Do you remember your first computer? I first laid my hands on a keyboard aged 12… We owned a Commodore 64 at a time where computers were luxury items…

Our faithful Commodore had a black and white screen, a keyboard without accents (not convenient when you’re trying to type something in French), a pre-historic version of Word, as well as the computer game Pac Man with funky joysticks!

Now, do you remember the first time you went online?

I think I first went online circa 1996… The Commodore had sadly passed away and we had moved onto a much better (colour) machine!

We had a PAYG (pay as you go) AOL dial-up connection which was terribly expensive and slow! I don’t remember browsing the net but the home page was an AOL chatroom and I used to spend ages chatting to some English and Italian dudes to improve my linguistic skills. I would never have thought back then that I would play with the Internet for a living!

We’re always talking about new technologies, but I’d like to hear about your computer and Internet stories from back in the day… Over to you guys!

Idea for this post courtesy of The Next Web

Wordle is a cool little tool that has been going around the blogosphere for a while now, and is simply perfect for your Moo cards! Shame that Cuil is so prominent on my word cloud though

Show me your Wordle cloud!

I have been a Flickr addict for the last couple of years but interestingly my interaction with other Flickr users has been very limited.

I really enjoy posting pictures on the site, discovering new amazing photographers, but I never find the time to leave comments or interact with other members… this should hopefully change as soon as acquire my Nikon D40 and start snapping away at the week-end!

As a result, I have decided to feature some of my fav photographers each month and will blog using the ‘blog this photo’ feature on Flickr.

This month, my favourite Flickr photographer is Sakurako Kitsa, who takes some pretty cool photos of Bento amongst other things.

Just a little comment for the Flickr folks though… and I am kind of hoping they’ll get back to me regarding this

Would it be possible to add a text editor option on the Flickr site so that I don’t have to go into my WordPress editor to edit whatever needs to be edited! I would also love to be able to add my category tags directly from the Flickr site… Is that feasible?

Have a good week-end everyone!

I went to my second Bloggers’ Meet Up last night, held at Doggets in Blackfriars. The drinks were on Stella - just wanted to say thank you for supplying us with copious amounts of soft drinks, beer and vodka! We had lots and lots of fun so thank you! You can view last night’s photos here.

The usual suspects were here but I also got chatting to quite a few interesting peeps: Andy Bargery (thanks for organising the meet ups!),Willem (at last), Hayley, Anthony, Julius, Cristiano and Chris.

See you all next month!

I picked up a thread by Mashable on Twitter this morning talking about the new search engine Cuil, packed with ex-Googlers in their team. Cuil claim to be the world’s biggest search engine, with an index of 120 billion websites in the world. Rather than relying on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. The odd name Cuil is an Irish word for knowledge. 

Well dear Cuillers (cuillère in French means spoon), I have something to tell you… If you’re claiming to be the largest search engine in the world, you should think global and act local. And here I am talking about your brand name. Cuil sounds like ‘couilles’ (balls/bollocks) or cul (arse) in French! Not exactly enticing…

Despite such poor branding taste, I decided it was time to check out Cuil in more depth but sadly got the following message:

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience.

When I did finally manage to take a look at their homepage, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the search results, although graphically speaking the site does look good and categorises information in an interesting way.

I have just done a quick Twitter search and the feedback so far isn’t particularly positive.

I am not quite sure how they’ll overcome so much bad publicity on their launch date but everyone is talking about them at the end of the day! 

So what do you think of Cuil? Am I being to harsh? Fire your comments away!

Travelling is probably one of my biggest passions in life – there’s something magic about being in another country; the excitement of not knowing what to expect, learning a few sentences in a foreign language, wandering aimlessly for hours…

Part of the fun when booking a trip, is to read about the country / city I am about to visit prior to booking my holiday. I am yet to come across a good site that gives me thorough information about what to see, where to eat and party as well as good photos so that I can get a good feel for the place.

