this post has some swearing, spelling and grammar mistakes.. if the first one bothers you then please don’t read this post, if the latter two bother youcorn  then please don’t read this blog..

To celebrate the end of BarCampLeeds08 and the start of our week in wales, Heather and I decided to have Sunday lunch at Weatherspoons, a usual haunt of ours… launch went fine and we decided to have a walk to the bus stop further away since it was a nice night (and lets face it… I could do with the exercise)..

At the McDonalds in the St. Johns Center a group of people with suitcases and a confused look on there face asked for directions to the travel lodge on Vicar Street in town, wasn’t too sure where it was and didn’t want to give them the wrong directions and leave them stranded (and we wern’t really in a rush) so I said I’d walk down with them, if I was right and I knew where it was that would be fine, if I was wrong I’d see if I could get a map on my phone or something…. luckily I found the place before Google Maps was involved..

So Heather and myself end up at the Corn Exchange bus stop.. we are chatting about next weeks plans and what we want to do and suddenly …CRACK.. I turn around and see a bloke on the floor… two guys run straight towards him and try and get him up, I was hesitant because 1) I didn’t see it 2) I was always told that if something like that happens you leave them on the ground and ring an ambulance..

The two blokes who are lifting him up are struggling and I rush over to give them a hand.. as soon as I start to lift, one of the blokes rushes off.. about this time I notice his head is bleeding and quite badly, I prop him up with one hand and start dialing 999 with the other..

Whilst I’m on the phone to the ambulance service and trying to get the address of the Corn Exchange (much harder than you think when your hands are full), he comes to life and wants to know “what the fucks going on”.. I explain that he’s hurt his head and I’m on the phone to the ambulance..

At this point he looks at me and states “No, You hit me you little prick”, he then takes a couple of steps towards me, another bloke who was nearby grabbed him and tried to calm him down (I’m still on the phone to the ambulance at this point).

The 163 arrives which appears to be his bus, he walks off and gets on the bus, I explain to the telephone operator that he has walked off and I’m sorry for the inconvenience..

The bus driver see’s the blood on his hand and head and refuses to let him on, after arguing for about a minute the bus driver turns the bus off and calls the depot…. after a 5 minute phone call, he calls the police.

After about 5 minutes the Police arrive, the bloke starts walking off but they catch up with him and ask him whats going on “That prick pushed me” (I’m sure you can imagine he means me at this moment).  They sit him down and talk to him while two other officers come and chat to me, I explain I was at the other side of the bus shelter when the incident happened and came over to help.. The policewoman took my details in a very stern manner, it was at this point that my mind clicked “This is getting serious”.

After taking my address, birthdate, telephone number, name and other details, I went through what happened again, she then questioned the Bus driver and asked Heather some questions..

At this point another bus arrived and the other couple who witnessed it were getting on (including the one who stepped in when he got aggressive) I got really worried at this point as the people who could agree with my side of the events were leaving the scene, I asked the woman if she could hurry and get there details..

She managed to get them off the bus and get the details and story…. it matched with mine (they’d had a few so I was on edge). She then walks to the group of Police that have arrived with the other bloke and another comes up, asks me a few questions, walks back.

At this point I’ve missed 4 buses and I think they are getting the point that the bloke is pissed out of his tree and has fell, so I ask if I can leave, another 5 minute talk with the group before “its ok you can go for now, we have your details.”

I won’t say that incident hasn’t shaken me a little, I am reminded about an incident several months ago when I was talking to a friend on the path about 3 meters from a nightclub entrance and a Bouncer told us to move, I disagreed and he pushed me out into the middle of the road, this was infront of several police officers who I asked “are you going to do anything” they just told me to forget it and walk away..

I would never leave someone if they needed help and I thought I could, but I think I will hesitate before getting involved and thats not a good feeling..

This would just be a bit of fun and for a couple of hours

Just throwing the idea out to anyone?

I think it was a really good day, although on the day I only sat in one session (and spoke in one session), I met a lot of old and new friends and learned a lot, We as NorthCrew had a good session and won an xbox (even if a bloke from the bbc blamed us for the north / south divide) but we will talk more about that on the northcrew blog when Ryan gives me access to it!

