Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

gapingvoid: blogger’s wine freebie

It’s a nice idea, give out a few bottles, get people talking, if the stuff’s any good, you get a strong base to grow a loyal organic market. Being possibly the first company promoting a wine this way, also develops a nice story to tell all types of traditional press, builds a few nice links from many sites to bolster that google ranking, etc

I’ve emailed a few times to participate in this offer – but heard nothing – which got me thinking about the down side.

I will never know if Hugh got the emails with my details, or the email chasing my details – at one point I even felt I had to apologise for not writing up the wine tasting ‘cos maybe the postal system had snaffled my bottle? Maybe a spam filter blocked me. Maybe I just didn’t make the grade. I guess the latter, which is ok – their loss. But at this point Stormhoek are a brand I’ll avoid. They’ve anchored a poor feeling and I’ve got plenty of great Sauvignon Blancs already to choose from to go with our crispy duck, summer evenings, late night working…. Infact, we had a party this weekend and our lovely guests left 5 different bottles of Sauvignon for us to quaff, amongst other interesting wines.

I’ve just got to finish off that fabulous cask of Guzzler from our amazing local brewery. (note to self – must write a few words about York Brewery – they’re doing so much stuff, very well, with a very nice team)

Brand is the emmotion left in your belly fueled by communication. For me, Stormhoek didn’t work.

Anybody else avoiding Stormhoek?

Seth’s Blog: Inside and Outside

I’m a big fan of FISH! – and will use to grow our team at Simple Usability. One of it’s foundations is quite simple – just choose your attitude – decide that you will enjoy your work.

It’s a no-brainer.

A local search engine optimisation company was recently overheard recommending to a customer that they should get a blog to help with their rankings on Google. The company then offered to write the blog for them, to ensure the keywords etc were correct.

This is so wrong. In fact it’s as wrong as selling live8 tickets on ebay. Yes you can do it, but it’s wrong. Blogs should be written by passionate individuals, experts in their own field – whether it’s your personal blog (being an expert in yourself) or your area of interest. How can an SEO company write your blog?

If you have a trademark or product, I recommend heading over to a blogging search engine like technorati or blo.gs and do a few searches and see who’s using your words and brand within spammy blogs, stuffed with keyword rich site maps and random text. I wouldn’t loose too much sleep over it, but something to bear in mind if this activity ever influenced your placement within search engine results.

3 Stories from Steve Jobs about joining the dots

3 nice stories about events that shaped Steve Jobs – the top man at Apple.

There is little in life to get bitter about, everything moulds the person you are today. I constantly get asked about the rollercoaster world of digital media and whether I hate X,Y or Z because of famous incidents that have brought huge change into our lives. My response is usually that life is too short to bare a grudge and if it wasn’t for X, Y and Z, I would not have been introduced to A, B and C. The tough bit for team builders, is having the balls to see beyond the CV and embrace the personality and skillset forged by experience. That’s why when interviewing, I spend 5% of the time talking about the CV and rest is about the person in front of me.

Forthcoming: on (completely new) software

Great words from Sigurd

creating the first light bulb in the light of gas lamps

I had to stop and think about this for few minutes.

Recently, I’ve been getting pretty exciteable on the concept of things having a context. Add into that, the context of creation/evolution and, and, and … I need a coffee to think about it some more.

Skype Phone Review: Siemens Skype Phone – this is a significant shift. May even replace my evangelism for amazing Carpet Tiles and better carpet in the home.

After 24 hours, my head is still spinning, we have a new gadget in the building…. Some new cordless phones from Siemens in the office. The thing is, I can now recieve skype calls on any of the handsets in the building, just like a normal call. There is no difference between a normal call and a skype call, period. The phone rings, I answer it and wander around the building as normal. If you don’t get the hugeness of this, then go play with skype – it’s free international telephony over your broadband. And it’s not one of those plug in skype only phones, this is a full featured DECT phone system that can route voip skype calls to handests.

Skype is no longer a geeky thing you have to do at your computer in hotel rooms to side-step huge call tarifs.

OK, so to put things into perspective: This is totally huge. This is convergence. This is a major problem for the telcos. My subconcious is really under pressure trying to process all the implications for this…

I’ve used Skype on and off over the last few years, and to be honest, it was hassle, making sure the microphone was plugged in etc… But after a bit of argie-bargie with the siemens software and dongle, it just works.

I’ve had a few calls from Switzerland and one from Spain so far…. lets see if I still love it in a few months?

Battlestar Aggregatica

Great article and nice site about one of the most important shows this decade and it’s also built on Drupal. Looks good and works well. Nice to know that there’s a whole band of people out there that know the significance of BSG and also compare it to the other classic, Babylon 5.

Must come back and look a bit more.

Must also come back and look at Drupal. They now have the Drupal Theme Garden enabling any implementation to look great. (Plone, please take note).

Video send up about google autolink

watch the video – really funny. What could you do with a camera and an official looking backdrop?

Click around the site – is this another case of me missing the party – Better Bad News – it’s a hoot.

