In a perhaps unsurprising move, Microsoft has chosen this Sunday to announce their latest .NET language: D_b.NET

The release comes a day prior to the lang.next conference commencing in Seattle on Monday.

Dubbed as vNext.NET the language features a number of key enhancements including the new Ostinato Framework,  Morendo Garbage Collection systems and Cantando Installer.

Read more about Db on the Next Language site, including the overview, tools and history of it’s development.

It’s always interesting to see how other people do things. Which is why I really like this video of the Microsoft TFS Agile team doing a daily stand-up.

Adam Cogan was able to shoot a quick video with the team whilst visiting them recently. There’s a short version and a long version (embedded below) based on his rules about daily stand-ups. It’s worth watching the full 12 minute long version. The interesting stuff starts around 1:46 (skip the guff with Adam at the start – he won’t like me saying that, but hey, he’s a good friend so I can get away with).

It’ll be interesting to see how people respond to this. Inevitably there will be discussion about what they do right and wrong – but I’d suggest avoiding that – instead, just find 1 or 2 points that can add value to your own process. Unfortunately discussions can descend into critiques of what’s correct – that’s fine, but while the ‘purests’ (as Adam refers to them) are yabbering on about the minutiae of scrum rules, hopefully the rest of us are actually getting on with doing something valuable.

Personally, I like the way they use a busy hallway to meet, and how they implement the ‘parking lot’. I also found the ‘schedule’ interesting (7:40) – I’ve not personally worked with multiple teams at once so it hasn’t been needed in my situations – but having a schedule means that the current team is forced to meet at the appointed time and be out of there before the next team. Not saying this is new, just that it is interesting to see in practice.

Gotta feel sorry for Greg though (see around 7:33 and 10:25) as Adam calls him out for a special rebuke and then lectures him on what he should have done. Good Lord! The slow-motion use of video is genius (cue Today Tonight evil sound effects!)

Ideally I’d like to have seen a week’s worth of stand-ups to see whether they incorporate any further items on other days (eg a Friday meeting).

Marketing Infographic by SEO Book

If you’ve experienced the DW024 error when attempting to install Adobe Photoshop or one of the Adobe Creative Suites, then the following may help.

The bottom line: Uninstall Adobe Reader.

First, here’s an example of the error message:

WARNING: DW024: The payload: Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Core {08EF22BC-43B2-4B4E-BA12-52B18F418F38} requires a UI parent with following specification:
Family: Photoshop
Product Name: Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Core_x64
This parent relationship is not satisfied, because this payload is not present in this session.

There’s also DW033 and DW036 variations.

I had this error when attempting to install the Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard edition, and it took me a while to solve the issue, so I thought I’d share the process I went through. Here’s the full set of steps I went through. Some may not be needed, but I’ve included all the things I tried that I think helped:

1. Uninstall your failed install from the Control Panel:

(The Size you see may be different – depending on where your install got to before failing)

2. Download and run the Adobe Creative Suite Cleaner Tool – this will remove any registry entries from the failed install.

3. Install the latest version of Adobe Air

4. Install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

5. Uninstall Adobe Reader (this was the big issue for me) from your Control Panel. In my case I had Adobe Reader X installed (the latest version even) but it was still causing a problem – possibly because the Creative Suite was trying to install Adobe Acrobat Pro.

6. Reboot your system. Yes, do this. Don’t skip it.

7. Try installing the Creative Suite again. 

I hope that helps – if so, please click ‘Like’ or leave a comment to let me know if it worked for you.

Life is a series of experiences. Some experiences are good. Some are bad.

Life is also a series of relationships. Some relationships end well. Some end… not so well. Of those that don’t end well, it’s only rarely that we get the chance to revisit them and find out what went wrong. To resolve them. To find closure.

This week I was fortunate enough to be given closure on a (business) relationship that went wrong a number of years ago. It had ended abruptly and badly, leaving me bewildered – floundering in self-doubt and guilt. A deeply significant event in my life.

But that all changed this week. In a brave move (for me at least) we met and talked. In fact, we talked until we had nothing more to say – we were talked out. And in the process I learnt a lot of things. Things I’d done wrong. Things I’d misunderstood. Things I’d never even imagined could have been perceived of me. Even things I’d assumed I’d done wrong but in fact hadn’t. Some hurt. But overall it was a wonderful lifting of burden. A lingering psychological wound was finally cleansed. Closure. It’s a rare gift.

So as the fog lifts, the walls fall down, the dam breaks, a new day dawns, etc, etc, the only question I really ask is: why did I wait so long?

If there’s unfinished business in one of your former relationships, perhaps it’s time…

Here’s the presentations from our annual SBTUG smackdown event held tonight. Most of the presenters have sent me their presentations, only a few left to add.

