Business Two Zero now @ biztwozero.com

This blog has moved and changed to WP

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:32:00 +0100

Business Two Zero is alive and well, hosted by Yahoo! Small Business in a new WordPress flavour, using Mike Little's Journalized theme. Come and find us at http://biztwozero.com

Blogging - New media value and SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:19:00 GMT

Dennis Howlett and I did a podcast yesterday about the basics of blogging, touching on the good reasons for doing it, Search Engine Optimisation, but also covering websites in general, and the marketing aspects around them. We moved on to the use of Software as a Service based systems in business and accounting, but ended with the importance of blogging as part of your marketing strategy. Dennis has called it New media value and SEO. Please have a listen.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, SEO, websites, media

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Are we heading for a Dot.com bubble?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:18:00 GMT

We definitely have a technology boom, triggered by the lower cost of entry for budding entrepreneurs, but some would suggest that must mean we are heading for a bubble that will burst. Chris Anderson has written an insightful piece in the latest Wired which suggests otherwise. He says:

"Companies are once again minting millionaires, but venture capitalists are investing less than a fifth of what they were at the 2000 peak. About 50 technology companies went public last year, but more than 300 went public in 1999."

And at the end of the piece:

"So there you have the recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble: a more receptive marketplace, lower costs, and lighter pressure from investors. Today, the typical exit strategy is to sell your startup to Yahoo! for a few million, not to maneuver for a rowdy IPO and an appearance on CNBC. Highway 101 is jammed with Prius-driving engineers, not biz-dev guys in Beemers. And most New York cab drivers are happily ignorant of what's hot in the Valley, just as they should be."

Please go and read the full article, and relax about the characteristics of the current technology market growth.

Technorati Tags : business2.0, web2.0, dot.com, SaaS, entrepreneur, VC

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Business Two Zero has moved and improved!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 02:06:00 GMT

I've just reached that point when I've outgrown this free Blogger service, and so have taken the plunge to switch to WordPress on my own domain. So, Business Two Zero is in a new place, with a new look and feel.

We have moved to www.businesstwozero.com or biztwozero.com - please follow the links, read the latest, and bookmark our new location.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, Blogger, WordPress, BusinessTwoZero

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The best of Web 2.0 of 2005

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:49:00 GMT

Towards the end of last year I missed Dion Hinchcliffe's review of the best Web 2.0 offerings he'd seen during the year. There are some I agree with, like Delicious, some I'm not so sure of, like Memeorandum, and some I hadn't heard of - Rallypoint and the online calendar products. I'm particularly interested in checking out the online file storage products.
Technorati Tags : Web2.0, Delicious, memeorandum, writely, basecamp, zoho, storage, flickr, digg

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This week's New Ajax Homepage

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 08:19:00 GMT

I feel I might be catching Listomania, a blogger's disease where you serially post lists from other blogs. I will keep taking the medicine. However, I spotted another list you might be interested in, but which also highlights two trends in the industry. A while ago I posted about the way that the Web 2.0 world has lowered the point of entry for Entrepreneur's to start a business, and related Joe Kraus' story - it cost him $3,000,000 to start Excite in the 90s, but only $100,000 to start JotSpot last year. Consequently we have new tech enterprises beginning at an almost alarming rate, which is causing some people to worry that another dot.com bubble is upon us. One of the new technologies that are being used more and more, in our own and other products is Ajax. There is a particular spate of Ajax based homepage products. Techcrunch reckons that they are arriving at a rate of 1 every 2 weeks. In this piece they discuss the latest entrant Wrickr , but also list 10 others. They are all interesting in highlighting the extra level of usability that is coming in web based applications, and in demonstrating the talent that is being released. It's not a dot.com bubble, but an innovation boom thatis upon us.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, ajax, dot.com, entrepreneur, Techcrunch, JotSpot, homepage, listomania

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Supplemental

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:18:00 GMT

For those of you who liked my guide to blogging, I'm planning a supplemental resource when I move off Blogger shortly. I've seen lots of lists recently, but I couldn't resist pointing you at Kevin Pierpoint's 10 Lists of 10 for Smashing Blog Success. There is some good stuff in there, along with some inevitable overlap. But actually there are 11 lists, so 110 ideas for your blog.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, SEO, marketing, writing, design

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Analysts who really understand Software as a Service

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 22:24:00 GMT

Here's something from Phil Wainewright's Zdnet Software as Services blog:

"There are plenty of industry analysts out there who will rent-a-quote about SaaS and on-demand, but only a handful really understand what it's all about."

