Author: Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

Broadband Life: No Business Like Snow Business

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 3 February, 2012
No Comments on Broadband Life: No Business Like Snow Business

You are looking at a disappointed man. Wha! How can this be? Surely not you Tref I hear you say? Yes yes disappointed 😉 What’s up? We have had a very light smattering of snow.

I like snow. Snow, for the most part, makes the place look pretty and means I can wrap up cosily in front of a roaring open fire at home and enjoy the real winter. I don’t do the sledging any more – it’s all very well getting a thrill from speeding down that hill but you then have to traipse all the way back to the top dragging a sledge and almost certainly a kid. I still like throwing snowballs mind you. Nothing quite like the satisfaction of catching someone in the back of the neck.

I also quite like the superiority of owning a 4×4 when it snows. Other cars are sliding all over the place or struggling to get up the slightest incline but the Jeep takes it all with total ease.

This snow is not heavy enough for any of any of that. It might well close the golf course tomorrow but that is largely because you can’t see white balls on a white background. That’s the only thing this snow is likely to disrupt this weekend and in all probability I’ll be watching the 6 Nations rugby so not playing golf anyway.

None of the above is why I’m disappointed.

Tags homeworking, snow, voip

End User olympics

If You Haven’t Got an Olympics Ticket I’d Think Twice about Going Anywhere Near London in August #LOCOG

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 2 February, 2012
No Comments on If You Haven’t Got an Olympics Ticket I’d Think Twice about Going Anywhere Near London in August #LOCOG

Could the London2012 Olympics be the new Y2K? I suspect not. Y2K came and went and we all looked back and wondered what all the fuss was about.

I have just had an email from Transport for London telling me that for large chunks of the day I can expect to have to wait longer than 30 minutes to board some tube trains. I regularly come in to Kings Cross in the morning and the underground is sometimes so busy on a normal commuting day that they shut off access to the platforms because there are already too many people down there.

If TfL is talking over 30 minutes wait the queues just to get through the door will be enormous. This is bad enough if you have tickets for an event and need to get there but is also a bit of a shame if you don’t and were just hoping to hang around the city soaking up the atmosphere. It might not prove to me as much fun as you had anticipated.

TfL has clearly gone to a lot of effort modelling the passenger traffic scenarios over the period of the games. Check out their interactive tube map here. It’s a bit like the BBC’s own predictions for iPlayer traffic. The annoying bit is that the BBC, along with all ISPs in the UK I’m sure, will have additional capacity in place to cope with the increased traffic levels.

It looks to me as if TfL has just come up with this interactive map and told everyone they would be better off walking. I suppose that is planning of some sort! If you ask a London Cab driver what their plans are for the games many will tell you they are going to see how it goes for a day or two but think they will probably end up taking the time off and going on holiday which will compound the problem.

If employers in London haven’t yet put contingencies in place to facilitate homeworking for all their staff over this period then now is clearly the time to get their act together¹.

PS London is also often “full” on a regular weekday. ie there are no available hotel rooms. I’d take a tent if I were you.

¹ Timico specialises in supporting homeworkers and provides thousands of broadband connections for businesses for this very purpose – mail me at [email protected] if you want to know more.

Tags congestion, LOCOG, Olympics, TfL

Business ofcom online safety Regs voip

Sat in an ITSPA council meeting discussing strategy.

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 1 February, 2012
1 Comment on Sat in an ITSPA council meeting discussing strategy.

Many of you will perhaps not have heard of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association. It is one of hundreds of industry trade associations serving their stakeholders in the UK. ITSPA was formed about 6 years ago at the “dawn of the hosted VoIP industry in this country”.

In its early days ITSPA was involved in the formation of codes of practice – working with Ofcom to define how an internet telephony provider should behave/operate. Things then went quiet for a while though the organisation has top notch networking events where executives get the opportunities to meet other people in the game to catch up on issues (and gossip).

Over the past 12 months industry affecting issues have started to come out of the woodwork.

Tags ITSPA

Business dns

Global domain name growth hit 9.5% in 2011 #Nominet

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 30 January, 2012
1 Comment on Global domain name growth hit 9.5% in 2011 #Nominet

The global number of domain names under registration grew by 9.5% in 2011, up from 6.1% in 2010. The total now stands at 218 million domains registered. I have a few of them – perhaps 7 or 8 I’m not sure. The growth trend might sound interesting but the rate peaked at over 30% in 2006 and for most of the ten years running up to 2011 was higher than the growth in that year. I got all this from the Nominet website.

