sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

is a venture of my friend Mike Carter, who used to be our UK contact at Doubleclick. He and his colleagues (who’ve done this from scratch) are very excited about it and tell me it’s the first web 2.0 vertical search application. Why is this interesting for me:

• I’m really excited some people I know have done such a cool thing from scratch, and it does look to me like a potential money-spinner
• It does use Ajax a lot to improve usability, and it works really well (even on my Mac at home)
• Google Maps, obviously
• Its primary data source isn’t some nice easy web service that any of us could use - they’ve written a web spider that crawls estate agency websites, pulling the unstructured property data out and putting it into a common format that they can search

The spider is really interesting: they have a browser plug-in they wrote, that allows them to paint the data fields on a web page and teach the spider what to pull back from where. They’ve written all this validation code so if the website owner changes the layout, it gets spotted.

Anyway, it’s interesting for a geek like me, but I think it’s also an interesting business idea. We all assume Google and some of the other big guys have search sewn up, but there are niches people will do well in, and this looks like it could be one of those.

What do you think?

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Seth Godin writes that some data from a division of Yahoo shows that people who were exposed to banner advertising became more responsive to text link ads. Even people who didn’t seem to notice the banner ads responded better to the text links. The results suggested a decent ad buy could improve text link click through rates by 249%.

Obviously Yahoo has an interest in this research being correct: they’re a major purveyor of both banner and text link advertising. It does seem intuitively right that good banners will improve text link performance as long as messaging from one to the other is harmonised, but there must be lots of variables that would confound anyone trying to achieve this result for themselves.

Certainly advertisers who use affiliates make much of the fact that they’re doing broad reach banner advertising as well, and sell this as an advantage to affiliates. They do the same when they’re running big TV campaigns, though, so perhaps it’s just the case that brand recognition isn’t 100% conscious. I guess someone will hook TV viewers and internet users up to an MRI scanner soon to establish how and how much this works.

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I read the Register. And today the headline that caught my eye was “Extra anus kills four-legged chicken”. How could I NOT click on that story?

Anyway, it’s very sad, quite weird, and I hear KFC are on their way to investigate.

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In this report Sir Martin Sorrell, who is the CEO of WPP, is asked why the UK market is growing so slowly for his group, and puts the blame on problems at ITV, the biggest commercial TV station, which I suppose might have an effect if the programming has deteriorated and viewing figures have suffered as a result. But the thing I found confusing was he seemed to be blaming the growth of "new technologies, particularly the Internet and mobile" for the slow-down too. I really couldn’t see how one channel growing really well can be the reason for a slow-down overall. Are our most successful clients spending less overall now that they’ve discovered the web? I suppose it’s possible.

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http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=tate+modern

I’ve overtaken Tracy Emin, into the number 3 slot, so my mass link-swapping and blog-spamming is working, but I’d have to say Harry’s rather excellent video is not getting the attention it deserves, and I can’t see anything at all from anyone else.

Anyway, Harry’s at http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=460158317795591508&q=tate+modern so go and have a look.

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Today we were talking in the office, and 3 of us had blocked a parent on MSN at some time, because their chat was getting distracting at work.

At the weekend, my in-laws (both long retired, but very young at heart) sent us a link to this video:

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If you’re feeling brave, go and have a look at the video at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/23/bush-says-he-uses-the-google/

I don’t really know where to start with this. The serious and comic potential are both so great.

Has he used it to search for bad guys in Afghanistan? Does he know it’s not real-time?

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A couple of weeks ago I upgraded to a Nikon D80, from a D70 that has given me really good service for almost 3 years. The camera is a massive improvement on its predecessor, and I’m already taking better photos, but I’m suffering from early adopter syndrome, in that the software to support it just isn’t there yet.

Apple doesn’t support its raw files yet, neither does iview mediapro, the library software I use. I’m having to use some Adobe software I would never have loaded onto my computer, until everyone else catches up.

It’s worth it, but I really hope it gets sorted out soon.

As ever, the best review is at http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Nikon/nikon_d80.asp

My favourite new D80 features would be:
- The programmable function key on the front
- Modelling light for the floash controlled from the depth of field preview button
- Raw and jpeg (with the option to choose small, medium or large jpeg) at the same time
- The MB-D80 battery grip, with its duplicated controls and the brilliant battery info on screen

A brilliant camera. Well done Nikon.

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Harry’s uploaded his video to Google Video, at

This means he can win the competition, if he gets enough votes!

There really ought to be more entries though. I know people have been filming, so where are the movies?

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I took this photo at the Festival Hall today, and I’ve entered it in the “embrace the blur” category for Jpgmag Issue 8. Please vote for it if you like it.

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