After the immensely enjoyable Think Visibility conference in March, I was flattered, surprised and somewhat horrified when Dom asked me to speak at Think Vis II. After all, my experience of public speaking amounts to a big fat zero and I’m just some girl from Leeds - not an SEO guru, a company owner or an affiliate superhero.

I do like cats though and I know a little bit about my job, which I imagine is why I’m on the speaker list.

I think Dom’s going to announce the schedule and the subjects soon so I won’t give away what I’ll be talking about. To be honest, speaking is massively outside my comfort zone so it’s not the content I’m worried about! I know people give talks all the time but it must take a huge amount of courage to get up on stage so if I get through it okay I’ll be over the moon

Think Vis II isn’t just about giving people like me the chance to embarrass themselves(!), there are some big name speakers like Judith Lewis and Joost de Valk, and completely awesome, successful local folk like Elaine Forth and Karyn Fleeting. Its sort of awe-inspiring to be in that sort of company so…erm…wish me luck!

The Leeds Shakespeare Festival has been an ongoing theme on this blog ever since it ran into some health and safety/funding issues last year and never took place. I’m glad to say that this year, Leeds City Council have decided to be sensible and the 14th (almost) annual festival is going ahead in July and August

Details about the performances and ticket prices can be found on the British Shakespeare Company website. You can buy tickets online via the Leeds Grand theatre - I’ve already got mine!

Okay so I only chose that title because it rhymes - Google Suggest of the Day has actually done pretty well in the couple of weeks since it launched. I’ve been on holiday the past week so only really got to take a look at stats and things yesterday and I was really surprised at how many people visited the site and more importantly, the level of interaction it’s experienced.

I was a bit disappointed that not many people have commented - I sort of envisaged immense philosophical debates taking place, or at least some bitching, but I guess people don’t want to invest that much effort in what is, after all, a blog you can read at a glance.

What totally delights me though is that we’ve had loads of suggestions sent in via the contact form - from real people leaving real names and URLS! This is great, so any suggestions that we use I’ve decided to credit with a link to whoever sent it in. If more than one person suggests the same thing they’ll all get credit!

I’m really looking forward to giving out some link love to people who support the site, so if you have a suggestion just send it in

As you can tell from the last few posts I’ve been a) highly amused by the Google Suggest feature and b) too lazy to write proper posts for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve decided to start another blog dedicated to the vagaries of Google Suggest. It’s called, ‘Suggest of the Day’ and like its name….erm…suggests…will feature one search suggestion every day.

If anyone feels like wasting some time checking back each day you might, like me, want to ponder the existential unknowable, ‘how will I die?’ or argue that Pokemon is not, in fact, the best. (The best what?)

(In case you were wondering, the technical wizardry was performed by Frog. Smartypants.)

Recently the Reuters blog reported on a Twitter campaign started by some ‘My Name Is Earl’ fans to try and save the axed show. I think this made the news firstly because it’s about Twitter (and when is that ever out of the news at the moment?) and secondly because the campaign has attracted over a million followers.

The ridiculous bit comes at the end of the article:

And whether it succeeds or not in bringing the show back to a TV screen somewhere, the petition has notched up a new entry into the English language – the first known use of the word “Twitition.”

Erm….what about, you know, Twitition?

The silly thing is, they could have just googled it:

I was really upset the other day when I went to Passive Aggressive Notes and saw they’ve added a crappy overlay. It’s one of my favourite websites for random laughs so I’ve got a dilemma - do I boycott the site or keep visiting regardless?

Shame On You, Passive Aggressive Notes!

Luckily it’s only a small overlay - it’s not like it blacks out the whole page like some do. Still, where did it come from? It doesn’t look too related to the website so maybe they’re getting paid when people take the survey?

Twitter is the third most popular social media network with something like 6 million unique visitors a month. It’s all over the media, used by celebrities and normal folk alike and really seems to be the next big thing. According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has secured tens of millions of dollars in venture funding and the company could be worth up to $150 million.

So Twitter Makes Loads Of Money, Right?

Wrong. Twitter may have had over $50 million in venture capital sunk into it, but it does not make meaningful revenue. In fact, according to the previous link, Twitter has only just hired someone to think about what services Twitter could charge for.

Possible Revenue Streams

Twitter could sell advertising on user home pages or through Twitter search. They’re currently improving the search feature so this looks like a strong possibility. Putting adverts on the homepage when users aren’t used to them could create a backlash however, at least amongst those users who haven’t fully bought into the service.

The number of monetisation options is limited because people are used to Twitter being a free, slimmed down service. There aren’t exactly many features to upgrade and limiting usage now would seem unfair. Maybe the founders didn’t expect Twitter to take off in such a big way (and who could have foreseen 6 million users?) but I get the feeling they didn’t really think about monetising the service at all.

Where Twitter Went Wrong

People have come to expect social networks to be free, so Twitter had to offer a free service. They could however have stuck advertising on it from the start to bring in a trickle of revenue and acclimatise users to the ads. If the advertising increases it does so by degrees and doesn’t seem like such an intrusion. On the other hand, Twitter could have offered premium accounts for users who want an ad-free site. If the premium account fee were low enough a fair percentage of users would be willing to pay it.

They could also have limited the usage to, say, 50 friends, with an option to upgrade to an unlimited account for a yearly fee. This is the model that Flickr use and it works pretty well for them.

Twitter’s problem is, the boat has sailed and with it the opportunity to monetise every single user on the site. They may find themselves relying on secondary revenue from search ads - that is, potential secondary revenue - good luck getting that venture funding back….