In amongst all the brou-haha about the Sun switching its mealy-mouthed allegiances to the Tories is one interesting little detail that was spotted over on Currybet.
It suggests that Labour and The Sun are already at war using Adwords as a battleground. The Google platform allows advertisers to buy up search keywords that will ensure a link to the advertiser’s site is displayed alongside search results.
Labour and The Sun have clearly been busy buying up ‘Labour’-related keywords, with the result that the first Adword entry is for the Labour Party under the title ‘You can’t trust The Sun’.
Underneath are the words ‘Wrong on Hillsborough. Wrong on Labour”.
I really love the semi-regular night in Liverpool when the city’s artistic buildings throw open their doors into the night. There’s a real festival atmosphere in town on these night, a little like the frisson on excitement on Halloween and bonfire night.
I went to see Tim Smit last night at the Phil, part of a series of lectures arranged by the University of Liverpool as part of Liverpool’s Year of the Environment theme.
I’ve followed Smit ever since I read his book on Eden, an extraordinary, inspirational book about one man’s fight with nature, administrators, economics, common sense and received wisdom.
As David Bartlett notes, Gordon Brown’s visits to Liverpool as PM haven’t always been the happiest of occasions.
Addressing the TUC today and telling them that public services will have to put up with some hefty spending cuts is unlikely to go down well either.
But Brown should use the opportunity to highlight some clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives going into the general election next year.
Look, I’m a big fan of food. I made an aioli dip all by myself to go with some fish I fried tonight, OK?
I love food, but I didn’t love the launch for Liverpool Food Festival today in Sefton Park.
I suppose in many ways it was a victim of its own success, but the congestion in the enclosure and queues evident throughout the day weren’t a lot of fun.
I spend a fair amount of time on Twitter, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere. Simply put it’s an amazing tool for connecting with interesting people, and it’s invaluable from a professional point-of-view, a hotline straight through to valuable marketers, PRs and journalists.
So, once in a while, I turn up to Twitter meet-ups to put faces to names, names to handles and handles to faces. That’s a lot of information to juggle in your head while making small-talk with someone you’ve never met before, but I like a challenge.
In case it passed anyone by, Tesco withdrew its application to build a store on Hope Street, after a significant amount of protest emerged online, focussed around a Facebook group ,which ended up with over 4,500 members.
In a rare triumph of people power, Tesco’s indicated that it was prepared to acknowledge the level of public feeling and look elsewhere for a new site.
I think it’s fair to say that few people expected the supermarket megalith to heed any complaints, but heed them it did.
Someone who must be scratching his head over all of this is
By Robin Brown
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08 Sep 09
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Posted in Life in Liverpool, Liverpool business, Regeneration
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I’m feeling a little vindicated in my view that the new Merseytravel ferry terminal and Beatles Story outlet is badly situated and unsympathetic to its surroundings.
Others have been more forceful in their views, and now the building has won the Carbuncle Cup, an architecture magazine’s award for the worst new building. Incidentally, One Park West – a building I think may be worse – was also nominated.
The ferry building is described as ‘a shining example of bad architecture and bad planning’ on the Building Design website. As I’ve said before, what constitutes bad architecture is open to debate and not something I’m qualified to judge.
But it should have been clear all along that the siting of the building as it has appeared was problematic at best: in front of the three graces and slap bang in the middle of a UNESCO World Fricking Heritage site.