silentflute

Blog

  • Review – The new rules of Marketing and PR

    New rules of marketing book

    An excellent introduction to the world of social media marketing (SMM) methods, tactics and strategies in an easily digestible way.

    David Meerman Scott’s book “The new rules of marketing and PR” is an excellent look at how to use new releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly.

    Following on from his 2006 e-book “The new rules of PR“, David Scott’s book looks at the umbrella term of social media marketing and lays out how everyone from Auto Dealership CEOs to even small business owners (ie: tailors, etc) are using everything from blogging to viral marketing to reach their buyers directly.

    (more…)

  • Facebook worth $15bn?

    According to the BBC news website, Microsoft has recently invested $240m (£117m) in Facebook (article) in exchange for a 1.6% share of the company, totalling to a a value of $15bn (£7.3bn) on a firm that has only been in existence three and a half years.

    I remember back in the day when big companies bought up popular buzz-filled websites Microsoft bought Hotmail, and when Yahoo! bought upcoming, when Google bought out Youtube — although this hasn’t happened with Facebook, it does raise questions about whether businesses are buying sites for buzz, branding, or on nothing but hot air?

    (more…)

  • Future for the site?

    I’m going to be splitting my site up very soon, and will be moving comedy/virals/video games to a more entertainment centered blog, and I’m playing with an idea to launch a fitness website.

    I will be turning this site into a much more “corporate” blog, talking about marketing/social media/web issues.

    Any updates will be posted on this website.

  • Review – Karate Kid III

    Karate Kid III

    Karate Kid III is the lamest movie I’ve ever seen.

    Released in 1989, the third-part of the Karate Kid trilogy (yes, I know there was a fourth that was even crappier than this) sees Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) returning with Miyagi from their trip to Okinawa and suddenly get involved with John Kreese’s desire for revenge over the loss of his karate school.

    With Kreese still bitter and angry, he visits an old army buddy in the shape of millionaire Terry Silver who vows to get revenge on both Miyagi and LaRusso, and – ever the business opportunist, realises the full business potential of getting into the karate school game.

    To this end, Silver hires Karate Kid “bad boy” Mike Barnes, and hatches a plot to unstablize the relationship (more on this later) between Miyagi and LaRusso and forcing LaRusso into defending his championship again. However Miyagi flatly refuses to train LaRusso.
    (more…)

  • Torrent OiNK’s Takedown

    Recently an IT consultant, Alan Ellis, 24, from Teeside, was arrested for running torrent-tracker website “OiNK”, and had his website closed down.

    Alan was held on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement, and is now on police bail pending investigation, and has spoken out against his arrest, stating that he “has done nothing wrong”, citing that if his crime was to provided links for downloading illegal material, then Google should also be prosecuted for the very same crime.

    Law enforcement agencies across the world have stepped up a gear on File-sharing P2P/Torrent websites, chasing down those who have illegally shared music, or breaking RIAA copyright.

    However this recent arrest has made a lot of buzz on the social sites, and has raised questions yet again about the legitimacy of the claims of the record industry about the use of P2P/Torrent sites to distribute music.
    (more…)

  • jQuery auto-complete and other Ajax resources

    nodstrum.com has posted a jQuery auto-complete tutorial which integrates with PHP/MySQL.

    There are literally tons of Ajax resources out there, perhaps too many to digest in one sitting, and one can get overwhelmed with the right framework to use and in what context to use them, but I do find AjaxRain to be a good resource for finding upcoming and current Ajax apps.

    Links;

  • Simple jQuery example

    This is a very simple jQuery example which shows a HTML defintion list being hidden and shown when clicking on a parent branch.

    Although this is a very basic example of jQuery in action, it does show the ability to separate Javascript actions and your HTML.

    This code assumes you have the jQuery library in the same folder as your html.

    You can also find an alternative Defintion list menu action on this demo page, as well as this screencast.





    jQuery | Example





    FAQ

    block-level elements

    in html, block-level elements may generally contain
    inline elements and other block-level elements. they are
    usually formatted differently than inline elements,
    typically on a new line in visual browsers.

    inline elements
    text-level elements

    inline (or text-level) elements generally only contain
    character data and other inline elements.

    Coffee
    Black hot drink
    Milk
    White cold drink


  • R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet

    R Kelly

    One of the most ridiculous things I’ve watched on Youtube is “R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet“. A hip-hop rap opera that is so silly and ridiculous it’s been parodied so many times by the likes of MadTV, Weird Al, and more.

    What makes it funnier is that R Kelly is *totally serious* about the whole thing, you can’t help but just laugh at him (note, not with him).

    Additionally the whole “trapped in the closet” is in itself a joke, considering R Kelly’s well known indiscretions, once being caught with a minor.

    Take for example this classic scene where some cop finds his partner is cheating on him, this scene is just … well I don’t even think there is a superlative that describes exactly what this thing is.

    Anyway, if you have the stamina, or the courage – or are just bored and want to waste a lazy Sunday, you can’t go wrong with this silly black hip-hop opera series.Links and resources;

  • New John Rambo Poster

    Rambo

    Here is the latest John Rambo Poster, courtesy of IGN.com

    Links;

  • jQuery – A quick intro

    Of all the AJAX frameworks out there currently, one that I’m really liking is jQuery.  It does pretty much what every other AJAX type framework out there does, but what I find really good about jQuery is that it tries to seperate JavaScript from your actual HTML.

    I did try DOJO (which I think is backed by IBM), but found it too hard to understand. MooTools is very popular, and has a small footprint but I find their documentation lacks any real examples, or code that you can copy-paste or hack apart. MochiKit has a lot of buzz, but I find it does a very similar job to jQuery.

    I find jQuery has a lot of examples, and there are already 2 books out there on this framework.

    Although I’ve only been able to do small-scale examples of jQuery, I’m hoping to learn how to integrate jQuery with PHP/MySQL and deliver some of those really nice effects that you’ve seen everywhere else.

    Links;