It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to envisage a situation where one day everyone on the planet has their own domain name. Every person in my family does. Your domain will be the basis of your own unique resource and identifier and used for many things. A bit like a “super” National Insurance number. The fact that John Smith is likely already taken is a bit of a shame if you are he but that is already something you have had to live with for most of your life. In the future we might even find couples searching for available domain names before choosing a name for their baby! 🙂

If we assume a steady rate of growth of 10% a year then it will take 28 years for the total number of domains to reach 8.14 billion. According to the United Nations the world population in 2011 was around 7 billion¹. I don’t know what it will be by 2040 but probably higher than my 8.14 Billion (assuming we don’t all blow each other up in the meantime) and it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this chat.

I guess what I am saying is that whether you agree with me or not re everyone having their own domain name there is still a long way to go with project internet. This is reinforced when you consider the capacity for expansion of the physical infrastructure presented by IPv6. I am also sure that thus far we have only scratched the surface of what can be done with domain names. We also have to recognise that many people and organisations own multiple suffix variants of the same domain so for everyone to have one we need to have far more than the 8.14 Billion registered.

As well as the Nominet website it is also worth checking out zooknic.com for data on domain history and growth.

¹ wouldn’t stay still long enough for anyone to count

Tags Domain, growth

Business datacentre

Service status updates at Timico – Thunderbirds are go

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 30 January, 2012
5 Comments on Service status updates at Timico – Thunderbirds are go

Some time ago I mentioned we were working on a new service status update page for the Timico website. Well the status of this service is now “up”. It’s been in testing for some time but I welcome any comments or observations as you come across them.

There is a lot of system development going on at Timico. Ultimately I expect the service status page to be integrated with our newly rolled out Service Now implementation although there are a few hurdles to over come first not the least being the amount of deep jargon that seems to fly around incidents and on ticketing systems. The service status page needs to be easy to read and understand. I am also wary of a status that always shows up a green so in our case the fault stays visible for 7 days after it has been fixed. If you sign up to email alerts you can get access all historical data prior to that.

One thing that caught me a bit by surprise was the number of service types we have to cover. It’s only when you see them all graphically illustrated in front of you that it hits home. Mostly they all come as facts and figures on reports.

You can see the new service status page here. Note that this site is hosted at a totally separate external location – if the entire Timico network crashed you would still be able to see that it has done so!

That’s all folks

Tags service status update, Timico

Business ofcom Regs

Bloggers subject to same rules as traditional journalists

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 30 January, 2012
1 Comment on Bloggers subject to same rules as traditional journalists

“Bloggers subject to same rules as traditional journalists.” Seems a bit obvious doesn’t it? In writing a blog one should respect the laws of the land and not defame, lie, slander, slur, libel, slight, disparage or apply any other similar verb to the html page.

I suspect if you are sure of your ground vilification, disparagement and other general character assassination is ok but the risk is yours to take.

At this point I’m sure some of you are wondering where all this is going.

Tags Attorney General, blog, Dominic Grieve, super-injunctions

Business mobile connectivity net neutrality ofcom voip

@EdVaizey reschedules #NetNeutrality Roundtable and ITSPA publishes detailed evidence on Mobile Network Operator bad practice

A Ministerial Roundtable on Net Neutrality had been scheduled for 24^th January (ie yesterday) with Internet Minister Ed Vaizey and the major fixed and mobile operators due to attend. EV is expecting industry to produce a voluntary code of practice in respect of Net Neutrality. In the run up to the meeting and following individual discussions with some of the intended participants the Minister has apparently been unhappy with progress. The Round Table has been postponed until 28^th March to allow time for further industry discussion.

Net Neutrality is a very emotional subject. By and large in my view it is something that has been creating more noise than the issue has perhaps merited but I can understand people’s concerns. The issue of transparency is in particular an important one

Tags mobile connectivity, net neutrality, voip

Business mobile connectivity

O2 – brown stuff spreads from whirring object

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 25 January, 2012
2 Comments on O2 – brown stuff spreads from whirring object

I don’t normally jump on a bandwagon although sometimes working for an ISP I get wind of juicy bits of network issues such as an exchange catching fire and might try and get in before the bandwagon has started to roll.

On this occasion the bandwagon is trundling down the hill at pace carrying news that O2 is including people’s mobile phone numbers in header information provided to websites visited by mobile users.

This was discovered by Lewis Peckover who has created a web page that tells you that kind of info is being left by your browser when you visit a site.

I took a look myself and drew a blank as you can see below

Tags mobile connectivity, O2, phone number, visited, website

Business Cloud datacentre

The communications world of the future #TimicoDC

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 25 January, 2012
5 Comments on The communications world of the future #TimicoDC

For the odd one of you that missed last week’s datacentre opening day I now have a few photos to fling your way (rhyming purely coincidental but reveals a deep natural talent 🙂 )

We had a great line up of VIP guests including from Newark Madam Mayoress, Mr Mayor and our local Member of Parliament the Rt Hon Patrick Mercer OBE, pictured here with our Chairman Tim Radford.

