I’ll give you £20, £30, £25, Deal

The web is great for virtually everything (and I mean ‘virtually’). In a post I wrote a long, long time ago (in relation to the age of this blog), I proposed the age-old question of ‘What can’t you do on the web?‘. Well I’ve thought of something - Haggling.

In the West, Haggling doesn’t play much of a part in every-day shopping, eg:

Checkout Clerk: That’s £38
Customer: Oh no, that’s far too expensive
Checkout Clerk: Well you’ll have to put some back then, hurry up there’s a queue forming…
Customer: Well, how about I’ll give you £25 for it all?
Checkout Clerk: What? No… you can’t do that!
Customer: Come on! OK, £30 - that’s as high as I’ll go…
Checkout: Fine… Security!

… there’s nothing wrong with exaggerating a situation to make a point. It doesn’t really work. Sometimes it’s possible to get a free piano stool or cheese grater thrown in with the deal but generally, down to the forces of commercialism and capitolism - a price is a price is a price.

I took it! The 2008 A List Apart survey. Jeffrey’s been ranting on about it on Twitter and his blog so as I generally get some benefit out of the result of these things - it seemed only fair to take part.

Cuil is a new search engine service set to rival Google, ironically created by a group of previous Google employees. The search service, pronounced ‘cool’, claims to index over 120 billion pages (which if I may say so myself, is a staggering amount). Various sources reckon this is almost 3 times as much as Google, however Google state otherwise, although not revealing any actual statistics.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

New design, obviously not straying too far from the old one. Additions include Twitter and Flickr feeds, Gravatars and a few more features still to be added, including styling up the pagebar and adding social bookmarking links. But aside from that it’s here!
www.nathanbeck.co.uk will be up at the start of August, unfortunately it’s currently down [...]

Get on the edge of your seats people! Matt Cutt’s announced on Thursday that the latest Google Pagerank updates will become visible ’sometime over the next few days’.
Well I’m waiting… ‘anxiously’!

I’m on Twitter! I made a step forward in my life this week and finally reactivated my Twitter account to… err… do whatever it is you do on Twitter. Don’t forget - it’s all about the social networking!
So - find and follow at www.twitter.com/redswish
Let’s hope I keep it up, when the new site goes live [...]

With my ever-growing fondness of blogging, I’ve wrote an article for the Flame blog on the subject of Navigating Large Blogs.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise [...]

Hey all, today was supposed to be the launch of the new Redswish/Nathan Beck site but unfortunately, due to a high workload and the small inconvenience of a hungover weekend - the launch is being pushed back till next Monday.
So… 7 days and counting!