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seaport.exe

What is Seaport.exe?

ErrorI’m still getting a lot of traffic from people looking for Seaport.exe and how to remove it – Seaport.exe, a battle of the cloud. It’s not a virus, it’s an app from Microsoft for souping up search. If you want to disable it here’s how:

Update: How to stop seaport.exe

Here’s the basics on stopping seaport.exe

For Vista go to Start and Start Search and enter “services.msc”

For XP go to Start Run

run

and enter “services.msc”

services

Click OK. Next you’ll get this screen pop up:

services1

Scroll down do seaport.exe, right click and select Properties – a box like this will appear:

properties

Go to Startup Type and select Disabled.

This should stop it hogging up your machine working.

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

New Social Media Case Studies added

The Rose Project – Dublin based not-for-profit using Twitter and Blogs to help support charity work in Africa

TriWest Healthcare Alliance  – e-mail/video campaign raises awareness with over 1 million people watching video on support for troops. 1st use of social media by TriWest – raising $ with social media.

BBQAddicts.com an enquiry via Twitter starts global viral web campaign to bring home the bacon

IZEA Kmart use whole range of Social Media Marketing tools/platforms inc Twitter and A-List bloggers to get their message through and raise brand awareness. Good range of metrics to back it up.

CoffeeGroundz Mr Tweet shows off how Twitter doubled the clientele in a Houston coffee shop

Carnival Cruise Lines using Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to build brand and customer loyalty

Get them all at Social Media Case Studies – the Hot List

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General

Reconfiguring site

Apologies for any errors generated!

Categories
Enterprise 2.0

A tad busy of late…setting up a new venture

 

I do wish I’d categorised this site a little better. I’m starting to delve more into the details of WordPress and how it structures information. The aim is a local business venture supporting the many and varied organisations and businesses of West London with a web presence. I am also potentially looking at some more international engagements, more of that later. In the meantime this has left me a tad busy of late and I’m hoping normal service will resume later. Please do accept my apologies. 

 

 

oh and btw, I have some ideas for the Social Media Case Study list, that definitely deserves some more time.

Categories
Theory

How to Wrap Five Eggs

How to wrap eggs There’s something very Heideggerian about the relationship between the ‘thing’ and its packaging here. This book, I want and desire… The ding in sich, wrapped up in its perplexity.5-eggs

“We have come a long, long way from the kind of thing so beautifully presented in this book. To suit the needs of super mass production, the traditional natural materials are too obstreperous . . . and one by one we have replaced them with the docile, predictable synthetics . . . What we have gained from these [new] materials and wonderfully complicated processes to make up for the general pollution, rush, crowding, noise, sickness, and slickness is a subject for other forums. But what we have lost for sure is what this book is all about: a once-common sense of fitness in the relationships between hand, material, use, and shape, and above all, a sense of delight in the look and feel of very ordinary, humble things. This book is thus . . . a totally unexpected monument to a culture, a way of life, a universal sensibility carried through all objects down to the smallest, most inconsequential, and ephemeral things.”

George Nelson

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Case Study Enterprise 2.0

Social Media Case Study Updates

Some great new case studies added to the Social Media Case Study: The Hot List:

Kraft iFood assistant on the iPhone – one of the top 100 apps and consumers pay 99c for it…

Novartis – video compo on YouTube (Blog Council, not much info at present)

Dell, Monsanto, iContact, Sabre 4 very different approaches to internal comms and technology.

IBM – Corporate Culture and Social Media – why the culture is so important for success

Must look at how to organise these better!

Categories
Enterprise 2.0 Film

Neat Viral: Dr Manhattan

It’s a little known fact that I used buy comics from the same market stall in Northampton’s Market Square, that Alan Moore bought his. Of more note, it’s going to be a little more interesting to see how social media gets used here following on from the example set by X-Men and Dr Manhattan

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Kick my RSS – How to make Enterprise 2.0 RSS work

newspaper_feed_256x256The RSS debate – enterprise disruptor?

I’ve just been dragged into the RSS debate. However, I must admit when I saw Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ReadWriteWeb (RWW) had written a lamentation on the death of corporate RSS R.I.P Enterprise RSS, that I simply didn’t bother reading it. However, a ‘Tweep’ from Dave Winer prompted me to read this post: Incredibly RSS is dead! Here, Phil Jones reckons RSS is a no-no not in my backyard technology for the enterprise:

We *imagined* that social-software would burst the enterprise. Instead, the enterprise resolutely rejects it. No senior manager (who has a certain amount of “between-ness centrality”) wants to legitimize the automated software streams that would route around him (or her), bypass the company’s official PR outputs, bypass the company’s official sales department’s inputs.

There’s a certain resonance with reality there, but I don’t buy the whole argument. RSS may have limited rollout in the enterprise, but I don’t think we can dismiss the whole bag of social media so easily. Yes for sure there are as Phil appears to know only too well, those who fear and loath the power of social media and its ability to transcend the normal corporate boundaries. What this misses is that the desire to control and batten down communications is a trait that can impact all communications and to my mind it’s a negative one. What such control can’t do is stop all communications and whilst many might fear the power of a blog to support an employee’s communications, they should equally fear the power of a one-to-one phone call. Or, put another way, social media create new channels but anyone can still send out a career-limiting e-mail…

I come to praise RSS, not to bury it

So back to our friend the feed that is RSS, why are RWW saying it’s no more? The quick answer is they’re not:

We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it’s their loss. It’s our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

But they say, but, against all odds it hasn’t taken off. And this is completely against all logic, in fact given the competitive advantage RSS provides RWW think it’s nuts.

Any company that steps up to make serious strategic use of such software should be at an immediate advantage in terms of early and efficient access to information.