Hover your mouse over photos for narrative.

We had the TV cameras in and have also recorded the event for our own purposes (available in time for Christmas).

Tim gave a very inspiring speech supporting local business initiatives and talked about the great communications infrastructure that Newark has making it an ideal place to do business.

Patrick Mercer swiped some virtual curtains on an iPad that opened curtains on the big screen in the NOC revealing a virtual plaque replicating the real one downstairs in reception.

I was interviewed by Central Television and then gave what I can only imagine must have been a highly intelligent and entertaining talk about the new datacentre to an audience of over 200 invited IT Directors, CEOs and CFOs.

We were fortunate in having a top class panel that discussed the future of the communications world for business – you can wait for the video to come out – it would take too long to discuss on the blog.

The panelists were Christian Craggs, Director of O2 Strategy, Delfino Canas, Strategy Director of BT Wholesale, internet entrepreneur Rob Wilmot and last but not least Ewan Macleod of “Mobile Industry Review” fame.

Incidentally we have a great meeting room on the top floor of the new new building that can be used for many purposes – look out for news in the future of events that we will be planning here.

Finally if you are wondering what on earth that fancy dress get up is all about in the header photo then join the club. The things I have to do for this business!!

Keep the faith…:)

Oh and I almost forgot. Thanks to everyone who helped to make the day a great one. This includes staff, the panelists, our VIP guests and of course customers both existing and of the future variety. Having been involved in many successful events over the years I can honestly say this was up there with the best of them.

Tags datacentre, Newark, Timico

End User fun stuff

What’s in a name?

Despite on occasion being known to criticise the UK government for policy matters relating to the internet I am not a particularly political person. I have had a go at both (New) Labour and the current coalition.

The one thing I can’t fault them on, whatever their political hue, is the names of the politicians involved. Here we are talking David (Dave), David, George, Nick and looking back a bit, Tony and Gordon. at Timico the leadership team comprises a Tim, Chris, Neil, Jonathan, Steve, Andrew, Luke, Sandra, Geoff, Calum and Tref – a good spread from around the British Isles.

What I just can’t understand is how on earth anyone could consider being run by someone with a name like Mitt or Newt. I can ascribe Barack to being a cultural/language thing – a bit like a bloke called Nicola running France. Angela in Germany seems positively normal!

Perhaps the Americans have done some market research and picked the “most electable name”. I fully expect to see a Giraffe or an Aardvark running for the US Senate in future – the only possible reason in my mind that the UK media would want to report such an event.

The only possible excuse I can think of is that they needed to find candidate names with available domain names but I haven’t done any research to validate this theory. Any original submissions on this proposition could well be published in full.

Call me boring…

Tags Barack, Dave, Mitt, Newt, Tref

End User social networking

Simple guide to being a real person who someone might want to engage with on Twitter

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 23 January, 2012
5 Comments on Simple guide to being a real person who someone might want to engage with on Twitter

For me one of life’s little disappointments is to see that I have lots of new Twitter “followers” only to find that they aren’t worth following back. Sounds a little high and mighty?

My approach to life is that I am only here the once so I might as well make the most of it. Because of that I treat all waking hours as potentially time to be doing work but because I enjoy what I do I don’t necessarily consider it to be a chore. In addition I try to make my workplace a fun place to be.

Also I have a major vested interest in the success of the business I work for because I am a shareholder. It is in my interest to be on the case more often than not and I am not therefore a someone who switches off when I leave the office.
I use Twitter a lot – for much of my waking day. The platform suits my natural gregariousness and it gets used for a mix of purposes that reflects my approach to life – that is a mix of work and play.

On it I tweet:

work stuff – usually blog posts on trefor.net but also links to online articles that I think relevant to the business, industry or things I cover on the blog
non work stuff – usually creative writing posted on www.philosopherontap.com – latest post here 🙂
and inanities that perhaps reflect my personality and which people can either gel or identify with or chose to ignore/unfollow – it’s a free world and a reflection of what happens in real life and not just online.

It is always exciting to get new followers on Twitter. At the time of writing I have 1,777 followers. However I only follow 1,058 people back. So what do I (quite reasonably) hear you say?

The point is that it is such a source of disappointment to see that you have new followers but not to think it is worth following them back. I’m a fairly easy going bloke so why don’t I follow these people?

To some extent this is because, just like in real life, you wouldn’t “be friends” with everybody you meet. The criteria for making this decision are however somewhat wider when applied to Twitter.

