The world needs more lerts

I am visiting my folks back in Belfast this week, so you will notice a drop in postings! You cant beat going home for a visit every once in a while. One nugget I have found today is googles extremely simple alerts system. Enter the topic you are interested in (make it as specific as possible) and how often you want updated. Then you will recieve an email say once a week with the latest news/blogs/sites with stories on 'the migration pattern of the lesser spotted snurzle'. Hmmm maybe too specific! Google alerts

mobile candyjar

Just tested candyjar and it displays perfectly on a small screen and even more impressive.... I can post new stories! But that is the silver lining on the cloud, as I live in a mac world and have only just got round to testing on PC and the template doesnt render quite as well as I would like... back to the drawing board!

Knowledge Management

Companies are starting to understand just how useful their own information is. Public sector clients have been buying expensive software such as Microsoft Sharepoint for years. Then after installing it realising that their staff can't be arsed using it. There is a core need that the majority of companies have: 1. Store internal information ranging from as simple as how to work the photocopier to their rules on booking holidays and pricing 2. Track client information, hours spent, passwords and contact details. Original tenders and spec documents. 3. To track tasks and hours, distribute and discuss documents in a collaborative environment At the moment most firms have their internal server and store everything in a myriad of folders. They have an intranet, which is kept up to date by the IT guy and contains basic information that is usually carved in stone. The other tasks are handled by expensive & complex CRM tools, sales and marketing staff often like it that way as it adds a certain depth to their position. In reality most companies need a system a child could use. If every client had a page on a site and every company policy had a page. If those pages had a simple edit button and everyone could add the latest developments then you would have a fully searchable system that the founder and the new guy could use the same way. Add some security, password protect certain pages and bobs your uncle. A lot of you will now know I am talking about a wiki. _____________________________________ But i have played about with mediawiki (the opensource system on which wikipedia is based) and when you click edit it is far from easy to use the simple editor. Also the system just isnt fluid enough. Its for techies, lets face it. In my search for the ideal system I look at a few possibilities and had a few requirements:

1. Simple wysiwyg wiki, add page, edit page, searchable
2. Ability to upload documents and discuss / versioning
3. Task list for each user
4. Possibly a billing system by hours for clients
5. Security, security security

(Future wiki's may also have the ability to create your monthly sales reports and marketing spend reports in a fluid way, see semantic wiki's) First up Basecamp from 37 signals: Not a bad solution, it can be separated into clients also, but lacks the freedom of a wiki. Also its web based, an internal server version would be preferable. Also its on a subscription basis and can get quite pricey: If you want to manage over 100 projects its $149 a month Next up confluence: Have a look at their list of features here This looks like the dogs, local hosted (behind your firewall) easy to use, based around the wiki idea but with a simple interface. Whats the catch? Well its not open source, the fee for 25 users is $1200 (gulp) So there has to be an open source Wiki, stored on an internal server with plugin like features and wysiwyg ease of use? I think I might have found it here: Twiki I will have a good look at Twiki and see what I think, if anyone has experience of it let me know. The Future? There is a golden child that I haven't mentioned. A ridiculously easy wiki, with plugins for a lot of the needs listed. Also they where developing a server version (it was in beta). That product was Jotspot just as it was about to blossom, Google have picked them up. So the server version has been canceled and while they move to the google servers you cant get a web version. You can read about jotspot and what it can do before Googles relaunch here. But if we leave this a few months, there may be a new powerhouse on the block, but I would bet my granny that they will want to keep your business info online..

Steve Jobs - Three stories from my life

Worth reading, not about computers. Steve Jobs:Three stories from my life

Disability awareness online

This was bound to start coming to the forefront. Usability online has a lot more to do with accessibility for all users than proving you can use css and getting on a digg post of the best 2.0 sites. In the UK all Public sector websites must be accessible. It is a stipulation on all public sector tenders. But how many schools, hospitals and councils websites are? Not surprisingly the states has lead the way with the public suing the companies that are not up to scratch: Bruce Sexton is blind. He would like to shop on Target's Web site, but says he can't "read" it. He says the site lacks certain coding, found on many other Web sites, that would activate software to allow blind computer users to hear audio descriptions of what is on Internet pages. Sexton, 24, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and the National Federation of the Blind are suing Target on behalf of the 1.3 million blind people in the United States. The suit alleges that the giant retailer discriminates against the visually impaired by violating state and federal laws that protect the disabled. The case draws national attention because it could have implications for virtually every retailer and business in the United States that operates a Web site. The case also fuels a wider debate starting to play out in courtrooms: whether anti-discrimination laws apply to the Internet. Read the full story

Getting Real

I mentioned a while back that I must pick up a copy of 37 signals book 'getting real'. Turns out they have it online for free. Thats handy! Getting Real

