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Hope those window cleaners have got rubber boots!

Good to see the latest bank holiday has returned to normal weather wise 

At least the roads will be quiet tomorrow as the schools are off again!

Watching the coverage on the BBC breakfast news was almost cringeworthy. "Here we are live from a car boot sale getting public reaction.." Some of the comments were embarrassing, proper bottom of the gene pool stuff

But it certainly is interesting times ahead, maybe the end of the road for the libdems? Prob the first time I've actually looked forward to a general election 

I just sat and watched this, mind blowing. Madmax somes it up quite well!

Interesting comment from the social worker,"I could kill him but people depend on him". It makes you appreciate where your from and puts life in perspective!

Guess what.. another bank holiday and schools are off again...

At least the weather is back to Bank Holiday normal

I would sooner extract my own teeth....

Two cracking cartoons done especially for this forum by our local illustrator Jan Sitek. If you are looking for any illustration or imagery work, be sure to check out his website:

www.jansitek.co.uk

We've recently had the latest instalment of the Google Panda Update which is an update to way the Search Engine ranks websites, and decides who will display where in it's search results.

An interesting side affect of the latest update was reports of American Digital Coupon retailer "Retail Me Not" getting hammered and losing a subsequent amount of key word rankings and search traffic, which was picked up by the likes of Search Engine Land.

This then led to a PR damage limitation exercise: Full Press Release

"RetailMeNot, Inc. wanted to take this opportunity to respond to recent articles about RetailMeNot.com's keyword performance on Google. 

The company believes these reports greatly overstate the impact on RetailMeNot.com"

In response to the news, the stock price of the company has apparently fallen by 18.%.

So a bit of a code update, upload it, and boom huge companies lose market share, stock prices crash 

The official motto of Google is "Don't Be Evil" although this is downplayed a bit these days.

I doubt very many of us don't utilise Google in some shape or form, from business tools, generating leads, revenue generation, email or just doing a good old search. There is no questioning some of the good they do, countless good causes and projects, pushing the bounds of technology. But they also get a good share of flak, from privacy concerns, a bullish "our way or the highway" attitude or accusations of monopoly or cartel style practices.

I think there is an easy solution to this, to keep concerns in check, but continue to stimulate development. It's called competition!

If there was a viable competitor to Google, then I think we would see a much less bullish attitude, especially when it comes to search engine updates or changing policies. Plus they can't be accused of a monopoly just because there isn't any other competition!

So where is Bing, Yahoo, Ask or any other bit player in the search engine market? Come on lets have some competition  Why can't Microsoft (the owners of Bing) get a serious foot hold in the search engine market? Is it Google is just much better than Bing, or is just a branding issue?

You would think with Microsofts resources they could become a serious contender, so I wonder what the issue is? I'll confess to being a Google Chrome user, with Google as my default search. I've never been a fan of Microsofts Internet Explorer Browser, so maybe this clouds my judgement of Bing? I've tried Bing, seems to work perfectly fine and is comparable to Google, but I always default back to Google. Why? 

Has anyone been impacted by recent Google updates? I'm not talking about Harry the spammer who deserves to be switched off, but genuine business owners following what they thought were the rules, or maybe have outsourced to some dodgy SEO firm, and are now paying the price?

Has anyone seen their web traffic increase as a result of the Google updates, and are more than happy? Or do we have any die hard Bing, Yahoo or other search engine users?

Well interesting if not surprising results, Tories and LibDems get a whipping, Labour big gains and UKIP come of age

Think it's a pretty standard pre election protest vote. Be interesting to see how the Tories try and counter it, and win people back over. No doubt some serious manifesto tweaking 

What's fascinating is the media are all over UKIP now, calling them the 4th political party etc etc, but bearing in mind they don't have a single seat in parliament.

Maybe this is the pinnacle of the Libdems career if they lose parliamentary seats to UKIP in the general election. Or maybe we will see some radical libdems or Tories start jumping ship.

Either way, I think it's going to be an interesting general election, and no doubt a long and dirty propaganda build up 

Originally Posted by garde

“Coffee closely followed by complaining about poor customer service .....

Yes i know im waiting for the plethora of replies to that one, especially Steve! ”

You complaining? You've turned me into a coffee addict