Whilst I do use Twitter to sell as part of the mix described above I don’t want a constant stream of sales pitches. In fact any sales pitch has to be so soft as to be almost not discernible (feel free to knock me down at this point if you think this cynically doesn’t reflect my own tweets).

Of my last 40 followers I only follow 18 of them back. The ones I don’t follow have profiles that suggests they can help me with things. These include:

finding a mortgage
finding a job
finding a franchise to run
making a fast buck
helping me market my business
etc etc etc

Drilling into the tweets of these followers they are invariably one way broadcasts offering advice, thanking new followers for the follow, selling left handed widgets (for example) or simply retweeting “interesting” stuff posted by others.

If someone wants to be followed back they need to be seen to be someone interesting or engaging enough to chat with in a pub or coffee shop. In fact one of the wonders of the Twitter world is that if you have already chatted with someone on Twitter then when you meet them in real life they seem to be very easy to get on with – you already have many things in common to talk about.

Sometimes “real people” don’t get followed back. Often their profile has no information on the person and not much in the way of tweets at all giving me no help with deciding whether to follow them. Also if someone looks implausibly attractive (I get suspicious – no offence intended girls) or as in one recent case, only tweets in Chinese, then they probably won’t get followed.

Although there are some journalists and news accounts I follow but who don’t follow me back I don’t usually follow people for long if they don’t follow back. It isn’t a personal thing. It’s just that I feel social networking isn’t a one way medium.

In the same way many of the accounts that follow me but don’t get followed back unfollow me after a week or two. Quite satisfying really. These are often accounts that simply seem collect followers because they presumably feel this is the right way to build influence. You have to question this when you see people who follow 70,000 people and have 70,000 followers in return. Who is going to notice anything in that stream? Also I often wonder how on earth do some people go about finding me on Twitter! Businesses advice in the Minneapolis area? No thanks.

The rules aren’t hard and fast. I often follow local businesses even if they are “just selling”. It seems reasonable to support your local businesses online in the same way as you might buy stuff from local high street shops. I also follow some businesses in my industry for competitive information purposes.

This has been a longer than usual post and many may not have stuck with it to this point. I understand:)

I will finish the rambling though with the observation/fact that I get many cold calls and unsolicited emails from people wanting to engage (sell). Most of them get filtered out because otherwise I would spend my whole day listening to pitches.

If you want to make it past the gatekeeper the best way is to first develop a non work relationship on Twitter. A subsequent work related approach via email is then less likely to be ignored because of course we will already know each other. Twitter isn’t a medium for selling but it is great for warming up the contact.

To help facilitate this my business card nowadays contains only my Twitter username (@tref) and no email or phone contact details. All the contact info you need is in any case findable online.

I have just realised Twitter is short for Tref’s witterings. Better go.

That’s all folks 🙂

Tags Twitter

Business Cloud competitions datacentre video

Video games killed the art of conversation – spot the game megaprize competition #TimicoDC

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 19 January, 2012
5 Comments on Video games killed the art of conversation – spot the game megaprize competition #TimicoDC

We had a hugely successful data centre opening event at Timico yesterday – 210 customers, prospective customers and business partners came along and, if I say so myself, had a great time (and were impressed 🙂 ). More on this as soon as I’ve assembled the photos etc – I’m on the move at the moment.

In the meantime I have a little prize competition for you. At the back of the lecture theatre (conf room, call it what you will – it had more than 200 odd people in it), just for fun, we had a range of “antique” video games, consoles and computers on show.

There’s a bottle of champagne¹ and a mug for the first person to correctly identify all the different systems shown in the video below (Timico staff not eligible here as they will have been able to view the kit yesterday). Note no apologies for the title of the post. It is partly true and the internet is now doing its best to finish the job.

¹ I saved it specially from yesterday’s celebrations 🙂

Tags console, datacentre, game, Timico, video

Business Cloud datacentre piracy Regs

Protest against #SOPA #TimicoDC

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 17 January, 2012
1 Comment on Protest against #SOPA #TimicoDC

The Stop Online Piracy Act SOPA bill is being considered by legislators in the USA as a means of combating online copyright infringement. “The bill is so over broad and badly written that it is going to impact all kinds of things that don’t have anything to do with stopping piracy” – Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia.

In the UK we are constantly under threat by Governments that latch on to the idea that they can solve specific problems by “controlling” the internet. Witness the Digital Economy Act plus a number of subsequent calls for the blocking of access to websites by a range of different stakeholders.

This is not to say that this blog supports the use of the internet for unlawful activities. It is however important to recognise that the phenomenal growth of the internet and, by definition, of the world wide web, has only been possible because of its openness. SOPA seeks to control this openness and will kill it.

