Pure Play

Posts that caught my weekend eye

Alan on the GAA-T

Alan O'Rourke posts a good review of his near-zero budget approach for his GAA-T site. Some excerpts that illustrate the issues for him:

• "I can’t just barge into a forum, post a link and comment about how great the T-shirts are and disappear. Me and my post would swiftly be labelled SPAM and banned."
• "My range of knowledge of all things GAA is limited which creates a big handicap to the much recommended option of creating a blog."

Go to his post (linked here) to read how he has or proposes to overcome these and other obstacles/opportunities :-). Thanks for taking the time out to post that Alan.

Fergal - "ditch that dial-up"

A weekend post from Fergal O'Byrne (linked here) on whether small and medium businessess (SME's) need to be persuaded to ditch dial-up for DSL (or whatever)has been followed by a good discussion on that topic.
Personally I think Fergal is right - "broadband" takeup is dismal. I talk to a lot of SME's who are not in technology businesses and the issue for most of them is not that they cannot get a broadband service, it is that they don't see why they should. This needs action on a number of fronts and Fergal's suggestion would go part of the way.

Michele speaks some (ad)sense

Michele Neylon brings his various experiences of adsense and how it has worked for him together in one post - linked here. Some interesting observations in here for Pure Play such as:

"Text links are more popular than I would have thought even when it is blatantly obvious that they are not part of the site’s navigation"

Kathy reclaims her sanity

Kathy Sierra writes a superb blog that focuses on end users. In this post (linked here) she makes a link between the neverending obsession with consuming media and our approach to developing for our users. She visits themes that many of you will be familiar with such as:

"By the year 2000, it had become impossible for even a Sun Java engineer--someone creating the API--to be familiar with everything in the standard library. Yet the rest of us were feeling guilty. Like we were falling behind. Like we weren't hardcore Java programmers. So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything."

And then links this to end user design
"Finally, are WE part of the problem? Are we overwhelming our users with documentation? Or are we part of the solution to their info anxiety? We're the ones that should be helping our users really focus on the things they need at any stage."

keith

I Have A Complaint

And it is about my own blog. Typepad brought in a Captcha system for comments recently so I signed up for it - without testing it out to see what it was like. And this is the sort of images they are using:

Which IMHO is bloody awful - it is very difficult to make out what you are supposed to replicate. So I have turned the Captcha system off and hopefully Typepad will produce an easier to read version of this. Apologies to anyone who may have been put off by this in the last couple of days - I only discovered it this afternoon when I went to leave a comment myself!

keith

Really good business conference

In March I posted on an internet discussion forum for women in business in Ireland - the forum is at this address: www.irishbusinesswomen.com/forum/

They have organised their first conference - see www.ibwevents.com/conference.htm for more details. It is being held in Mullingar on the 24th May and they have a great speaker line-up. These speakers caught my eye in particular:

• Amanda Pratt, Avoca
• Valerie Pierce, Clear & Critical Thinking
• Cristiona Kiely, Blackberry Village

however there are loads more. And before you ask - I do not know whether men in business are open to attending - it is not made clear on the site :-). I have emailed them about that and I will post the answer here when received.

keith

UPDATE: I received this from Finola Howard - one of the conference organisers. "IrishBusinessWomen.com is inclusive and we would be delighted if men would attend." 

Marketing

Myself and Fintan met this evening to catch up with each other and discuss our planning of our marketing post-launch.

Classically a pure play web-service would only advertise online and that makes sense. However because of the demographic of our target audience (as referred to previously they are internet users - but at the basic internet and email level) certain avenues such as "working" the blogs may not be enough for us.

We will be running targeted adsense/similiar campaigns using relevant keywords and we will have to back this up with some real world advertising/advertorial spend in key magazines for our audience.  That will not be cheap - but it will be necessary for penetration of an audience who are still avid consumers of traditional media.

keith

Google Adwords

I have watched the experience of entrepreneurs such as Julian in Tablane with interest (see here) as they work with Google Adwords and experimented to make it more effective for them.

And now it is my turn - dbTwang has now started a campaign with 3 words/phrases (and a very limited budget) to begin with! This is the only way to make sense of the myriad of terms that surround services like Adwords - just do it. And have tied it into an Analytics account for reporting purposes so I will have to start hacking my way through that as well :-)

keith

PS - thanks to Aidan from EventIreland whose delivered a really good talk at the IIA event in Kilkenny yesterday. That prompted me to get on with this. I enjoyed the seminar and hope it helps SME's in Kilkenny to develop their internet usage.

