I was thinking last night, about how much the Bournemouth web/creative/geek scene (for want of a better phrase) is accelerating at the moment.

Within the last year (and please comment to correct/update me) Bournemouth has gained:

dotdorset

Dorset Digital

startup-meetup

Bar Camp Bournemouth

meetdraw

There’s also more arts focussed groups like, Bomo Creatives (which have been around a bit longer) and other business networking places.

Do we need all of these?

They fulfill slightly different niches but would Bournemouth as an area benefit from all the organisers coming together for the common good? I think it would.

Your thoughts please.

UPDATE: and BUNIX – thanks to @darkphnx

started charging to sign up?

Part of the value in Twitter for a user is the ability to communicate with a wider circle of influence than you might otherwise of been able, as the masses join twitter the danger is that the noise to signal ratio increases making it less useful – but what if they’d started charging when they hit a certain number of users?

Would it start to make some real money that so far it has only hinted at being able to earn? Would people of left the service for another? Certainly charging existing users, would create a mass exodus… but some of the attraction for early adopters is the exclusive club feel – that would be, in some ways, amplified.

This is a very hypothetical post btw – it came from being asked why twitter was anything more than “the next big thing” – in their words, “it was all about friends reunited, then myspace, then facebook… now everyones joining twitter – its just another fad, I’m not signing up”.

That conversation led me to the thought above and also to wonder, what’s the next big thing?

What if twitter IS just a fad?

Some people lose a lot of money, the cool kids move on, the spammers and randomness takes over – this is based on what some people would perceive happened to myspace as a platform, although I would argue its reverted back to its “native” state of being a good place for bands/musicians/DJs/performers.

So what do you think?

Is it a fad?

If so, what’s next?

A great tip for sharing the wheat and not the chaff from your twitter feed is to make use of the favourites feed – anything of interest I see on twitter, I’ll click the star to add it to my favourites.
My favourites are then published as an RSS feed, which I’ve added to the side of my blog under my twitter updates – have a look, you’ll find some interesting stuff.

I’ll add to this post a diagram of how all my RSS/twitter stuff floats around the interwebs later

I was talking to a non-techy friend last night and he asked me how I could afford to set-up an office and buy the software/hardware I needed to get going in the current climate.

As promised J here are my top 5 tips for cutting costs (thought I’d share it with everyone):

1) Phones: He uses just a mobile at around £70pm – I use VOIPfone £10pm inc 0845 number

2) Photo/graphic work: Photoshop CS4 £450 – the excellent Gimphoto £0

3) MS Office + Outlook £499 – Open office and Thunderbird £0

4) Project management software? I use the self hosted Taskfreak to manage my to do list, it allows me to share with others too, especially when combined with…

5) Google docs

£1700+ saved in one post, winner.

If you’ve not used these tools, I can’t recommend them highly enough

As for the office, its a hot desking environment shared with 2 others, my furniture, renovated PC and other bits have come to £135 in total.

There’s a growing problem for campaigns across mixed forms of media, how do you link back to your internet page/site from a TV, radio or print advert?  Friendly, memorable URL’s are becoming scarcer as the internet gold rush means that most are already taken (even if not in use).

Some campaigns get it very right, using memorable URL’s for a campaign: how could you forget “Compare the meerkats”?

Others go for a subdirectory like “example.com/offer09” – not bad, but harder to remember and more likely people type it incorrectly, although they’d still end up on your site, its harder to track which visitors were arriving as a result of which elements of the campaign.

Recently there’s been a trend towards “search for:” for example the new “Search for: Change 4 Life“.

Are these a good idea? Well there are a few points to consider:

It allows your competitors to sponsor the exact phrase you are paying to advertise – see the PPC ads now listed against the pharse above.

Other entries could overtake your own as the number 1 ranked spot, a blog entry discussing the campaign is already in 4th place.

It IS more memorable, the campaign can be built around a pharse, which you’ve heavily SEO to appear.

Radio ads don’t need to clarify spelling “Connections, with an x” – great for remembering it, but uses up valuable Ad time.

For some campaings, a variation on this kind of advertising is “Search Facebook for:” and then using the group/fan page name as the phrase – that will avoid PPC targetting and it would be easier to complain to Facebook about rivals targetting a specific phrase, but parody groups/pages could easily rank next to your result.

Certain products are experimenting with 2D barcodes, too techy for most, although good if you’re targetting the geek niche I guess.

What are your preffered ways to spread the URL love? Did I miss any?