The Core

flipping heck Jason, I never reallised you were so exotic 

I think a lot of people who say horribly racist (and other ist) things are not in reality racist, but they believe what they read and speak without thinking - my dad for example is open and friendly and does have both black and muslim friends so on a personal level he has no issues at all with race or religion, but he still lapses into daily mail propeganda occasionally. Its hard to deal wiith that - a gentle rebuke along the lines of "dad you can't say things liike that" "you know thats not riight" or "you donn't really believe that do you" is what I tend to do - some of you might thing I should be harsher but I was raised o respect my elders and I really do have trouble with bollocking him!

I did have a massive row with my sister in law about refugees at Christmas though. Zenophhobic b###h is definately not old enough to get away with that sh##!

I also say things I shouldn't sometimes, to be honest. Not about groups of people, because I don't think like that, but I am the type of person who would use a word which used to be ok and no longer is because I haven't realised.  Truth is I was never really exposed to anyone other than white, christian (of one type or another) people growing up. There were two black kids in my secondary school of 1200. On the flip side of that I socialised a lot in Brighton where the gender/sexuality mix was pretty out there for the 80's. Outcome of that is I really, genuinely, don't think about a persons colour, religion, nationality or personal preferences, nor do I bother to read about it much as it's a non issue to me - you are what you are and unless you're a d*ck thats fine by me.

But that does mean I have no idea at *all* what politically correct words are for anything, I had no idea until a friend (who is black British and also didn't know  until she did it accidentally when she was asked to cater for somethinng at work) that to (some?) black Americans serving watermelon is considered horribly racist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_stereotype ).  I didn't understand the difference between Presbytarian and Church of England unil I innocently asked if someone would like to attend church while staying with me.  I'm totally idiotic about this stuff. It doesn't mean I don't believe in equality or care about everyones rights.

recommendations? Want initial sample/test lists and then good sized ones for what works well.

looking for SME sized named contacts in construction/home decor/interior design.

 

hmmmm, interesting, thanks Jason!

is hashtagging a little with #jesuischat , although I think #jesuischien pretty much stole the show!

we do in house live-user testing - its incredibly interesting to watch and throws up all sorts of info - for me its substantially more useful than most other types of testing because we start by asking people to do something (research a holiday, buy a present, etc) and that generally means we see their search behaviour and how often they loop back on themselves, as well as a straight task on a website.

BUT if thats not practical and/or there's no budget any type of user insight is better than none imho - people behave so differently than you expect them to, and different groups of customers do entirely different things - I'm watching this one with interest as we do use lots of card sorting tools etc, split testing software etc, but there are always new and better ones out there


ergo - you can just label up each link from an email specifically (eg; segment header, body, message, footer links using one of the GA tags so you know if the homepage link came from your logo, text link, footer etc). Its not perfect but its better than just adding a single email tag to every link and then not knowing the click location?

change in rankings, or in traffic?

I was a little preoccupied around that time but nothing pinged onto my radar. Looking back I'm seeing about the pattern of traffic I would normally expect to see on a half term weekend - most sites down a little but traffic patterns the same, a couple up a smidge when they have the kids on holiday style keywords/offerings, again patterns following the normal daily trends.

I'm seeing the same pattern across the sites we SEO and the sites we only run other channels on - so a few different SEO styles in the mix.

That said most of our sites aren't content dependent (as in blog or magazine style content) enough for that to impact overall traffic substantiially, so if its a panda stylee thing I would be less likely to notice than others.

ok - so small device to read tweets meeting certain croiteria (hashtag, tweeted from specified account, or whatever) aloud?

Karotz used to do it - that little bunny thing with the moving ears - but that seems to be discontinued and all I can find is Sense Mother which is home automation - seems well within its capabilities in theory but it doesn't seem to 'speak' just create alerts.

There must be something - anyone know of a gadget to do this offhand? Or I guess a smartphone with a text to voice app would do it - anyone know of an existing app which works with twitter?