Buying a train ticket in the UK is fraught with difficulty. There are loads of different ticket types, depending on whether you want to travel at peak time or off-peak, first or standard class, and whether you’d rather buy in advance or at the last minute.

Just in case you weren’t confused enough already, sometimes it’s cheaper to buy a return fare as two separate singles. And it can be even cheaper if you split one single into two separate legs, even if both are on the same train. In short, it’s really difficult to be sure you’re getting the best deal.

This over-complex ticketing system is crying out for a website to make it easier.

Right now, each train company has its own website selling tickets. But most of them are based on the same underlying system – the one that powers TheTrainLine.

It’s really not that intuitive. When I tried to buy a ticket from Reading to Edinburgh earlier today, it gave me a choice of 19 different ticket types, ranging in price from £21 to £184.50. And it presented them in one huge table, with no advice about which would be the best for my circumstances.

Virgin Trains do it a bit better. They have a new website which seems to be bespoke. It claims to show the cheapest prices for your particular circumstances.

It certainly cuts down the number of options, but it’s still far from easy-to-use. You always seem to be several clicks away from actually making a purchase. And changing your journey details is difficult because the site’s not been designed with the ‘back’ button in mind.

Add in a random error or two (“Due to inactivity, this site has timed out. This is for your security.”) and it’s enough to make you queue up at the local ticket office instead.

Truth is, the Virgin site is the best of a bad bunch at the moment. The ticket model is screaming out for a decent online booking service to let you:

• Search just for the cheapest fares, or for flexible tickets
• View fares over different time periods, so you can see when it’s cheapest to travel
• Alert you (via RSS or an email) when the cheap tickets for the dates you want go on sale
• Enter a starting point and see the cheapest places to go to for a weekend away

The first train company to sort this one out properly will clean up. They’ve been doing it with plane tickets for yonks – why don’t they just get the people from Skyscanner or Expedia on the case?

Making the trains run on time is another matter altogether, of course…

So back to Facebook. Well, everyone else is talking about it…

A posting by Matthew Stibbe over at Bad Language got me thinking about about the security side of this popular social networking site. Then today I heard that my mum had been a victim of credit card cloning for the second time in a year. As everyone knows, two and two make five, so here’s a blog post combining these issues.

If I was a scammer (I’m not), I’d be seriously looking at Facebook as a potential source of income.

How? I think I’d try to take advantage of people’s natural tendency to want to add ‘friends’. I’d create a fictitious identity and try to add unsuspecting strangers as my friends. I reckon the line “don’t you remember me from school?” would get me surprisingly far.

Once I’ve got someone on my friends list, I’d probably be able to see their birthday in their profile (along with lots of other personal information).

From there, I don’t reckon it’d be too hard to convince some people to let slip a few other personal details.

Place of birth, first pet’s name, partner’s name … before you know it, they’ve given away everything I’d need to do a bit of telephone banking on their behalf.

I’m not sure anyone has tried this yet. But I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time until something like this happens. And so far I don’t remember seeing many security warnings on the site itself.

Don’t get me wrong – Facebook seems pretty addictive, and a great way of staying in touch with your friends. But before you release any personal information on there, just take a moment to think about how many people will be able to see it.

The Department for Transport has kicked-off its Act on CO2 campaign, to enourage people to think more about carbon emissions when they’re driving their car, or choosing a new one.

I caught one of the TV ads tonight and the call-to-action at the end was one I’ve not seen before. Instead of telling us to ‘visit actonco2.co.uk for more information’, the commercial directs us to ‘search online for act on CO2’.

When you put that phrase into Google, it seems they’ve bagged the top natural search spot, as well as the top sponsored link. Fair enough – they’ve picked a tag line and optimised the site so it’s highly ranked for it.

This approach does make some sense. It’s often easier to remember a phrase instead of a website address, and if you can’t recall the exact wording, a close approximation will often get you there.

But it does leave an obvious route for someone to mount a counter-campaign. A bit of concerted search engine optimisation work could probably push a different site to the top of those Google search results. And then the Department for Transport could find its ads promoting exactly the kind of behaviour they’re trying to discourage.

It would be interesting to hear if they’ve thought of this – and if they think the gains they’ll make from not quoting a specific URL will outweigh the damage done by conflicting websites appearing alongside their own.

(To give you some idea, the Association of British Drivers are already 5th-placed for that term, and I think it’s fair to say that they are slightly sceptical of the whole thing. With some work, I bet they could rise up the rankings.)