Creating a new tab in Chrome this morning resulted in me seeing this:

Previously I would see something like the below, a useful screen providing one click access to the websites I visit most regularly and the last few tabs I had closed.

It looks to me as if this new “new tab” screen has been rushed out to promote Angry Birds without much thought given to its usability.

This page now has three tabs. The central tab branded “Apps”- set as the default – contains the not particularly well branded Angry Birds advert on the “App” tab. The the “Most visited” tab features now significantly more blurry screenshots of webpages I regularly visit – with access to recently closed tabs now a step further away, hidden behind an expandable menu rather than the previous one-click access. And the third “Bookmarks” tab? Well the Google Gods haven’t even made that yet “Bookmarks coming soon…” it reads.

So now without warning I get adverts in my browser, slower access to recently accessed tabs and an incomplete non-functioning “bookmarks” page. Thanks Google.

Connor Wilkins succintly explained the reason for the rebranding from Game Maker to GameMaker:

“YoYo Games’s (paraphrased) reasoning: A ‘Game Maker’ is someone who makes games, while ‘GameMaker’ is a tool to create them.”

Another user replied with:

“I think one of the main reasons for the change is because searching for Game Maker gives more general results than searching for GameMaker. It’s better marketing from the customer discovery angle. And, really, does a space make all that much difference as to even warrant a discussion about it?”

Which is a load of tosh.

The (logged out) Google.com results page for “Game Maker” returns 4 YoYoGames.com pages, followed by some non-GM Google news articles, the GM Wikipedia article, Game Maker hosted on a download site, two Game Maker YouTube videos, a “rival” product and finally Game Maker hosted on another download site.
A total of: 4 official Game Maker links, 5 unofficial Game Maker related links, 1 rival product and Google News.
Total Game Maker specific results: 9/10.

The (logged out) Google.com results page for “GameMaker” returns the same 4 YoYoGames.com pages in a slightly different order, the GM Wikipedia article, Game Maker hosted on a download site, a Game Maker video, a Swedish curriculum which has no apparent link to YoYo Games’ Game Maker, a rival product and a historic product with the same name.
A total of: 4 official Game Maker related links, 3 unofficial Game Maker related links, 2 different non-YoYo Games products and an education course with the same name which does not use the software.
Total Game Maker specific results: 7/10.

7 < 9.

"Better marketing from the customer discovery angle"? On both queries YoYo Games have the top 4 results.

[game maker] also has more than 4 times as many global exact match searches on Google than [gamemaker]

The user continues:

“When marketing a product, you want users to find your specific product when searching.”

Yes. Both searches yield the specific product, with the [Game Maker] first page being more specific to YoYo Games’ product than [GameMaker].

“Perhaps Google, yes, but there are other search engines. For example, searching “game maker” on Excite has YYG at the 4th result, dogpile.com has it as the 3rd, it’s 4th at WebCrawler, sixth at MetaCrawler, etc. The reason for all of these drops is because other sites involving “game” and “maker” (some about university courses in game design) show up first. If removing a single space would bring GM to the top of all these engines’ pages, then it’s a good marketing move, and there’s no reason to be against it. It’s just a space, after all.”

Ummm no. Firstly let’s ignore the fact that the combined marketshare of all the mentioned engines is minuscule. The only reason these results don’t appear at the top is because both these search engines do not distinguish their sponsored search results from their organic listings in a clear manner at all. No idea how this is even allowed from either a an advertising provider point of view (both use sponsored Google and Yahoo listings) or the “hiding ads from the consumer” angle.

Take a look at Excite.

Dogpile is even worse.

I now know exactly what that Dog pile is! Dog S***.

WebCrawler and MetaCrawler are the same. YoYoGames.com is the top natural result for [Game Maker]. They just don’t clearly distinguish paid and organic listings. MetaCrawler isn’t as bad as the others at this though.

Excite, Dogpile and MetaCrawler also return YoYoGames as the top result for [GameMaker], the only different being that WebCrawler returns the official Game Maker Community ahead of the GameMaker page at yoyogames.com

Inconsistencies across YoYo Games’ own homepage certainly don’t help. But GameMaker definitely does not yield better results than Game Maker.

The media
Gave so much free publicity to a certain incredibly shallow dating site which claimed to have a virus in a PR stunt. No idea why they all lapped up the “story”.

Via The Inquirer

BBC graphics department
For allowing the below to appear on screen as part of an animated sequence. Really? Blow Jobs. No one saw that coming?

Via @The_MediaBlog

Clear Channel Adshel
Installed a bus-shelter/advert in front of someone’s driveway.

Photos at This Is Gloucestershire don’t clearly show a driveway so maybe not as stupid as it first sounds!

Un-named contractors working for City of York Council
This is a good photo story so you’ve probably already come across it. A fence was installed through the middle of a football goal at a park in York.

Jon Bennell
Four masked men decide to go and break in to someone’s house in the middle of the night.  House occupants, including a “nice, quiet man who works in a local garage“, see them.  Phone the police.  One of the burglars is stabbed.  Burglar buddies carry off stabbed criminal before dumping his body in the road and running off.  They sound like really nice guys.

