2005 November Archive at Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Monthly Archive for November, 2005

Shel Israel podcast

Published

on 22/11/2005

in Blogging, Business blogging, Interviews and Podcast

. 5 Comments

The Shel Israel interview went ahead last night, as planned. Shel was great, full of warm humour, interesting insights and relevant anecdotes. below are the questions I asked him and the times in the podcast they were asked:

Shel, what is it about Ireland that appeals to you? - 1:15

You guys wrote Naked Conversations right out there in the open - as you completed each chapter of the book, you published it online - what was it like writing a book as transparently as you guys did with Naked Conversations? - 2:30

Most people have read the book now online, will they buy it? - 5:50

If you were writing another book, would you do it online? - 6:30

Given that very few Irish companies have started blogging yet, why should a company have a blog? - 7:28

What are the advantages of blogging to a business? - 8:40

What advice would you give to business bloggers to help them become become successful - 11:50

Companies can be afraid of being open in their blogs (what if our competitors are reading the blog) and are afraid of what will be said in the comments - how do you deal with these fears? - 15:11

If I am a developer, how can I see what people are saying about my application/product? - 17:55

What do you see as the benefits of Podcasts/videocasts to businesses? - 23:30

How is a podcast/videocast of use to smaller companies (smaller than Microsoft!)? - 25:25

So blogs/podcasts/videocasts are about humanising companies? - 27:50

You have recently blogged that you are going to start writing about startups - what aspect of startups most interests you? - 32:30

What challenges do startups face today that they didn’t 25 years ago? - 34:30

Brian Greene’s question:
There are 40,000 blogs updates every hour of the day. How am I to read all that? seriously hasn’t blogging just added to the textual data smog that make it easier for government to bury the truth, making facts harder to come by? 37:30

You can listen to the podcast of this discussion here.

Steve Ruble’s latest hacks - a suggestion

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/11/2005

in Blogging

. 2 Comments

Steve Rubel is continuing his list of social media hacks - his latest is a list of 10 Wikipedia hacks. Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia which anyone can edit.

Again, there are some interesting ones there - like the ajax search, the create a user account suggestion and the keyboard shortcuts.

Steve, now that it has been made free, you need to do 10 hacks of Google Analytics - now that could be interesting!

Podcasting search engines reviewed.

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/11/2005

in Blogging and Business blogging

. 0 Comments

In my recent podcast with Robert Scoble, one of the issues I raised with him was how much easier text blogs are to index for a search engine, than are podcasts or videoblogs. Robert agreed that this was the case but he made the point that search engines are using link text and the text surrounding the links to podcasts and videoblogs as a means to indexing their content - not ideal but it’s a start.

Robert went on to predict that because technologies are currently being developed to allow for the indexing of these mediacasts that we will see great strides in this area in the next twelve months.

Sure enough today I found a comparative review on Yahoo! News of three podcast search engines which use speech-to-text software to generate written transcripts of the podcasts. The three reviewed are Podzinger, Podscope and Blinkx.

I searched the three sites for the term “Scoble” - Podscope found no podcasts with that term (!), Podzinger found 5, and Blinkx found about 50. I say around 50 for Blinkx because its horrific interface actually made it quite difficult to see how many results there were! None found the podcast I did with Robert Scoble last week!

All three include the ability to add your podcast to the index but the Blinkx link ended in a 404 for me!

However, things are set to improve - as the Yahoo! report put it:

the engines can learn better ways to determine words from their context.

Blinkx co-founder Suranga Chandratillake illustrates the process this way: If a podcast were made about the topics in this story, a computer probably would be right if it detected the phrase “recognize speech.”

But in a podcast about last year’s tsunami, the computer would do better to hear almost the same sounds as “wreck a nice beach.”

Any questions for Shel Israel?

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/11/2005

in Blogging and Business blogging

. 1 Comment

Shel Israel describes himself as “a recovering publicist“. Shel used to own a PR agency specialising in tech startups and Shel

was involved in the initial launches of Sun Microsystems, PowerPoint, Filemaker, SoundBlaster, Napster, MapInfo, Virtual Vineyards and quite a few others

More recently Shel co-authored the authoritative business blogging book Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble. This is a book which was written entirely transparently in a blog online with the collaboration of many of prominent business blogging consultants.

I am interviewing Shel this late this evening/early tomorrow morning (damn that 8 hour time difference!) and I will podcast the interview later this week.

If anyone has any questions they’d like me to ask Shel, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Google Analytics graphs on a Mac

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/11/2005

in Mac and Search Engines

. 0 Comments

Google announced it was opening Google Analytics - a web stats program, for all to use free last week.

Since it was launched Google Analytics has had problems - mostly related to the unprecedented demand for its use (unprecedented by Google, at any rate).

One persistent issue, unrelated to popularity is that the Google Analytics graphs don’t appear on a Mac in Safari (or in my version of Firefox - although this may be due to my use of Adblock in Firefox).

However, I spotted a tip in Mactips today which explains how to get Google Analytic’s graphs to work in Safari -

Try to force a reflow of the page, e.g. by hitting â€œCmd +â€? or â€œCmd -â€? to resize the text. The charts will appear.

I tried it in Safari and FIrefox and while it works great in Safari, it doesn’t work in Firefox - Still, at least I can see the graphs now.

Irish podcasting representative body created

Published

Tom Raftery

on 19/11/2005

in Podcast

. 1 Comment

Brian Greene of Doop design has created a mailing list for those interested in being involved in podcasting in Ireland. This is the first step in the creation of a representative body for Irish podcasters. According to Brian:

The function of the list is to discuss the setting up of a representative body for Podcasters in Ireland. The list is open for anyone to join and discuss this topic.

The need exists to safe guard the activity of podcasters regards licencing, legal and a range of other issues like standards, training, hosting, product placement & sponsorship.

As someone who has done quite a few podcasts and who intends to do many more in the near future, I have signed up and will contribute to this body - if you are interested in podcasting in Ireland, I urge you to join up as well.