Marshall cites Forrester’s Oliver Young, who having wrongly predicted that 2008 would be the year of RSS, largely agrees and wonders if something has gone fundamentally wrong here. What has gone wrong though they ask – maybe it’s duff technology, maybe it’s too difficult, maybe it’s a fear of acronyms. I’m not convinced on the latter, acronyms go awol given a bit of tlc or even gbh.

High Stakes

The stakes are high here, massive competitive advantage and the chance of pundits like me getting rich quick here as Neville Hobson acknowledges:

What would make RSS grab attention within the enterprise? Heh, if I knew the exact answer, I’d be sitting back and picking up those royalties!

Well, I sure could do with some royalties, in fact as of today I could do with some regular income, but in the spirit of openness (if not humility) I’ll share what I think is going wrong here.

The acronym could easily be replaced, as e-mail did with SMTP, and I prefer the term ‘feeds’ or even ”webfeeds’. There is also the problem of explaining what RSS does and Neville describes well the penny-dropping moment when the advantage of RSS is understood:

You can see people getting their ‘light bulb moments’ when you illustrate the simple example of getting content from their ten favourite websites automatically delivered to them rather than having to visit those ten sites individually to see if there’s anything new.

What’s really gone wrong

So why oh why not use it? Is it the technology, there seems to be some large agreement that the RSS vendors haven’t quite got it right yet. I’ve tried both Attensa and Newsgator and both a OK, but neither really integrates into the electric working patterns of the average office bod. For sure Attensa has an Outlook plug-in but I don’t want RSS in Outlook, even if it’s in its own folder. And what I don’t want is a separate application, nor really do I want it in a web page though there are some very nice reasons for being able to make an enterprise Netvibes type thang, which I’ll talk about in a future post.

I don’t want these things and I know that a lot of other people in the enterprise don’t want them as I’ve actually gone out and talked to people about it and surveyed them. The feedback was a lot of confusion with some – ‘RSS what?’ etc but also, equally a lot of people asking why there wasn’t more use of RSS. This was despite the fact that I’d made sure that in my sphere of influence, almost every single web based news channel had RSS feeds available as standard. RSS was ubiquitous and it was still only being used by a small %. So some hadn’t a clue, others wanted more, but it still didn’t connect up.

And this to me is where the enterprise class readers and aggregators fall down – they don’t connect. For sure they might connect up backoffice, Attensa certainly does with Active Directory and auto-subscription and more metrics than you can shake a dirty stick at. What they don’t connect up with though is working patterns. RSS becomes another application to open up and use, it’s somewhere else to have to look to find information.

How to fix it

So what the vendors need to do is synch up the RSS readers with how people want to work. Attensa goes the right way with the Outlook plugin but it’s with the wrong app, it should be with the browser. I’ve written about this before Flock vs Chrome RSS and sung the praises of Flock’s built in RSS reader but not thought about it in enterprise terms.

The fact that Flock integrates RSS into the browser means it becomes part of the browser experience. The feeds I subscribe to become dynamic automatic bookmarks in my browser. This I like, it’s not another app to learn and I can use the Flock reader as a base while jumping from page to page (something that is lost in a pure web page experience.

Some may differ about Flock or prefer another way of reading their RSS, but I stand by the fact that what’s needed is a way of integrating RSS into working practices. Until that happens it won’t take off – it will be another chore rather than a helper. When RSS does become a true boon, the results will be immediate and of immediate benefit.

Categories
Analysts Enterprise 2.0

Gartner: the CIO and Web 2.0

The beleaguered CIO is being proffered heavy weight advice by the analysts at Gartner. First they weighed in with a Gartner Presents CIO Resolutions for 2009 and now Gartner’s top pundit Mark McDonald has offered his advice to the CIO in an interview with the Wisconsin Technology Network saying that “CIOs may have only four months to show results”:

Now is the time for CIOs to pick one thing that they have to get done fast and get done well and put all of their resources against it.

What’s interesting is where he sees that worth being demonstrated. Budgets in IT he notes will be flat. Large scale type projects therefore, while they can generate revenue or create savings, are currently too costly a risk for the cash-strapped IT dept:

Investments in BI and CRM and ERP were viewed as investments, and fairly significant capital expenditures.

And what this means is that they won’t happen in the foreseeable and certainly not in the next couple of quarters. Asked what will be “left out in the cold” McDonald’s reply was:

Basically, anything new,- but Web 2.0 tools are not among them.

What we are seeing therefore McDonald argues is Web 2.0 achieving mainstream adoption despite the downturn. This will be both as an external marketing tool and as an internal collaboration tool. Neither he says should be put on the back-burner. Notably, it’s the internal collaborational aspect that is now generating the most heat:

Every company, regardless of who they are, is probably going to be looking at using Web 2.0 to improve internal collaboration, but I think there is a significant difference between companies that are effective and have a history of being effective, which is achieving their goals.

This I think is the rub of the interview – social media as collaboration technology is going to take off, not least because it’s relatively cheap to introduce and can quickly achieve demonstrable results. The key aspect I believe though, is whether the company can capitalise on the potential gains here in Europe. McDonald is focusing on the USA and it will be telling to see how the potential adoption takes place in the UK and in Europe. Now, McDonald says is the chance to sieze the opportunity in the USA, let’s hope our European CIOs achieve this too.

Other postings
The interview has had keen reactions most notably Fast Forward Gartner: Web 2.0 Tools Exempt from Economic Cutbacks and at The Content Economy Cutting costs by improving internal collaboration

Categories
Communications

Tin Eye tinned

Just been trying to confuse Tin Eye the reverse image search tool. Theory is upload an image and it tells you where it came from and other sites where it lives. I tried to confuse it with the Wittgenstein’s Duck Rabbit but to no avail as neither a duck nor a rabbit was found. Will have to try again at a later date…wittgenstein_duck_rabbit