Archive for June, 2008

Free podcast: TBX1’s ‘Reverse Dragon’s Den’ business networking events in Devon

Jun 30 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, podcasts
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The Business Exchange’s ‘Reverse Dragon’s Den’ event recorded at the Future Inn in Plymouth 20th June 2008

Dragon's Den panel Image: Cassandra Photography

Question 1 of 10: “How much would the panel be prepared to invest to save 1 hour a day of an employee’s time?” – Gordon White, Voicescene

The ‘Reverse Dragon’s Den’ is a free networking event and ‘Question Time’ style panel discussion that gives business people the opportunity to gain advice and insight from successful local entrepreneurs about coping with the present credit crunch.

The Plymouth panel comprised • Richard George of Scream-IT • Damon Leszner of Pacific Staff • Joseph Louie of The Astor Hotel • Barry Cole of Riviera International Conference Centre and was chaired by Jeremy Filmer-Bennett of the Devon and Cornwall Business Council.

You can quiz the panel at the next ‘Reverse Dragon’s Den’ in Exeter at the Exeter Court Hotel, Kennford on Friday 11th July. Please contact The Business Exchange to book.

Click the player below to listen to this question or R-Click here to download.

[Click here to listen to the full 52 minute podcast (R-Click to download).]

When Twitter stops working…

Jun 30 | by Sam Deeks | GRRRR!!!, blogging technique, news
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Yes, folks. Twitter killed my site today, it’s official.

Twitter sh*tterWhat I learned today is that if you build stuff into your site that refers to external sites (like Twitter, Viddler, YouTube etc) you go down when they go down.

Our site was getting stuck loading. I tracked it to problem connecting with Twitter. Twitter’s server timed out. Checks showed that Twitter was down. The only thing I could do was remove the Twitter feed widget from my sidebar. Pity really. I quite liked that quick news headline function.

Can you afford your site being impossibly slow all day because an external site is down and your site keeps on trying to connect to it? Probably not. So the choice is ‘take it, leave it or hope that Wordpress developers code a way around it’.

[6 hours later and it's still slowing everything down when I activate the Twitter widget, so it's out on its ear]

FREE! Adwords case-study podcast

Jun 28 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, marketing, podcasts
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In this free case study podcast, Matt Cummings tells how his company turned a £13k Adword spend into £65k of new business

Speaking at a Wired West event in Exeter last week, Matt takes us through how webrecruit.co.uk put Adwords to work after a shaky start.  If you’re thinking about using Adwords, you should give this a listen.  Matt’s talk demonstrates a strong business case for using AdWords – and for paying for professional management of your campaign.

R-Click here to download the mp3.

Technical note for those interested in podcasting: This was an ‘unplanned’ ambient recording using just the m-Audio Microtrack I with its plug-in mic with the result that the ’signal-to-noise’ ratio was low (i.e. less voice, more room ambience). Normally, we use a wireless lavalier mic to capture seminar style talks because it keeps the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible (i.e. more direct voice and less room ambience).

How easy is it to make a video podcast with Wordpress?

Jun 28 | by Sam Deeks | blogging technique, how to
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It’s easy. This is how Viddler embeds in Wordpress.

If you’ve got a webcam, you can sign up to Viddler and record your video podcasts directly to their system. That’s one way it differs from YouTube.

Like YouTube, you can then easily embed them in your website / blog pages – but unlike YouTube, Viddler allows you to tag and comment on various parts of your video. (Oh no!)

The result is comments embedded in your video which (and I haven’t played with this yet) presumably make your content more ‘findable’ by search engines.

Let’s click publish and see.

That’s pretty simple – you just need to remember to paste the player code into the HTML editor window when you’re making a post (not the VISUAL editor window).

There are basically two kinds of video streaming: ‘http streaming’ (what’s happening here) and ‘proper, real, serious streaming’ (what costs).

The upside of http streaming is that in 5 minutes, anyone can be doing it. The video and sound quality can be as high or low as you like (depending on your equipment). The downside is that for people with less-than average broadband (like us) the buffering lag (the time you wait for the thing to start playing) is pretty long.

Simple choice, though. Get it free or pay for it.

A quick comparison (more later) shows that YouTube has a faster streaming time than Viddler.

Voip made simple and easy

Jun 26 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, how to
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If you don’t know about Voip, you need someone who can make it easy for you to learn.

Enter Gordon Henderson from Drogon Systems.

This is how simple and easy it is to use Voip with Drogon Systems:

1) Gordon handed me a phone with a cable attached

2) I drove home and plugged the cable into my router at home

3) I dialled people and spoke to them

Then Gordon explained the charges. Then he showed me the online billing page. And if I like it, I’ll keep it and pay for my calls.

Err. That’s it.  How much more simple and easy can you get?

Give Gordon a call on 01364 698 123 – and tell him Sam Deeks recommended him to you – highly.