The Daily Record states that “his dad Garry, 52, admitted he [Jon Bennell] was on bail for another alleged burglary weeks earlier.” Some common sense though, dead burglar’s Dad also said “Things can get out of hand but you’re entitled to protect your property.”

Stephen Kirkbride

Photo: 5.11 Tactical Fleece Lined Jacket by Chazz Layne (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
This guy (not the one in the picture!) turned up to court on a shoplifting charge wearing the jacket he was accused of stealing. The jacket was ripped where he had removed the security tag.
Via The Westmorland Gazette

Just saying.  No idea if it’s true or not as when a super-injunction is taken out it means the press can’t publish a) the story of the affair or b) publish a story stating that the individuals involved had taken out such an injunction. And because the people that the injunction relates to remains secret (apart from “the press” who know all about I presume) I’ve no idea how I am meant to know whose affair not to write about…  the whole thing is just silly.

They have a ‘Yellow Card’ promotional scheme where students can purchase a credit card sized discount card for £1 which saves you money on some drinks.

Today Scream Pubs asked their 26,000 Facebook followers “How much d’you reckon you’ve saved with your Yellow Card?”. Over half the responses are currently negative!

Quite the opposite from the Sarah Palin delete negative comments strategy!

It will be interesting to see if they leave these comments on or delete them.

You might not be able to read the hand-written note he added to the side, it reads – “familiar wording?”.   The left side of the image below is a cutting from the property section of the Watford Free paper, the right hand consists of a merged screenshot of content from my website about Cassiobury Park.

The source of inspiration for the Watford Observer article is clear.

I imagine the process went something like this:

WO Office: “We need to make an area profile for a local neighbourhood to stick at the front of the property section in front of the 50ish pages of property ads – preferably somewhere local estate agents want to push  - I know we haven’t done Cassiobury recently”.  Google.  Copy + Paste.  Quick re-order, small additions.  5 minutes later – content done.

When I first saw the piece I wasn’t really sure how to feel. On the plus side it shows my website is used but the laziness of the paper also annoys me, with not much more effort they could have rewritten the content to make it unique.

My sources of information for the site consist of my own local knowledge and of course information I have found elsewhere such as council documents and books but it has all been rewritten and certainly wasn’t a 5 minute job.

I have seen the ad on the left several times over the past few days linking to the recycling section of the council website.

Why?  I don’t live in or anywhere near Medway.  Facebook profiles contain lots of demographic information to which advertising campaigns can easily be targeted so the fact that it is showing to me seems unforgivable.  I did once visit Chatham Docks though and watched as the Tour de France passed through!

The houses are pretty affordable though and Ebbsfleet International to St Pancras is a 20 minute train journey. I’ll remember that.

I opted for a $50 bid and made the payment via PayPal from a different location than normal and it its wisdom PayPal decided that the payment was suspicious and the transaction was put on hold. I went through the verification process as requested which required me to re-enter my bank details and take a call from their computerised voice but the payment has now been on hold for two and a half weeks.

“Inquiry by PayPal Temporary Hold” and “Being Reviewed by PayPal” are not things you would like to see in your account. “Documentation received from seller” has appeared four times in the event time-line and I have given PayPal everything they have asked for so I have no idea why they are still holding my money.

I wouldn’t mind if they refused the transaction and gave me back the funds so I could go elsewhere or if they let the transaction through but this limbo does no one any good. My project is on hold, the freelancer and Guru have been messed around and worst of all they probably both think this is down to something I have done wrong.

Naturally when they didn’t receive my payment Guru suspended my account (I suspect they get a fair amount of chancers using hacked/stolen/fraudulent payment accounts).

The last action from PayPal was over a week ago. Pathetic, yet PayPal is so widely accepted that I will have to continue to use it.

Today joy of joys the BBC is headlining with “Students to face higher costs as graduate tax proposed” whilst a quote from today’s Guardian Online reads “It makes gloomy reading for those studying computer science and IT – they have the lowest employment rate for any area of study”.  Lucky us.

Natwest also sent me a nice letter saying they are going to stop paying me interest on my student account. I don’t know what the rate of interest I had been receiving from them was but it is the principle of the matter! The savings I have elsewhere are earning me something like a pathetic 2% a year thanks to low interest rates caused by all those people buying houses they couldn’t afford and inflating the prices so I will have no chance of owning one for the next 20 years or so.

So the parents of my generation not only got paid to go to University and benefited from vastly increasing house prices once they were on the property ladder they also get to retire at an age which is totally unaffordable leaving us to work longer and pick up the bill!

Grrr. I bet that if I do manage to save up to buy a house interest rates will magically be much higher then.  </rant>

Yesterday for example there were presentations of the third year module options, today there were committee elections and tomorrow exam script viewing.  On Friday I am going to the GradJobs fair at the NEC.  I went last year and couldn’t see myself working for the vast majority of companies there.  I applied for a couple of industrial placements at the most promising looking businesses but they didn’t go very far, I got further with ones that advertised on campus and online.  Better luck this year I hope although to be honest I don’t really expect to find anything to suit my fancy there as most of the companies that will attend are large and boring.

Also booked myself a careers appointment for tomorrow having realised that in about a year I will have finished my final year and will need to get a job.

It’s scary.