According to Wikipedia:

“[George] Osborne’s wealth is estimated at £4.3m”.

He also sends his children to private school.

I heard on the news the other day that David and Samantha Cameron have a combined wealth of £30million – Wikipedia backs this up and also says:

“Cameron is a direct descendant of King William IV”

and as for his wife: ” Samantha Gwendoline Sheffield, the daughter of Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield, 8th Baronet and Annabel Lucy Veronica Jones (now the Viscountess Astor)”

Bloody hell!

Do you remember when the “up and coming” Tories did a photoshoot in Tatler, wearing clothes worth more than most people’s monthly wage packet?

I don’t want to enter into a class war – no one can help where they’re born or what they’re born into, and life is what you make it. What pisses me off though is that people like Cameron and Osborne pretend to understand, when they don’t, and they pretend they’re normal, when they’re not. The Tory party, even today with their shiny new image, still looks like an old boy’s club. For Eton-educated wealthy folk, going into politics is pretty much a natural progression. Does that make them qualified to run the county? Maybe. Does that make me like them?

No.

Mister Toast (foreground) looks particularly dapper this morning – perhaps Mister Snoot is feeling jealous?

It was the first conference I’d ever been to outside of Leeds – obviously I’d attended/spoken at Think Visibility but London conferences seemed pretty out of reach. I need to say thanks to Patrick for taking me – I know that other companies wouldn’t stump up the attendance fee so it just goes to show how lucky I am to work at Branded3

For a first-timer then, I was pretty impressed by how the whole conference was run. Firstly, the venue was amazing. I’d been to the Expo Centre before when I was at university, but I never realised just how prepared they are for conferences. There’s a huge row of hotels right outside and good transport links to the City. During the day, there’s tea when you need it, food when you need it, and the conference rooms are brilliant with all the high-tech stuff you need. Despite there being hundreds of delegates, I never saw any rubbish around nor heard any grumbling about the lack of tea/food – that’s down to the excellent staff who made the whole thing run smoothly.

What about the talks? Well, they were all run incredibly well. A huge mention has to go to Jon Myers who seemed to be moderating/introducing every single talk I went to. Most of the speakers seemed to be conference pros, including SEOMoz co-founder Gillian Muessig, who gave a particularly assured and interesting talk on turning your ‘stuff’ into new products and finding new audiences.

My favourite talk of the two days might come as a surprise to some people – it was actually marked ‘basic’ in the timetable. It was the first talk of the day by Angela Greenwood and Joshna Patel from Red Letter Days. They talked about building a successful affiliate programme from the ground up, from a merchant’s point of view. I knew nothing whatsoever about this side of affiliate marketing so it taught me a lot. It was nice to actually hear from someone like Joshna who works within a company (like myself) and not just the MD.

You can tell just how big a deal a4u is by 3 things. 1) Google send delegates. 2) All the affiliate networks are there. 3) Even though it’s an affiliate conference, the top SEO’s go.

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

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:

Why would you want to?

Journalists and bloggers use Wikipedia to source information about companies, places and everything else under the sun. Gone are the days of strict fact-checking when the internet makes it so easy to find information in just a few clicks. Whether that information is correct or not is another matter. Imagine someone has written a Wikipedia page about you and it gives your age as 35 – you’re actually 34 but when a journalist writes about you, they put 35 because they trust Wikipedia to be right.

Wiki Alarm lets you monitor these changes and be the first to know about updates to your page. It takes a few seconds to sign up and you’ve got instant control over your online reputation.

This is the press release, taken from the Internet World site:

Branded3, the Leeds based digital agency, has just been appointed by Internet World as the official Social Media Partner for 2009.

Branded 3, based in Aberford North Leeds, is one of the most successful ethical SEO & social media companies in the UK, boasting high profile clients such as Interflora, Dial-a-phone and Abel & Cole.

Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view.

I’m sort of waiting for the backlash on this one, but I haven’t really seen any ‘oh my god, Google are watching us in the shower’ reactions. Basically, Google are taking all the data they accumulate from your browsing and showing you relevant content network ads based on your online interests. So if you keep visiting Lolcat pages (and who doesn’t?) you’ll get shown adverts for kitty food and little clothes to dress Muffin up in.

The thing is, Google are gathering all this data by default. If you’re logged into your Google account they knows what you’re searching for and what pages you’re visiting from that search page. They could use that data for all sorts of things – working out what pages to put at the top of the results for example, and choosing what adverts to show a user is just one possibility. I for one don’t mind – if it means I see more adverts for shoes and less adverts for weight loss and baby products (I’m looking at you Facebook!) then that’s a good thing.

According to the Google blog, users can even set their preferences (sort of like Stumbleupon I guess) so you can set your preferred adverts right from the start. The only thing you might lose through all this is that one in a million product that you didn’t know you needed until you saw it. Most of us I think won’t miss the variety.

What about advertisers? Well, this could wind up helping them too. After all, you can already pick content network websites to advertise on, so if users themselves are opting into (or out of) your adverts your market is pretty much selecting themselves. Hooray!