There seems to be a video floating around the internet of me, I believe its called Gravy in yer Servers… I deny all knowledge of it.

I will say on a personal level, having people tell you that they honestly think your doing a great thing for the community and give you ideas and suggestions is an amazing feeling and even the people who had concerns or didn’t find the service useful offered suggestions and ideas… we take each one and talk about them… we will be blogging about a few of them soon (but anyone paying attention to the northpack website will notice that we now have search button (I’m told theres an easter egg in there as well)

As for barcamp Leeds, im unsure what I’m going to be able to do with it this time around, work, northcrew and the missus take up a lot of time :)…

I can say that northcrew has some things up there sleeve but its more local developer / designer focused… *ooooooo** suspense!!

Northcast

Northpack

Northcrew 

• Give Up Chocolate
  • Fecking hell, with 5 days to go until I make a toblerone castle at my desk, I’ve gone without it for the year, I’m not going to lie, it has been difficult and I did move to other sweet type things but all in all I did lose some weight

  Do The Great North Run

  • I did this one as well, It was one of the most fantastic experiences I’ve ever had and I urge anyone to do it, however if your gonna do it, do it dressed up! seriously, nothing gets you going like 3000 Geordies shouting “Go On MARIO”.

  Start A Company

  • hmmm I’ll get back to this one in the middle of Jan, my work with stickyeyes took over a bit but I might have things to announce then

2007 was also an amazing year for my other projects, MTGCast went from 800 listeners to well over 10,000 a week, I’m very proud of the podcast and though it gets criticisms and people are always moaning about “transcripts”, I know that I’ve created something popular, thats why its quite hard to write this :), The week of Jan 20th will be my last show as host of Monday Night Magic, there are a lot of reasons for this, not just the fact that I havn’t played Magic properly in ages, I don’t have the time to keep up with the news and the rumors and the listenership has changed a lot in the last year and wants more information rather than good humored banter.. I will still be very involved in the network (since I own and pay for the bloody thing) but on a more admin and server level..

Onto 2008

• Make Secret Project N A Roaring Success
  • More about this in the middle of Jan
• Learn To Semi Play An Instrument
• Lose Some More Weight
• Cut down on the goodies but not give up
  • I’ve proved I can give them up, now can I cut them down
• Sometimes I’ve gotta take my time with things, instead of diving in head first (sometimes good, sometimes bad)
• Do another big thing for charity
• Blog at least once a week (this has to be the hardest one)..

The We I mention are Paul Stanton, Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett and of course ME!..

We had a good response yesterday from the preshow which was just to get Stanton and Taylor used to talking via a podcast and will be recording the next one… soonish

The real one launches in Jan with lots and lots of shiney (read: crappy) video until we can afford some decent stuff

Version Control by Lorna

Q and A by Rockstar

(half of) TV 3 by Mark

and a few others, I really was intending on podcasting the day and doing some interivews but that really didn’t go to plan, however people seemed to like the day and have blogged some good stuff (especially about my session) and who could forget the ultimate barcamp battle of Rockstar’s latest game - Wii Table Tennis, in one corner - DOM, someone who never touched the game before, in the other corner IAN - Art Director for Rockstar Leeds, it was a tense battle with the warmup game handed to Ian first off but when The Hodge got into it Rockstar was defeated!.

The best bit about barcamp is the evening, and thanks to Rockstar for helping us out with that (congratulations to all afterparty attendees for out geeking a Rockstar coder), theres a lot of pictures floating around the internet, (do a search on flickr for barcampleeds)

God knows when the next one will be but I’m sure you’ll be informed..

As for geekup, last night I did a presentation about MTGCast and how it grew from this small little podcast to a network of casts thats too big for its own good ;), it was a 20:20 presentation that I felt went badly because well basiclly with everything that had been going on this week, I didn’t have time to sit down and go through it, but the information was there and it was a starting point for people to ask me questions after the presentation (of which I got quite a few).