So go and read Phil's thoughts on 8 you should listen to.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, analysts, business, business2.0, on demand

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Top 10 Beautiful Physics Experiments

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:39:00 GMT

Now this doesn't have much to do with business or Web 2.0, but it's an interesting diversion, that I'm sure will spark an idea for you. Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. This site shows, with nice graphics, the top 10 chosen by those scientists.

Technorati Tags : Physics, experiments

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Zoho - the web based document writer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:24:00 GMT

After Writely and ThinkFree, I've come across another interesting online alternative to Word called Zoho Writer. This has a very neat interface, which I assume uses AJAX, and some very interesting features. It looks like a combination of the best components of the other two. You can invite people to collaborate with you on the document, and it retains full version control. The service is free and you store your documents in your own folder style storage area. You can print documents as PDFs and even publish them to the popular blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.

Zoho also has a family of products that do collaboration, CRM, to-do planning and application creation. I'll be investigating these further over the coming weeks, and plan a fuller review of Writer.
Technorati Tags : Zoho, Writely, ThinkFree, SaaS, blogging, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress

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Now we have Microsoft Live, does that mean that their old products should be re-branded Microsoft Dead?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:35:00 GMT

This is one of the excellent lines spoken by Marc Benioff, the CEO & Chairman of Salesforce.com, at their European launch of Winter 06 and AppExchange today at the Portman Hotel in London. It's the first time I've seen him speak in the flesh, and he is certainly a very direct and straight talking individual, commanding the stage and interjecting in to the presentations on several occasions. He had plenty to say disparaging Oracle, SAP and Siebel for their lack of understanding of the new paradigm, or as he calls it "The End of Software". By the way, have you seen the great game they've created on their site to attract disaffected Siebel employees - it's akin to the arcade game where you wallop an animal on the head - go have a look.

The session started with a US TV interview of writer and journalist Thomas Friedman explaining that we are at the "Mother of all turning points". His argument is that the combination of the digital age of the PC, the new world of the Internet, and the availability of workflow software has flattened the World and created the Business Web. This must be one of the threads in his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which also covers globalisation and the after affects of 9/11. At one stage he commented that "geeky guys are predicting this is the end of Microsoft", and after the recording Benioff professed to be one of those geeky guys, and agreed that's what he would be doing today!

The rest of the session presented the latest flavour of Salesforce.com and a number of customers explaining how they are using it, and partners demonstrating their add-on applications that are available through AppExchange. They are trying to make this platform like an iTunes or eBay for applications, both in terms of a development platform for partners, as well as a distribution mechanism to get their products to market. They even managed to have one of the demonstrators online by webcam and web demo from his base in South India. I'm sure the organisers were relieved when that worked!

There were some very good demonstrations of how you can integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that have a proper web API, with other applications with a web API, such as Google maps. These are called mashups, and they can look seamless to the user, as well as being inexpensive to do.

Overall the key message was strong. The world of SaaS, or as they call it "no software" is definitely upon us and the old guard better watch out.
Technorati Tags : Business 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Benioff, Friedman, Oracle, Siebel, SAP, iTunes, eBay, mashup, on demand, ASP

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Does the Internet need a health warning?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:15:00 GMT

Or at least an accuracy warning? Publishing anything on the Internet is incredibly easy, without the checks and balances and editorial control applied in the traditional media. That's part of its beauty, but it comes with some risks. That means that you need to take care in how you use the words you'll find, and sometimes corroborate your sources in the way a journalist would before he published anything. Hear are some examples of what I mean from major to minor.

