Brilliant Thinking

I have been a member of Ecademy since 2003. Over the years I have made some good contacts and enaged in some excellent conversations in the various online clubs that I joined. I have also met some good contacts through the occasional offline events I have been to.

However, the value of the system has declined in the past couple of years to the point that I have decided to leave.

There are two reasons for this: continue reading »

Social media - when applied to the web and mobile technologies - is a collective term for any place where dialogue can occur. This dialogue is generated by members of the community where the interaction occurs and could be text, pictures, video or audio, or any combination of these. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Although there is a huge buzz about social media currently, social media has been around for a long time.

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Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include

• Search engine optimization (or SEO),
• Paid placement,
• Contextual advertising, and
• Paid inclusion.

In this article we will look at link building and how it fits within the overall marketing strategy for your site. 

In the above methodologies, link building sits mainly as contextual advertising but can also fit into paid placement and paid inclusion (if you have to pay for the link, obviously).

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After Peter’s comment on my recent post comparing SugarSync, DropBox & Live Mesh saying that I hadn’t looked at Syncplicity - his preferred Cloud-based synchronisation tool - I decided to install it and try out the free 2Gb storage as a trial.

I was quite impressed with the simplicity of the interface - it was very informative about what was being uploaded to the cloud, what was being downloaded and what it was going to do next. It was also very easy adding existing folders to the sync set (much more so than Live Mesh: see Live Mesh Syncing Folders).

Everything was going well until Syncplicity told me that I had exceeded my storage quota and would need to pay to upgrade my account in order to continue to sync the files. This was strange because I only had 1.6Gb of files to sync, and allowing for possible differences in quota allocated to the files in the cloud versus the Windows PC, this should not have been an issue.

continue reading »

Image via Wikipedia

A few years ago I listened to analysts talking about the “virtual business.” They envisaged a world of mobile workers who could tap in to their corporate networks from anywhere. There wasn’t much substance on this future vision, and certainly not to the extent that mobile workers now enjoy with technologies enabled by Cloud Computing.

Back in 2001 when I set up my first web company, it was always my ideal that the company should be truly virtual and not be tied specifically to any physical office space. While it is important for people to come together to build ideas, this can be done in any space that provides the correct tools - which for us means whiteboards and notebooks.

I still value physical interaction with people for certain meetings as you get a visual feedback which you cannot get on the Web. You can see all of the participants’ body language, and it is much easier to be completely inclusive in such arrangements. Virtual meetings - using Skype and whiteboarding technologies - are OK in some situations, but not all.

However, these meetings do not make up the bulk of the day to day work - this is spent with the computer either writing, desigining or programming. And, as long as the computer is present with the right tools, this can be done anywhere. As long as the files are there also.

This is where the Cloud comes in (see also previous post: Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers). continue reading »