flaminglacer's mutterings

West Midlands MeetUp

flaminglacer — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:50:45 +0000

I’ve just got back from the West Midlands MeetUp in Evesham, tired but happy as they say. It was a great afternoon and well worth the effort of organising it.

We were a select band with a widely differing range of experience, and all kinds of different skill sets but it made for a harmonious whole and demonstrated the benefits of having these get togethers. I had met some of the guys before at the Manchester MeetUp in August last year and it was an absolute pleasure to see them again, as well as meeting some new friends and bringing online acquaintance into the real world. The range of topics discussed was huge, everything from deep philosophical debates on the transfer of the market place from the High Street to online, the pros and cons of wordpress, linking strategies, the intricacies of Google Analytics to ‘are the chips good’ - they were.

The five hours of continuous chatter was useful for everyone and we will definitely be repeating the experience with a discussion theme for the meetings as everyone felt this would be useful. I’d like to think some good relationships were forged today. There was a brief moment of silence for photos but that only served to emphasised just how much chat there was….

Left to Right - Tim, Lisa, Chris, Elaine hiding behind Chris, Sandy, Annette, Me, Enzo, Walter

I’ll be posting details of the next one in due course - and all are welcome - it will be worth the trip…

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West Midlands Meetup

flaminglacer — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:52:51 +0000

I’ve been threatening to do this for a while and have finally got it sorted! For anyone who has been to one of the MeetUps held all over the globe, you will know how beneficial they are - and fun too. I have happy memories of the Manchester MeetUp that launched the Thirty Day Challenge last year, not to mention the lunch that preceded it!

However, I digress…

The Date:- Saturday 21st February

The Time:- 12 noon onwards

The Place:- The Amber Bar, Evesham, Worcestershire - google map here

Easy access via train (direct line from London, Oxford) plenty of car parking within five minutes walk. The Amber Bar does reasonable food at reasonable prices.

Previous meetups have been for Immediate Edgers or Thrity Day Challenge participants and I suspect most people who come will have been involved in one or other, but anyone interested in Internet marketing is welcome…

Please leave a comment if you are thinking of coming so we have some idea of numbers.

Hope to see on the 21st…

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Turning The Tables

flaminglacer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:03:17 +0000

It’s a well known fact that I have unbounded admiration for Seth Godin, what you probably don’t know is that I have spent the last few weeks and months becoming increasingly vitriolic in my tirades against the Numpties who preach doom, gloom and despondency in the various media - I am becoming the woman who shouts at the TV… it gets embarrassing after a while.

The reason I shout at the TV, in particular the BBC Breakfast TV programme’s Business Reports is that they see everything from it’s absolute worst possible perspective, they give huge credence and publicity to negative news and skate past anything good with a muttered aside. Then they return, with huge gusto, to full throated baying of doom laden forecasts. OK, I accept that things are not good, you would have to be blind to say that they are. But it is not all bad, there are ways forward and there are ways out. What you have to do is take action, not just cry into your Beer.

A brief video interview with Seth Godin was published on Mashable yesterday, it should be required watching for everyone in business, especially for those of us who have a bit of courage rather than being of the ‘cry into your Beer’ variety. In case you missed it, it’s here. I suggest that you also take a trip to his blog and look at some of the recent posts - expecially you guys at the BBC, perhaps then you can do something positive towards moving us forward rather than just digging a deeper hole for everyone to fall into.

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From the Feeds 14 Jan 2009

flaminglacer — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:03:06 +0000

This is a lovely little extension for Firefox for all those web builders out there - ColorZilla provides a whole raft of tools for analysing colors and so forth on websites. Very pleased to have this at my finger tips.

This one came as something of a surprise to me - I didn’t even realise this tool existed - MakeUseOf.com is a constant source of joyous info for me - How To Create Your Own Fonts & Characters on Windows

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Social Media And The Importance Of Friends

flaminglacer — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:59:03 +0000

I have a plan for this year - it involves a major housekeep of all my sites (and there are an awful lot) which will end with many of them going by the wayside I suspect. I’m also revamping my vanity site, which hadn’t been touched in donkeys ages and which was really quite shameful. The new site will be a little bare to start with but will gradually become a directory of all my sites and work online. You may be surprised at what comes out of the woodwork….

There will be some reshuffling here on Mutterz as well, mainly in that it won’t be so neglected. I’ve started the tidying and revamping here today with the addition of some new social media contact links in the sidebar and also google friend connect. The video profile will be going soon as it’s a bit too dominating - so if you haven’t seen it yet, take the chance whilst you can. Why am I paying so much attention to the social side of things. It’s two fold. First of all, I’m a social animal and working online can be a lonely business. I find the twittering and the contact through various other social media an antidote to that isolation which leads nicely to the second reason.

I had a minor rant the other day about the proliferation of rubbish on the net and commented that the rise of social media would have an effect on this. I’m something of a cynic but my other half is even worse and muttered into his wineglass that it wouldn’t change anything and there would always be the lowlives that were out to screw us out of our hard earned money in return for their rubbish. I agree. However, amidst the press induced gloom and despondency about the economic situation, I have noted that most companies are reporting an increase in Online trading which is, to my mind, a natural result of the demise of the High Street shopping culture.

For some reason, we always like to shout when something goes wrong, or we feel hard done by. Sadly, we rarely shout so loud when something is good. The rise of social media is going to mean that people who are conned by the lowlives are going to shout, and the word is going to spread. People are going to polarise into groups where they feel they can trust people, and get good advice and guidance and they are going to use the ‘oh so easy’ social media in the ether. As mobile phones synch more and more with the net it is getting easier and easier to be in touch in so many ways. Being a part of the conversations is going to be so important for more reasons than I have space for here. That is why I am paying so much attention to the chat, and why I will continue to do so.

