Firetop

Traditionally advertising messages accompany relevant content. When I was a marketing manager this was generally the way a publisher pitched a sales opportunity to me “We’re writing an article about corporate training, would you like your training courses advertised alongside it?â€? The web has naturally followed the same model as both print and TV in this regard; even the much-admired pay per click search model aligns adverts against keywords. Behavioural targeting however is something quite different; by monitoring a visitor as they navigate a website, tracking articles and keywords contained therein, a picture can be built up of a visitor’s unique interests. This information can be used to target advertising to a visitor wherever they are on a website - based upon their prior reading preferences and not just their immediate ones. (more…)

I finished reading Rudy Giuliani’s book on leadership yesterday having read most of it by the pool in Ibiza last week. The first and last chapters cover the tragic aftermath of September 11th in Manhattan, and I found these most interesting because they discuss how he dealt both emotionally and practically with such a massively difficult situation. However, you come to realise throughout the rest of the book (as Rudy did) that everything he learned and put into place up until that terrible time made him one of the best prepared people to see New York through the WTC attacks.

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I’m getting sick and tired of seeing journalists reviewing new websites and still referring to the number of ‘hits’ a website is receiving; it’s relatively meaningless data and does NOT mean ‘visitors’. Back in 1998 I thought technology editors might wake up to this by 2006 but it seems not. A hit is recorded in a server log file for every single file downloaded per page viewed on a website - this includes images like jpegs and gifs, .txt, PDF files and page includes themselves. Just opening this blog’s home page for example causes you to make around 50 hits. To give this some perspective let me put it this way - Firetop has received 106,463 hits in August - a journalistic field day! However, the number of visits has been a lot less at 2,118 from only 1,141 unique visitors. (more…)

With the clubbing bug still with us post-Ibiza, Suzie_Q and I decided to pop down to Brighton on Saturday night to see Italy’s DJ Benny Benassi at the Honey Club. The official promotional night was called ’sevensins’ and Benny Benassi (real name Marco Benassi) played a great set - he really seemed to be enjoying himself. Sometimes DJs can be far to sour faced but this guy was really smiling, at one point he was doing a lot of smiling at Suzie_Q - probably the Italian look that caught his eye so we moved… His final track of the night, a hard house remix of The Automatic’s ‘what’s that coming over the hill is it a monster?’, was fabulous. Unfortunately the Honey Club itself seemed to have gone down hill for anybody who wants to dance in a great atmosphere. (more…)

Now that we’re safely back home I thought it was time to write a review of the Bellamar Hotel in San Antonio Bay. I originally checked San Antonio hotel reviews on Trip Advisor before booking with lastminute.com - the reviews weren’t entirely wrong - the hotel isn’t full of lads, it’s clean, with a decent pool and close to the dog-end littered beach for convenience. It’s also only a fifteen-minute stroll down to San Antonio’s main square. If you’re a family and planning to go to the Bellamar hotel whilst keeping regular sleeping hours, then I’m sure you’ll have a nice ‘average’ break. However, if like us you’re planning on going to bed after 6am (post-clubbing) then forget it; this hotel’s cleaning staff shout up corridors, laugh and bang walls so much you’ll be cursing them with a pillow over your head, not to mention wasting the sunshine outside on missed sleep. (more…)

So in the early hours of Friday morning it was time to visit Cream at Amnesia in what we hoped would be a much better clubbing experience than the disappointing Gatecrasher @ Eden, and oh how much better it was! Amnesia is a massive nightclub that manages to pull off two large rooms with a great atmosphere, so many people just enjoying their music and not simply ‘on the pull’. It was pretty packed, getting space to dance in the main room to see Ferry Corsten or Paul Van Dyk was a bit tricky; Suzie_Q and I managed to perch ourselves on the corner of a stage beside a Spanish girl sat dealing her wares without so much as a care in the world… quite inconsiderate as she was taking up vital dancing space.

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I’ve made reference to Ray and May’s English Pub in San Antonio Bay quite a few times during our holiday, so they really deserve a post of their own. I would say that this little pub beside the hotel Bellamar was honestly one of the things we enjoyed most in Ibiza. A great place to get a few drinks down you while waiting for the clubbing hour to come. (more…)

On Thursday at around 8am we were rudely awakened by what I thought must have been a fire in a local fireworks factory - about three minutes of the loudest fireworks all going off in quick succession. I poked my head out of the balcony curtains and couldn’t see anything going on in the early morning sunshine so went back to bed. I’ve never heard of fireworks in daylight before, so I assumed it had to be an accident of some kind - perhaps a display going off early during set-up. Later that day I discovered that it was August 24th - the festival of St. Bartholomew, widely celebrated in Ibiza by early morning firecrackers and again later that evening with a huge fireworks display. Nice of the hotel to warn their guests they’d wake up to the sound of explosions! (more…)

The nightlife in Ibiza takes a bit of getting used to, clubbing doesn’t start properly until around 2am and it finishes well after 6am. Due to the shift in the hours we’re keeping I’ve felt a bit jet-lagged all week, and for the most part seem to require twelve hours sleep each day. We shouldn’t really have bothered to get breakfast included in the accommodation package as we’ve only been up early enough for that once - and even on that occasion we went back to sleep again afterwards. On Tuesday evening we went to the Gatecrasher night at Eden nightclub in San Antonio; a very different clubbing experience to El Divino in Ibiza Town… (more…)

After a few drinks on Saturday night in ‘Ray and May’s English Bar‘ (a Liverpool FC shrine beside our hotel), we headed off to Hed Kandi at El Divino by around 2am. We were tiring a bit after the 5am arrival earlier that morning, but as we´d bought tickets online we thought we best make the effort to use them (30 Euros each). Luckily, in the street, we came across a Mexican couple seeking a taxi to El Divino too, split the cost from San Antonio bay to Ibiza Town with them.

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