Financial & Travel Musings

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The price of weddings seems on a never ending spiral upwards with not only inflation to contend with but increasing requirements for little extras around the main business of the wedding too.

So, as well as the wedding invitations, you now need to send “save the date” cards so that people can pencil the big event into their diaries even further in advance than they used to. Those bits of admin mean that it’s not uncommon to need a wedding planner to pull all the various bits and pieces together so that the day is a success.

Even for the main items it’s becoming more of a hassle with the need to co-ordinate the bridesmaid dresses with the rest of the stylistic features of the wedding.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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% [?]