Gun Ruler

When I was a little kid, my dad would go out in the garden and nail two pieces of wood together into an L shape. He’d hand it to me and call it a gun. I’d spend the next few weeks “pow pow pow”ing around the house and garden getting a handful of splinters and making the neighbour’s dogs bark like crazy. I’m not now a gun carrying gangsta and I’ve no plans to be one.

So why is is that when I saw this Gun Ruler available for 9€ from French store Atypyk, thoughts of ‘inappropriate’ crossed my mind? Argh! I’m morphing into Mary Whitehouse. Stuff it, I’m going to buy one and “pow pow pow” around the office.

Internet Population Is 1 Billion. Crikey!

Comscore have reported that there are now 1 billion people online. It also looks like the UK might, just maybe, overtake Germany in the online population table in the not too distant future. The most connected countries (internet population) are:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Interestingly but unsurprisingly, Asian Pacific represents the largest share of the internet population with Europe a big chunk behind:

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

Source: Techcrunch

Twit or Fit?

Remember hotornot.com? Apparently it was sold for $20 million not too long ago. Now hot on its heels is twitorfit.com!

The site uses your existing profile picture on twitter (you know, the tiny one people can’t see too well) and asks people to rate you from 1 (twit) to 10 (fit). It’s interesting to see this format still, potentially, has legs and as twitter becomes more mainstream and grows in popularity I guess it could join the ranks of other twitter add-on sites.

For the purposes of research, I’ve signed up so if you come across me – go easy on the 1s eh! twitorfit.com/boringwill!

You know when a software project fails when…

Recently I answered a question on Linkedin which asked Finish this sentence. “I knew the software project was doomed when…”

I’d worked on a project back at AOL where the project named changed about three times in as many months so shared my quip. When I was contacted by the questioner to be told I was the top answer and made the first entry in her article on CIO.com, I was pretty pleased.

You can view mine and the 25 other answers, bound to resonate with anyone who’s worked on a software/large scale web project, here.

The late bird catches the worm?

As I mentioned before, though I’ve been working in digital for long enough to have the cheek to call myself a vetran, I only properly embraced the world of social media tools very recently.

Today marks another milestone. I’ve properly started twittering. I say properly because I have had a twitter account for quite some time, maybe 18 months, but never used the bloody thing as I couldn’t see the value. Now, I can see that if I tweet and check out other people’s tweets, I’m bound to learn lots and those who are silly enough to follow @boringwill might see how strange I really am.

My media flirts

Back at AOL I had a vanity job title of Safety & Security Expert. This only came out on PR occasions, those being a number of radio and newspaper interviews. I had a load of fun doing them and, get this, along the way was interviewed by Maggie Philbin and had a photo shoot with Kim & Aggie. These sorts of life-changing moments (I hope you’re sensing some sarcasm here) stay with you for life so I had a quick look today to see if I could find the old articles and thought I’d record a few here for posterity/embarrassment.

“Phishers are becoming increasingly sophisticated at spoofing legitimate brands and it is often difficult to spot a scam, so it’s crucial that people protect themselves,” said Will Smith, AOL’s safety and security expert – Guardian.

“As well as using spam filters and being wary of unsolicited emails, we would advise internet users to check their bank balance regularly and read their bank’s terms and conditions,” said Will Smith, AOL’s safety and security expert – BBC News

Said AOL’s safety and security bod, Will Smith: “Phishers are becoming increasingly sophisticated at spoofing legitimate brands and it is often difficult to spot a scam, so it’s crucial that people protect themselves.” - The Register

Will Smith, AOL’s Safety & Security spokesperson, is keen to centralise AOL’s current online security tools to make them easier to use. – PC Advisor

Never did I think I’d share a column with the President of France in the Times but it must’ve been a slow news day:

“Some of the terms being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers’ convention than for people who want to go online at home” Will Smith, AOL’s net security expert, says online terms such as “phishing”, “rogue dialler” and “Trojan” leave most computer users bamboozled - The Times

Introducing me

I guess it would be useful to have a bit of information about me here. As you might’ve guessed, my name is Will and I work for a company called Boring where I’m a director. I’ve lived and worked in London since 1998 and have always worked in the Internet. These days some people who’ve worked in an industry for over 10 years would call themselves a vetran, I’d say I was on the wrong side of being a dot com millionaire.

The majority of my career has been at AOL, where for most of my 8 years I worked in Product Management and even found the time to do a little bit of PR stuff when they’d let me out my cage! After AOL, I did a stint at American Express and more recently have been Client Services Director at Boring’s sister company, Acknowledgement.

My passion is doing web type stuff. What’s that mean? Er, well, I can’t design for toffee and my coding skills are limited to being able to embded a link into some HTML but I do like coming up with neat web ideas, overseeing projects and trying to create decent web and digital marketing experiences. Does that make me an annoying nusience? Probably.

It’s Just All Noise, Right?

“Blogs? Ha! What a bloody waste of time and webspace”

These are words that, in the past, I would proudly put my name to. I’ve never been convinced of the value of blogs. In fact, I’ve scoffed and spluttered an excessive amount when I hear that someone intends to embark on writing a blog -  the world could really do without more thought, opinion and comment. WordPress has i-dunno-how-many million blogs, blogger probably has a similar number; it’s just all noise! So the fact I am even typing this first post does make me feel a little bit strange. I’m a bit spooked.

I often have these turnaround moments. I think anyone who knows me well enough will be familiar with my firm stance on something, only to change my way of thinking. Indecisive? I’d rather call it, um.. progressive. So I spent a few minutes yesterday thinking about it, going through my bookmarks and checking out my RSS reader. I quckly came to the realisation that I’ve actually always avidly followed a number of blogs and RSS feeds, for example Google Blog, Springwise and I’ll admit that I do follow the Digital Spy celebrity news RSS feed with more interest than I’d like people to know. The thing about these examples is that they lack any sense of personality. So that must mean I am not a proper blog user. Phew.

I was wrong. Argh! I realised that  when I search for something, the answers would very often come from a blog. So I thought that I would start to make my contribution.

So now my stance has changed… “Blogs? Oh yes, they’re good aren’t they.. mmm yes”