Technology

information & communication technology

Skype Journal Launches

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Stuart Henshall at Unbound Spiral has launched a new community around Skype, the free Voice over Internet Protocol system that lets you speak from one computer to another computer anywhere in the world. You can also call regular telephone number for a very low price.

Concurrently Skype growth has accelerated with over 2m active online and some 40m minutes a day. New products both hardware and software for Skype are emerging daily. Each day Skype adds another 130000 users. With 24+ million Skypers the majority early adopters, computer literate, these are the current change agents for the communications society. While for the most part tied to desktops and headsets they will become part of a mobile social communications revolution.

This burgeoning market needs representation, and a vehicle for sharing news, product updates, industry views and counterpoints. Skype is also proprietary, it is pointed out again and again that it is not SIP, and similarly security and business applications are frequently raised (usually by competitors). These are important issues, and the blog world has enormous power to influence where a company goes and how it develops. I’m listening for counterpoints!

I find it interesting, and very McLuhanesque, that this company has launched to support a community that uses a proprietary software application. It’s third-party marketing, customer lobbying and developer support all rolled in one; and the company (Skype) is not even involved in this venture. However, Skype could really benefit in an active relationship with Skype Journal, and I’m sure that they understand this. Definitely one to watch.

Aliant Mailserver Down

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Aliant’s mailserver has been down all morning :-(
There is no information about this on their website, which gives you the Aliant stock price, but nothing of use to a customer. Time to change ISP’s!
News on the radio says that there is a power problem, which will be fixed today, tomorrow, or whenever.
15:30 local time – server up and running :-)

I’m still available: hjarche at gmail.com :-)

Do You Have a Company Blog Strategy?

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According to the Wall Street Journal, "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back – Small Firms Find Tool Useful for Recognition, Connecting With Buyers".

Instead of maligning blogs as being written by a million guys in pyjamas, the WSJ states:

The blog as business tool has arrived.

Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business’s online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level — and keep them visiting a company’s Web site regularly.

Those inside the corporation/company/organisation/department may want to consider what Robert Paterson has to say:

Imagine you are a senior executive and one of your 20 old staffers asks you about whether we are going to have a Blog Strategy. You are surely going to be stumped.

I continue to be amazed at how busy people in corporate life are. The sad thing is that they are so busy that they don’t know what is going on and will find this a mystery

Blogs are not a mystery. You just have to start with the premise that markets are conversations, and go from there.

Comments temporarily disabled

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I’ve disabled comments on this blog for a while, as I’m still getting a lot of comment spam. It does not get posted to the site, but I still have to clean it up in my comment queue. I cleaned out 65 this morning. You can always contact me via e-mail: hjarche at gmail.com

OpenOffice.org 2.0

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For the adventurous, OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Beta), the free, open source office suite that is compatible with MS Office, is now available for download and testing.

This one is our candidate for the first OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta. It needs further testing and QA. If no showstoppers are found, it may be selected as our first public beta release. These builds need testing and your feedback. There are no guarantees.

It’s available for Windows and Linux, but not yet for Mac.

* March 4 – "The OpenOffice.org project is pleased to announce that the first public beta release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is now available for download." This includes a Mac version.

Our Own Reformation

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Robert Paterson has put together many of his thoughts on social software and societal reform in an excellent synthesis entitled, “Going Home – Our Reformation. Rob’s article begins:

I was in a meeting this week with a group of “educators”. We were talking about Communities of Practice. I mentioned blogging several times in the meeting. At the meeting’s end, one of the participants approached me and said, “Every time you mention blogging I get annoyed. It is only a fad and will never affect education.”
I believe that it is not a fad. I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the printing press.

He continues with a number of current scenarios that show the desperate conditions we have created, and then goes on to show how targeted, local initiatives can get us out of this mess. The future that Rob sees for Prince Edward Island could happen almost anywhere, and he describes the kinds of grassroot projects that are possible and feasible. Rob’s description of the new schooling model is an example:

The School Revolution — As with seniors, the revolution in PEI schools did not happen as a result of any deliberate project to transform schools. What is happening is that a series of projects designed to engage children have taken hold. This work did not even take place in the regular school day but in the afternoon. The afternoon has become a place where children can do the one thing that they really love. They choose and then the community tries its best to find people who can take them to a place of great expertise.This idea had its start in two areas, Theatre and Sport. Theatre PEI began a community program in the afternoon to awaken kids to the thrill of theatre. At the same time, Sports PEI began a similar program to offer the average kids more opportunity in sport. All this work was organized and expanded by the use of local blog sites that were designed to engage the local community. The resources came from adults who lived close by.

