Month: December 2008

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Unique Entertainment, SEO and Joomla

A conversation yesterday, with Trevor Hamilton of Unique Entertainment on his web site. Unique Entertainment do events management and conferences for corporations across Europe as well as Product Launches and Strategic Communications.

Interestingly the site built on the open source content management system Joomla which will allow Unique Entertainment to update their content themselves. So, theory is when Trevor has new photies he can add them to the Unique Entertainment Gallery.

Joomla is one of those apps I’ve dabbled briefly with but never quite got my head round and the Unique Entertainment site has gotten me wondering how it can be tweaked for SEO. A quick Google provides and search on the Joomla site provides a good few ideas.

One of the key things to think about here is how to ensure that people looking for Unique Entertainment’s contact details get pointed through to the actual Unique Entertainment site rather than all the other potential links that this name is associated with. Market Samurai throws up a lot of potential confusion here so it’s not an easy one.

Thus, if anyone has any ideas on the SEO question and Joomla, please do let me know.

Unique Entertainment
Unique Entertainment
Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Mike Volpe’s superb preso on Blogs, SEO & Social Media

Another slideshow. This is really good too…I can see another Top 10 brewing.

How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media For Results HubSpot

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: business blogging)
Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

IBM and Social Software

Chris Sparshot at IBM has posted a great preso on their Social Media project:

Adoption Of Social Software at IBM

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social software)

Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for finding this one

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Every Cloud has a Chrome Lining

via-vietteYesterday I downloaded Microsoft’s Live Writer after Neville Hobson gave it a plus. Trouble is it downloaded not only the Blogging tool but a villain’s swag bag of other goodies too. I now need to find a new ’round-2it’ to unpack them and see what’s on offer. As the angel fish are looking fed up and after a big water change I don’t think this will happen soon.

Another big factor are all the WordPress Plugins I’m now using, especially the SEO and Tagging ones. These have now become key factors in my publishing as I try and increase readership and reach (OK get Google to find me) and ensure that my content is tagged right for Calais/SemanticProxy.

And then there’s RSS. The integration between Flock and RSS is the best I’ve seen. The fact I can flip from a side bar of feeds to my RSS summary pages is a big plus for me when I’m writing my Blog. It’s then a case of copying the quotes and URLs from that browser to Chrome. Well that would be OK if there wasn’t a big big problem here.

What I find is that if I run Chrome and Flock simultaneously then the old Dell box I’m using grinds to a halt. There seems to be some sort of resource hogging going on between them and Chrome loses the battle. Chrome is an app I like, but maybe it’s a bridge too far for Google. 

lego-googleInternetnews wonder this too and base this not on the fact that it makes an old dicky PC run so slow it’s in reverse, but on the fact that it is such a new app. Chrome they point out was in beta for just 4 months before going gold. ‘Why so rash for Google?’ they ponder and come up with the answer that Chrome is not only part of Google’s secret operating system, it’s the actual UI for the OS. And perhaps they wonder, perhaps…

Perhaps Google’s browser is a new UI to the cloud.

And they’re not alone here. PC Advisor advise us that Android is already an OS and that Chrome takes us nearer to…?well the cloud:

By so carefully binning the user agent string from its OS, Google has ensured that other, less sensitive data is retained. Or to put it another way, it’s the perfect security setup for an operating system based in the cloud.

chrome-girlWhat’s more…it’s all Free. Woo Yay for the ‘great unwashed’ say PC Advisor:

Users tend to be a great deal more forgiving of software that’s free, than that they’re forced to shell out a mint for.

CNET are of a like mind and point out that it complments Googles already impressive swathe of freebies. Add to that a canny observation from the Google Operating System Blog that Google are conducting a highly aggressive promo for Chrome. Now it’s out of beta so quickly they point out, it can be bundled with those other freebies that people want such as their toolbar or Google Earth. This distribution as we learned earlier could be done with some crafty fast caching…

google-wallpaper1Thus in a jiffy, Google have set up all the means to distribute via a 2-tier fast-track, a spanking brand new OS, with a funky UI via the cloud and for the cloud.Let’s just hope it’s ready when they release it.

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Top 10 Internal Comms / 2.0 Twitter List???

There’s a great post on TwiTip called “Construct your own ‘Top 10 Must Follow’ List as it relates to your own Niche”.

Which is what I’ve done: my niche is internal comms and all thangs 2.0 and I’ve found some of the key players on Twitter. 

‘Ten People all Internal Communicators Should Follow on Twitter’

But it’s not up to scratch at all, as I’ve only got 6 peeps. So who else should be there?

