I am aware that the state of education in the Country is, quite frankly, appalling and even if it wasn’t I recognise that you don’t view learning as a top priority. Of course there are more important things. I know most of you would rather be out pursuing other interests; racking up ASBOs, being a nuisance, and generally ‘chavving it up’ are after all, most important pursuits. But please PLEASE make at least the smallest effort when you decide to write stuff.
You have not ‘brought’ your car from a garage, nor have you ‘bought’ it to an event. You did not buy new ‘tire’s’ and you certainly didn’t drive ‘their’.
http://www.askoxford.com/
Simples.
Well as I previously stated I had quite an article lined up to write about Zopa, but quite frankly, I couldn’t be arsed so I shall summarise thus; Zopa is probably the most ‘out there’ use of social networking. You either lend money or borrow money to or from individuals respectively, and are able to lend or borrow to specific requirements. I’m averaging an 8% return on the money I’ve put in per annum, before tax. Work it out yourselves.
That will be all.
The first time I heard about ‘social networking’ was while I was still at college. It appears that this term was first coined when Myspace was around. I consider that to be the first mainstream ‘Social Networking’ website. Since Myspace has become less popular we’ve had various incarnations of other social networking sites. Those that spring to mind would be; Bebo & Windows Live Spaces.
Obviously the biggest players in social networking at the moment are, of course, Facebook and Twitter. I can easily understand why Facebook has become so big. Users are given everything they need! From what I’ve seen of Facebook it can be used for networking, photo sharing, video sharing, bookmarking & chatting. I can’t think of another service that offers all of those features together, under one (easy to use) interface. Then you’ve also got the advertisement side of things, Facebook is funded by targeted advertising but you can also create a ‘page’ or ‘group’ for your business which potentially gets you a lot of free exposure.
Despite Facebook’s various attempts to incorporate ‘twitter-like’ features, Twitter seems to have a very strong following too. I can’t see what Twitter offers over Facebook, in fact it offers substantially less than Facebook. You can’t host pictures, or videos etc… but in my opinion that is Twitter’s main strength. I am able to see what everyone is doing very very easily. It’s very interesting that two if the market leaders in Social Media are almost at opposite ends of the scale, feature wise, but both work very well indeed.
While I was weighing up these services it suddenly dawned on me that the social internet ‘revolution’ is much wider than this. How about sites such as Youtube, Deviantart, Flickr? Surely these also fall into the ‘social media’ category despite being based a particular area (for example; Youtube is based around sharing video). I have since come across this page which highlights exactly how big social media and sites have become.
This is all I’m going to say for now, but there will be a follow up article regarding a specific and different form of social networking. It’s all very exciting…
Categories: Computing, Technology, Web Tags: bebo, business, deviantart, facebook, linked in, media, networking, social, social media, social networking, Technology, twitter, youtube, zopa
I used to sell on eBay regularly a couple of years back, and out of interest I have decided to do some sums and see whether the same business model would be viable now.
Please note, that I know the margins were not big enough really, however the product I was selling had fierce competition from the Chinese Market (of inferior quality – strangely people seem to want to buy something that lasts half the time but it 2/3 of the price!). With hindsight I wouldn’t have retailed this product but I learned a lot doing it. All figures are averages based on a months sales from August 2007 (apart from the fees, which are up to date).
Item Cost – £40.00
Sale Price on eBay – £68.00
VAT to pay – £8.87
eBay + Paypal Fees – £9.59
Profit so far – £9.54
Basic Rate Tax – £2.10
Postage Cost – £5.00
Total Profit – £2.44
And just for the sake of a cheap shot at government, if I decided to spend my profit on Diesel… after fuel taxes I would get £1.58 worth of fuel.
Note that these figures do not also include any packaging materials either.
Fun times.
Well Windows 7 has finally been let loose amongst the public, after almost a year of (unofficial) public testing. I’m a little undecided on what to think about Win7, there’s no doubt it’s leaps and bounds ahead of Vista in terms of performance and stability, but are there enough new features to warrant a new OS with new branding?
I have been keeping a very close eye on forums, blogs and twitter regarding this and it would appear that the majority of users are against me – Windows 7 is percieved as a very good thing by mostly everyone. From where I’m standing Windows 7 seems to be a form of ‘Vista Done Properly’… I have no doubt that if Microsoft hadn’t got caught up in the ‘Longhorn Fiasco’ they would now be much futher along with Windows development.
Despite my reservations I can’t deny that Windows 7 is very very good. I have been using almost exclusively since the public beta release and I can’t say I’ve had any faults with it at all. I haven’t had any compatability problems, stability problems, hardware incompatabilities etc… It’s vastly quicker that Vista too, especially when it comes to booting up the system. All in all, I think this release of Windows can only be ‘epic win‘ for Microsoft.
