I enjoy reading Seth Godin’s blog. It is an easy read and helps keep the brain juices flowing. Unfortunately I’ve fallen behind these past few weeks and am just playing catchup now. One noteworthy entry for May that I wanted to mention here is What Every Good Marketer Knows Here are a few snippets: Continue reading “What Every Good Marketer Knows”
Surfulater V1.65, B0.0 released
Surfulater V1.65, B0.0 has just been released. One issue that has been on the todo list for a while was to enable images to be copied and pasted from your Web Browser into existing Surfulater articles, in addition to text. Continue reading “Surfulater V1.65, B0.0 released”
Knowledge Lost
Two articles caught my eye in last weeks Melbourne Age IT section. The first was about two Californian business men who are setting up cruise ships 5.3km of the coast of Los Angeles where they will employ 600 software developers per ship and have them working 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. These foreign workers will be classed as seamen and be able to come ashore without requiring visa’s. The ships will cost $US10M a piece to fit out. At first I thought this had to be an April fools day joke, but apparently they are very serious about this. One has to wonder where we are heading with such goings on. I guess the ships aren’t heading anywhere and what about the workers?
The second article was about the large numbers of qualified IT staff that have been let go from Australian companies in the last 3 or so years in the name of downsizing. It seems that these companies are now realizing that they’ve lost a vast amount of knowledge from this process, knowledge that will be quite costly to recover, assuming of course that it can be. This also ties in with offshore development (and on cruise ships) and makes me wonder whether all of the valuable information that is built up off-shore can be transferred back to its owners, or do they write that off in exchange for the money they save using off-shore development.
As far as I’m concerned building and retaining knowledge and the intellectual property that flows from that is fundamental to the long term success of any business. It’s what gives us the edge.
Managing Knowledge Pt 1
I spend a reasonable amount of time reading about and looking at Knowledge Management (KM) style software. Lots of different types of programs can be used or abused into performing knowledge management tasks. These range from storing bits and pieces of information in Word Documents or text files (or PDF files!), to Outliners and Notepads with Trees to structure and categorize information, to ever more complex programs that morph trees and display them as graphs, or in other visually exciting and sometimes useful ways. For example programs like Grokster use circles within circles where you drill down deeper and deeper to see things of interest. (Surfulater customers who visit the forums will have seen threads about this there.) The higher end knowledge management tools tend to be quite complex and expensive beasts indeed. Continue reading “Managing Knowledge Pt 1”
Surfulater.com Makeover
The Surfulater.com website has just undergone an extensive makeover. We did the original site in-house and even though we were pleased with the results it lacked the professional look and feel we felt was necessary as part of the Surfulater package. Continue reading “Surfulater.com Makeover”
On Press Releases and the Media
I’ve just read an interesting article by Paul Graham titled “The Quite Submarine” Paul provides an interesting insight into PR firms and the Media, based on his own experiences.
The articles starts with:
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
Should I laugh or cry?
Three US boffins built a programme designed to create research papers with random text, charts and diagrams.
Two bogus papers were submitted to a computing conference in Florida, and one of them was accepted.
I really can’t believe this. What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in when such obvious gibberish can be accepted by anyone with half a brain, let alone someone vetting papers for a computer conference. Continue reading “Should I laugh or cry?”
Surfulater V1.60, B0.0 released
Surfulater V1.60, B0.0 has been released. One thing that has been bugging me for a while with Surfulater is that after jumping around from article to article there was no way to backtrack to an article I’d recently seen.
Fortunately I know the developer very well and hold some sway about what gets done and when. So with a small nudge I was able to get a content navigation history list added.
Now I can move backwards and forwards through a list of the last 30 articles and folders I’ve seen or pick any one from a drop down menu and jump directly to it. This will definitely make revisiting content in my knowledge base easier.
Other changes in this release include the ability to use the Delete key in the knowledge tree, visual tweaks, information about our Web site update, our new Blog and various bug fixes.
Please, please do tell us your Surfulater likes and dislikes. If you’ve looked at Surfulater and decided it isn’t for you, we would greatly appreciate knowing why, and what we can do to accommodate your needs.
Surfulater’s evolution is immutably tied to what you tell us you want, so speak up if you want to have a say.
Password company spams
I can’t believe this but it’s true. A colleague of mine received the spam e-mail below the other day from a company that wants us to store all of our passwords, drivers license details, travelers cheque references and other valuable information in their virtual safe.
How can any company that purports to safely and securely look after all our sensitive information have the slightest tiny weeniest bit of credibility, if they are forced to send spam in order to try and drum up some business. Would you trust any of your passwords with them? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Continue reading “Password company spams”
Podcasts – what and why?
There was a post over at one of my favourite sites Codeproject yesterday asking if anyone was into podcasts, to which I replayed yes. If you don’t know what podcasts they are quite simply small radio shows that you can download and play on your MP3 player, iPod, PC or any other device capable of playing MP3’s.
Podcasts like the web cover a broad range of information and interests. To date my focus has been on listening to marketing and business related podcasts.
The thing I really like about podcasts (apart from the content) is that I can acquire information without having to sit in front of my PC.
I download podcasts and copy them to my HP iPaq PDA. Then plug in the headphones, start the music player playing the podcast and put the PDA in my pocket. Most times I listen while I’m doing chores around house, or I’m out for a walk. This is great because I don’t have to try and find some free time which doesn’t exist anyway and I get to feed my brain during times which it otherwise wouldn’t be doing much.
In addition to Podcasts you’ll find audio books available on the Web which are played just like a podcast.
The Podcasts I’ve enjoyed listening to the most so far are by Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba over at Church of the Customer. The content is fresh and interesting and Ben and Jackie have an upbeat very easy to listen to style. Their most recent podcast is Word of Mouth Summit highlights and interviews which I’ll be listening to today.
I’ve been looking at a few programs that enable you to subscribe to podcasts and automatically download new ones as they become available. So far none have particularly grabbed my interest. I’ll likely write more on this later.