I’ve been searching reviews for a natural dietary supplement to see what it does and if it’s any good. The process brings me face-to-face with the real nature of the internet, and a lesson in marketing, during the very week I’ve been planning my own internet marketing strategy.
Upon searching for this particular supplement, I find that the reviews on the first couple of Google pages of links were all very positive. Nothing is so perfect. Perfection makes me suspicious. The reviews were similar in their wording. My guess is the marketing man (who shall remain nameless) from the company who make the supplement has entered into as many blog and review sites as he could find. SEO at its best … and worst. Manipulating search engines and saturating the bandwidth for those searching on the efficacy of a product is very shrewd marketing strategy, but I find it a little sad, because it erodes the internet’s usefulness as a resource for impartial, genuine, user reviews of a product.
Ah well, moral of the tale: if you want the genuine stuff, click straight to page 20 of the search results; if you want to sell stuff, get it into pages 1 and 2!
Add comment October 26th, 2009
I heard good things about Windows 7 on netbooks. So I took advantage of my MSDN professional subscription to download it and install it on my Eee PC netbook. There were a few tweaks necessary to install it on the netbook, but hey, after thirty years doing this stuff, I’m used to that! Netbook specific install quirks aside, it installed fairly easily.
I must say, first hand, that Windows 7 has surprisingly good performance on a netbook. Microsoft got worried about loss of market share to Linux on netbooks and so took the netbook market very seriously in Windows 7, and it seems to have worked. It performs at least as fast as my old Linux installation, and faster in some ways. Running Google Chrome on Windows 7 responds faster than Firefox on Linux (Chrome has a very fast JavaScript engine - Google’s speciality). The new OpenOffice 3.1 boots up faster on it too. Writing should be a breeze - no excuses now. Lets see how fast it stays when I install the software development tools on it!
They have improved some of the problems Vista had. The annoying UAC pop-ups seem to have gone, now only asking me when it really needs to check access permissions (like the first time a new device driver is installed). The user interface feels a lot “smarter” - the result of lots of little tweaks to it. Cleaner too. Everything seems to be easy to find, where you need it, when you need it, and no clutter. The only downside so far is that shutdown takes a long, long time on my relatively slow SSD drive. But, I’ve set it to hibernate instead of shutdown all the time, which is quicker, and means it can start-up much faster too.
So overall, I’m happy with Windows 7 … so far!
2 comments October 8th, 2009
I’m winding down to my long overdue vacation. Lately, I feel like I’ve been shooting into the fog, hoping to hit something. The final round of agent submissions felt like that. The attempts to heal my sciatica have felt like that. No targets hit so far, and worse … I can no longer see where the targets are, or what they are. Weariness from a year of constant pain has fogged it all over.
So I’m off for two weeks, to relax, recharge, and re-focus.
To keep myself going until that break, I decided to play around with the Gunning-Fog Index and the Flesch-Kincaid Test this week. You could be forgiven for mistaking them for obscure titles of gripping thrillers, but actually, they are metrics for grading the readability of text. It’s based around sentence and word length. I applied it to some chapters of my novel. The readability was quite good, but by adopting some of the change suggestions from Edit Central, I found I could improve every chapter by almost a further point, which brings it comfortably into my target audience range.
I might apply it to the whole novel when I return. Tighten it up even more. I wouldn’t recommend applying it blindly as an editing technique. It’s just interesting, that’s all. It makes me more aware of my style, and where it could trip up a reader. It made me think of even simpler, clearer ways to compose some sentences.
The most interesting thing of all, for me, is that readability was hardest in chapters where certain people were talking. This is mainly because those people would be having some technical conversations (with lots of multiple syllable words like ‘forensics’ or ‘genetics’). I could almost tell which chapter it is by the readability index alone. (I’m too damned close to this thing!) Is editing ever truly finished? Or am I just gilding the lily at this stage? Time to let go.
Ah well - holiday time too. Back in a couple of weeks.
Add comment September 4th, 2009
Back injuries got me thinking mortal thoughts lately. Contemplating a long-running ailment made me consider that my youth is at an end (physically at least). Early this morning I watched a discussion on breakfast TV about ageism - it is discrimination, but the guest was making the point that it is a very subtle form of it. There’s just an assumption that as we get older, we can do less. It has been said (by Dorothea Brande) that writing is something to be considered only after you reach the age of thirty. The quality of writing is one of those things that - arguably - improves with the age of the author. Which is probably just as well, since recent rejections have me thinking that if I want to be in this at all … it has to be for the long haul!
It makes me think too of our youth-centered culture. Marketing gurus love “yoof”. Reinvent and recast. Bring the most beautiful and appealing onto screen and stage. I’m thinking of the youngest actor ever cast to play Doctor Who. I’m thinking of a new young Star Trek film cast. I’m thinking of the rumour that Stargate: Atlantis was cancelled to make way for Stargate: Universe - a show which will, no doubt, be another pale Star Trek style rehash, but with a younger cast to appeal to a larger demographic. I’m thinking of the trend in recent years of announcing book deals with teenager authors, the kind whose pictures look pretty next to the byline. I’m not resentful - more luck to them I say. I’d have loved to be in that position when I was that young. But I held off, knowing that my work wouldn’t start to be of a quality I’m happy with until this stage of life.
Of course, there is another reason the marketeers like this youthful shim on our world - inexperience comes cheap. It is the beauty of the healthy balance sheet they like to ogle.
Add comment August 27th, 2009
I turned on Tom Dunne’s radio show as I started to write this, and what do I hear - a woman describing how she published her own book. Someone up there is trying to tell me something, most especially because I sat down to write this post to tell you about the latest and possibly last agent rejection of Broken Evolution.
It all seemed very promising; hopeful words were coming from the agent. I also got affirmative feedback this week from two impartial readers, saying things like “it’s as good as any thriller I’ve read” and “I wasn’t prepared for how good it was” and “It kept me up reading at nights wanting to see what happened next.” Even the agent was full of praise and admiration for the novel in this ultimate rejection.
Now, my best chance yet has been shot down with the excuse of … the recession. It’s an environment that has become, quite frankly, hostile to new authors. And I don’t know if I can shift any longer the feeling that I am wasting my time with this traditional route. Time for a re-think.
Add comment August 7th, 2009
