I have no idea what posessed me, but these are the most monumentally awesome jeans in the whole world (no exaggeration!). I don’t think I ever owned any clothing that fit as well as these jeans. I am automatically cooler for owning and wearing them.

The key factor to this, in my opinion, is that it always seems to be approached from the angle of “how can we least irritate the users of this site, but still gain money from their use of it?”. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in the logic. You are much more likely to successfully monetise a site if people actually benefit from what they’re paying for. It’s obviously easier to do this by offering perks to paying users in the same vein as flickr or vimeo’s increased bandwidth/storage space limits, but you really have to rack your brain for a decent model when it comes to most of your users having free accounts.

Untargeted advertising is awful. It’s intrusive, mostly irrelevant and makes designers cry. Google tried to combat irrelevance by keyword matching content of sites or, more controversially, emails. It almost worked, except for the fact that it somehow didn’t. No-one clicks Google text ads unless they’re specifically trying to generate click revenue for a site. This means that the advertising has failed. It’s not a scalable or future proof way to monetise a site, so it’s out. No untargeted ads.

Facebook have recently been really picking up the game with respect to advertising. I mention that I like movies and music on my profile. I talk to my friends about web development, gaming, social media, photography and more and I get small ads (which are obviously Facebook-approved and sit inline with the design of the site (I don’t want to get into Facebook’s design. That’s a whole other can of worms)). They also offer me the ability to vote-up or down an ad. I’ve not seen the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, and I have no interest in doing so, so I vote the ad down and don’t see it again. Brilliant.

Now, if I were a sensible businessman, I would take these ratings and apply them to conversations I have with my friends about movies. If one of my friends mentions that they like movies, and maybe even give as much detail as sharing similar film taste, my voting-up an ad would make it more likely to appear in their ad rotation. Brilliant. That, to me, is the way that targeted advertising should be done. Friends talk about things together, they recommend things, they get adverts that logic dictates they might like. They’re not all going to be winners, but it’s a solid foundation that, with enough data and participation, could provide a self-perpetuating engine for revenue generation that all the owners have to do is assign keywords to and release to the wild. Yes, a lot of programming has to go into this sort of thing, but the rewards are potentially phenomenal. Especially with the userbase that Facebook has.

So, where does that leave twitter? I don’t have any statistics, but I see a lot of businesses have adopted twitter. I’m a particular fan of indie Mac developers and I exercise this enthusiasm by following their updates on twitter. I’m a bleeding-edge kinda guy and I like to know when new stuff is coming out that I can play with. What if you were to apply the same model to twitter? You already have the interaction between consumer and business right there, but it lacks the audience in some cases, so we make it special.

Say every twitter user has their own tag cloud (for those of you who don’t read any other blogs, a visualisation of word density/popularity comparative to overall volume) to target ads to. I mention the word “Mac” or “Apple” (probably) on a freakishly regular basis and so do a lot of my followers/followees. I, therefore, see a valuable type of advertising which has a special kind of (purchased) tweet with a wider scope. Say the good people a PotionFactory want to send out an ad, they hit up twitter, buy a “penetweet” (I should TM that it’s so good), associate some keywords and BAM, anyone who follows PotionFactory sees the ad. Anyone who’s friends with someone following PotionFactory who has a high enough keyword density of any number of the keywords PotionFactory bought when they bought the ad sees it. It appears inline with their tweets, it doesn’t say the word “sponsored” on it or anything tacky like that, it just sinks down with the rest of the tweets (or maybe stays up longer for a premium (not too long, though)) and everyone goes about their day.

So, there you have it. An unintrusive, targeted advertising engine built on the contents of people’s tweets, who they follow and who their friends follow. It easily fits in a tiered model (different tariffs give you access to more keywords, lower concentration of keywords for ads to be shown to users) and is far better, in my opinion, than the arbitrary character-limit-increase-based model that I’ve seen floating around recently!

I’d love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this, as I know most twitter users will have floated around their own ideas, if only internally.

So, it’s finally back. And I’m £400 lighter.

Too bad that I had so much to do today that I didn’t have time to even think about using it. Definitely try to use it tomorrow, though. In the meantime, this sums up my glee satisfactorily!

Buy one then. And send it to me.

Today, I wanted to create an abstract, moody forest effect using remote flash.