Wikipedia is a really excellent resource. The encyclopaedia written and kept up to date by us. However, it is not perfect and contains widely publicised inaccuracies. There was quite a furore back in December. Wikipedia's own pages now explain the issue:

The John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy occurred after an anonymous editor posted a hoax in the Wikipedia entry for John Seigenthaler Sr. in May 2005. In September, Victor S. Johnson, Jr., an old friend of Seigenthaler's, discovered the entry, which suggested that Seigenthaler may have had a role in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

As you might imagine, this generated a lot of heat. Danah Boyd on Many 2 Many tells some more about the story, and it has led to some changes in editorial procedure at Wikipedia. In some areas the resource is quite amazing, but in others you need to take care. My football team, West Ham United, is listed, but until a few days ago it was described as a semi professional team (original entry clearly written by a Spurs, Arsenal or Chelsea supporter!) but the page has just been updated by some Happy Hammer - thank heavens.

Back on 3rd January, Robert Scoble caused a stir from his blog by castigating his own company, Microsoft, for taking down Zhao Jing's blog site in China after government pressure, and then backtracking on his comments. Corante has a good analysis of the events.

To get away from assassinated presidents and global politics, on a more mundane footing I recently referred to a comparison of blogging software in my "insider's guide to blogging", only to be told by a colleague that there are inaccuracies in the chart. Whether this is because things have changed since the time the author penned the article, or because of her lack of knowledge, I don't know. However, for me it is a lesson learned to take care, issue disclaimers where appropriate, and check my facts like any good reporter. As with many things it's caveat emptor. Oh, and that's one you can look up on Wikipedia and get the right answer.

Technorati Tags : Internet, accuracy, Wikipedia, Siegenthaler, Scobleiser, Corante, blogging, WHUFC

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 02:12:00 GMT

What do I do now?

So you've been inspired to start a blog, you believe the ROI messages from Part 2, Part 3 has helped you choose a platform, but now what? This section gives you some guidance on the key things you need to do to make this a success, and points you to plenty of resources that will help.

First, you've got to get the purpose of this new blog clear in your mind. You might be selling something specific, or you might be taking an indirect approach and promoting your expertise in a particular area so that potential clients like what they hear, want to work with you and check out your company. You might be sharing expertise around your organisation, or you might be using the medium to connect directly with your customers. Whichever it is, get that vision clear in your mind.

Next, give the blog a theme. It might include your musings and rants, but give it an identity around something that you're passionate about. There is an enormous amount of content out there, and you need to make yours worthy of people's attention. That will happen if yours gets mixed with your enthusiasm and passion.

Get a domain name of your own. Blogger and TypePad domain names are OK, but you wouldn't start your company site on Geocities would you? In any case, you will almost certainly want to switch platforms at some point, and this will be easier if you've got your own address.

Get in to the habit of writing and set aside some time every day, or week. If you want your site to get noticed, you need to feed it, so it can feed the audience and the their news aggregators.

Cross post and comment on as many sites as you can. Make sure your site is easy to access, with RSS feeds, Atom, or a subscription option, or all of these. Have a blogroll of blogs you read and people you like. There is an interesting rule in blogging - the more you send them away, the more they'll come back. So the more you connect with other bloggers, the more they'll connect with you, and that will improve your ranking.

And the topic that seems to be missed by so many bloggers - apply the rules of Search Engine Optimisation. In simple terms you want to get noticed by the search engines. That is more likely to happen if your blog titles aren't esoteric or clever, but say what the topic is about with the appropriate keywords. Your post should have those key words peppered around in prominent places. That, combined with the links you'll manage to get from those other bloggers who are wiser and more popular than you will enhance your page rank in Google, and bring more traffic to your site.

The good news is that there are plenty of advisers out there to help you. Here are some:

Dennis Howlett's take on the do's and don'ts for an accounting practice.

Darren Rowse is the problogger from Australia. He writes half a dozen successful blogs, and has plenty of advice for the more directly commercial blogger. Here's a selection from him:

18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging
Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days
Social Bookmarking - Getting your Blog Noticed
Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources

Take a look at Aaron Brazzell's "The Blogger's Primer".