I wanted to say a big thank you to Nick Ellery (@nickellery) from Microsoft for looking after us on the night. Not only did Microsoft supply the venue (which they do every month) and free parking, but they also sponsored the night and supplied pizza and drinks for all the attendees (approx 60 people). Thanks!

As an aside: Without launching into a fanboi speech too much, I have to say how impressed I’ve been with Microsoft and their support of the developer community. I’ve been running user groups and events since 2004 and Microsoft has always been there to help with the venue, sponsorship and even prizes. Interestingly, not once have they tried to influence the content of the meetings – they simply provide resources, and then get out of the way to let you get on with it.

And now onto the nights presentations:

I kicked off the night with the following agenda (I’ve included it below because it includes a few links people may be interested in).

Then I gave a brief introduction to Content Management Systems.

And then dived into an overview of WordPress.

Next up was Aaron Powell who presented on Umbraco (Aaron is on the core team). An excellent overview of the benefits of Umbraco, especially for developers.

Ryan Cross was back for another year, to discuss the improvements in Drupal. His presentation will be available soon.

Ali Mohammed from Waratah Web gave us the lowdown on Business Catalyst with this presentation.

Next, Anthony Milner from Elcom, with a slick presentation covering the 3 main benefits of the Elcom CMS – Community Manager. See also Anthony’s blog post about the event.

Daren Hawes from Web Design Magic covered Kentico.

After a brief break, John-Paul Syriatowicz from Squiz gave us a look at the slick new interface in the Squiz CMS. He was kind enough to record his presentation – it is embedded below:

Finally, we ended the formal presentations with a minor miracle – Adam Cogan presented in 10 minutes – on SharePoint!.

It’s been a week now since Google Instant hit the news desks of IT blogs everywhere.

I’ve started getting a few questions from clients and friends about it, so I thought I’d put together a simple collection of recommended links, and finish off with some of my thoughts. There’s been tons of discussion of course, but for a good summary of the main points, the following 4 or 5 posts will serve you well:

SEObook – How Google Instant Changes the SEO Landscape

Aaron Wall has a good overview of the announcement and summary of the main effects (and if you are an SEObook member a very detailed analysis inside) as well as some interesting thoughts in the comments. Primarily it seems as though the changes are profit motivated, wrapped up in a ‘it’s faster and saves time’ ribbon.

Search Engine Land – Google Instant: The Complete User’s Guide

Matt McGee provides a good analysis of the user experience, covering what kinds of searches work well and which don’t, as well as how it works (it’s localised and personalised) and how to disable it.

John Ellis covers probably the main concern of SEOs: that Google Instant will reduce the number of long tail searches (ie searches with 4 or more keywords). His post – Will Google Instant Kill the Long Tail? is pretty much on the money as far as I’m concerned.

Danny Sullivan has a great post – SEO is here to stay, It will never die – where he answers the inevitable ‘does this mean SEO is irrelevant now’ questions.  Answer, no. Danny also puts Google Instant through the George Carlin ‘seven words’ test in this post.

PPCblog – How AdWords Counts Ad Impressions with Google Instant

Geordie Carswell clarifies how impressions are counted. Initially some advertisers were worried that their impression counts would be based on the instant search keystrokes. But as per the Google AdWords help, impressions are only counted when a user clicks, presses enter, selects a predicted query or results are displayed for 3+ seconds.

That 3 second rule… BTW here’s a possible gotcha – type a keyword term and hold the Enter key for 3 seconds. When you release you’ll be taken auto-magically to the first result (this result will be the first paid result if some are listed, otherwise the first organic result). Yep – in a competitive field, someone might be getting a bunch of unexpected clicks if they are in the first ad position. This could be good and bad. Good in terms of raising your CTR, bad in terms of sending you possibly inappropriate clicks. [Hat tip to the SEOBook forums (where I’m a member) for first discussing this issue.]

Matt Cutts – Thoughts on Google Instant

Finally, Matt Cutts finishes with a nice Q+A style post where he outlines why SEO is still important in spite of what some people trot out. Summary: SEO is very important, and gets more important every time Google puts out a major change (not to mention the hundreds of minor changes they release every year).

SEOmoz – strangely, no post from Rand on the Google Instant release…

Here’s the obligatory Introducing Google Instant video, complete with ‘zetabyte barrier’ and ‘magic’ references as well as footage of people being astounded by how useful Google Instant is – ‘oh look at that… I like that’.

To be fair, Google Instant is pretty cool. The impressive part is how they’ve managed to scale this out. As many have pointed out, the technology itself is not that innovative – Long Zheng had a similar concept he dubbed The Real Live Search (based on the Bing APIs) working over a year ago. And Yahoo had their own Instant Search plans as far back as 2005.