Creating Passionate Users: Why I want a Tablet PC

Really an article about mind mapping – something we should all spend more time doing.

I do a bit of work with a Dutch chap, Menno, that draws mind maps in meetings – he brings a sheet of A4 and a bumper pack of felt tip pens – the sort of huge long pack you used to get at Christmas, when you were young. He uses all sorts of shades to create his maps. I’m not sure what his final maps are like, or if they help him do anything beyond a meeting – but it’s a great device for being remembered – ‘the chap with the big pack of felt tip pens that draws those maps in meetings’. Slightly more approachable than the nice chap we met at a Swiss venture capital company that typed his mind map out furiously on his keyboard as we explained about one of our ventures. We thought he was doing emails or something – but then at the end of the meeting saw this map of our proposition.

moving to the speed of sound
It’s amazing where a piece of spam and glass of good red wine will lead.

From an introduction to a group on tribe.net (a networking community type site thingy) I started looking around, read a few well craft rants about ecademy, then clicked on an advert for a ‘dj kramer’ tribe, looked at his links and found this cute, but empty site.

The things i liked:

There’s lots wrong with this site – but it had me looking for a few minutes. Great photo of a girl holding a drink to the camera.

There’s just so much good stuff yet to be done with the web. If you keep digging, you’ll find so much stuff for inspiration….

Well, coming up with the ideas is… but you’ve still got to grow and love the beast.
Seth’s Blog: What’s the always?

It’s a killer. This one goes in the special toolbox that helps clients shake up their business.

Treat yourself, spend a few mintues each week thinking about this; I bet your subconcious will kick out some amazingly simple business concepts that give you your own bit of purple cow.

great video archive – this is what broadband’s all about
Click on the archive and watch the different clips – if you’re not inspired to do your own roadtrip style movie with your dv camera – then you don’t deserve the air you breath. Scroll through the archive and find the husky movie that so ‘gets’ the spirit of what I do in my spare time – obviously on wheels in the uk – but they just capture it so well.

So Tom… when are we capturing your fine beast of a car on quicktime?

Climb Sepu : Great Videos including Tibetan Twister and tug of war
Superb record of an expedition supported by my favourite outdoor clothing company – Marmot. Work your way through the videos – they’re a mixture of candid interviews, compiled highlights and high altitude wisdom. Check out the video with a game of Twister with the guides on 6 – Heading Home.

Just awesome – great use of the web. All you need is a dv camera and an imac!

Moosejaw Mountaineering
Whilst looking for a new duvet, I came across this rather purple cow-esk retailer. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea – but it’s definitely mine. It reminded me of the mexican restaurant in York that used to have something on the menu about how the team enjoyed what they did, and if you had a problem with that, then maybe you should go elsewhere. They’re reasonably busy most nights – but well worth the effort. Have an opinion, a passion, a style – and just stick with it for success. Just don’t employ the suits – cos they don’t understand.

In fact, someone named Sally said that our good humor and brilliant service changed her entire life.

If you are offended by ridiculous stories and silly comments then we advise you only pay attention to the fact that Moosejaw has the greatest prices and the best product selection in the world.

I wish we had a few more reailers in the uk like this.

In the bid to up the customer communication stakes, I spent my bank holiday customising my first installation of Twiki – http://www.twiki.org – the rather good wiki package. I’ve been using Wiki’s for a good number of years now – mainly of the Zope variety, hooked up to a bug tracker. Projects without a wiki – are well outside my comfort zone.

Having installed twiki – I can now understand why we’re still awaiting the mass uptake of this tool for collaboration.

My gripes:

apart from that – Twiki is really cool. I’ve installed the java based drawing tool – so I can sketch out basic ideas on a web browser and collaborate on drawings….. how cool is that. I’ve yet to play with the action organisor and the calendar. The spreadsheet and table functions look useful too. As a basic wiki – it really works – I think the toys will make it a run away success…. once I’ve got people logged on and passwords generated at the command line with htpasswd :-(

Web analytics blog

Aparently, Xavier Casanova is a guru – only time will tell – nice articles with a good measure of common sense.

More Control and Better Results
coming soon – another ppc platform – but lets you decide the age and sex of audience.

Think different – choose your own colour

Nice paint job for your boring mac. The imacs look rather nice – just too many colours to choose from.

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web
Yahoo’s take on the last 10 years of their existance. Very American – but nice to start with a photo of the founders – which did make me wonder what I was doing at that point… cos I was working on commercial web sites in 1995…

Looking back though, we did sell a directory website of uk sites that had about 30 sites listed, to Internet Magazine a few years later… How crazy were them days eh? We got 6 months of magazine advertising in exchange for the web site.

InternetRetailer – Search Engine Marketing Results

Are marketing people still so ignorant of the net these days that they need a report to work this stuff out?

In a nutshell….

• Those that spend money on making their sites more visible, sell more goods online.
• Those that spend money on advertising, sell more goods.
• Natural listings on search engines, produce more sales than adverts
• Those companies that have both an inhouse and external team working on advertising and site visibility, out perform those that only use either

Please tell me you could work this out for yourself…….