Thirty Stories up has their "7 Mistakes for your First Week Blogging".

This is Jakob Nielsen's "Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes".

And here is Mary Hodder's "A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work".

Presentation Zen asks "Where can you find good images?".

You need to do enough preliminary research to get the feel of what style and level of detail is going to work, but then just jump in and join the Global conversation.

If you missed them, here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, marketing, SEO, problogger, AccManPro, Cluetrain

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The Software-free Computer?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 02:05:00 GMT

How far away are we from the Software-free Computer? With Software as a Service solutions available for most applications we can get pretty close, but we'll still need things like MS Office on our deskstops won't we? Actually, no! With ThinkFree Office Online you get an equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint called Write, Show and Calc that are a Microsoft Office-compatible suite. What's more, for the basic service, they are free! It must just be worth checking out.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, Office, ThinkFree, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Write, Show, Calc

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 01:42:00 GMT

Which platform should I use?

With the tools available you could set up your new blog and be operational within 10 minutes of reading this post. It wouldn't need to cost you a penny, and there won't be any adverts on your site - unless you want to sell something! Even if you decide to go for one of the premium service options, we are talking a few pounds, euros, dollars a month. The technology is easy to set up, the online editors for your content work well, and it's reasonably straightforward to syndicate your content to the world with RSS. For the small or medium business, this is a low cost, low risk exercise to add the concept to your marketing mix, and to start having an online conversation with your market and customers.

There are perfectly acceptable free services available like Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress.com. These are a good place to start. Blogger gives you all of the basic features you'll need, gives you a fair choice of template styles and allows you access to the template code itself. This means that with a little care and very modest knowledge of HTML you can customise your site's look and feel, to add links, add feeds, add skype buttons, add almost anything. Most of the useful utilities you can subscribe to provide you with the HTML to copy, and guidance on where to paste it in the template. WordPress.com gives you a good range of styles and templates, and is nicely configurable, but does not allow access to the template. So you are restricted in terms of look and feel and placing extra features and plug-ins, but it does have the concept of pages, as well as posts. You can set up as many pages in a hierarchy as you need, just like a Content Management System. This makes it easy for you to describe your business in as much detail as you need, alongside your regular blog posts. Either of these will work well.

The next level up is a product like TypePad, from Six Apart. Their pricing is from $5 to $15 a month, depending on how many blogs and authors you want to be involved, or to get extra features like photo albums. This offers a good range of features, templates and configuration, as well as access to the templates to add in those extra goodies.

The next option is to download blogging software yourself, so that you can take control of the templates and style and get the look and feel you really want. You could choose a commercial option like Moveable Type (MT), which is actually the software used by the TypePad service, or an open source (free) offering like WordPress.org (WP), which is the software used by WordPress.com. MT's pricing starts at $70 for a basic personal option, right up to $1,300 for a commercial licence for 50 users. WordPress just costs you the time and effort to download and install it. In both cases you'll need to budget for hosting the software. However, there are options for either WP or MT with Yahoo! Small Business, where you can rent appropriate server space with the capacity and bandwidth you need, and have either product installed and kept up to date for you.

Here is a good blog software comparison chart, (UPDATE: please note, Dennis Howlett tells me most of the no's for WP on this chart can actually be done with available plug-ins) and the accompanying article by Susannah Gardner which asks "Are you using the right blogging tool?". MT and WP are discussed in some detail by Vinnie Garcia in "Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed".

A recent poll of about a 1000 readers of problogger showed the following spread of platforms - 37% Wordpress.org, 22% Blogger, 8% Movable Type, 4% Expression Engine, 3.5% TypePad, 3% Wordpress.com and 49 different platforms in the survey.

