Pebbles From Paradise

When Harry sent Stephen Bray a twitter message seeking his advice on marketing, this is how Bray responded.

If you want to know if it was Cartier-Bresson or Winnogrand who inspired me when taking the image above just click on it. It will take you to the original photograph I had in my mind to precede it in my presentation.

In Turkey many mosques, including this one, broadcast prayers, and accompanying roger beeps, on over-amplified, inferior public address equipment, thus obscuring the diction and creating a kind of pastiche of what might otherwise be a beautiful spiritual experience.

Those of you who have followed this journal from its inception will know that my inspiration is the incredible Alf Erickson of Corkscrew-Balloon.com. Alf has blogged every day for more than ten years. Hannah says South American briefs are most uncomfortable, but I don’t care! It is with great pleasure that I show a few [...]

When Alice left here a month back she left a copy of ‘Country Living’ in which I found an advert for a denture fixative. The advert featured an apple with a bite taken from each side. Who is wearing the dentures it asks? In Britain, for forty or so years, a huge group of committed [...]

Well, to be fair, it’s not Google per se but rather Google Groups. If you go to the Google homepage and click on the link that says: ‘More’, scroll down and hit the tab for groups instead of hitting the Google site you will find yourself with an anonymous looking 404 not found page. Google [...]

Not Twitter, But Strategic Profits! You may think I’m obsessed with twitter, but twitter is just one of the node networking strategies that pebblesfromparadise.com uses to maximise its visibility. I also post comments on any blog that I think merits a teaspoonful of my grey-matter. One such blog to receive such attention is that of [...]

The Fish Was Delicious We hadn’t intended to spend the day on a beach. It wasn’t planned, although we were ready because I own a little Suzuki jeep so we can off-road to locations that are inaccessible to folk with more prosaic vehicles, so perhaps I was prepared when Oğuz Bey invited us to join [...]

$1.2 MILLION to build a list of over 40,000 rabid buyers in less than 9 months When you look down the right hand column of this journal you will find a number of advertisements from Google Adsense. People who click on the links there are taken off this web site to some exotic destination that [...]

Mr Seth Godin, like your hero, is not one to be trifled with. When a restaurant puts him in a ‘bum’ table and refuses to give him a better one he blogs about it. Quite right too . . . . . . and gentleman, as he is, Seth does not name names, or establishments, [...]

Plain Sailing At The Family Business School, Despite Suffering With The Flu! Despite suffering with flu, and also buried in the chaos following the redecoration of the house, and replanting of the garden, I’ve slowly been working on The Family Business School web site. The desktop computer is out of action, but the laptops are [...]

An Opportunity Of A Lifetime!  The incredible Mr. Seth Godin strikes a helpful and optimistic note in his recent blog, titled: ‘Opportunity Of A Lifetime.’ I follow Seth because his writing always reflects both innovation and integrity. Indeed I probably have learned more from following his writing, much of which he gives away for free, [...]

Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham have written an intelligent document that describes how you may become a trendsetter, leader and highly sought-after consultant in your particular field. When I read it I was immediately struck by how many well known, and well-placed,Internet Marketers are using this formula to influence those of us in the field [...]

Sometimes I wonder when we’re going to give up the notion of “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for them?” Damla lent me a book purporting to be a translation of the words of the Dalai Lama, it even had his picture on the cover. Within it I found the following paragraph: When [...]

Sorry about the lapse in transmissions. Not me this time, if you want the full story you may read it here, and here. Anyway, we’re back on-line today. At least pebblesfromparadise is. The Family Business School web site got so over run by spammers in the time I couldn’t access it that I had to [...]

Rich Schefren the Internet based business guru has just released another of his free reports concerned with the reasons that people fail, (or succeed), in business. In a smokescreen of reframing and redefinition pegged to an historical account of the rise of technology and communication Rich is declaring the information age to be dead. Instead [...]

I’m Helping My Bank Thrive, Maybe? Damla came to have lunch with us today. She has a bad back, and a computer that won’t play the visual part of her new ‘Law Of Attraction‘ DVDs. For some reason whenever she comes here she insists on speaking solely Turkish, which in effect excludes me from the [...]

Our aviation correspondent sends news from the motherland: I brought tears to the eyes of the happy shoppers in Tesco’s yesterday, I wanted to purchase some software, having unloaded all my worldly goods at the till point, a mere £200′s worth, just enough to get through the weekend. I was told that I would have [...]

A new image for olive oil Emre Soylu, the International brand expert, has created a new web site for the olive oil business. His olive oil is pressed from olives grown near the village of Behramkale, from which the web site takes its name. You may view the website by clicking here.

Dear Friends, Christmas has crept up upon me with the stealth of the foibled cat, which crept in the crypt, crapped, and crept out again. I’ve missed the post. As a result, and in desperation to catch up with myself  I have started mailing the following to people on my many Christmas Card lists. Unfortunately [...]

My regular readers have wondered what has happened to their heroes here in the land of paradise? We are all fine, thank you – but a number of events coincided to render my writing here an impossibility for a few weeks. Firstly, Pebbles was moved to a new server. Theoretically this should be good, and [...]

