Cut&Paste Digital Design Competition

7 Apr 2009

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend Cut&Paste, a really fantastic live digital design competition, for Spoonfed.  My review went up on the site yesterday.

I enter the Coronet Theatre to a whir of technological activity. On the main stage, computer equipment draped in wires waits patiently for the competition that is about to ensue. On the ground in front of the stage, four more desktop setups are being put through their paces by some rather frantic-looking designers who are steadfastly ignoring the crowd growing around them.

I am at London’s second annual Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament where graphic designers compete against each other and the clock to create designs from scratch in front of a live audience….

Read more from my article Cut&Paste on Spoonfed.

The Queen’s Head Pub

6 Apr 2009

One of the things that I regretted about my time in the UK prior to going back to California for Christmas, and something I have happily changed since my return, was how little I knew about my immediate neighbourhood.  I live in a very residential area of London but like the rest of the city, numerous surprises can be hidden just a few houses away.  I took advantage of some recent nice weather to explore the surrounding area.  Hopefully I’ll be able to post about a number of my favourite nearby finds but I’d like to dedicate this post to a local pub with all the charm one might expect of a British pub and all the negative reviews of a New York bar.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s been so thoroughly bashed in nearly all of the reviews but in my opinion, The Queens Head on Brook Green is a top notch London establishment.

I first visited the Queen’s Head with Ann not too long after moving into the Top Floor Flat – it’s a few blocks away and a nice walk when it’s a warm evening.  The most striking thing about the pub is its ginormous garden in the back which could easily fit our flat three times.  This might not sound like a huge selling point but with space at a premium in London, a garden of this size is certainly cause for celebration, especially in the summer when outdoor pubs space is always overcrowded.

I’ve also been consistently impressed with the friendly staff and had no arguments with the food (although perhaps I’m less picky than most as that seemed to be the main gripe amongst those who complained about the place).  The indoor atmosphere is as cozy as the outdoor one is festive and summery.  A number of separate rooms all offer plenty of seating by the best spots by far are the cushy chairs and couches by the front windows.

So the Queen’s Head may not have the cheapest of all chips or the most central of all locales but as far as pubs go, it’s certainly one of my favourite in London.

Fast Blog Finder and How to get (more) High PR Backlinks

5 Apr 2009

One of my most popular posts to date, based on the number of visitors from Google searches, has been my previous guide for how to get high page rank backlinks to a website using forums and the SEO for Firefox toolbar. Although that is a very effective way to get high PR backlinks, it’s also quite time consuming and might not necessarily be the most efficient way to carry out the process of backlinking. I wanted to review another tool called Fast Blog Finder that makes the job of building manual backlinks significantly easier. I discovered this tool quite a while ago and when I first came across Free Trial of Fast Blog Finder, I could not locate any good reviews on the tool, particularly it’s paid versus free versions. Here’s a recap of my experience.

If you are not familiar with backlinking, dofollow and nofollow tags and SEO, you might first be interested in reading the following posts:
How to get High PR Backlinks
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the English Language

As I mentioned in my last post on the subject of building backlinks – that is, links from other websites pointing to yours – is one of the most important elements in ranking highly for search engine results. Three main ways to get backlinks are to wait for them to come naturally as people link to your content, ask people directly for links from their page to yours, and create them manually. While using forums for high PR backlinks is one of these manual methods, using blog comments is another. Simply posting a comment that includes a URL on someone else’s blog post can create a backlink from their blog. However, as anyone who has tried using blog comments to generate backlinks will know, it is often very difficult to find blogs in which the comment field does not generate all URLs as nofollow links, rendering the backlink invisible to Google robots.

Fast Blog Finder is a tool that searches the web for blog posts based on your search query and returns a list of places where you can leave comments that include dofollow links back to your site. Instead of spending hours searching for these dofollow blogs yourself, this tool can do it in a matter of minutes, leaving you the time to actually post comments (with a link back to your site of course).

Fast Blog Finder is a downloadable piece of software that contains no malware or spyware and has a free trail version as well as a full paid version. The free trial is fully functional – allowing customised searches, links to all blog results, the page rank (PR) of the domain and induvidual post, whether or not the blog is dofollow, how many outbound links appear on the page and when the page was las updated. The free trial, however, will only return up to 50 results for any given search term, no matter how many blogs are available. Often of a list of 50 results, between one and five of the blog posts will be dofollow, and will be suitable for creating a backlink. There is no limit to the number of searches one can do.