Instead what is impressive with Google Instant is how they are providing the results plus advertising so quickly. It’s a massive undertaking.

My experiences so far

Personally, as a user, I quite like the experience.

But putting my SEO and AdWords hat on, what are the effects?

It’s only early days so it’s not yet clear how big an impact this is going to have on SEO and PPC. In the private forums I’m a member of, the jury is still out, with people having varied experiences. With that caveat, I thought I’d share some of my own observations based on my own sites, and some of my clients’ sites.

The summary (thankfully) appears to be that there’s only minimal changes on both organic and paid fronts:

Organic

After a week I’m relived that our revenue producing sites have experienced little impact. Our organizing site for example has had a small decrease in organic traffic, mostly in long tail terms (which we rank really well for). This is understandable given that Google Instant is encouraging shorter keyword phrases. Users are getting results immediately – they get distracted and don’t bother finishing the longer phrase they might have otherwise entered (as discussed earlier).

The result of this is that I’ll probably start focussing on optimising for some of the shorter terms again – something I haven’t put a high priority on lately – as shorter terms in our niches tend to have lower buyer intent.

On client sites that have focussed on shorter terms there has been a slight rise in traffic. This is pleasing but isn’t significant enough to say is definitely Google Instant having an impact – it may just be seasonal fluctuations at play. It’ll take a few months to see whether the trends really pan out.

Paid

On the other side of the page (ie the paid results via AdWords) we’ve seem an increase in both impressions and clicks. Again this is understandable because in our AdWords campaigns we tend to be top heavy in the shorter terms. Our average CPC is also slightly up.  As our campaigns mature the terms head more to longer tail but when I’m experimenting and looking for new terms to target the terms are usually shorter (and broad match even!). Google Instant means I’ll probably be keeping short terms in campaigns longer…

I don’t run any local campaigns on my own sites, but I do manage them for clients – and this has been one area of noticeable improvement. The click through rate on location based ad groups started increasing on 12 September (a few days after Google Instant was released) – I assume as it started rolling out by default to Australian users. I’ve had specific location keywords jumping from less than 1% CTR to up to 20% in some cases. CPCs are slightly down also, so this is a great result… but I suspect this window of opportunity won’t last long as most PPC managers cotton on to it.

Summary

Overall then, the Google Instant changes haven’t had a major negative effect on my SEO or PPC efforts, and there’s even some positive opportunity in the local side of things. So, Google Instant will affect my approach in some areas going forward.

But What About Bing?

Does Google Instant mean I should focus more on Bing?

This shouldn’t really change your attitude to Bing. Because basically, if you haven’t been targeting Bing yet, then you definitely should be! But not because of Google Instant. Instead you should be targeting Bing because it’s now heading to the number 2 spot, and commands close to a quarter of all US searches.

I get asked all the time how to target Bing over Google. It’s not a simple question to answer of course, but when forced I usually mention that Bing tends to favour fresh links – so if you’ve got a blog that’s regularly updated and getting freshly linked to, that’s a nice advantage to have (over a static web site that has an aging link graph). Just sayin’.

I wanted to give you advance warning that we’ll be having our annual Web CMS Smackdown at SBTUG on Wednesday 29 September. Yes, September – roughly 6 weeks away.

This was one of our most popular events at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group last year. If you’re already sold on the event and don’t need to know anything more, then just pop over and RSVP now on our Facebook Event.

For those of you who might be a little lost as to what a smackdown is I’ll give a quick overview of the night and what we are aiming to achieve…

Aim

The aim of the night is to introduce attendees (usually developers, managers and business owners) to a range of web content management systems. We’ll aim to cover at least 6 of the most popular CMS available – highlighting their main features and target users/customers.

Format

Due to time constraints each of the presentations is very short – 10 minutes of content, plus 5 minutes to answer questions (while the next speaker gets ready to present). This rapid fire delivery is probably where the (silly) smackdown name comes from. I also think that smackdowns have an aim of finding the one best winner (‘one CMS to rule them all’) but that’s where we’ll be a little different – instead we’re trying to find the best CMS for your business (or scenario). You won’t hear speakers criticising other CMS, instead they’ll just be highlighting where their CMS is best fit. If you hear anyone saying their CMS is a one-size-fits-all solution you’ll know they’re talking porkies!

So, for basic web site needs we’ll be covering WordPress, moving to middle-size business solutions such as Drupal and Kentico, and then also briefly covering larger offerings such as Elcom and SharePoint. 