The simple way to use Twitter with your blog

Jun 20 | by Sam Deeks | how to, marketing
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twitter buttonTwitter gives you an easy, mobile way to post news updates

At it’s simplest, Twitter is a great way to create and post short news updates / quick bites of info to your website or blog. On a blog site like this, you create a Twitter account and put those details into a ‘widget’ in your navigation bar (see ‘quick news’ in the right column).

The widget reads the RSS feed from Twitter and updates your latest news item in the way you see here.

What’s nice about that is that if you’re at a PC, you can write a news update quickly (without going into your blog control panel) and it will update on your site. Better still, you can just text it in via your phone and it will appear on your site immediately.

Twitter is already (and going to become) far more than just a quick news feed. It’s a ’social media’ space and used imaginatively promises to be able to increase traffic to your site, answer questions and enhance your marketing.

But hey. I only just signed up this morning. Take all these things in small bites, I say – and put them to work in the most straightforward way possible to start with.

Make your own podcast!

Jun 19 | by Sam Deeks | how to, podcasting technique
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Making a podcast is easy – relatively speaking ;-) Make your own podcast cartoon

The basic steps in making a podcast are:

• Plan what you’re going to be saying, to whom, how often – and most important, why.

• Record your content – which could be a mixture of you speaking, conversations and interviews. Record on anything that can capture audio in wav format. It could be direct to your PC via a built-in mic, onto a mobile phone, a minidisc, a voicemail line or a whole range of mp3 recorders.

• Edit your sound and export it as a mp3 file

• Upload your mp3 file to a server (ideally a dedicated commercial podcast hosting service which is easier and cheaper)

• Put a link to your mp3 file anywhere you like (website, emails, blogs, documents, listings etc) and distribute so people can listen

and / or

• ‘Publish’ your episodes in the form of a podcast so that listeners can use iTunes to automatically pick up content when you publish it.

• Promote your podcast – use the power of the web to let people know it’s there

The good news is that it’s easy to get going on a very low budget. We have packages ranging from our Fastcast right up to our great ‘Start Podcasting Now’ package complete with professional recording kit, training AND your first 4 podcast episodes to get you going!

Our advice? Don’t wait to be perfect. Take a risk, get going and make lots of mistakes. We did and we have great fun doing it!

Spotting scams online

Jun 19 | by Sam Deeks | GRRRR!!!, business insight
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Google result for \'spotting scams online\'Proof that Google isn’t human (or is very human)

Do a search on the phrase ’spotting scams online’ and you get a page full of ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes. For most humans, this might seem.. somehow.. wrong.

But think about it for a moment. Who would most want to know how to spot scams online? Quite possibly somebody trying to evaluate some sort of ‘opportunity’ in front of them, that’s who. Someone already in the market for a ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme.

So it’s not really a surprise then, that there are ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes bidding on the keyword “scam”. The likelihood of a clickthrough clearly outweighs the negative association.

In my more sentimental moments, I catch myself wanting to believe that what things mean in relation to each other would figure in Google’s criteria for establishing relevance.  I want to believe that the outright cynical and exploitative will somehow be judged as ‘irrelevant’ – but that would be to expect of Google a degree of social responsibility that would be at odds with its business model.

So what’s the problem?  The fact that the meaning and value of information is now shaped by economic algorithms, not the social context in which it arises.

Blogs are good-looking and professional

Jun 17 | by Sam Deeks | Benefits of blogging
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Blog templatesWordpress templates let you build good looking, professional web sites – fast!

If you need an online presence and you need one fast, then blogs are a great solution. What they lose in graphic uniqueness and design flexibility they gain massively in ease of use, Google-friendliness and speed of publishing.

Because blogs are built on templates, you can be confident of getting a fully-functional, competent and professional site up within a couple of days – leaving you free to concentrate on writing quality content.

A huge range of free templates take away most of the hard work of building a site. You can choose from literally thousands of them and try them each of them out for size. See whether you like the look, the format and the functionality.

And if your preferences change later you can just switch templates and carry on with a new look without losing any of your Google ranking or readers.

Could do better…

Jun 15 | by Sam Deeks | ORM, marketing, smile
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What’s the one thing that the UK Podcasters Association really needs to be able to demonstrate it can do well?

You’d be forgiven for answering ‘Podcasting’ :-)

The dire quality of the video podcasts currently on their home page sends a really poor message to the wider world. I’d seriously recommend taking them down – particularly since there are better versions of the same events elsewhere on the site.

Even though the other versions are slightly more watchable (because you can hear the audio) they still make what I think is a big mistake: they’re video. Why is that a mistake? Because the image doesn’t add enough to make the huge filesizes worth it.

It also means that I can’t take it in the car to listen while I’m doing something else. I’m not against video podcasting. On the contrary – I’m all for it when it’s presenting information that can’t be presented any better way but I’m not sure this is a good example of that.

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