Statistics have become the ubiquitous life-blood for much football journalism in recent years, happily coagulating in the void between games. Thanks primarily to Opta, once fans and pundits have had their fill of a match, once each have finished meticulously analysing every significant incident in detail, there is now the option to gawp in wonderment…
What Does The Future Hold For Football?
In Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End Of History And The Last Man, the philosopher and political economist postulated that history may well be coming to an end. His words weren’t those of a raving soothsayer – he did not claim that everything everywhere would end in an apocalyptic hellfire; quite the opposite. He argued that…
Paris
It’s difficult ordering breakfast in Paris. Not because of the language but because the French aren’t early risers. In a damp northern part of Paris, locating breakfast before 10am is as difficult as navigating the Louvre. And The Louvre is huge. It could apply to be an observing member of the UN. Speaking of The Louvre,…
Seeing an Old friend
So I went back. More – it turned out – to suffer the frustration that has punctuated the season first-hand than anything else. Firstly to Everton and then to Cardiff. The latter happened to be the first game of the Spanish thirty-something million pound guy. The former didn’t quite have a billing or a summary…
The British Museum
One thing I should stress about the British Museum is that you shouldn’t wander around it with a backpack full of stuff. By the time you’ve worked your way through to the 15th Century teapots, you’re going to be feeling it. Fortunately, there’s loads of stuff that predates said teapots that is really sodding cool….
First Utility: How Not To Be Competent In Anything You Do Ever
I felt I needed to write this to share the vast incompetence of an energy company who shall not be named (First Utility). This company (First Utility) has, for almost a year now, candidly shared with me the incredible ineptitude of their data management, their embarrassing customer service and their cumbersome, sloth-like reaction to their…
Berlin
Berlin is a post-post-apocalypse capital city; a city beyond dystopia and rebuilt. You’re not going to find decaying, flailing zombie torsos, get stopped at checkpoints with guys in hazmat suits or get radioactive stuff thrown at you by aliens, but it has Kartoffel as a speciality and some really old buildings. Really old buildings. Let’s…
York
When Romans weren’t busy eating grapes they conquered places and built some stuff. Yeah, they built roads but roads are boring. One of these places where they started building stuff was called York. They didn’t call it York in AD 71, of course; they called it Eboracum. When that didn’t work out they called in…
Marketing Bullshit
Something’s really started to piss me off lately. Something 3 parts nauseating, 2 parts irritating and 1 part – yeah, you get the idea. It’s marketing bullshit. Delve into this painful document of excruciating bullshitorama and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a composition of tweets from the recent Social Media Week in London which…
Nineteen Sixty-Four
I did something I don’t normally do this week. I watched trailers of the 1964 American election campaign. Yeah. I don’t get invited to parties much. In one, one of the twin girls from The Shining counts down in a field, decimating an innocent flower. Aww. But, unbeknownst to the kiddiewink, the evil Russians are…
Reboot
I’ve started using this again on occasion. So let’s see how it goes.
Notes: Affiliate Links
Affiliate links are an easy way for a website to monetize their external links. Most of the time they operate via a javascript plugin such as Viglink. These plugins can automatically change natural links within articles into affiliate links. These can even be dynamically created. Here’s an example article: Here, both links here are dynamically generated and…
Brand Republic: Autotrader and Just Eat
Notes from the Brand Republic Virtual Summit. As part of their SEO strategy for this year, Autotrader set about removing sitewide links. The theory was that it was unnecessary to have so many links built on one domain, especially if the domain (as is usually is the case) is of low quality. They backed this up…
Kyle Jackson 