Too many CMS options

There’s hundreds (probably thousands) of Web CMS out there – so we can only cover a few of the more popular ones. Here’s the list of CMS I’m thinking of choosing from:

• WordPress
• Kentico
• Joomla
• Sitefinity
• Drupal
• Elcom
• DotNetNuke
• Umbraco
• SharePoint

Even this list is too many so I’ll have to prune it down. I’d love your thoughts on which ones you’d like covered – please leave a comment. Or, if there’s an obvious one that I’ve missed, please let me know that too.

Once the list is finalised, I’ll then be looking to find great presenters for each – again your suggestions in the comments would be valuable.

Why you should attend

I think there’s two main reasons to attend:

1. You are a business looking to find the best web CMS for your current situation – this night will be way to get a high level look at the popular options – plus meet people who can help you implement one.
2. You are a developer using a CMS now, but looking for guidance on other CMS offerings. For example, most of the web work I do is with WordPress but it doesn’t meet the needs of more complex sites. Every week or so I knock back work simply because WordPress is a bad fit for the requirements – instead I recommend they find a Drupal developer or SharePoint company. So, if you’re like me – then this night is going to be really useful – for example, I’m really keen to learn a little more about Kentico – I’ve heard great things about it…

You can help

I’d love your input to make this a really useful night. If you are keen could you please:

• RSVP here to say you are coming
• Help spread the word (via Twitter or Facebook, etc)
• Leave a comment with your suggestions and recommendations

Thanks again for your interest – last year this was a huge night. We’re hoping to make this year even bigger.

Image credit: WWE

Good leaders make tough decisions. They may not always be the right decisions, and usually not everyone likes those decisions, but they have to be made.

Ed Bott’s post – Good Microsoft versus Bad Microsoft – highlighted this interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal. It’s about how Microsoft decided to kill off some of the planned privacy bits (in particular what was enabled by default) in Internet Explorer 8 coming up to its release in 2009.

It’s interesting for a number of reasons:

1. It highlights how two divisions within the company had different ideas about where IE should go, and how the dollar eventually won out.
2. It shows that Microsoft IE planners were thinking strategically when it comes to improving IE. My respect for the IE planning team went way up after reading this.
3. It shows that at the end of the day Microsoft is a business, and IE is a tool foremost for building the business. You can’t make money pleasing everyone.
4. It’s shows how a decision like this is interpreted by the media and bloggers. Ed leans on the side of privacy. Others may lean on the side of profit.

Corporate Politics

The fact that there’s differences of opinion within a company shouldn’t come as any surprise of course. Nor should the fact that it became a heated internal debate – every corporate has internal politics and competition. There’s winners and losers. What’s intriguing about this little debate is how high up the chain it went:

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer assigned two senior executives, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie and the general counsel, Mr. Smith, to help referee the debate, according to Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist.

Improved advertising experience

On one hand I value my privacy, and on the other I like having an improved advertising experience. The better the ads match my interests and preferences the happier I am as a consumer. And if giving up some of my privacy enables that, then perhaps there’s a good case for it.

However, it’s also important to recognise that giving up your privacy become almost inescapable. For web companies (it seems) there’s a direct correlation between reducing your customer’s privacy and increasing your advertising profits. Google gets this of course. Facebook gets this. Apple gets this (watch them carefully in the coming months as iAds takes over the iPhone advertising ecosystem…). And of course Microsoft understands the dilemma.

Privacy versus Profit

With the exception of a few stumbles Microsoft has been very good when it comes to protecting it’s customer’s privacy. However in the instance of IE and privacy there’s almost a case to be made that if Microsoft didn’t make the decision it did, then they’d be doing wrong by their shareholders.

Sometimes it’s a fine line between upsetting your customers and upsetting your shareholders.

No particular reason for this post except to mention a few things I’m liking at the moment – feel free to move along now…

• Let’s Golf 2 – I’m not really a golfer, but this iPhone game has me hooked.
• Glenmorangie – taking a big risk and trying something different from my usual Macallan 12 yo, I’ve gone for a Glenmorangie Sherry Wood Finish. A bit stronger than I’m used to, but not too bad.
• Orianthi – surprisingly cool album from Adelaide’s guitar virtuoso. Is there any album John (Josh) Freese doesn’t play drums on these days?
• Good health – easy to take for granted… until you get sick of course. Michele has been really, really sick this past week (poor thing) so I’m particularly grateful I’ve managed to avoid it, so far…
• Chuck Season 2 – We’ve just finished watching Season 2 of this highly believable show: Nerd guy has CIA database in his brain and kick-ass hot chick as a sidekick. Plus Adam Baldwin. Good times.

What are you liking at the moment?

Image credit: dearbarbz