Do join in - I’d love to hear your views - there’s lots of ways to converse with me, just pick one of the nice shiny new buttons in the sidebar, or better still pick more than one and connect as a friend. I might be a grumpy old woman but I don’t bite!

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From the Feeds 9 Jan 09

flaminglacer — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:49:02 +0000

The feeds have been a little quiet this week but a few nice items have come through today:-

MakeUseOf.com have come up with a very interesting article on posting to Blogger from your cell phone - ideal if you are on the move and want to keep things up to date… How To Send Blog Posts To Blogger With Your Cellphone

TweetBacks is a nice little wordpress plugin - still in beta - which will add tweets about your blog post just above the comments. I’m trying it out here so it will be interesting to see what the results are.

Another top 100 list from Mashable - Google Maps, best tools and mashups. As google maps is on my new phone, this is quite timely for me!

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From the Feeds - 5 Jan 2009

flaminglacer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:08:14 +0000

This useful article popped up today. I’m sure there isn’t one of us that hasn’t seen the ‘missing dll’ message when trying to do something just after a file clean up or the like. This excellent article from MakeUseOf tells you how to sort it - How To Fix Missing DLL File Errors

Graphics are my downfall so I’m always happy to find good tutorials and this is an excellent list from Smashing Magazine - 50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials

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The Marketer’s Mantra

flaminglacer — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:32:02 +0000

It’s the first day ‘back at work’ today for lots of people, though many of us who inhabit the cyber world have been dipping in and out over the holiday period. I have been quite heartened by the reduction in spam and rubbish that has landed in my Inbox over the last few days, but the floodgates opened today and I have been inundated with a tidal wave of ‘Your business won’t survive without….’ or ‘ Make a fortune even in the bad times…’ and other such headers.

They have all produced one reaction - swift recourse to the ‘Unsubscribe’ button, and I know I am not alone in that. It really is quite depressing that people still peddle the kind of nonsense that is put forward in those emails, even someone for whom I had a great deal of respect seems to have got caught up in the dissemination of that rubbish, the fact that it was ‘free’ (in exchange for my very valuable email address) didn’t make it any better - or any more accceptable to my mind.

Philoscribe, one of the members of my group, The Marketing Mavens, had a sobering experience today - she was on the other side of the fence and was searching for information. I’m sure she won’t mind me quoting here

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap I have had to trawl through…..and still I haven’t found anything that has convinced me!!!”

followed later in the conversation by

“I know we keep saying it BUT I simply hadn’t realised the scale of the problem until I searched today… I have been truly amazed and shocked. Some of the information I read today was so wrong it’s hard to believe someone has even had the temerity to post it. Some of the information was just plain misleading…. It really is no wonder there is a level of cynicism about the quality of information on the www”

From a seperate conversation but on broadly the same topic came this comment

“We want to do the right things but how do we differentiate ourselves from this type of thing or, indeed, do we need to?”

The response from goup members was immensely heartening and boiled down to a great big ‘Yes, we do need to distance and differentiate ourselves’.

I make no apologies for reiterating my response:-

“How do we differentiate ourselves from this kind of thing - we do it by being professional, by taking care, by giving value and providing service.

Do we need to differentiate ourselves is a moot point - there are enough people out there who behave in this way and make money, however I suspect that this will not last. People are going to be a great deal more careful about what they spend their money on in the current financial climate. They will want the comfort of the appearance of professionalism, they will want to feel that they are valued, they will react badly to being treated with contempt. The social networking on the web disseminates word quickly and those who do not give value will soon find themselves ‘outed’. The reverse is true, though it tends to be on a smaller scale, bad news travels fast, good news not so fast… I prefer to go the route of offering a professional product which gives value. I may not ‘get rich quick’ (and neither will the less professional in truth) but I won’t be ashamed and embarrassed to look at my face in the mirror each morning.”

We have a Mantra as group that is very simple and we hold it very dear “REAL products for REAL people with REAL money”

It saddens me to think that if these Conmen put as much effort into fulfilling that mantra and doing it right as they do into doing it wrong, they would do a great deal better and all of us who work on the web could hold our heads up without being tainted by these unscrupulous scammers.

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From the Feeds 3 Jan 2009

flaminglacer — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:53:57 +0000

This is a neat application - at first glance you may think ‘why?’ but it has lots of applications. Most of us have digital cameras that will photograph documents when we are out and and about - this converts them to look like a scanned image. In other words it takes out all the angles, distortions etc. My first thought was ‘family tree docs - great! There are lots of other uses. Snapter is free for the first 14 days, then goes to a paid version - you can still use the free version but it will have some watermarking and a tagline - though at $20 for the light version it won’t break the Bank, it’s a cheap way to create very acceptable PDF’s

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From the Feeds - 2 Jan 2009

flaminglacer — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:44:00 +0000

I’ve long been a fan of Scrib’d and it seems I’m not the only one… this article on TechCrunch makes interesting reading :- Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

As someone who is bedevilled by poor eyesight, I just loved this idea, it would save me a small fortune…. Inventor Creates Instantly Adjustable Eyeglasses

Mashable is another of my favourites - and this is well worth spending a few minutes of your life on. 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources

There just has to be one from MakeUseOf.com How To Create A Disposable Webpage - I’ve yet to come up with an idea to use this but give me time….

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