post about how I was never attending £500+ conferences again. This was after speaking at the free 'Brighton SEO' the same week I'd missed Content Strategy Forum 2011 - which costs £840 but work commitments had caused me to skip. Bye bye money.

First: the offer

But first, in the spirit of being constructive, I'd like to make Andy an offer.

UX London tickets are £1,200 (including VAT). Gulp.

Now I'm a one-man-band consultant - but I'll put up £100 if Clearleft Ltd (the organisers, of which Andy is CEO) will match that in proportion to our respective turnovers last year (I'm guessing theirs will be about 20 times mine but let's compare notes and see).

And let's use that money to subsidise someone - or a few people - who would otherwise never afford to go. They could be students or first-jobbers or those under 25 or the self-employed or the unemployed. (And, dear reader, if you're reading this and want to put some money up, so much the better. Do get in touch.)

But let's use the money to make sure that expensive conferences aren't the preserve of big agencies' employees and make sure that at least a couple of those with no one to pay for them aren't excluded.

Anyway, I hope he'll take me up on the offer.

Now, let's take issue with the cost

Andy explains how conferences are expensive to run - and I believe his budget. It's just that it involves spending nearly $160,000 on paying speakers, flying them over and putting them up in a hotel for a week.

Do we really need that many speakers from abroad?

Apparently we do as the high costs mean that "organisers try to mitigate some of these risks by picking big name speakers that we know will fill seats".

Call me naive but if there weren't so many big name speakers costing $160,000 wouldn't the costs be a bit lower? And hence the risks? And thus the prices? It's all a bit circular.

Andy rightfully points out that conferences are about more than the content. They're about meeting people - clients, contacts etc.

But what sort of people do you meet at a £1,200 conferences? Well, you don't meet many of the unemployed, graduates at small agencies or that many consultants. Why? Because the risk is the opposite of the organiser's - that you spend £1,200 and don't get a return on it.

Sure, you do meet some people in this position - I paid for myself to attend UX London when Don Norman spoke back in 2009. I thought it was great. If expensive.

But many people whose company can't afford to pay for them to go (or who don't have a company) are priced out of the market by costs of £1,200.

One of the comments (by someone else) under Andy's post says:

One point I would add, is the pricing a conference in some way sets the tone of it. UX London is full of UX professionals. A €99 or €129 per day conference tends to have a different crowd, different attitudes, different expectations and different ways of complaining about things.

If UX London was a €99 conference, I expect it’d full of people falling into the “f**k it, why not?” category. The relevance of delegates would be minimal for me, so I wouldn’t be interested in attending. At the saying goes, you can make a pizza so cheap that no one wants to eat it.

I mean, who would want to attend a conference that just anyone could afford to attend, eh?

In conclusion

I used to have a policy to go to one expensive set-piece conference a year, whatever the discipline - which I paid for out of my own money.

But this year I've concluded that I just can't see I get enough value from them - especially if you end up booking way in advance to get the early-bird prices and then can't go. Plus big name-speakers can be cool, but so can hearing other sorts of people at smaller conferences. And you meet people in the bar afterwards, regardless of what sort of conference it is.

Anyway, I hope Andy and Clearleft will think of a way to help those who can't afford - and shouldn't have to afford - £1,200. If my £100 can make that happen, I hope they'll accept it.

Photo credit.

Greater Manchester Police on a long sentence over shorts

But I was burgled recently - the thieves got away with three laptops, an ipad and my camcorder.

I was pleasantly surprised when the police said they'd raided an internet cafe and found one of the laptops along with a load of other stolen computers.

Then I got an email over the weekend from the detective investigating it all, suitably apologetic, but saying:

"The Crown Prosecution Service has declined to charge the person who was arrested with your stolen property in his shop (and several other stolen items) as, in their words, 'it is not possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he purchased the goods knowing or believing they were stolen'.

As such, no one will be prosecuted for this matter."

So while police Twitter accounts are busy trumpeting the court decisions after the riots - claiming there are "no excuses" in the case of a woman jailed for 5 months for accepting looted shorts - the people with my stolen computer won't be charged at all.

Apparently there are some excuses.

The cover of the page-turning abomination

1 Font too small

Like most online magazines that use page-turning technology (to mimic a paper magazine effect), they look like they've  designed it for print and then converted it to be an online magazine. That means they've used a font size that's too small so to read anything comfortably, you have to zoom in. Then zoom out to change page. Then zoom in. Then out. In. Out. Hokey cokey.

The font is small and squitty

2 Font too straggly

Again, because they've designed it for print, they haven't thought the font through well and it's horrid and spindly and squitty.

3 Stop moving about

Maybe in some sort of abomination of Fitt's Law they thought it would be helpful if, when you moved the mouse towards something (EG some text you want to read), the something moves towards the mouse. This isn't helpful - it just means you overshoot the target and have to move the mouse back 10% towards where you started.

4 I feel seasick

I'm one of those wierdos that likes to move the mouse pointer to where I'm reading. If I move the mouse, however, the whole of the text moves, making me feel ill.

5 I can't copy and paste

Because the mouse is being used to move the whole screen about, you can't copy and select text. Great.

6 Navigation is awful

Choose a dot then a page number. That's clear.

Once you're in it, navigation is awful. To get to another article, you first choose one of four dots and then select the page numbers you want. The page numbers? How's that a useful way to navigate - that's why we invented page titles for webpages so we wouldn't have to work out URLs.

7 You can't share or link to it

One side effect of the awful navigation is that the content can't be shared or linked to. There are page-turning platforms that do allow this - but all the content in Google's case is on one URL (making it terrible for SEO ironically). So if I want to share an article with someone I need to copy the URL of the homepage and then give detailed instructions on how to get to it - click the dots, then again, then scroll, then this then that then zzzzzzzzz.

Good things

The mobile and ipad and HTML for desktop versions look good, though ... And I'm sure the content's fine. I'll go and have a read.

The new theme needs a lot of pictures to work ...

Anyway, if you spot any problems, don't like anything, wish something was here that isn't etc etc then let me know in the comments (unless it's about the small font sizes. I'm fixing them. God how many CSS changes do I have to make to fix that?!?). And as I've finally achieved a logo that changes on rollover, let me know how that works. Cheers!

Of course, whether it's better to be basic, intermediate or advanced when it comes to reading level depends on your intended audience ...

Goosh

Goosh

SEO Chicks

SEO Chicks blog

Hobo Web

Hobo Web blog

SEO Begin

SEO begin

Great Websites Blog

Great websites blog

Nikki Pilkington

Nikki Pilkington

Dave Naylor

Dave Naylor's blog

Vertical Leap

Vertical leap blog

Blogstorm

Blogstorm

SEO Gadget

SEO Gadget

SEOptimise

SEO optimize

Ciaran Norris

Ciaran Norris

Impact Media

Impact media blog

Paul Madden

Paul Madden's blog

My blog

My blog

Explicitly Me

Explicitly Me blog

Have I missed anyone out? Let me know ...

Join my Facebook group: Let's keep the airports shut - the ash means it's nice and quiet everywhere.

Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?