Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Garlik to Qdos

Whilst checking my credit rating etc. using Garlik. I discovered the folks at Vodafone have me in default for £34 from May 2002. This I’m now disputing with them, since as far as I’m aware I paid of Singlepoint(4U) (who my contract was with) in July 2002.

Garlik are also getting into checking your digital presence /social software rating with their Qdos site.

Obviously I just had to fill it all in! You add your login name for all the social sites (no passwords required) that you frequent, including your own website.

Then it displays a fancy chart with your so called Q rating:-QDOS rating

As you can see my Q is 7346.  I score highly for activity. But pretty low for number of friends etc. and lets fce it with a name like Geoff Jones and blogging very low for individuality 🙁

You also get the opportunity to compare yourself with other groups, I chose bloggers :-).

The guys at Qdos obviously need to do some work on the algorithm as they rate me higher than Jeff Jarvis (Q7290) and Matt Cutts of Google (Q6530) Matt only today, did a post about his 1.5million visitors last year!  and even Robert Scoble with his maxed out thousands of members on dozens of social networking sites is only at Q8297.  The top blogger is apparently Rob Malda founder of /. with a Q11,199

They claim “At Garlik, we’ve analysed the digital profiles of the nation and have made available a QDOS score for every UK adult”.

Lets hope it doesn’t get used for anything to serious at the moment.

Measuring up

I managed to get invited to a OHM event at the Saatchi Industry Lab in London on 28th November 2007 where the keynote speaker was Douglas Hubbard, inventor of Applied Information Economics (AIE). Douglas spoke about How to measure anything (which is also the title of his book).Douglas Hubbard

These are my rough notes..

An investment is a cost now with a benefit later.

First of all he defined measurement as an observation that results in reduction of uncertainty about a quantity (that is a measurement has an associated error bar)

Baysenian – each bit of data updates the measurement.

Bookies are great at assessing odds subjectively, Doctors are terrible!

You can easily train people, by calibration, to assess odds (decision psychology)

Computer managers are over confident – use too narrow a range in general – costs were measured more than uncertain benefits, small hard benefits measured more than large soft benefits.

Biggest risk decisions have least quantitative – only measure what they know – no benefits if no one uses it!

Once we determined what to measure we can think of observations that would reduce uncertainty.

Nike method – JUST DO IT – Don’t let imagined difficulties get in the way of starting observations.

Difficult – compared to what?

Ultimate non-random sample – their own experience.

“Its amazing what you can see if you look” Yogi Berra

  • Its been measured before.
  • You have more data than you think.
  • You need less data than you think.
  • Getting more data is more economical than you think.
  • Probably need different data than you think.
  • Your opinion about potential measurement of errors also has a lot of error!

Measure 13 things take 4th largest and 4th smallest you have 90% confidence in the answer.

Hubbard Chart

A very interesting and thought provoking speaker especially with the audience participation in getting people calibrated when ‘guessing’ quantities in bottle etc. He gave a few plugs for the TacAdvisory group who he does work for.

Still not sure how I came to be invited, guess they thought I was some high flying University Don!

Adding a favicon to wordpress.

After looking at my 404 statistics and noticing the huge number of failed requests for a favicon.ico file I thought I should add one!

I added the favicon (the little graphic before the URL in the bar at the top of the screen) to my site by:-

  • Importing the desired picture into the favicon.cc site, although you can design an icon on the site too.
  • Upload the generated favicon.ico file to the WordPress themes/nigarila folder.
  • Then added this line to the file header.php: <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” /> just before the </head> tag.

Hopefully, that will stay working! Many thanks to the WordPress help site for the code.

_______________-

Kiara emailed me on 240918 and suggested this one. 

https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/favicon-generator/

this tool allows you to create favicons from pictures that are up to 5 MB from either JPG, PNG or GIF or even from a gallery. It also lets you generate favicons for different screen sizes and resolutions at the same time.

Geoff on wikia

Jimmy Wales has just released his new open source search engine wikia, which he thinks will overtake google in the future. Although I’m sure Jason over at Mahalo would disagree.

I did my vanity search geoff on it. In google I tend to be in the top 5 for geoff. On wikia I’m at:-

Wikia results for geoff

So I’m not impressed 🙁 However, in true open source fashion you can see exactly  how  Nutch (the engine that wikia uses )have rated my little website:-

Wikia calculations for geoff

If you can understand that! Although I guess the spammers and sploggers will!