Follow the discussion on Twitter using #SOPA

I had intended to switch off the blog tomorrow, Wednesday 18^th January 2012 in support of the Wikipedia protest¹.

Unfortunately this clashes with the Grand Opening of the new Timico Datacentre in Newark. Timico has invested around 15% of its turnover in this project. For us it is a serious bet too important an event to have any distractions on the day.

I will be posting photos of the day on the blog as soon as the speeches are over and the champagne has stopped flowing. I’m the shy guy hovering in the background guy looking uncomfortable in a suit.

You will also be able to follow the day on Twitter using #TimicoDC – the stream appears in the sidebar of the blog if you prefer to stay here 🙂 Oh and by the way, as of tomorrow the datacentre is officially open – you know where to come if you need colo, dedicated servers or VMs. Drop me a line at [email protected] if you want to know more.

I am also offering personal guided tours to readers of the blog (fwiw 🙂 ) – drop me a line if you want to come and see the facility including our brand new state of the art Network Operations Centre.

Finally comments on this blog are Twitter enabled – sign in with Twitter and a tweet will be sent with a link to your comment and quoting the #TimicoDC hashtag. If you want to help spread the news please comment using this facility.

¹ Wikipedia is being switched off for the day to illustrate what it would be like if it was blocked.

Tags SOPA, TimicoDC

dns internet

Domain disputes and cybersquatting

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 12 January, 2012
3 Comments on Domain disputes and cybersquatting

An invitation arrived yesterday to attend a Nominet briefing on dispute resolution for domain name registrars. It’s a breakfast job in London so I probably won’t go. With the invite came an interesting stat – one in every 3,000 .uk domains is subject to a dispute of some sort!

Considering that Nominet manages knocking on 10 million domains that’s a lorra (my wife’s from Liverpool) disputes. I imagine quite a number of these disputes relate to cybersquatters¹ . I recently had occasion to look at some domains names to buy. There are a lot of domains out there that are owned but not used or simply point to sites that make money out of click through advertising.

These days the problem of finding a suitable domain is exacerbated by the fact that you also need to secure the corresponding Twitter name. I think it’s about time we started from scratch and changed the whole system. Bags I trefor.net 🙂

¹ if you don’t know look it up.

Tags cybersquatters, Domain, name, Nominet

charitable End User social networking

world record attempt – the results are in #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 11 January, 2012
5 Comments on world record attempt – the results are in #comment24

We had a good go at it guys. When I first discussed the world record attempt for “most comments on an online news post” with the Guinness World Records® people there was no record in place. We came in at 5,455 comments in 24 hours.

Unfortunately in the meantime a Japanese pop star – don’t ask me his name, I was too distraught to register it¹ – has come in with 56,800 on his fan website. Apparently a quarter of all his registered fans left a comment. That’s life folks.

However we should not be dismayed. We should rejoice. First of all we raised just over £6k for the RNLI. The RNLI needs £150million a year to keep going. That’s a lot of two pences rolling down that lifeboat donation box and every little helps.

Secondly I contacted Charles Arthur, Tech Editor of the Guardian who after digging around a bit discovered that the most comments ever on a Guardian news post was 4,789. The Guardian is reputed to have a monthly unique readership of 50 million people globally so the fact that we beat their number for most comments is huge news. NOTW phone hacking not unsurprisingly seems to be the subject that generally attracts most people to comment at the Guardian.

Perhaps I’ll change the subject next time to something more inflammatory. I think we will have another go – next year maybe. There was huge enthusiasm amongst everyone who participated. The main feedback from GWR, apart from the fact that they enjoyed following the attempt was that it appears that this sort of record is generally best suited to celebs with huge followings. A bit obvious but perhaps we can prove that wrong someday:)

Still to do: tech post & look at the “most inspiring comments”. As regard the latter if anyone has any they would like to highlight let me know – leave a comment on this post linking to their favourite comment.

That’s all folks.

PS world record attempt blog post here

¹ tbh it’s ‘cause I couldn’t understand it & didn’t want to look stupid asking for the name again 🙂

Tags blog, comments, Guardian, Guinness, Records, World, 世界記録のコメント

Business gadgets

CES Las Vegas – the non report #CES

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 10 January, 2012
No Comments on CES Las Vegas – the non report #CES

I’ve been keeping an eye on proceedings at the Consumer Electronics Show in ‘Vegas¹ . So far it’s a bit disappointing really. I guess we are all used to a rapid pace of change and when it doesn’t keep accelerating we think something is amiss.

This year I suspect the change is going to come when the next generation of mobile handset technology comes out sometime later this year. Mobile is where it is at.

