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I'm a little bit miffed. I've been using it as a collaboration tool for the wedding (bridesmaid is 150 miles away) along with a wonderful shared spreadsheet in Google Docs. I'd just got all sorts of countdown widgets and timelines and whatnots in the Wave, now I find out that the servers will be turned off before the countdowns complete.

But even for a Google fan like me, it had so many flaws.

1) Unless you were using Chrome, you had to download stuff to make it work. This eliminated people who don't have administrator privileges on their work computers, and was off-putting to people who dislike or are not confident in making software changes. It also made it less portable - despite being on the Google cloud, you couldn't just borrow someone's computer to show them your Wave unless they *had* Wave already.

2) Using it was dependent on being in contact with other people who were using it. But because of the "invitation" scheme, I got onto it, watched the demo, and then sat there in virtual solitude thinking "ho hum, this will be good if anyone else joins." By the time I was given my first five invites to distribute, I'd pretty much wandered off to do something else, and by the time any of those people had actually *joined* (and several of them didn't because of point 1 above) the hype was gone.

3) It didn't integrate with Google Docs in any meaningful way. That's why I was having to work with both Wave and Docs as two almost completely separate things.

Still, I'm kind of hoping that the mothballing of Wave will allow for greater collaboration tools within Docs itself. Plus, there's several months notice, so I can get started on making sure I don't lose anything important. I'm disappointed but not devastated.

I must admit I'm very two-faced about parent blogs. I often find them entertaining to read, but at the same time, I'm sitting there in the smug security of knowing that the worst documentation of my own childhood is a few cringesome photographs, not tagged, not indexed, not backed up on Google's servers, just shut away in a cupboard where no school friend (or enemy), no future employer, and no future employee is ever likely to lay eyes on them.

I can't quite figure out what's so special about breakfast. Is it because everyone wants to pretend that they're far too busy to get together at 9am instead? Is it another way of eliminating people who have to do the school run before work? Is it just cheaper to get a conference room booked at that time of day?

On the other hand, if anyone hears of an elevenses meeting, or better still, an afternoon tea with scones and jam meeting, then I totally want to know about it.

Part of me thinks, ye gods that's appalling.

Another part of me wants to be damn certain that when people search for "swine flu what do i do" they get the NHS advice at the top of the list and not some dodgy online pharmaceuticals sales site.

But then... and I'm sure some of you SEO bods must know this... surely the whole point of .gov.uk and .nhs.uk domain names is to be the approved, official, trusted sites? So they must be treated differently by search engines anyway, without paying for SEO?

That's definitely what ours was - the shifts were arranged to fit in with the college/sixth form hours. Up at the front was a girl in her early twenties squeezed into a horrible polyester suit occasionally screeching "COME ON YOU LOT, LET'S GET SOME ****ING LEADS!" which was guaranteed to make whoever we were talking to hang up on us.

Aww, congrats.

I think it must work, otherwise companies wouldn't drop such vast sums of money into having factories of telephone operators doing hours and hours of cold-calling.

But I think a lot of the time it works because of deception.

For instance, when I worked in the double-glazing call centre trenches, we were told (for a while) to start our calls with "hi, my name is Mary and I'm calling from (well-known insurance company)." This meant that most of the people who would have hung up the instant they heard "Such and Such Windows" would stay on the line. We were then supposed to suggest that getting double-glazed windows fitted - with super-duper special locks - was a security feature recommended by (insurance company) that might, possibly, maybe, perhaps, in addition to increasing your home security, have some sort of effect on either your insurance premiums or payouts.

In retrospect, I'm fairly sure the two companies had nothing to do with each other, as after a couple of months an order came down from on high that we were never allowed to mention insurance or (insurance company) ever again.

I think it goes:
1. Do I have a conscience? If Yes, abort, if No, go to 2.
2. Am I targeting the gullible and/or vulnerable? If No, abort, if Yes, full steam ahead!

That is not the only typo in there. And according to Google Maps, there's no place or company called "Out" in New Delhi, so his grammar's buggered as well.

*sigh*

If only it were possible to find an online (or "virtual") copywriter, at a reasonable hourly rate, with a demonstrably good grasp of written English.



Of course, we all know you should never start a sentence with "and". However it is considered acceptable when used sparingly and to make a point, particularly in writing that has a conversational tone.

I think the problem lies in the assumptions and generalisations about what people will be capable of - mentally, physically, or in terms of their attitude - at any given point in their life. We're all hugely different, and I'm sure everyone here can recall meeting a sixty-year-old who looked eighty and a eighty-year-old who looked about fifty and had a sharper mind than we did...

Taking as an example, the web designer. Let's assume that some evidence exists to demonstrate that in general, an older person is less likely to embrace changes in technology than a younger person.

That does not mean that every older person is less likely to be able to deal with technical changes. It's quite possible that an older employee working in a rapidly-changing tech industry has been dealing with changes for the entire twenty years of his tech career and that this is an aspect of the field that he enjoys. He'll also have developed and demonstrated other 'soft' work qualities like experience, work ethic, company loyalty, proven trustworthiness, negotiating skills, customer rapport and so on that might not be so prevalent in a person who has only just entered the world of work.

Then again, you might find that your older employee has spent the last three years insisting that (whatever new tech) "will never catch on" and is refusing to go on a training course to learn how to use the new corporate software. But that's not an age issue. That's a "being a twit" issue. Being a twit is not age-specific.

So there needs to be a solid pension mechanism in place to catch those who don't age so well and by their sixties are no longer really able to work... by the same token we need to diminish the constructs that see hale and hearty people in their sixties being booted out of the workplace and onto a state pension when they are quite willing and able to continue earning their living. It's the one-size-fits-all assumptions that are the big problem.

(As for the pushing-trollies-in-Sainsburys thing, I suspect this is to do with demographic. If you're the CEO of BP and you've kept your

Himself suggests "KiddieKube" and feels it should have a round window, a square window, a triangle window...