It’s going to be interesting to see what the Bing team have been up to lately – this Wed at SBTUG Mark Vozzo is going to be covering all the new stuff in Bing. He’ll be on after the pizza break (remember we have Gary Hayes talking about Augmented Reality in the first session). One of my frustrations with Bing is that most of their new stuff doesn’t show in Australia – it is US only, meaning you have to change your region in order to view it. And even then it won’t always work – for example, I still can’t get the Bing app on my iPhone. It’s a strange move by the […]
Augmented Reality with Gary Hayes at SBTUG
I wonder if you’ve spent much time considering what the benefits of Augmented Reality are for your business? Personally I think Augmented Reality is soon going to be as significant as Location has become today. A few years ago people thought tracking your mobile phone location was only useful for freight companies. Now we know how much of a game-changer it has become with companies like foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter and Google Latitude all providing addictive tools and business models around location. Augmented Reality will be next. But perhaps you’re not even sure what Augmented Reality is. In that case check out this quick 2 minute overview from the Common Craft […]
Using Excel 2010 Sparklines to Analyse Google Analytics
Seriously, how would businesses survive if it weren’t for Excel? 
Excel is perfect for analysing analytics data in a variety of ways (eg using Pivot tables and Conditional formatting) and it keeps getting better. I’m loving Office 2010 and Excel 2010 in particular – it’s just beautiful to use. In this post I want to highlight one of the ‘tiny’ new things in Excel 2010 that I love. It’s the new Sparklines feature. In a nutshell Sparklines allow you to analyse a range of data and display tiny trend graphs. They’re very handy for spotting correlating trends. Here’s a simple (contrived) example: In this post I’ll […]
SEO and SEM at NSW.NET
I’m excited to be presenting with Mark Vozzo (<- SEO guru) at this month’s NSW.NET meeting. It’s on this coming Thursday morning, June 24. You can register here. The event is in two parts. Mark will be covering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for 30 minutes, and then after breakfast I’ll cover Search Engine Marketing (SEM). To give you a quick introduction to the event, consider the following screenshots* from Google and Bing. In the green you’ll see organic search engine results, in the red you’ll see the paid ads (eg via Google AdWords) Here’s how it looks in Bing: In […]
Australian SharePoint Conference Review
I was fortunate to attend the Australian SharePoint Conference this week (June 16 & 17). This was a surprisingly good conference – comfortable venue, well organized, top notch speakers, great networking and most importantly a very useful look in detail into SharePoint 2010. Complaints & Reality There’s always a few things to complain about at a conference eg the air conditioning was inconsistent (too hot at times, too cold at others) but these are rarely things the conference organisers can control. I’ve learnt from running my own events in the past that you are often at the mercy of your venue when it comes to these kinds of things. […]
True Blood and Urgency
Michele and I have decided to have a week off. Which, as you will know if you are a business owner, means you intend to relax but really just end up doing pockets of work in between snatches of non-work: TV watching, book reading and other activities that you think constitute ‘getting away from it all’. But we’re trying – and to that end we decided we’d watch Season 2 of True Blood, since we quite enjoyed Series 1 last year. First off, I need to warn you that Season 2 is a debacle. It’s the first time I’ve seen a show jump the shark so early – normally […]
Office 2010 & Windows Intune at SWUG this Wed
I’m looking forward to the Sydney Windows User Group (SWUG) this Wed (only 2 days to go!). Nick Rayner (newly blogging again) has lined up another rip-snorter (<- the first definition) and managed to get both Alistair Speirs and Jeff Alexander presenting on the same night (many people travel miles to hear just one of these guys – they’re that good ) Alistair (newly married) will be talking about Office 2010 including Visio, Project and SharePoint. I’m a big Alistair fan (as you know), so I’d be going anyway, but having just upgraded to Office 2010 I wouldn’t miss it. Office 2010 is an excellent upgrade IMO, particularly Outlook 2010 which has […]
Bing Webmaster Blog
It’s good to see the Bing Webmaster Center Blog picking up. I’ve been following Rick DeJarnette’s posts more closely lately – he’s putting out some good stuff. I thought it worth highlighting a few examples: SEO for Silverlight SEO Site Review tips – Part 1 SEO Site Review tips – Part 2 Chasing the Long Tail with Keyword Research It’s not all good though – try to avoid any posts that refer to ‘discussions’ on the Bing forums – there’s so much bad advice and busy work getting pumped out there it’s not funny (example). Oh, and […]
Content is King by Bill Gates
I’ve had a frustrating time trying to find the original ‘Content is King’ article written by Bill Gates back in 1996. There’s a few sites that have a copy of the essay, but nothing on the Microsoft site (it has been removed from the Bill Gates Published Writing page). Wayback Machine seems to be the only other option (thanks to Andrew Heenan for the link).
If you can find a Microsoft link could you please let me know. For now, I am adding the essay in it’s entirety here (as I will be referring to it in a future post).