The Power of the Blog

In theory a blog (especially a successful one) raises the profile of the blogger and thus makes him/her a valuable commodity.

In practice it may not yet work - especially in a market (Ireland) where blogging is still in the infancy of its development. So howabout we put it to the test?! Tom Raftery (award winning blogger and all round smart cookie - see my previous post here :-) is job hunting and so this post is my assistance in his hunt.

Where would he fit? Very nicely into the mix of a FMCG business or a marketing business consulting into that sector - where his knowledge of the social software/services/online space would be a clear differentiator.

He has also got a really good techie skill-set and that I cannot do justice - see his blog post for more - http://www.tomrafteryit.net/gis-a-job-seriously/

keith

technorati tags: raftery, recruitment, cork, ireland, opportunity,

Security upgrade - Dilbert Style

I subscribe to the Dilbert RSS feed and have always resisted posting one here because I am unsure on the copyright front. But this one today is just too good (especially after Patch Tuesday yesterday!)

You can subscribe to Dilbert by email here or to the RSS feed (unofficial) here

keith

Help - or the Things You Take For Granted

When I use a site or a service I take it for granted that there will be a help function. And contextual help is really useful sometimes.

It doesn't grow on trees. Nor can you cut and paste it from somewhere. So myself and Fintan have discovered as we both labour through developing detailed textual help (and some image based in his case) for the dbtwang service.

So hats off to those of you who have launched a virgin service with good help available - good for your users and also good for you because it adds to the feeling of substance and trust.

keith

A delicious irony

During the week Tom Raftery worked up a lather about the editor of a traditional communications journal and the editors inability to "get" blogging.

This is another tale of the unexpected that involves a business in the US whose goal in life is to provide online brands with a managed solution to enable, encourage, and monitor online customer ratings and reviews. The business is Bazaarvoice. And they have a blog - http://www.bazaarblog.com/

My attention was drawn to this blog during the week by someone who had posted a comment to it - informing them that a link from a post did not work. The link was changed (it still does not work) but the comment never appeared. Another comment was posted drawing attention to this - and that never appeared either. This is strange - because the Bazaarvoice blog invites comments:

Interact (it says): Add a comment (it says): Leave a Reply (it says). Was this an isolated incident I wondered - so I had a look at 10 different posts. No comments. At all. Anywhere.

So either they have a very underperforming blog that does not attract comments at all - and my contact during the week would suggest otherwise OR (horror of horrors) - a business whose sole focus is to encourage customer interaction does not allow comments to clog up it's PR driven "blog".

I wonder which!?

UPATE - the comment was posted - nearly a month later. Could be just a glitch in their initial blog setup - stranger things have happened. Good to see it anyways.

keith

AdSense optimisation - Dublin specialist

Picked this up from tech.memorandum.com - an interview with Ivan Heneghan, a Dublin-based AdSense optimisation specialist - linked here. For those readers who work with Adsense this is worth a read - and for those of you in Ireland always good to know about local talent!

keith

dbTwang - first announcement of our new venture name

We are now at the end of week 7 of our 10 week build and confident enough now in our June launch that we decided yesterday to put up our holding page - www.dbtwang.com.  (at the time of writing this post our holding page is in beta! - with a typo and as yet unconnected backend for collecting emails. This will be remedied very shortly :-)

And this is our logo as featured on the home page. Developed for us by Cian Walsh in Afterglow.

It's kinda nice to see something up in public!

keith

Paths are for people

Off Topic! In Kilkenny, as with most other towns and cities, there are parking issues. Mostly these are raised by motorists giving out that either parking is not available, or that they have to pay for it. (I am a motorist myself - and say tough. We are a selfish bunch and the world does not exist to facilitate us)

Enterprising motorists can get around this by clever thinking - why not just park on paths? The inconvenience or even threat to the safety of pedestrians, people pushing buggies and people in wheelchairs is nothing compared to the sheer convenience factor. And unfortunately the local County Council here are pretty inactive about sorting this out.

So today I am walking along a path that is being used by parents bringing kids to school and right in front of us two Kilkenny County Council employees drive their big jeepy thing right up on the path and walk into the garage. Go figure.

keith

Enterprise Ireland Web2 event

We have a venue (Helix), a date (Thurs 27th April) and a description "Web2Ireland is Ireland's Web 2.0 conference, in the Helix DCU glasnevin.  You will hear from thought leaders, connect with peers...."
See the Enterprise Ireland website for more - here

Except there are no speakers listed. Not one. With 3 weeks to go. And don't expect to book online - because you can't. Although if you download the Word formatted booking form you can find the email of the person to send your email booking to on it. But it is not on the web page above.