There seems to be a phenomenon that bloggers start with something simple like Blogger or TypePad, but then after 3 to 6 months they feel the restrictions, and move up to something better. Stuart Jones recently moved his BusinessMatters blog from Blogger to TypePad. Dennis Howlett started on TypePad, but recently moved his AccMan Pro blog to WP. I'm about to move BTZ from Blogger to WP. The good news is that migration appears to be straightforward, with guidance available from platform to platform. Both Stuart and Dennis have good experiences in their transition, and that seems to be the norm. I hope so, but I'll tell you more on that once I've lived through it.

These products make it very easy for any business to get a web presence. I've noticed a number of companies recently setting up a blog site, and not bothering with a traditional website, for example GlobalBrain. Last night on the drive home I thought about my own accountant, who has an embarrassing holding page for her website, awaiting her technically minded husband to find time to finish the job. While I was thinking about this article it occurred to me that she could set up a WordPress.com account, start a blog, but use the tabs and pages to get some web presence explaining what she does. She had set something up within 30 minutes of my call. I won't point you to it until she's got some sensible content written, but it shows the power and ease of this medium.

The next in the series is Part 4 , which give you some ideas on how to start, things you must do to help make your site a success, mistakes to avoid, and some important words on the topic of Search Engine Optimization. If you missed them, here is where you find Part 1 and Part 2.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, RSS, Blogger, WordPress, Google, TypePad, SixApart, MovableType, Yahoo!, BusinessMatters, AccManPro, GlobalBrain

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Complete list of Web 2.0 applications

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:48:00 GMT

This might be useful - Virtual Karma's (reasonably) complete, alphabetically sorted, list of popular Web 2.0 applications. The description for each of the application is taken from their own About or FAQ pages.
Technorati Tags : Web 2.0, Business 2.0, applications

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:46:00 GMT

Is it worth it? What's the ROI?

Well it is a big regular investment in time if you are going to make it successful, and a nil to modest investment in technology, with excellent free or low cost services and tools available. Part 3 will cover those technology choices, but is it worth it? In the best of guerrilla marketing traditions, a resounding YES!

A Web log created by Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon has helped build a community of enthusiasts, some of them far away from his traditional markets in Britain. It turned his ailing local business in to an Internationally known phenomenon. Go to English Cut, see the PR it has helped create or listen to the podcast (and while you are there, sign up for his newsletter).

Blogging has doubled Stormhoek's wine sales (a South African brand) in less than twelve months.

Robert Scoble has a major impact blogging for Microsoft.

Big Blue bit by the blogging bug and now Christopher Barger is IBM's "blogger in chief". He is helping lead the computer giant's efforts to make everyone in the company familiar with blogs.

On 17 December 2005 in his 3 month progress report, and just before he moved from the Typepad platform to WordPress, Dennis Howlett wrote of his AccMan Pro, accounting practice oriented blog:

"As of close of play today, we've had 6,270 visits with 13,350 page views. And I've now penned some 297 articles, receiving 84 comments. Thank you all. It's shaping what I do."

I wonder what point you are at now Dennis? I would guess the pace is increasing.

Some other commentary you can look at:

Blogging ROI: Building a Customer Base from Crossroad Dispatches.

What's the ROI of blogging? from Collective Conversations.

Or what's blogging's r.o.i.? from Gaping Void

And lastly, to demonstrate the power of this stuff The Best Blonde Joke Ever

If you missed part 1 it's here . The series carries on with Part 3 - plaform selection and Part 4 - key lessons and SEO.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, ROI, English Cut, Stormhoek, AccManPro, IBM, Scoble, Typepad, WordPress

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Actually, it is Del.icio.us!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:12:00 GMT

Now that Del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo!, I really thought I should give it a try. The power of being able to get at your bookmarks from any PC helps me enormously in many of the projects I do, and the ease of tagging them for finding later is a jump ahead of MyWeb 2.0 which I was using previously. If you haven't looked at it yet, make the time, and you could read this interesting treatise on how it could help you - The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users.

Technorati Tags : Yahoo, MyWeb, Del.icio.us, social, bookmarking

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The Power of Passion

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:59:00 GMT

I don't see enough passion in business these days. I was talking to an old business colleague today, and we were discussing a company we both used to work for, and we were bemoaning the fact that they don't have a clear product strategy that's voiced with passion by the man at the top. I suggested this outfit's strategy was little more than making sure they make 10% profit next year. A laudable goal, but hardly anything to get excited about, or to make you feel part of something special. They're a traditional software and consulting company of course.

