Our clients occasionally ask us how we come up with the cost breakdowns in our estimates, and since we’ve just changed our process for that, we thought it might be an opportune time to explain how we arrive at them.

Estimating is an art, not a science, and honestly, a lot of the time, it really is just plucking a number that feels about right from the air. Yes, you’re guided by hard-won experience, but every project is different, and they’ve all got hidden pitfalls. Estimating is hard, and takes time and skill.

Until now, anyway. Now, the bright sparks at A Few Men Internet Solutions have come up with a typically brilliant idea that will revolutionise the business of providing time and cost estimates, making estimates both easier to produce, and much more accurate, so we’ve decided to switch over to using it. Now, instead of holding laborious planning meetings, trying to put hard and fast times and costs to vaguely understood requirements, we’re going to do something much simpler and easier, which should result in savings that we can pass along to our clients.

We’re going to ask a badger to do it.

Prominent UK blogger Tom Coates wrote an excellent and impassioned post about the way corporations interact with bloggers on Flickr the other day, one that’s probably worth thinking about if you’re considering trying to use bloggers to get some word-of-mouth buzz going as part of a promotional strategy.

Some companies (particularly in the consumer electronics field) have been doing this for a while now in various forms - sending (or offering to send) certain target bloggers free samples in the hope that they’ll say something good about their product. What we’ve seen of these deals do generally seem to be in good faith - the bloggers aren’t generally under any expectation to say anything good, or anything at all.

But of course, this word of mouth is only good because bloggers are generally seen as non-corporate sources and many bloggers pride themselves on that. These are their personal sites, after all, and the notion that they might be for sale, or even percieved as for sale is something that anyone who prides themselves on their integrity is likely to find offensive.

And even if you can find a willing blogger, then there’s a strong possibility of backlash if it should even come out that this word-of-mouth reputation that your building began with paid advertising. One thing that the blogosphere tends to pride itself on is honesty, and anyone seen as trying to subvert that can easily find themselves being talked about in a much less positive light than they might like.