Zen and the Art of Prop Making

Deciding between quality or economic manufacture of products present a challenge to companies wanting to develop new markets. With money tight customers have to consider the pros and cons of quality or economic products. They are more likely to accept cheaper, lower quality products (or even dispense with them altogether) rather than spend a bit more on a quality product. A financially conservative approach may appear an appropriate path in the short term however the mid to long term consequences of economically driven decisions should be carefully assessed. A well made, quality product that is pleasing to the eye carries those qualities with it through time. Poor quality products may do their job initially but actually get worse over time. Any initial savings are quickly dissipated. Good quality or economic choices There are times when a product is used only once so its manufacture can be more cosmetic. Products of this nature are easy to provide as they can be quickly made w...

When searching for information on the Internet you want relevant content in your search results. Usually you get relevant content for your query in the first few pages of results. If the information you seek is more than 6 months old it will be buried beneath tens of millions of irrelevant results because it is deemed not relevant enough to make it to the top of search results. This makes the relevant content you are after virtually impossible to find. Google judges relevant content as content that is updated regularly as opposed to static content. An historical document is static content but it is still relevant content . Static historical content should be just as accessable as regularly updated content and should not be prioritised in importance by companies who control access to this information and have a financial interest in search results. Is this trend what we have to look forward to in the future? It's hardly a satisfactory state of affairs. "What's Hot" v...

Is all the time and effort that we put into blogs really worth the effort? We have an initial surge of literary largesse with their first blogging experience but I wonder how many of the plaintive "Hello world" posts have actually been read by a human? Does anyone ever benefit from blogs ? Considering the sheer volume of information available on the Interent today the vast majority are unlikely to become compulsory reading material. Am I too cynical? I'm probably just tired of looking at the computer screen. Working on a computer has an addictive quality and I can be, as a friend recently pointed out, doggedly obsessive when I'm focussed on a project. Blogs or bogs I personally don't like the word blog. It sounds heavy and cumbersome - a bit of a downer. Blogs conjure up images of swamps and bogs. Uploading information to a blog seems a contradiction of terms. Dump seems more appropriate. Like some primordial tar pit into which things fall and are then preserved...