We also announced the development of Northcast (I’ll link when things are up), a podcast that will demonstrate the abilities of northen companies and developers, the presentation was a “test the waters” thing to gauge peoples reaction and I’m glad I did a lot of people had comments and seems genuinely enthusiastic about it, a lot offered advice and quite a few wanted to book a slot to demo / talk about there site, company, experience, Ryan and Paul of Havoc Stuidos also joined as partners in podcasting, podcasting with people you know and gel with works a lot better (as was said in my presentation).

There are plans for a Rockstart’s Party in the evening however that hasn’t been finailised yet…

Thanks to everyone at Rockstar Leeds for being so accommodating and we look forward to kicking your arse…at the game you made?

(since I’ve had a few questions,

• I’m one of the organisers so this isn’t a load of Bollocks
• Rockstar Make Grand Theft Auto
• I don’t know if they are looking for developers.. ask them on the day

• Anger
  • They assume I’m the one who has knocked their precious website to #2 in Google
• Confusion
  • They don’t understand and when the next person asks, chips in with “He makes websites”
• Ok”
  • They understand what it is and leave it there or want to know a bit more..

Its completey obvious me to 90% of them they didn’t understand what I do…whilst some people were engaging and asked questions, other dismissed the work I do off hand and marked me as a blackhat spammer stating

“Google has a whole bunch of programmers to stop what you do”

…. not so much? or else these pages on Google’s site wouldn’t exist, let me pull a quite out from one of these.

“However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.” #

and these few are the ones that people hear about, but search IS important, I was talking to someone last night who was spending £200 a day on PPC but nothing on SEO, using the outdated but still used Yahoo Keyword Tool, we could see his term had 40,000 searches a month on Yahoo UK online in Janurary 2007.. if he was in the top ten and got just 10% of that traffic, that would mean 4000 clicks a month on one term alone, with an average CPC of £0.30.

4000 x 0.30 = £1200 a month in free clicks on one term alone..

if we take my podcast network, we recently had an upserge in downloads and we are looking at around 10,000 downloads per week, I really like looking at stats and use a mixture of Heatmaps tracking, server side tracking and Google analytics, you’d expect a podcast network to get most of its traffic from directories and referring sites…. not this one!

55% of all traffic comes from organic search… on longtail terms, sure we are number one for magic the gathering podcast and mtg podcast but those arn’t the terms that bring us the most traffic, its 4, 5 and 6 word keyphrases that do it..

I’m not going to belittle you by explaining the longtail theory but with search and certain niches it really works.. I’m working on a project right now that will prove it because its such a niche area that it’s main market will be.. long tail searches..

SEO has a bad rap at the moment because in the early day’s it was all about “keyword stuffing” and “hidden text”, however the game has changed, the engines have evolved and so has the optimisation, last year I could have posted that SEO is all about TLC

• Titles
  • Make sure your titles are optimised and short
• Links
  • Get good links onto your pages and also have a good linking matrix within your site
• Content
  • Get some good original content, optmised and something that would want to be read by your readers

However now there are just so many other things to consider

• Social Media
• Universal Search
• Local Search
• Competitors sites using blackhat

It’s a funny ol’ game this SEO lark…

Monday, the MELD launch event, which arrived and went with mixed reaction, a lot of people were disapointed at been asked to make posters as a “MELDING” event, but the concepts and the ideas discussed were worth the crappy drawings :), I like MELD as a concept though I think the implementation of it at the moment is too broad and lacks focus, not to mention you had to apply for a place to come to the event and a lot of people were put off by the “invitation only” status..

Tuesday, the Apple launch event at Old Broadcasting House, I feel I will be blogging a lot more about this place over the coming months, not only because Linda is constantly bugging me to join, but also because thats were we Barcamp Leeds will be, but more on that later

Wednesday, Good old Geekup, upstairs this time in a more intimate environment,  good presentations and good company, I may be presenting next time.. IF I can get my skillz in order

Thursday, Work Night Out… nuff said!

Friday, Spent the evening playing Magic, something I havn’t done for a couple of months, which is Ironic considering I run a magic the gathering podcast network

and somewhere inbetween that we announced the date for Barcamp Leeds… which looks to be an awesome event..