This is undeniably useful for beginners looking to test out some SEO practices and are just starting to generate backlinks for their site. However the true power of this tool becomes apparent when splurging on the full, paid version of Fast Blog Finder which is available for a one-time fee of $49. While users with the free software may feel they are getting results, and that perhaps there aren’t significantly more than 50 blogs out there – at least not enough to justify the expense – the proof is in the number of dofollow links generated. Popular keywords, such as music, travel, technology or celebrities might generate over 50 dofollow links alone. The paid version delivers results and is definitely worth the money, allowing those interested in generating backlinks to find literally thousands of places to post a comment and a link back to their site. The only thing Fast Blog Finder does not do is post a comment for you.

For a whole variety of reasons, I do not in any way endorse spamming these blogs with comments simply to get a backlink, nor will it necessarily help your backlinking campaign. When leaving a blog comment, please make sure your comment is relevant, on topic, polite and not simply a link and spam.

MusicMetric and MuZoid Give Music Info on Demand

4 Apr 2009

While both the areas of music information sites and apps and twitter apps are full of heavy competition,  my neighbour in the so-called London Silicon Roundabout MusicMetric has created an interesting service called @MuZoid to bridge the gap between music info and Twitter.

On their main page, MusicMetric claims to “distil raw data into knowledge about the music business” which sounds a bit like a cross between a brewery and a record label but has led to a site full of micro-features on a large number of individual artists and bands.  Where things get interesting is how they have decided to disseminate these pages and decide which pages to add next.  Smart script (and, according to creators, female gendered script) MuZoid is a Twitter application that allows any user to send an a message to @MuZoid with the name of an artist of interest.  If MusicMetric already has a page for that artist, MuZoid replies instantly with the link, providing a list of albums, upcoming gigs and similar artists.  If the artist hasn’t been profiled, MuZoid tracks down the information, creates the page and as soon as it’s complete, responds to the original comment.


In theory, this service is useful as it provides information about bands and related music suggestions much more rapidly than a web search on the topic and the system works exactly as advertised with surprising speed, catering well to a “need it now” mentality.  It will be interesting, however, to see if there are more practical applications for this tool.  The MusicMetric page provides genre, album and similar artist information – all features that are already available from most streaming music applications and websites which would be the places one would be most likely to find an artist to learn more about.  The gig listings are much more useful (although, again, often already listed in the places where one might discover a new artist) but more often than not, no gigs are listed and there is no way to limit gigs by location.

One additional part of the MusicMetric pages which I would love to see translated into more features for MuZoid is the ‘Similar Gigs” section which searches for gigs by similar artists to the one queried.  Additionally this bit does seem to be at least moderately related to location (I was only receiving listings from the UK and Ireland).  I’m sure the very clever people at MusicMetric have many plans for MuZoid and it’ll be interesting to see how the combination of instant communication through Twitter and a giant database of music knowledge will combine to save me from feeling so out of the loop when my coworkers talk about new music.

The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race

2 Apr 2009

Lest you believe it’s all been riots and bank crisises, I’d like to add that the absolute antithesis of these events occurred along the River Thames last weekend – the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Their top rowers (only six of which, between the two teams were actually English) raced between the banks of west London and I, along with my friends Sarah and Steve, headed down to watch.

The weather was cooperating and so there were thousands of people, all in their Oxford and Cambridge gear, converged along the riverbank. It was an area that I was at least passingly familiar with as I had gone on a few walks there when the weather was nice, but I had never seen it like this, swarming with people, food stalls, beer gardens, and posh British accents (well, ok that last one had always been there).

We wedged our way in between the other spectators just in time to see the boats approaching. The two rower’s boats were nearly neck and neck (and to be honest I wouldn’t have know which was which anyway) but amusingly, behind them were nearly two dozen other boats, all filled with either fans, video equipment, medical staff and police.

The boats were in our view for about 30-40 seconds (the entire race is around 15 min long) before disappearing through the bridge. With nothing but empty river in view, we fought our way through the crowd to a busy park with people out enjoying the sun where we gathered through various cheers and shouts that Oxford had won that year.

I’ve never been to a car race (actually I don’t think I’ve ever been to any sort of race, to be honest) but I think it would be similar. A moment of thrill as they pass then just wondering what’s happening for the rest of the time. All the same, it was a quintessentially British event that I’m glad I didn’t miss. Next up, the Royal Ascot!