Over at Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds is talking about it:

The best presenters I have ever seen were not trained actors or professional presenters (though they may indeed present a lot). The best presentations I have seen were from everyday business people, designers, or researchers who (1) had a clear interest in their topic and about sharing it with the audience, (2) had their material down clearly and accurately in their minds and in their visuals, and (3) they displayed a clear passion for the material and made warm connections with their audience, connections that were undoubtedly sincere.

He goes on to say you can't fake it, and it's not about being perfect, but passion matters!

Technorati Tags : Passion, presentation, business, Presentation Zen

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You need some PureText

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 02:41:00 GMT

With most blogging and many CMS programs, you can hit all sorts of formatting problems with a cut/paste from Word. The mess of codes that Word uses can give unpredictable results, so it's normal (and a pain) to copy text in to Notepad, which strips out the codes and leaves the raw text for you to select and copy again. I'm indebted to Sabine at CT Biz Blogs who tipped me off to Steve Miller's PureText. This free plug in sits in your system tray and does the equivalent of the cut/paste in and out of Notepad for you with one click. Excellent!

Technorati Tags : productivity, blogging, CMS

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:14:00 GMT

Introduction - get blogging!

When I started writing this blog back in October it was triggered by conversations I'd been having with Dennis Howlett, along with the realisation that roughly 80,000 new blogs are created each day, and that Blogs mean Business. Here is a wave you need to catch! I firmly believe you should consider starting a blog today, but more importantly you need to understand how this phenomenon is changing the world's of media, marketing and in turn business in general. For any organisation on a tight marketing budget (which is most!) it can be an asset to your guerrilla marketing plans providing you avoid certain mistakes, get the right advice, and recognise that you are starting something which will need constant and consistent effort to make it successful.

There are plenty of resources you can access or books to read on the topic. For example, two of blogging's leading lights Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have just written "Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers".

Over the next few days and weeks I intend to be posting a series of articles on the topic, and pointing you towards some of the better resources there are on the web to help you out. One of the choices you'll need to make is which platform do you start on. This blog is currently powered by Blogger, which is great free service and as good a place to start as any. However, if you are serious about blogging, you'll soon outgrow it and want to change to something more powerful. I'll be journaling my thoughts on this, the decision process I'm just going through on which platform to choose, and then how painful or easy the process of conversion is for me and my site. I hope to have moved on to a different platform well before the end of January, but we will see.

I know that just talking about this post has already triggered one of my blogging chums to write a piece on the issues around taking on blogging for your company. One of the beauties of this medium is the way the conversations can interconnect to add value to the message you are trying to communicate. If you haven't researched this topic already, put some time aside this week to find out more.

Update: For the rest of the series, you'll find them at Part 2 - why and ROI, Part 3 - platform selection, and Part 4 - key lessons and SEO.

Technorati Tags : blogs, blogging, Blogger, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, AccManPro, marketing, Business 2.0

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The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:21:00 GMT

Just before Christmas I attended a customer briefing with one of our business partners, who were explaining their revised product strategy and other issues for that client. The ideas and information exchanged were all great, but the PowerPoint slides were unreadable. They would have been excellent as a supporting handout, but most people in the room couldn't possibly read them. Why does this happen all too often?

Way back in 1988 (when I was an IBM agent) I attended a fantastic presentation laid on by IBM on presentation skills by the best presenter I have ever seen. He is David A. Peoples, and I immediately bought his book Presentations Plus, which I still refer to regularly. My copy is the first edition from 1988, the currently available edition is 1992, and some reviewers criticise it for being written in the pre-PowerPoint era, when we used flip charts and foil projectors. I suggest this is a positive advantage. Much too often these days, when people think about their presentation it is in terms of the particular content and flow of their PowerPoint slides, when they should start by thinking what do I want to say, and what is the best medium for getting that message across?