Take some time to read Rob’s article and see if it makes sense to you. Either way; please make a comment. This is just the beginning and Rob has given us the first draft of the blueprint.
Here in Sackville, the town is going through a strategic planning process – once again. Our downtown is in decline, due in part to competition from the nearby Trans-Canada Highway development of fast food restaurants and drive-through shopping. The new highway also makes it easy to go to the big box stores and shopping complexes in nearby Moncton. Much of the discussion that I have heard to date is focused on the symptoms, not the root causes of the decline of the community. Instead of debating the problems for another decade, we now have some concrete examples of what we can do in Sackville (The Commons Network; The Media Revolution; Local Food Networks; Seniors College; and The Consulting Revolution) . Rob’s examples provide a starting point to initiate conversations on how to create our own future.

Thank you Rob, now it’s up to us.

One Down …

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I started this blog one year ago today. I committed myself to write for at least one year on a regular basis (~400 actual posts).

I had had some other niche or project-specific blogs prior to last year, but almost all of my posts have been on this site for the past 365 days. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the benefits of blogging for me and there really aren’t many negative aspects, other than the time commitment, so here comes year two :-)

Thanks to all of you who have helped me stay motivated this past year with your visits, comments and referrals.

Blogs for Traditional Businesses

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During the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to once again take to the airways. Along the way I met some very interesting people and the talk usually turned to business. I explained what I did and several people were quite interested in blogs, particularly in order to reduce their e-mail, increase their reach or gather competitive intelligence.

Naturally, blogging has been taken up by the IT industry, as reported by the media; but brick & mortar industries are less in the news. The Tin Basher Blog, about a sheet metal company in the UK, is a notable exception. According to the Tin Basher, there is a direct return on investment on blogging for this company:

If we’re being conservative, we’ll say there’s been a 10% increase since we incorporated a blog. And, we’ll also say that it costs 10% of that 10% to have me write it, maintain the other websites and pay for hosting etc. And, once we get the next order we’ve been promised, that figure suddenly rises to nearer 40% of annual turnover, but without any increase in cost.

This is concrete and tangible, which you may know really appeals to me. It also makes sense to Will at GoodBasic, who has been discussing this issue and offers services around business and academic blogging .

I think that we have reached the tipping point on this technology, which has been tested by the Innovators & Early Adopters and we are ready to bridge the chasm to the more conservative majority. Using social software like blogs or even wikis is no longer about technology as software & hardware but rather technology as the application of organised and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. There is a growing market for those who want to know how to use blogs for business – without the hype or geek speak.

Blogs + webfeeds + podcasting + iPod Shuffle = Business Solution

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The guys at Infosential, a UK-based technology consultancy, have developed a great way to piece together some simple technologies (blogs, RSS, MP3, iPod Shuffle) in order to create a seamless competitive intelligence solution for a globe-trotting client.
Here’s the problem:

Our client is the classic Type-A personality, time-poor, stressed executive with too much to do and too little time to do it – he spends most of his life on planes in transit between meetings. He needs to keep up with the key developments in competitor intelligence, but gets very little opportunity to sit in front of a screen to browse through reports. Neither does he want to drag a large pile of paper around with him.

The solution, according to Tim Ducketts, starts by monitoring a variety of web-based information sources and recording the ones that may be of interest for their client. These recordings are made available as an RSS feed and the client can access these 3-4 minute recordings from anywhere in the world and then easily transfer them to an iPod Shuffle. The Shuffle measures 8.4 x 2.5 x 0.84 cm, which makes it pretty darned small.

This kind of a practical solution to a real-world problem validates the many hours of my monitoring and testing of new technologies, often without knowing where it will lead. In the end, I try to offer similar solutions that link a few of the right technologies with some innovative process and a little bit of insight in order to help somebody out. Well done Tim & Wayne.

Taking back the Web

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So how powerful is the blog as a marketing tool?

One year ago I had about 50 visitors per month on this site. Today, I have more than 30,000. I just did a search for "harold" on Google, and of over 11 million articles, I am now on the first page; the last entry, but still page one. I know that this is a bit of vanity and I don’t believe that this position will last [I may have been kicked to page two already], but the lesson here is that I have spent no money on advertising nor marketing.

I write 3-10 short articles per week and I participate in conversations that interest me. I have not paid for search engine optimization and I have not hired any marketing specialists. I’m just doing on the web what previously I was doing face-to-face. This is the power of blogs; to extend our reach while retrieving our sense of community.

Now this great honour of being on Google page one does not equate to market share nor additional revenue, but it shows how some guy in a small town in Atlantic Canada can be part of the global village. This is the power of networks, as discussed in The Cluetrain and recently evidenced by the over 25 million downloads of the free, open source web browser – Firefox.

Yes, Virginia, we can take back the Web.