Update: I’ve started a page as a more permanent list…

If there’s someone left out, let me know…

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Yammer away, but what about Infosec?

yammer_logoThis looks a lot of fun and potential rich uses within the coporation – a Twitter like tool for internal comms called Yammer –http://www.yammer.com/

The big concern has to be security! Many years ago on a project, I looked at SaaS for internal comms and in one instance we thought a hole might be needed to be made in the Firewall to get the data through, which was a big no-no. Luckily we got round this with https and a lot of converations with the vendor and the security guys.

This service looks like it relies on purely text data being added to the system, but how to ensure that users don’t do anything silly or that the data is encypted?

My motto here is simple – can it be trusted with bank account data? If not, tread with care: I can see enthusiasts jumping in and ruing their acts later…

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

ProBlogger’s top SEO Plugins

These are very good – Google is now picking up my site after a migration:

ProBlogger’s top SEO Plugins

Categories
Enterprise 2.0 Film Theory

B3ta dreaming

Almost beyond belief that daydreaming should be pathologised, yet Boing Boing picks up a thread from Consciousness and Cognition of a report about a woman who cannot stop daydreaming. Her doctors can find nothing wrong with her, yet prescribe her 50 mg/day of fluvoxamine but are unable to dream up, define a DSM condition.

50-minsBoing Boing relates her experiences to the chapter in the 50 Minute Hour called “The Jet-Propelled Couch” of a scientist called John Carter who had a similar condition and thought he was the John Carter of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories:

The physicist told Lindner he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes!

This was the inspiration for Gene Brewer’s novel “K-PAX” and also bears a strong resemblance to P K Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, filmed of course as Total Recall. It also underpins Billy Liar and Walter Mitty. 

The condition described is not just found in fiction and it’s not an anomally, as Consciousness and Cognition state that:

Recently, the patient discovered a website containing a surprising number of anonymous postings on the topic of excessive or uncontrolled daydreaming. Numerous posters described patterns and tendencies that appeared remarkably consistent with the patient’s experience (including the original pacing behavior) and emphasized the stress of concealing their imaginary lives and the attendant shame, confusion, and difficulty in controlling their divided realities.

It has to be b3ta.com….

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Scotland joins the Interweb, Obama Tweets

Following on from John Cleese and Twitter, the judge’s decision turned out not to be final and he’s moved the man to the number 2 spot. The reason being the UK is not a country but a combo. As I recall it’s actually the UK of GB and NI, so if they’d started with GB they would be OK.

But as it happen’d the 14 yr old judge didn’t so the Scots Nationalists kicked up and now Mashable is the No. 1 in Scotland. Kid Tech Guru is reported as telling Mashable that he didn’t expect a Spanish Inquisition…  

Over in America everyone is following Obama’s Tweets, in Poland it’s AndyBeard while in Japan, it’s Weird News. Funny old world, the interweb.

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Calais : I Tagaroo, do you?

tagaroo_logo_fina_2501

Plugin Tagaroo
This Blog is now supported with the WordPress plugin Tagaroo. This plug-in looks very very tasty. It’s not like your ordinary plugin, oh no. Tagaroo is one small plug in something bigger and that bigger is SemanticProxy.

semanticproxy

In the future…
Now if this is all old hat, please leave me a comment on what else I might have missed lately but if not here’s what SemanticProxy aims to make it so:

In the future the entire web will be one giant tightly interconnected information asset. Beyond just publishing information for humans, every site will expose its content in a way that’s readable by machines. Those machines will mix, match, filter and aggregate information to greatly improve things for us humans.

What SemanticProxy aims to do,  is to help achieve this by building and supporting apps and plugins such as Tagaroo and its globalised tag machine. Check out their gallery for a synch up with other tools including Drupal.

Calais on my heart
SemanticProxy itself is all form part of an even more ambitious project sponsored by Thomson Reuters called Calais (or OpenCalais in some quarters) They hope going to transform the web as we know it:

calais_logo1We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

What Calais claims to do is create maps of meaning with the meta data in this or any document. The range of its includes is impressive: calais-02


Linked Data Cloud is so sexy
The next big release of all this will be in January. Calais say it’s going to be a big deal and reading the quote below, even if they half-deliver, they’re going to be right!

The Gist: Release 4 of Calais will be a big deal. In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.

Hermenuetics
Not for one minute do I profess to understand all of this. What interests me is the flow of information and the creation of meaning – the hermeneutics of data. What attracts me is the fact that I can jump right in and play with the technology. I like this interplay between the now of available technology and its interface with Theory.