Elliott Rodgers

Every so often one of people on my Facebook friends list joins a group with a title along the lines of Facebook to start charging $5.99 a month from 1st July 2010 join to say no.

The case against Facebook charging

Facebook won’t start charging, ever. It would be business suicide.

Facebook revenue comes from selling advertising, targeted with surgical precision. Targeted using information supplied by users; sex, age, location, interests etc. When I split up with Rachel and changed my relationship status to single, Facebook was immediately offering dating sites and advertisements. Users can even flag an advertisement as irrelevant effectively further targeting the ad. With around 400 million users, half logging in every day, even if users only viewed one profile page on that daily login it would mean 600 million ad views a day! Facebook is set to make half a billion US$ a year in 2010, you’d have to be severely insane to risk alienating your customer base with half a billion pounds of revenue and those ad revenues.

Facebook already announced way back in May last year on the Facebook blog that they are NOT planning on charging.

So why do these rumours keep surfacing?

Just because lots of people keep claiming something is true, doesn’t make it so, even on the internet. These groups are created with the specific intent of doing everything they can to get as many people to join the group as possible (hence the provocative group names), once they have enough members someone will start dropping in spam messages to make some dollars.

If a group has 100,000 members and 1% of people follow up on a spam ad yielding a US$0.50 return that’s $5,000. Not bad for quarter of an hours work and a few posts of Facebook to keep it looking legitimate. The same person often creates a dozen of these groups at a time. There’s no advertising cost involved for the scammers apart from their time. The irony of it all is that as more people sign up they keep promoting the group making it get ever bigger.

Just to give you an idea of real numbers, I’ve seen one group with 650,000 members and at least twenty spam ads. (Based on the equation above that’s US$130,000!!)

In Chesham where I live we’re lucky enough to have a beautiful park, Lowndes Park. Chesham Town Council do a brilliant job in keeping it as nice as possible with the limited resources.

So why is it that some people can’t be bothered to do the simple and put there f***ing litter in the bin! There’s bins all over the park and some are strategically located by the exits. You have to walk past at least one bin to leave Lowndes Park. Is it to much to ask for people to take their litter with you to the bin?

Dozens of people walk their dogs in the park every day. Within ten minutes of the centre of Lowndes Park there are fox dens, Badger sets, Muntjac Deer, Red Kites and lots of other wildlife. Many of them bringing up young. When you drop your litter you potentially endanger all of the animals. Surely for that reason alone it’s worth picking up your litter?

Another classic short film by Jim Field Smith always cheers me and makes me laugh every time I watch it… caution contains use of swear words which may make it NSFW. You need to watch it right to end for the absolutely stunningly brilliant punchline.

Today is World Blood Donor Day so why not take the opportunity to become a blood donor? In the UK to become a donor you need to be aged 17 – 65, weigh more than 50 kg (7 stone 12lbs) and be in general good health. There is no upper age limit for donors who have donated in the last two years. To book an appointment call the Donor Line on 0300 123 23 23 or visit http://www.blood.co.uk.

Donating Blood is something I feel very strongly about I’ve been a blood donor since I was 24, the only thing that stopped me donating was too unwell to give blood (at the moment I can’t donate due to recent medical investigations). It doesn’t hurt any more than an inoculation injection you might get before travelling abroad (honest!). I’ve also worked as a volunteer at donation sessions.

Here’s some facts

• A unit of blood is measured as 470mls (or just under a pint)
• A small amount of blood is kept for blood cross matching and so on
• All needles and equipment used is sterlised and only using once for your donation
• There are no more pints of Guinness at the end of the session, they are however tea, coffee, cold drinks and biscuits. Sometimes there’s even cake!
• The NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) is a specialist Health Authority who are responsible for ensuring there is adequate supplies of blood at all times. It includes National Blood Service, Bio Products Laboratory and Organ Donation and Transplantation.
• Donating blood takes about an hour. The actual collecting takes about ten minutes.
• Donors can give blood three times a year.
• In 2009 NHSBT collected 1.9 million donations from 1.4 million donors.
• In the World Cup 2006 blood stocks fell by almost 20% (a fifth), the lowest level since 2001.

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Welcome to my new look website, this is the first time I’ve used WordPress as a complete CMS for my personal site. The change to my personal site is part of a bigger plan to move all the sites I’m involved in onto a Virtual Private Server (still from names.co). This will give me a whole new range of extra technology to use on my websites (including CRON jobs and mod_rewrites). It also means that my company ERS Web Solutions will also be able to offer customers hosting alongside the other services.

I decided on the Prosumer Theme since it ticked all the right boxes for me. I will probably change the colour scheme and tweak a few small things. The current header image of a sunset is part of a photo I took across the Pednor hills near Chesham, where Sheppie likes to go play ball and I like to sit there, watch the Red Kites flying overhead and have a think. The header will probably change in the future.

Although I pulled an all nighter and got the basic bits and pieces together, along with a lot of content, it’s going to take a few more days before a lot of the content is back (including book reviews), so please be patient while I do all this.