I don’t know why, but when I’m at the in-laws’ house, I always get in the mood for abstracts. This is the head of the bed in Charlotte’s old room, with the SB-800 firing at a 45° angle towards the camera, which is in turn angled up towards the flash at 45°.

This whole setup was a great exercise to show Nikon’s genius product design. As soon as you get pro glass, you need to pro flash setup. The on-board flash is set to command with "zero" output (obviously it needs some output in order to trigger the flash), but at this range, the lens was casting a shadow over my subject. Annoying. I’ve taken a look, and for a mere £200, I can get an IR trigger that won’t affect the shot. This will also be useful for when I start increasing the size of my flash army and getting umbrellas and stands.

Just as you think the expense is over, more mounts up. Bloody cameras.

I’ve recently started noticing limitations of my camera equipment. I resolved a while ago to not buy anything major, camera-wise because it was really difficult to justify. The distinct lack of funds made it substantially easier, but justification remained relevant. It’s quite cool that I’m now able to say that my skill/experience behind a camera means that I could now easily justify 2 new lenses – one wide, one long. Be it ironic or not, these are both of the lenses that I wanted before I decided not to buy!

Take this shot, for instance. I keep missing sunsets, so tonight I got out of the car in my favourite area of Southampton to try and catch the sunset surrounding something. For this, I easily need something wider so that the crane and the path frame the shot better. I nearly got hit by a car getting this right, and I’d still be happier with it if I could’ve zoomed to 15mm-ish. The telephoto isn’t so necessary, I do occasionally find myself thinking of how nice it’d be to be able to get closer without scaring something away but that’s a dent of £1000 that I definitely can’t justify now!

I’ve pretty much settled on the Sigma 10-20 4.5-5.6 as my wide choice. I’ve used it before and I like the results (although I did whore it slightly in the hours I had it!) so logic and experience would dictate to go for it, but I’m open to suggestions (Charlotte: “or gifts”)…anyone?

These guys come and try to convince us all we’re condemned. I’m sure they’re really nice people. This guy was so elated, he started singing. Pretty snazzy.

I spent just over £400 today. I did manage to get a load of stuff, including my wedding outfit (yes, I’m going to look awesome!) so it’s not all bad, but I could do with having spent no pounds.

I threw the filter from the hoover away – my timing couldn’t be better.

Until yesterday, I haven’t really been affected by the current financial crisis. Sure, I noticed the price of stuff going up, but we switched our energy supplier and petrol appears to have lost about 20p a litre so it’s been a relative plateau for me – my funds have just leaned more towards food shopping than energy/fuel. Yesterday, however, it seems that the pending recession (I don’t even know if we’re actually in a recession now – we could be!) took its toll on the awesome agency I work for. It wouldn’t be fair of me to go into details of the whys and wherefores (largely because it’d be mostly speculation), but the upshot is that in a month today, I’ll be jobless.

Obviously, the potential repercussions of me not having gainful employment could be great – I’m getting married in exactly four weeks, Christmas is coming up and I have financial responsibilities and dependants. Weddings, contrary to popular belief, aren’t an expensive ordeal. Like most things, if you buy (operative word) into tradition and cliché then you could end up spending a load, but if you remember why you’re doing what you’re doing and remain selfless then you don’t have to blow all of your savings (nothing) on it! Having re-read that, the same goes for Christmas!

The reason that this is a little more than a twitter update is that I’m swaying towards freelancing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s damned difficult to find a job at Christmas. I’ve had to do it before and it’s really stressful. Secondly, the (buzz-word-worthy) financial state of affairs seems to have scared small companies into not hiring people (I like working for small companies – I don’t function well as a number and a keycard). However, just because these companies aren’t hiring, doesn’t mean that they’re still not trying to make money. My plan is to put my name in the head of agencies in the area as a Swiss Army Freelancer type person and take any web projects that they can throw my way. I’ve always really wanted to take what I do into freelancing, but I’ve never really had the balls. It’s a big step! What I really need to do now is get my portfolio up and running, get my CV up-to-date and get on the phone.

This is kinda where anyone reading comes in. If you’re aware of any websites that need attention (and the owners are aware of it – I’m not a cold caller!) please get them to email me – with my gorgeous little designer buddy, I can offer a wealth of branding/internet services.

All this self-pimping has made me feel quite dirty, but it needs to be done!

Who doesn’t worry about money though, right?