I'm indebted to David Tebbutt's blog for tipping me off to Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint. Here is what Guy says:

"I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc."

In these days where PowerPoint is the medium of choice, this is an excellent maxim, but don't forget to spice up your approach with some extra visual aids that don't appear up on the white screen. Buy Presentations Plus, get some ideas from places like Presentation Zen, and do something different.
Technorati Tags : presentations, Tebbo, Guy Kawasaki, PowerPoint

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Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Tomorrow I'm with a customer facilitating a design workshop for their new website. I know they are keen that their new site makes a striking first impression, but I hadn't realised quite how important that is until I saw this research on Nature.com which says that potential readers can make snap decisions in less than 50 milliseconds:

"Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions."

Read the full article, but try and take a very quick look at your own site with fresh eyes.

Technorati Tags : website, design, marketing, Nature

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Vandalism strikes everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 13:50:00 GMT

My local parish council (Sandridge Parish, St. Albans) have decided to support renewable energy initiatives and publicise the concept by installing and using solar roof panels on one of our (Jersey Farm) community centres. A laudable idea, but the day the installation was due to finish some fine member of our community put a brick through one of the panels, so now there is a wrangle over insurance and repairs, and the extra expense of installing polycarbonate sheeting for protection.

On my last post I mentioned the Million Dollar Home Page, but wondered why the link didn't seem to work. I discover that poor Alex Tew's well publicised site is under intense DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. I don't know what that is, but it is enough to bring the site down, as measures to prevent that aren't part of Alex's service package with his ISP InfoRelay. The article I read suggested:

The attacks are coming from computers worldwide, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, Weiss said. The attacks could be the work of a botnet - a network of computers illegally commandeered for sending spam and DDoS attacks.

It sounds like InfoRelay are trying to help (they'd have a PR disaster if they didn't!), and doing more than they've been paid for:

InfoRelay has been in contact with law enforcement about the attacks, and has worked with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation before, Weiss said. "We don't like to see this," he said. "It is illegal."

Don't you think this is appalling? Whether it is the brick flung by some disaffected youth, or these cyber vandals, spammers and virus creators, it means that we all pay for it in the extra protections we have to fund, or the extra work it generates for our companies and governments in the clean up. It's the reason why my company has to pay for a team sitting in The Hague monitoring our systems 24/7 for potential hacking attempts like this. Entirely necessary, but such a waste of the world's resources, not to mention the creative energy that goes in to these things that could be doing some good.

Technorati Tags : hackers, milliondollarhomepage, DDoS, InfoRelay

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The SaaS Debate and the Business 2.0 wave

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 10:11:00 GMT

In recent weeks and months there has been an element of debate on AccountingWEB and various blog sites around the SaaS topic. Several of the players from traditional software vendors like Sage or Pegasus have weighed in, as well as contributing editors from the site itself, and don't forget some of us from the accounting and business community at large. Over on AccMan Pro, Dennis Howlett is taking it further with a series of pieces on "The Nightmare Scenario" of how this is part of several disruptions collectively called Business 2.0 (which is what this site's all about!) and how it, with Web 2.0, will change the business world that our kids are growing up to join. If you've got teenage kids, they need to know about this, but maybe they are ahead of you and are already thinking of ideas like Alex Tew's Million Dollar Home Page that has been so much in the International press in the last week.

AccountingWEB, to their credit, have come up with the excellent idea of setting up an Oxford Union style debate around the SaaS topic. It's a great idea, and in the context of what normally happens around these kinds of discussions, it's different!

On a site called Cluetrain, there are some fine words that relate to the topic:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."

They also have a manifesto with 95 theses. It's worth some of your time to trigger some ideas, but here are a few of them:

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

I believe 2006 is going to be a year of change, and you'll hear a lot more about this debate. But more importantly, join in with it, find out about it, and prepare to make some changes in your business approach to catch this wave.
Technorati Tags : SaaS, Business 2.0, Web 2.0, ASP, debate, cluetrain, AccountingWEB