Vehbi Koç Vehbi Koç deplored waste so he arranged for his refrigerator to be transported between his summer and winter residence. One day however he arrived at his summer house to find a new fridge installed upon the instructions of one of his managers. Koç telephoned the manager in something approaching ill-humour, but the manager [...]

“A bijou cocktail, if you please” Not only does Eileen from Public Domain Podcast read this venerable journal, it also it seems to have been read by Olivia Khwaja a customer relationship manager with British Airways, who kindly wrote to me today: We are pleased to advise you that travelling through and from Londonand the [...]

Are you an artist? Can you draw the pirate? I have to thank Gary Bencivenga for alerting me to today’s story. Gary is a marketer and copywriter who from time to time gives away free tips which he calls Bencivenga’s Bullets. One arrived today, it was about well lots of thing really but it concluded [...]

Did you know the rules of C. V. writing have changed? Employers no longer wish to see stodgy, irrelevant information presented in a uniform format that looks like the architecture of a spreadsheet. They require spark, originality, simplicity and honesty. Writing a good C. V. is a specialist skill and you should consider employing a [...]

A number of my small business clients suffer with lack of customers. What can I do to increase sales, they ask? I already have an advertisement in Yellow Pages. Now it must be said that I happen to like Yellow Pages because for many businesses and advertisement in them works like a credential. People think [...]

Well it’s out at last – the final chapter of Rich Schefren’s trilogy for Internet business owners. And as we’ve come to expect it’s concise, it’s relevant, it’s reader friendly, and it’s free. There are many terms that I don’t like in Rich Schefren’s trilogy. For example I don’t like the idea of being ‘strategic’, [...]

That incredible fireball Rich Schefren is about to release another free PDF e-book in the Internet Business Manifesto series. He says that this will be the third and final book in this series. He writes: Hey Guys, I’ve got some GREAT news. In just a few days, I’ll be releasing “The Final Chapter” of the [...]

Usually I’m not a joiner, but I’m not a loner either! I just don’t care to be organised although in the past I created a project that connected customers of Barclay’s Bank together in what might have become a thriving economic community. Some years after I left to live in Turkey Barclays scrapped the idea, [...]

In Internet Marketing circles there is much discussion about such topics as conversion, squeeze pages, up-sells and similar techniques. Software has been manufactured that scrapes the content from other peoples web sites and serves it up on other web pages in response to Internet searches. Marketers know scientifically how many people are likely to buy [...]

When Guy Bourdin or Helmut Newton were commissioned to photograph fashion, or even make pictures of cars or other machinery, they always managed to inject a sense of the macabre into their work. Of course they’re both dead now which is pretty macabre too! But when I get summoned to take a photograph of the [...]

July 2006 It’s gratifying to discover that there’s so much interest in my modest musings, for it was only a year ago that I started writing on the Internet. Today the stats are finally in for July, 2006 and they make very pleasant reading. During the month this site received 44254 hits, and 19264 page [...]

e900photography.com is packed with highly specialized content, but was not ranked at Google After receiving yesterday’s inspiring audio-product from Jon Andersen and thoroughly reviewing it I have been left almost numb with ideas for using other peoples writing, and also cannibalising some of my own earlier work. I’m not going to let the cat out-of-the-bag [...]

Rich is, I believe, an incredibly talented young man and I am not so much ‘pissed’ as disappointed. He has made several fortunes both in conventional and on-line business. Recently he has been selling an elite coaching based upon his knowledge of business systems. The free stuff he’s been giving away is wonderful. So why [...]

Not A Bad Place To Study Social Caswork, (or Geography, for that matter!) It seems barely yesterday, but it was over 30 years ago, that I trained in something called Social Casework. This is a concept, perhaps rather than a method, denoting the ways Social Workers used in the past to help people. The Casework [...]

There is a popular misconception on the Internet today that if you buy an e-book, or DVD on how to make a fortune on-line you must succeed. It’s probably true that if you follow the advice in products such as ‘The Rich Jerk‘, or even a free manual such as ‘The Work At Home Mother [...]

Guy Bourdin Rejected Transparency File It seems like yesterday that I was writing about how American Photo suggested that top photographer Annie Leibovitz was inspired to create a cover for Vanity Fair by the painting Le Dejeuner Sur L’herbe by Eduard Manet. In fact it was two weeks ago! Time passes quickly here in Amos. [...]

80% satisfaction, maybe? The Internet provides a fund of interesting, and irrelevant information. For example when you enter my niece’s name into Google she comes up on page one as the chairman of a select group of auditors, but nearby, (but now falling down the Google Charts), we find her globe trotting with her beau [...]

Beach Vs. Mountains According To Google Trends According to Google Trends the beach is more popular than the mountains. The statistics are based upon the number of searches made for terms including the word ‘beach’, compared for those including the word ‘mountain’. Here at Amos we are pleased to enjoy both the beach and the [...]

Living in Amos saps your focus but increases libido ~ read this post, if you dare!

An Unlikely Sign? Seth Godin published a useful link in his journal today. It connects to a nice article about logos and brand identity. It makes the point that a good logo won’t support a weak product, or service. True as far as it goes no doubt? To my mind those commissioning a logo, are [...]