I want integration of the mobile with the house. Currently we have DECT phones scattered around the place – the kitchen, lounge and TV room all have chargers. Apart from my wife everyone has a smartphone in our house (granted the 11 yr old wants an upgrade from his Nokia N97 which, at some point soon I will see as not an unreasonable request). I see no reason why these handsets shouldn’t replace the DECT ones. Everyone already has their own number. The kids only use the house phone to avoid paying mobile charges. This should all be blended. It’s just about the physical transport medium. It is doable once the mobile networks play ball.

I also see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to

charitable Cloud datacentre End User social networking surveillance & privacy

The social media summary of the world record attempt

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 10 January, 2012
No Comments on The social media summary of the world record attempt

The world record attempt started at 6am on Thursday 5^th Feb and ended at 6am the following day. There are three stories to tell here. The first is the charity fundraising aspect that was covered on Friday.

Second is the social media story. This was an event largely promoted using the #comment24 hashtag on twitter but the story was also posted on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. The effort also caught the imagination of a good number of friendly journalists as the list of names in the table of top referrers for 5^th Jan illustrates.

	referring site	# visits	pages/visit	time on site
1	t.co (Twitter)	2,012	2.73	00:04:08
2	facebook.com	903	4.44	00:04:56
3	gizmodo.co.uk	310	2.38	00:02:19
4	thinkbroadband.com	291	4.38	00:04:36
5	forums.moneysavingexpert.com	265	3.24	00:02:58
6	m.facebook.com	240	2.2	00:01:53
7	guardian.co.uk	233	3.07	00:03:50
8	thenextweb.com	221	2.83	00:02:47
9	telegraph.co.uk	207	3.6	00:04:47
10	hootsuite.com	67	2.88	00:04:10
11	community.plus.net	63	2.84	00:02:43
12	plus.url.google.com	59	4.05	00:05:45
13	linkedin.com	57	4.84	00:07:03
14	thelincolnite.co.uk	51	2.25	00:02:07
15	celticquicknews.co.uk	50	1.36	00:00:23

In all according to Google Analytics there were 162 referring sites over the 5^th and 6^th January. A Google search for

Tags analysis, charity, fundraising, media, record, social, Twitter, World

Cloud End User media social networking

The evolution of TV – Sky and Zeebox

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 9 January, 2012
1 Comment on The evolution of TV – Sky and Zeebox

I note that Sky has taken a 10% stake in Zeebox, a service that integrates TV watching with social media presence. This is the future. In fact this, to my wife’s annoyance is also the here and now.

How often do you see the twitter stream fill up with comments about a TV programme that is on at the time? It is usually stuff like Xfactor or The Apprentice, neither of which I can stomach. Yesterday it was the Manchester City v Manchester United FA Cup tie.

This is a pretty astute investment by Sky who scrapped their monthly Sky Magazine in print format last autumn despite it being profitable and one of the highest circulation monthly mags in the UK. Zeebox will add to Sky’s already powerful interactive online presence with Sky+, an interactive planner on iPhone/iPad app and SkyGO their app to watch TV on the move.

My wife may not like it but it is also the way forward in every aspect of life. She already shops online. It won’t be long before she is coordinating shopping trips using Twitter, Facebook or some other as yet unheard of facility. We have to embrace the new technology and the new way of living.

The size of the Sky investment has not been disclosed but my bet is it will be great for both parties and shows that there is still plenty of opportunity for the canny entrepreneur to make things happen even in this economic climate.

More TV related stuff:

Sony 4K Ultra HD TV

TV detector vans – the truth

Boring TV & better things to do.

Tags Sky, Zeebox

charitable End User

The morning after the week before #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 6 January, 2012
7 Comments on The morning after the week before #comment24

The world record attempt finished at 6am this morning. Phew. We didn’t get the 100,000 comments we were after. According to the screenshot I took at 6am it was 5,455 though there are potentially a few “non-qualifying” comments in there that I will have to check.

final comment numbers - snapshot at 6.08 am

At this point in time I don’t know whether we will be accorded a world record for this one. There is no existing record to break and the 100k was an arbitrary target set by the Guinness World Records® organisation as one considered appropriate based on a different record category concerning Facebook comments. I will report back on this one over the next few days as the info comes in.

More importantly the current tally of funds raised is £5,809.50. This comprises 110 donations made online via just giving (includes a very generous £1k from zeninternet – thanks boys) and also includes £2,360 worth of pledges made to me offline that I know we are good for (£2k is from Timico & £250 from ipcortex – both great contributions) .

