The Dotshop - A Small Business Incubator

Unlike his peers Martin Hatchuel is all over the net but he is still difficult to find unless one is specifically looking for Martin Hatchuel

A not entirely believable special forces action thriller

But credible enough to pass as an easy read. A book for a long journey.

Weaving the web for the Spiders.

Search engines use spiders to crawl the web looking for webs, that hold interesting and unique content. I can make beautiful and intricate webs for the spiders…..

I write because I enjoy it and particularly like taking complicated or mundane subjects and making them easily understood and somehow interesting. I have written for several years on the internet producing SEO articles. Length of copy varies from tiny tweets, comments on face book and small blogs of three hundred words to lengthy promotional articles of more than a thousand words.

Subjects range from international travel and hospitality, to finance, health, employment, property and so much more.

I write articles relating to original web content, and place them in ezine directories and link all of these together to create the spider pattern that the search engines love so passionately. This in turn raises the ranking of your website, bringing you traffic, making you money

ladyweb@askthelocals.co.za

Ruin Beach by Kate Rhodes is your stock standard, run of the mill ‘who dunnit’ crime novel.

A story set in a small island community, to pass the time by.

A novel based on the true story of Spinalonga, a leper colony established on an island off the coast of Crete.
The book is salvaged from deteriorating into a tiresomely predictable love story by the account of life on the island in the leper colony. That struggle between adversity and the emergence of the human spirit.

Not a particularly good book. Nor is it that well written. But I enjoyed reading it all the same.

Looks like it is part of a series and it gets a bit gory at times. But it is an easy light read. The writer is a good story teller. Set in fourteenth century London it is supposed to have some historical significance which may or may not be particularly accurate.

An excellent read. Well written, thought provoking, engaging.

Alternates between two narrative threads – one set in Virginia in the US, during and after the American civil war, and the other in the 1950’s as one of the characters retraces the path to his roots. Capturing the themes of conflict, oppression and ultimately resignation and reconciliation.

I felt that the author rushed the ending which was maybe a little too abrupt.

Fast moving, action packed, almost believeable.

Another book by an ex Special Forces author. Well written and not too over the top. A light read for those who enjoy the genre.

According to Google Nikki Ridley is the only journalist and ghost writer on the Garden Route which for “a nook of the country that offers inspiration to the writers and artists whose presence gives it a trendy flavour”, this is a pretty poor showing. But at the same time it should be seen as both a challenge as well as an opportunity.

A challenge that took me all of three weeks to get this site to rank alongside hers and an opportunity to add some real value to what I have started. It’s not difficult to do. To the contrary anyone could do the same with little or no training.

And this brings me to the point of this post. What is it that is stopping us from making use of these sort of tools to open doors into the global market place? What is stopping us from setting up and and growing a local cottage based industry that is not driven by the erratic and unpredictable tourist traffic everyone sits back waiting for? And this is a direct challenge to every single one of those would be ghost writers to change the way it appears not to be.

We are looking for a newspaper that will be kind enough to mentor us. To track and record our little successes and more often than hoped for, failures. We are looking for writers who will let us have short sharp monthly features of two hundred words or less in return for us promoting and marketing their sites and or services. We want to build a workshop for emerging writers that does really work and it can be done if enough people have enough reasons to make it happen.

It was going to be long flight there and back.

So I stocked up with what I could find from Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Books I can skim through. However I do worry that I should be looking for stuff that has a bit more substance to it. Chris Ryans work is readable although the tales are very much do and die.

Helps to pass the time.