Have You Seen This Man On Your Telly? An ex-flatmate Bryan, who is an American of Iranian stock and the possessor of an Irish pasport, the founder of the the United Kingdom’s Saucy Shakespeare Company, writes: Hello there lovely Stephen and Irem, Ages since we’ve been in touch…. I’m still hoping to come see you [...]

For Your Throat’s Sake! Scanning through the old copies of Lilliput loaned by Alpay Bey I was struck by the number of advertisements for tobacco products. Today these are banned but in their heyday tobacco ads produced some of the most iconic brands of their times. For example the Gitannes Man, taken by Alice Springs, [...]

Chopped Willys On Demand! Customer focussed communication was one of the buzz-concepts of late twentieth century management. I even wrote an ebook about it! But that’s not entirely what I want to write about. For today I’ve been experiencing that peculiar kind of melancholy that frequently precedes change, although the change may be as long [...]

Even after three days of tweaking the CSS code at e900photography.com I still find occasional items that need attention. For those of you who are not familiar with CSS the code looks like this and e900photography.com has several pages of it: .tabs ul.primary {border-collapse: collapse;padding: 0 0 3px 10px; white-space: nowrap; list-style: none; margin: 0 [...]

My newest website has attracted 90 guests and I don’t know how, or why?

Continuing our search for aesthetics in the Ukraine!

Here at Amos, Turunç, Near Marmaris, there always seems plenty to do, and time passes quickly. Perhaps this is because we’ve chosen to lead a life that’s pretty self-sufficient? We’re currently burning wood salvaged from the husbandry of the estate. This means that it must first be cut up by either a saw or a [...]

“The most important attribute of a good portrait is that it captures some individualism in the subject” Jorge Lewinski and Mayotte Magnus Some of my readers suggest that yesterday I was a little hard on BACP, who in a letter ‘inviting’ me to become a member chose to make the main subject heading a reference [...]

“…get off the wheel for a moment, discover where you are, and make a conscious wakeful decision about whether you want to get back on that wheel or not. Using our awareness, we can process the events that are happening to us. Otherwise, we are passive, unconscious witnesses of our fates.” Dr Arnold Mindell, Founder [...]

I was trying, rather unsuccessfully to teach a group of Turkish psychologists the art of Family Therapy, when Laurie appeared wearing vivid red lipstick!

Laurie Phillips is coming out of retirement and plans to set up a new business. He said: “I may well become teetotal – not entirely 100% on that yet!! but will try it for a while!”

Eventually there must be 500 people all dancing in this brightly lit pristine white studio, that’s 2000 arms and legs, when grouped together. And the man is still chanting, and the camera is still spinning, and the dancers are still dancing and I’m wondering what the hell it’s all for . . . and then?

Unforgeable I think not. The www.turquality.com web site is still under construction at the date of posting this entry.

The Turkish Beadle is about!

The Attractor Factor contains new material by Joe Vitale, as well as contributions from others, such as the one I made on pages 21 and 22.

Will anyone manage to design an elegant Search Engine Portal? Here are two attempts to do just that.

Years ago Mustafa Kemal’s government decreed that the head scarf was reserved as the apparel of prostitutes.Today this distinction is no longer is applied.

The authors of ‘The Big Moo’ are remarkable people in their respective fields yet, and they are donating the profit from this exceptional new book to three charities.

Demi Moore, been more beautiful. Tom Peters is, according to ‘Fortune Magazine, comparable to Ralph Waldo Emerson.’

Mahir is Turkey’s first Internet personality. Can his message of love once more rise in the ratings?

Martha Higareda is a very cool chick but Isn’t the purpose of this commercial is to sell pepper sauce, rather than simply to add cyber-spice to my life

The foot Hills of the Himalaya’s were the origins of the Turkish People who Travelled Here in 340 A.D.

Paul Goodman, the US poet and educator who like me was born on 9th September once said: “All men are creative but few are artists.” My name is Stephen Bray. According to Wikipedia I am a successful songwriter, drummer and record producer from Detroit. It is written there I befriended Madonna during her pre-stardom days [...]

Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read On The Internet

If you want to sell your product you must make the customer an offer that they cannot refuse.

The cola wars begin . . .

Whilst the search results for Pebbles From Paradise from Yahoo and Google are intermittent, MSN Search seems to be providing consistently accurate listings.

When someone uses my name and private e-mail address to send SPAM it’s time to take action.

Ülker the manufacturer of Cola Turka are running a special promotion. There’s also a link to the second of the brilliant Chevy Chase Turka Cola adverts.

When Ali Fuat Fidan, Mayor of Turunc launched an Internet Site, Stephen decides to launch a Turunc website of his own.

This advertisement for a Turkish Cola may have seemed uncontroversial had it not been for the Gulf War.

When Stephen saw the TV advertisement for Virgin’s High Speed Train he wondered could Amos Beach Club also be a setting for espionage?

It has been claimed that listing in Yahoo makes, or breaks, a website. Pebblesfromparadise.com is currently invisible. Is this sinister interference from Big Brother, or was it incompetence by Yahoo?