The total funds raised is yet to be firmed up as money is still coming in and

charitable End User

World record attempt for most comments on an online news item in 24 hours has started. #comment24 #RNLI

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 5 January, 2012
5,595 Comments on World record attempt for most comments on an online news item in 24 hours has started. #comment24 #RNLI

At 6am Greenwich Mean Time (that’s in the the UK) an attempt at the world record for the most comments on an online news item in 24 hours began (ie this blog post). According to Guinness World Records® we need around 100k unique comments. That’s just over 1 comment a second! With your help we think we can whoop that.

This is also charity fund raiser for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) the UK. The level of funds raised is not associated with the number of comments and it doesn’t cost to leave a comment but if you want you can make donation by clicking on the big green “DONATE NOW!” button in the sidebar – the bigger the donation the better.

When you leave a comment you have the option to tweet it – please do so if you can as this will help to spread the word using the #comment24 hashtag.

To comply with the rules the comments must be at least 10 characters, a minimum of two words and not comprise solely of punctuation marks. Basically comments have to make sense. Happy commenting & let’s see if we can raise some cash for the RNLI.

Postscript – conclusion here

charitable Engineer

The tech detail of the platform being used to host the world record attempt #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 3 January, 2012
13 Comments on The tech detail of the platform being used to host the world record attempt #comment24

The attempt at the Guinness World Records® Record for most comments on an online news post in 24 hours is set to start at 6am on Thursday 5^th January. This is going to be an interesting experiment which will hopefully raise a lot of cash for the RNLI.

In order to make a success of the record attempt we have moved the blog off its old shared platform onto a new state of the art job hosted at Timico’s new data centre in Newark. This is before the data centre is officially up and running so we have all its resources to ourselves. I am heavily indebted to Timico for this.

We have been quite busy getting the new infrastructure up and running so I am also very indebted to neighbour Steve Nice and his company Forlinux for their help with the platform software.

The basic architecture looks like the diag on the right (click to enlarge). A load balancer fronts a number of wordpress servers that in turn feed off a two database (one replicates to the other as a backup).

Each server is a Cisco UCS B200 blade and connects with 2 x 10TByte EMC Storage Area Network (SAN). The blades are dual 6 core (hyper-threaded) Xeon processors with 96Gigs of RAM each and with the Hard Drives disabled for mtbf optimisation purposes. The components are all connected using a 10GigE backplane.

The data centre initially has 2 x 10Gig connections coming into it so there is plenty of bandwidth available. The site supports IPv6.

We are using WordPress 3.3 on top of CentOS 6/Apache 2.2/PHP5.3 and mysql 5.1 – version numbers are hidden from people querying the web server (Apache).

The blog itself, already relatively light on plug-ins, is based on the Thesis theme and has been pared down to the minimum to maximise performance.

Some plug-ins are worth a mention. Caching is employed using WP Total Cache for performance optimisation. Simple Twitter Connect is used particularly for comment tweets and AddToAny is used in the post for sharing.

We were kindly offered CDN capacity by Limelight Networks but we as we have already been working overtime to get the data centre ready there wasn’t time to incorporate this. The CDN is probably just a “nice little extra” on this occasion anyway as the content isn’t particularly heavy on bandwidth.

If you want to help with this world record please tell your friends – the post is going live at 6am on Thursday at http://www.trefor.net. If you regularly use a forum or have your own blog please leave a post with a link to this site. If you want to donate please use the JustGiving page or click on the big green “DONATE NOW” button in the sidebar.

charitable Cloud End User

promo interview with BBC for Thursday 5th Jan world record attempt #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 2 January, 2012
8 Comments on promo interview with BBC for Thursday 5th Jan world record attempt #comment24

More world record stuff. Keep the sponsorship coming in by the way. It’s starting to build momentum.

Tags #comment24, BBC, record, World

charitable End User

calling all sponsors – help a good cause and be associated with a fun event #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 31 December, 2011
26 Comments on calling all sponsors – help a good cause and be associated with a fun event #comment24

Many of you will already have heard of the world record we are going for on Thursday 5th Jan. This is for the most comments on an online news story in 24 hours.

Timico is sponsoring the first 2,000 comments. Yesterday Rob Pickering of ipcortex (great company) came up with £1 for each of the next 250 comments – totally unprompted and keen to support the cause (RNLI). Thanks Rob.

Now we are looking for more donors. Donating is easy – you can use the JustGiving page or hit the big green “DONATE NOW!” button in the sidebar. Leave your twitter username if you can – here or on the JustGiving site.

Note that the number of comments made is not actually associated with the amount of cash raised. In other words we don’t have to have the same number of comments as pounds and vice versa.

If you are a corporate sponsor and would prefer to send a cheque or do a bank transfer you can email me or call me – number is here.

