It is good to see that Donagh Kiernan has started a blog.
If you don’t know Donagh, he is the founder and CEO of Maidsfield Business Development and former owner of Vistech Software.
Donagh is blogging about sales, marketing and productisation - this is an area Donagh knows volumes about so he has a lot of knowledge to impart.
As Donagh only has just started the blog, there is only one post up so far but I will be following it very closely ‘cos I know absolutely nothing about sales, marketing or productisation!!!
Welcome to the blogosphere Donagh.
A curious question, you might say, and you’d be right, obviously!
However, seminal business thinker and social philosopher, Charles Handy has said that new ideas, new products, new kinds of associations and institutions, new initiatives, new art and new designs seldom come from established organisations, they come from individuals – what he terms the New Alchemists.
Handy recently said:
My studies of people who have created something out of nothing with their lives – the new alchemists - have proved for me that you can learn anything if you really want to. Passion is what drives these people, passion for their product or their cause.
“Passion for their product or their cause” could certainly be applied to Robert Scoble - why do I think of him specifically? Well, both Robert Scoble and Charles Handy are keynoting the IT@Cork Annual Conference in Cork on November 30th so whenever I see the one I immediately think of the other (I am involved in the organisation of the IT@Cork conference).
It will be fascinating to see these two individuals together in Cork and I can’t wait to see what Charles Handy will make of Robert Scoble and the whole phenomenon of social software.
Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller has written an article in News Forge called Three reasons why Internet-based applications are a bad idea . His arguments are basically:
- Peering agreement falls apart - recently a peering agreement between two providers broke down and a lot of people were left without Internet access
- Cut one line, cut off DSL - a phone line was cut in Florida recently cutting off Internet access for many people
- Mysterious outages abound - a co-worker of Robin’s lost Internet access for a couple of hours recently
Basically, what Robin is saying is that online applications require Internet access and Internet access is not always reliable, therefore online applications are probably not a good idea.
Rubbish! If your electricity is cut off, you can’t use your PC. Does that mean desktop applications are a bad idea? Of course not. I would argue that online applications are a great idea and if your Internet access is not reliable - that’s a completely seperate issue. If your Internet access is dodgy, change to an ISP which is dependable or have a backup Internet access service available!
Jakob Nielsen has written a top 10 suggestions for blog usability. The ten points Jakob are sensible and straightforward to implement, for the most part.
His suggestions include:
- Including an author biography and photo
- Descriptive post titles
- Descriptive link text
- Links to older popular posts
and so on. I have to put my hands up and say I am guilty of not having most of these points implemented on this site. I will have to start adding some of these to this blog in the coming days and weeks.
UPDATED:
Edited to correct the spelling of Nielsen’s name in the post title - thanks Michael for pointing it out.
Apologies for the lack of posts in the last couple of days but I have been busy with personal stuff (family illness, home moving hassles, etc.).
Two comments were left on this post earlier yesterday - I have removed them.
I rarely remove comments on this site unless they are spam or abusive. These were the first abusive posts on this site which I have removed.
The comments were left by someone purporting to be both David Jones and Alex Bunten - however the fact that both posts came within one minute of one another and from the same ip address leads me to believe that both comments came from the same person.
The ip address used was 84.92.124.116 - this is the ip address of a UK ISP (Plus.com). That ip has now been banned on this site.
Well the Tech Camp Ireland meet-up is over and it was a great day. Kudos to Piaras and Ed for organising it. Some of the interesting talks that I attended were given by Darren Barefoot on (un)marketing and Digital Rights Ireland on our lack of digital rights in Ireland (think mandatory 3 year data retention, DRM, mobile phone tracking etc.)!
My own talk was titled “Increasing traffic: How to Promote your blog / web business” and a pdf copy is available for download here.
My talk was also recorded by Gavin Byrne of NearFM (the first radio station in Ireland to PodCast!) to be PodCast so when I get an uri for that I will update this post with those details.
Interesting observation from Tech Camp - I counted 8 laptops - 5 of which were macs. If Apple has only 5% of the market, how does that work?
The podCast of my talk is now available here
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