Increasing Search Engine Traffic by 455% in One Month

Chris Pearson at Pearsonified has a great post on how he increased his site traffic by a whopping 455%. Lets face it his site traffic already had a couple of thousand visitors a day more than candyjar. So this is quite an achievement! With my recent focus on SEO, this story caught my eye. I was pleased to notice that the details of how he did it are somewhat similar how i got candyjar up the google ratings. I set up in wordpress (built from the ground up for optimisation) and used not Chris's template but a style variant of the wonderful K2 template. After reading around I think my issue with google not picking up on candyjar as quickly as the others may be down to the sandbox effect. Although candyjar as my domain has been about for at least four years, changing my own dns & registration details and moving server may have jolted a few bolts at google. I think his move to wordpress brought attention in google to his older content and that coupled with google trusting the content on his site brought hundreds of new key phrases to the top of the listings. Read more about Chris's experiment:Click here Instead of trying to get found quick schemes you could stick to the top ten seo rules 

Online Business models

Online business models are to me one of the most interesting subjects on the web. Models are always changing, and it changes the web. Keeping moving with those changes can be very difficult, as Odeo are finding out. People are always using terms to justify new changes online. The most popular at the moment is web 2.0 That overused, little meaning term for me sum's up the teenage years of the subscription model. Online services have cropped up that are taking simpler tasks online. These are sometimes termed 'web products'. Recently the subscription model has been used to turn these products into high earning businesses. One such product that was there before the subscription model really took off was Blogger. A very scalable system where anyone can sign up and start their own blog. How did it make money? For co-founder Evan Williams it was advertising until he struck gold and they where bought by Google. The big machine eating up smaller smart companies is not a new thing only it used to be Microsoft, a few monopolies commission investigations lead to them re-evaluating their stance and setting up a very strong partner system instead. They still buy companies out of course, but they are a lot smarter these days. At the moment though, one of the main goals for a smart bright young company is to get noticed by Google and get bought out. The founder of Blogger Evan Williams worked for Google for a while, but then left in 2003 to form the pod-casting site odeo. I listened to his lecture at Stanford nearly a year ago and thought a lot of him. Well Odeo got bloated, lost direction. Evan says it himself, even going against the words in his own book “Ten Rules for Web Startups”: “ 'Be Narrow, Be Tiny', I was working on Odeo at the time I wrote that, and I was ignoring most of those rules.” You cant deny that Evan has more experience than most and even though Odeo has made mistakes, he is still ticking and so is Odeo. Evan has now set up a new firm to manage his 'web products', its called 'obvious corp' and they believe they are going to make the plates of the profitable web shift again: "We are attempting to create a new model for building and running web products. Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant. The models for how these types of companies build and launch products is fairly well-known—although some certainly do it better than others. My theory is that a confluence of factors are paving the way for a different type of company:"

• Sites are cheaper and faster to build
• The consumer web is increasingly hits-driven and increasingly crowded, which makes it more difficult to predict what's going to work.
• Sites that do get attention can make money with advertising and/or subscriptions.

The Obvious model goes something like this:

• Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.
• Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)
• Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently

It will be interesting to see what the next shift will be, while we are waiting why not check out Obvious

Task Management

Every single day I use the online app Remember the milk to manage my tasks. My boss calls it my Moo list, if you look at it you will see why. The beauty of it is that if someone sends you a task by email you can forward to your list and the title of the email is the task name, the content is the detail. You can print out the list for your monday morning meetings, its great. Its also based on simple priority rules. It just makes sense. The problem is its a website, while you can keep your tasks private there are still a few security niggles. This morning I found an open source alternative that can be installed anywhere. Even your apple laptop or your xp box, also the local kids will give it Kudos as it uses Ruby on Rails. Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL. Have a look at 10 tracks

Utube Sues YouTube

This story gave me a laugh, 68 million hits for a 17 man company. He he he A company inundated by millions of people looking for YouTube has sued the video-sharing site. Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., a Toledo, Ohio, company that sells, well, tubes and rollform equipment, said its Web site — utube.com – has had to change its domain names five times to evade the YouTube masses. The small company, with just 17 employees, got 68 million hits on its site in August. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Toledo, didn’t specify damages but asked that YouTube to stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube’s cost for creating a new domain. Here’s the nub of it: “Due to the confusion in the minds of consumers, the spillover of nuisance traffic to Plaintiff’s neighboring Web site at utube.com has destroyed the value of Plaintiff’s trademark and Internet property, repeatedly caused the shutdown of Plaintiff’s Web site, increased Plaintiff’s Internet costs by thousands of dollars a month, and damaged the Plaintiff’s good reputation.” Read the full story on WSJ