Content Is King – Bill Gates (1/3/1996)
Content is where I expect much of the real money […]
WordPress and SEO
How time flies I’ve been meaning to post these for months now – they’re sessions on SEO and WordPress I’ve presented at various User Group meetings this year. First off, here’s the notes from my IIS SEO toolkit presentation at SWUG back in February. The slides are pretty simple, so I recommend reading my complete review of the IIS SEO Toolkit (from my XEN SEO site). IIS SEO toolkit And for a quick overview of SEO tips, here’s a 10 Thing in 10 Minutes mini-session on SEO – with just the basics. [drain […]
Saasu, Xero, Freshbooks, MYOB and more at SBTUG (UPDATED)
UPDATED: See notes below. I need your help please. This month at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we’re covering online accounting, bookkeeping, time tracking and invoicing systems for freelancers and small businesses. But I need some guidance from you: First, which products should we cover? I’m thinking products like Saasu, Xero, Freshbooks and Zoho. Which others should we include? – ideally we have time for five or six in total. What tools do you use in your business? UPDATE: A few other products that have been suggested including: Shoeboxed, MinuteDock, BankLink, FreeAgent, MYOB Live Accounts And second, who would […]
Australian SharePoint Conference
As far as well-priced technical conferences go, I think the Australian SharePoint Conference is pretty impressive. It’s $650 + GST for two days, with three tracks, held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. The speaker line-up ‘aint shabby either. There’s also a big line-up of sponsors and vendor booths, so the usual networking opportunities will be there. User groups will be playing a key part this year, with dedicated areas […]
Lack of SharePoint professionals? Or lack of Simplicity…
Back in January Oscar Trimboli started a great discussion on whether there was a lack of SharePoint developers in Australia. It’s a good post, and there’s a ton of value in reading the comments – you’ll hear the thoughts of some of Australia’s best SharePoint minds. As is the case with any technology on a fast growth adoption ride, there’s always going to be a supply versus demand equilibrium to be sorted. In SharePoint’s case, this coupled with the enormous breadth of the product, means that getting your hands on a good SharePoint hire (be they developer, admin or architect) is getting harder. As most of the comments on the post […]
Location, Search and Google’s Patent
Google’s patent awarded last week for using location in advertising is interesting news (patent details here via VentureBeat). Not because of the dramatic effect (dun, dun, dah) it might have on the industry . No, the key point here is they submitted the patent for consideration back in September 2003. This is significant because it shows the foresight Google has. Sure, the concept of location isn’t new – people have been talking about it (or at least claiming to have talked about it) for more than a decade. And recently the talk has reached mainstream discussion. But most of that talk (myself included) has been about location enabled services. […]
Video Ezy Chatswood
Just wanted to give a shout out to our local DVD store: Chatswood Video Ezy (link to store). They’re just down on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Neridah Street near Chatswood Chase. Why this post? Well, two reasons. The first is mentioned in my disclaimer at the bottom, but the second – and most important – is because we want more people to patronise them. We’ve been happy customers there for more than a decade, and currently take advantage of their $39.95 a month membership. There’s no lock-in, so we can cancel at any time. And we get to hire 4 DVDs at once. Overnight videos need […]
Sydney WordPress Event at SBTUG
I’m looking for Sydney’s hottest WordPress developers to come and present at SBTUG this month. And to clarify, by ‘hottest’ I mean ‘skilled’ – this isn’t a calendar photo shoot We’re having a huge WordPress event at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) on Wed 24 Feb 2010, covering all facets of using WordPress as a web platform for business. We’re planning to have 5 sessions covering: WordPress as a CMS WordPress for Blogging WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) WordPress Customisation & Themes WordPress Hosting Plus case […]
The price of a useful enhancement
What larks! I wonder what metrics Microsoft uses to calculate the benefit of a new feature. Take the new battery notifications messages added in Windows 7 for example. On paper, and during testing, that must have seemed like a useful feature to have in the product – it certainly seems useful to me. Instead, when the feature actually worked as it was supposed to it turned out to be a mini PR issue for the company, as sites reporting that ‘Microsoft is investigating battery notification issues…’ steadily appeared. Of course there’s nothing wrong with reporting that there might be an issue (thankfully it didn’t turn into the sky-is-falling fiasco of […]
Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit
If you are interested in knowing a little more about the IIS SEO Toolkit (I give it the big thumbs up), I’ve written a little review over on my XEN SEO blog (note I originally wrote the review based on the beta version, but it has been updated based on the release in mid Jan). Plus, as mentioned in my previous post, I also discussed the SEO Toolkit with Andrew and Michael on Frankly Speaking last week. And if you are in Sydney tomorrow (Wed 10 Feb), I’ll be presenting on it at the Sydney Windows User Group (here’s the SWUG post with details). Tomorrow will be a big night – its […]
Frankly Speaking on SEO
A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here. Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list. SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched the surface, but here’s a summary and links to the various items we touched on: Danny Sullivan on SEO for Bill Gates – in which Danny reviewed Bill Gates’ new site The […]
Putting the boot in to Microsoft
Apparently February is ‘put the boot into Microsoft’ month. I must have missed the memo. Or perhaps it only got sent to the ex-senior-management@microsoft.com mailing list. In any case it’s been good to see that some have taken the directive to heart. Oh hang on, cancel that – there actually hasn’t been much said by former softies at all. Instead it’s just all the noise of journalists (and Microsoft!) reporting on what one or two (and perhaps three) former softies said. If you haven’t yet written your own second-hand post about the internal woes of working at Microsoft and how they are doomed to failure, you’d better get started. Otherwise people will […]