This event is going to get some serious media coverage and sponsors will get very positive global PR out of it. As the world record is going to be formally submitted to Guinness World Records ® there is also the possibility of being associated with a long lasting record online. The value to sponsors could continue long after the event is over.

I will publish a list of major donors but in the meantime the Twitter list of sponsors here. (needs updating)

Tags #comment24, RNLI

End User fun stuff

wistful retrospectives and bold predictions?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 30 December, 2011
No Comments on wistful retrospectives and bold predictions?

I suspect that at this stage of the holidays I normally write a review of progress over the last 12 months (with appropriately satisfied noises) and put my mind to the next year.

Well this year all I have to say about 2011 is that it was another great one – they all are. No doubt there were ups and downs but hey, you have to get on with it.

So what sagatious pearls might I have to impart in making predictions for 2012? I am not a wise man. I can only say this:

“There will be a lot of change in 2012 and how you feel at the end of the year will depend on how you managed that change.”

Whether this is in business or in your personal life it is no different. New things will come your way. Try them out. Throw them away if they don’t suit but don’t sit on the fence muttering that things ain’t what they used to be. That fence is groaning under the weight and one of these days it is going to collapse. If you’re sat on it you can wave goodbye as you go down.

For various reasons we live in exciting times. This is probably the most exciting period of technology change I have known in a short life that has (and I am constantly amazed by this) seen the invention of the mobile phone, the personal computer, the internet, oh and penicillin¹ . The excitement may stem from the pace of change but believe you me that pace is accelerating.

So in 2012 embrace the change and make it work in your favour. Work hard, play hard but most of all don’t sit on that fence.

See ya next year.

PS sorry if the title was somewhat misleading -I’ve obviously been reading the tabloids to much recently

¹ only joking – not that old 🙂

Tags 2012, predictions

charitable Cloud End User social networking

The story behind the world record attempt #comment24

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 29 December, 2011
22 Comments on The story behind the world record attempt #comment24

This attempt at a Guinness World Records® Record all started back in November when I took a customer out to dinner to celebrate a bit of business. The customer mentioned that he read trefor.net and, to cut a long story short, I said that Timico would donate £1 to his favourite charity for every comment left by one of the staff from his company. I capped this at £100 – it was just a bit of fun. His favourite charity is the RNLI.

A glass or three of wine followed and we decided, as you do, that we would go for a world record. Considering this I upped the ante to 1,000 comments from his employees (£1 each) and said Timico would double up if we got a world record out of it. The record, whatever it was, seemed eminently doable. This customer has thousands of employees globally with many of them being industry analysts and commentators with large twitter followings.

I was sure that we could have a good time with this important customer and raise some funds for charity at the same time.

I woke up the next day thinking hmm what have I committed to

Tags Guinness, most comments, news, Records, World

Cloud End User fun stuff

2 days til Santa comes yay

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 23 December, 2011
3 Comments on 2 days til Santa comes yay

This is undoubtedly one of my favourite times of the year. When you are a believer like me the run up to Christmas Eve is very exciting. I start going to bed early and being a good boy so that there can be no question in Santa’s mind that he should be making that important stop in Lincoln.

The mince pie, carrot and brandy get put out before I go to bed and it always amazes me how Santa can get down what must still be a red hot chimney after that fire has been going all evening. The next day he and the reindeer have always scoffed the lot. Every year, without fail.

The run up to the big days is always busy and this year has been no exception. This week has been a particularly good one with a trip to see Paul McCartney at the last night of his tour in the Liverpool Echo Arena.

We also had the annual Timico management bash, this time at Stapleford Park.

Stapleford, if you have never been, is a stunningly luxurious country house hotel in Leicestershire – former seat of some duke or other and surrounded by Capability Brown landscapes.

You know what it’s like, champagne, cocktails, port, brandy, that kind of stuff. We’d do it more often if it was up to me.

We were lucky enough to be entertained by top international harpist Eleanor Turner who lives locally. Brilliant stuff though the team needs to stick to managing a business because carol singing accompanied by a harp is not their strong point.

The pic on the right is of me wowing Eleanor with my witty and erudite after dinner conversation.

It’s been another great year in business and on the blog. In fact it’s been a great year all round. To all friends out there have a wonderful Christmas break and I look forward to engaging with you anew in a slightly toned down January – life can’t keep going at the same pace when you get to my age you know!

I will be working between Christmas and New year – data centres to launch, world records to smash etc – so keep your eye open for news. Your help is required. 🙂

Tags Christmas, Eleanor Turner, harpist, Lincoln, stapleford park, Timico, Waitrose

Fish finger sandwich – a must when the wife is a way.