I quit my job today.
No, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. I have given 6 weeks notice, intend to part on good terms and I have a long term plan. I just thought that I would start out this post with a rather sensationalist line. A hook, if you will.

I’ve been working at the bank for a long time. I’m only 24 years old, though I always knew that I wanted to work in IT. I joined the bank for that reason, and I accomplished it. In that time I’ve managed to do some exciting things. Some boring things. But above all get real experience in the field. I had previously worked for NTL, providing technical support for their internet customers, this is where I first dipped my toes, professionally. Of course, I have been designing websites since 1997 and I started to learn my first programming language at the tender age of 6 (BASIC on the Commodore 64).

I leave my position on the 1st of May with no job to go to. Not at another company, at least.
In the past 9 months I have been dabbling with freelance work. After doing some unpaid work to bulk up my portfolio and some favours for friends of friends and with other contracts now in the pipeline and ready to go, I decided that I want this to be my new career goal. To become a self-employed, or freelance, web application programmer.

In the next 6 weeks I will be launching at least two separate ventures.

The first, which will be my primary business, is web design and programming under the moniker ‘Pixelfreedom‘.
I created Pixelfreedom almost 8 years ago as a base for my photography portfolio. I still think this is a good name for a creative organisation.
Under this banner I will provide services to clients to provide a solution to the technicalities of their desired websites.
In layman’s terms, this means the clever stuff that goes on the in the background. Making a website ‘interactive’, being able to sign up, log in, upload your photo, add products to your basket, checkout and pay. All of the kind of stuff that you probably take for granted when using social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. This kind of thing takes many man hours and a lot of code in the background to achieve.
Along with this, as you would probably expect, is the part where the site is made pretty and functional at the front-end, for the user. This will also be something that I will be offering as a product of my labour.

The second venture will be provided under my own name, Nathan Collins, which will run from one of my other websites, ‘nate.me.uk‘. For this I will use my considerable knowledge, expertise and experience in the field of online marketing, advertising and social networking to consult companies on their brands use of these tools.
This means advising clients on the best use of Google Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other means of conducting ‘viral’ advertising, and running the campaigns, which can be so very effective if used in the correct way.

The next few months will be a roller-coaster ride for me. I have been in full-time employment continuously since leaving college aged 18. I have learned many skills along the way and continue to learn new things every single day of my life, which is something that I relish continuing to do, as no doubt I will, especially considering the line of work that I am in where knowledge is most definitely infinite.

Now that the biggest step has been taken I will be carrying on at this momentum. Next week I am having my business cards printed up and will be filing forms to register myself as self-employed.

I hope you all wish me luck, continue to read hintofsarcasm while I go through this big transitional period and of course recommend my services to anyone that you come across that may require them :)

When robots are given the job of choosing advertisements, unfortunate placement is one of the risks.

On the right you can see one example, found on icWales.co.uk, a Trinity Mirror group website, that in the age of keyword based selection, things can sometimes go wrong and insensitive or inappropriate advertising can be displayed, something which would rarely happen in a newspaper or on television, where advertisements are placed manually by humans.

One way to counter this would be to use blacklists, as well as a keyword list. A list of words which, if found on the page, should prevent the advertisement from being served, instead, moving to the next in line. For most, this would be a very simple piece of code to implement and would do wonders for the credibility of the advertiser.

Google adwords already has this capability and would imagine that Yahoo!’s answer to the Google service, Yahoo SM (Search Marketing) would employ a similar facility.
However, it seems that Trinity Mirror control their own advertising using scripts and pulling banners from DoubleClick. Perhaps this is a feature they should look at building into their back-end?

Just when we thought that Facebook could not put a foot wrong, rather like Google of the first five years, they overstepped the mark with Beacon and now James over at The Laboratorium has come up with interesting reasoning to condemn Facebook and Blockbuster for breaking the law by collecting and distributing video rental information in an ‘opt-out’ scheme, incriminating stuff. And if the sums of Mark from Mashable are anything to go by, the two companies could be in some substantial trouble if the any number of people decide to start class action lawsuits.