Maybe the quality of the speakers will make up for the approach. I certainly hope so as I have had the pleasure of some really good Enterprise Ireland events so I know they can host them.

Via Eirepreneur who got his from the Web2Ireland blog

UPDATE: Almost complete speakers list as received from EI this morning:

Kevin Sherry, Manager EI High Potential Start up Division

Judy Gibbons, Accel -   Web 2.0: What does it mean?

Marc Canter -               Web 2.0 Technologies and why they making an impact

Jeff Clavier -                  Web 2.0 – What makes companies successful?

Daniel Waterhouse, 3i - The Investor’s Perspective

Nasser Batley, -             Web 2.0: The M&A Perspective
Dresdner Kleinwort
Wasserstein

and a couple of as yet unannounced EI client companies showcasing Irish Technologies.

keith

 

Google Analytics hold another party

In November last I installed Google Analytics on this site and also requested an account for my wife's blog.  This morning we received that call to come join them for fun and games.

And a quick technorati search shows that a flood of invites went out - so exclusive it is not :-)

keith

The right tools for the job

Software is there to make tasks you need to do easier.  Cccasionally I miss this altogether - when I spend an hour or two installing (and then uninstalling) a piece of software just because it caught my eye - or setting up an account with a web service that is of little or no relevance.

This morning I got it right. I am currently writing the help text for the Pure Play site - and I stalled. Not on the writing - but on the structure that I was using to hold it.

I had it on a word document - yet that offered very little by way of searchability. And certainly was not going to be of use for a data import into the back end. I then tried the Open Office database wizards - but got the set-up muddled somewhere and it did not function as I had wanted.

Then I saw a reference this morning on eHub to www.madb.net - a Ruby On Rails web database that allows you to define the structure of your data and immediately have the interface to manage and search it. And share of course!

So off I went. And an hour later have a structure that I can manage and that gives a lot of flexibility for filters and presenting the individual help text items. So they can be grouped together easily to present the help for an entire page of the site.

And for me this allows a formalised approach to the text writing that allows me to see where a piece of text will fit.

Thanks to Emily for that - her blog is a great source of useful services.

keith

 

Business blogging - the challenge

Good V Bad - my favorite kind of movies - with the good guys winning of course! And for me the good guys in the food business are the growers and producers with a passion for great food.

On Saturday morning I saw some food sampling in Superquinn Kilkenny and stopped for long enough to take in that it was not the product of a mult-national that was being portioned and divvied out. Instead it was pizza from the Alternative Pizza company.

I stopped to chat to David Flynn who is the founder of the business. He is passionate about his product and loves to interact with others who feel likewise. And he is currently having his website changed to try and encourage his customers and potential customers to engage more with him.

So I told him I would email him and explain that maybe he should consider a blog. And here is why: because no other medium (short of face to face food sampling) is so friendly to comment, feedback and debate. Never mind the increased liklehood of enhanced exposure to search engines. And the linking with people running food blogs.

Never mind a yearly cost of €50 - max. And an incredibly easy to use interface for posting and managing your blog.

I am going to contact him today as I said I would. And see if I can persuade him :-)

keith

A visual treat and a rare insight combined

There are bloggers lurking in your midst. I have known the guys in Cartoon Saloon for years and every so often have a chat with Tomm Moore to catch up with how they are doing in their persistent quest to raise funding for a number of productions they have conceived.

And this morning it takes Alan from Spoiltchild to point me at Tomm's blog - which is running since December. The Blog of Kells - great title! (In my defence when we do chat it is about the "real" world :-)

Tomm's blog is notable for two reasons. Firstly it contains some superb pics from the work of Cartoon Saloon - they are superb animators and this really is a joy to browse. Secondly Tomm posts about the ways in which they have approached the financing of the productions they are involved in and about the evolution of the finished product (which is still a work in progress). This is great stuff.

keith

technorati tags: kilkenny, animation, cartoon saloon, the book of kells,

Beta tester(s) required

We are 5 weeks away from finishing the launch build and 6 weeks away from needing 2 beta testers to have a second look (see my post here) at our service in advance of the launch.

So we would invite contact from bloggers who have a collection of guitars - (this can be a couple or a lot) and who would be willing to have spend a small bit of time looking at the service and makes notes on their comments and feedback. That will be gathered online and location is not an issue.

Email me at keithbohanna AT gmail.com

thanks, keith

technorati tags: guitar, guitars, guitar collector, guitar collection, beta, beta tester