Financial & Travel Musings

Sometimes I look for photos to illustrate a blog post but the problem is that it’s a terribly time consuming thing to do.

You might think that with google image search it would be a doddle to get great images for blogs. A few years ago it used to be and I had photos on nearly every blog entry. The problem these days is that there are just too many images around and very few of them are tagged. Without those tags, the image search features just don’t work these days whereas in the past they didn’t seem to need the image tags.

Net effect of that is that it can take an hour or more to find an image to illustrate a post which is just too long unless you were making serious money blogging or had unlimited free time.

However, that said, I am experimenting with a new illustrated blog over at On a Postcard which I consider an experimental blog for a number of reasons. First is that I’m trying to see if I can attract image searches to the blog. That’s not always easy these days as some spammy blogs try to pull in image searches by packing the image name with unbelievably long lists of key words. Second is that I’m looking at the search terms which hit posts and writing more articles in the same subject area. Unusually for a new blog (well, for a new one of mine anyway), it’s already starting to attract hits but ’tis early days yet for it.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The problem wth social security benefits is that people generally just assume that they’re entitled to a whole bunch of things which, on the whole, they won’t be able to get or at least not in quite the way that they expect to get them.

For instance, you probably “know” that the social security system is an integrated one. It isn’t. Each benefit that you are entitled to is almost always administered completely separately from every other one. Thus you won’t get a single social security payment but will normally get a number of separate payments on different dates if you’re entitled to multiple benefits.

Moreover, when you claim, you’ll generally find that the knowledge about benefits in general is quite limited. If you claim unemployment benefit those people won’t know much about the additional benefits that you can claim for your children. For example, if you are entitled to income based job seekers allowance, you’ll also be entitled to a whole range of benefits including child benefit, child tax credits (really a benefit), free school meals, a uniform allowance for the children and housing benefit. In addition to this you are entitled to other things such as support for education and training costs and things like reduced cost admission to museums.

Don’t assume that these entitlements will go on forever though as some have stringent requirements applied to them.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When you’re British you basically assume that America is just a large island off the coast of Ireland and one that is clearly very similar to Britain.

Of course, it’s similar in terms of language and, largely, in terms of general culture too. But it isn’t exactly the same, nor is it just like one would consider a frontier off the coast of Scotland.

Most notably different is sales of things like barska scopes. Gun shops are a whole retailing category which basically doesn’t exist in the UK and the “right to bear arms” is something that is profoundly alien.

On the other side of the coin, travel agents barely exist in America in comparison to the vast numbers spread across the British countryside.

Popularity: 3% [?]