Tripwolf is a new social website packed with tons of info with free printable guides for the whole world! Tripwold is written for travellers by travellers and is backed by Europe’s largest publisher of guide books, MairDumont.

Here’s the best bit – Tripwolf is compatible with a multitude of other sites: you can add a Facebook widget to your page, share your Youtube holiday videos with the rest of the world, share and geo-tag your Flickr photos with fellow travellers or blog about your travel adventures.

If you’re looking for the cool little bar where locals hang out or that amazing street your mate told you about but that you can’t find in your guide book, check out Tripwolf as you’ll probably have the answers to your questions and even more.

I will be reviewing the site’s features in more detail over the next couple of days… stay tuned! 

Wodka is a product that has been out for a while now, and you just have to love their campaign!

With the influx of Poles in the UK, and the expansion of Europe, Polish Vodka Wodka has become a new item in UK’s shopping baskets. This has to be the best alcohol campaign I have seen in a while.

Still on the topic of alcohol consumption, I recently discovered another official anti-binge drinking campaign ad. You may remember that I was recently invited to the launch of the new Home Office’s anti- binge drinking campaign produced by ad agency VCCP. Although a little too long in my liking, the Scottish version is also effective at showing the effects of binge drinking…

If you have a Flickr account, you’ll probably have heard of the free digital travel guides Schmap. I first became aware of the guides last year, when Emma emailed me to ask if she could use some of my pictures.

I downloaded the guide to see what the hype was all about, and although they are well designed and informative, I did not find them particularly useful as I never carry my 15.4 inches laptop around when I go on holiday!

But I recently got another email from Emma informing me that the guides are now available on iPhone and iPod touch, creating a whole new meaning to travel guides. Now that’s definitely something I would look into as I hate carrying cumbersome guides around.

The guys at Schmap are indeed very smart social media folks – they have gradually managed to create a relationship with me by keeping me updated on the latest Schmap’s development both via email and Flickr, but I am now also blogging about them and recommending their guides.

Recommended reading: Open letter to PR agencies: it doesn’t have to be that way you know…

“Create and follow trends, share and discuss them - then watch as they spread across the world. Who tells the world what‘s next? You do.”

Edopter is a social trencasting tool that help you combine combine your insight and worldwide buzz to tap into the next big thing. Users create and follow trends, share and discuss them, then watch as they spread across the world. The site provides a social interaction point around trends in people, places, things, ideas, fashion, media and the web.

The site seems rather easy to use – you can either browse trends or even create your own one. There is a point system that measures the trends based on the users involved, the internet buzz, and the time it’s been a trend. The points go up with each user, and down as time goes by. If it were to take off, Edopter would have access to a very hard to reach demographic –early adopters…

Although I really like the concept, the site is still in its infancy and the trends are not particularly exciting (for now) as a result…

Is Edopter the next big thing or just a big flop? Let me know what you think!  

First impressions count - it’s a well known fact that in the first five minutes of a meeting you can have possibly landed the job or blown it! The same applies to brands; with increased used of the Internet and consumers becoming increasingly marketing-savvy, corporate image is of utmost importance.

I have recently discovered an interesting new website called BrandTags, which could be a very powerful tool for businesses wishing to update their logo.

BrandTags visitors play a game of word association to sum up their impressions of major brands in one word or phrase — and then the site graphically displays the answers in a tag cloud.

Click here to view the answers associated with Virgin

I had the opportunity to work on a number of re-branding projects in my qual research career, where we showed respondents new logos and asked for their impressions and feedback, potential improvements.

The only downside of this approach is that, whilst you can certainly get a lot of good qualitative insight, you cannot quantify what people have said… and clients do like robust statistics! Brand Tags offers the chance to provide with both the robustness of quantitative data (I am not sure whether they quantify anything at the mo but that’s something they could easily integrate…) but also the richness and depth of qualitative data.

BrandTags has the support of ad agency Naked. You can also read their blog here.