I was a bit shocked to see that today is this sites 4th Birthday. Doesn’t time fly?

So a quick thanks goes out to Chris who helps with some of Design and Wordpress tweaking. www.1steasy.com for hosting the site and finally anyone who contributes by leaving comments or subscribes to the RSS feed for updates.

I do my best to share knowledge and have published 110 posts containing tech tips. These are posts with some practical guidance on the given topic (see Tech Tips).

Also I hope the Screencasts are informative, I have published 29 of those (see Screencast).

I hope the rest isn’t just Internet noise (although sometimes that’s unavoidable).

As part of my job I give advice to companies about blogging and publishing content so I walk the walk in that regard.

I have learned a lot over the last 3 years, in fact I learn something new every day so that in itself makes it all worth it.

There is an old Kevin Costner movie in which he has a dream about building a baseball field.

In the dream he hears a voice. “If you build it, they will come“.

I’ve not got to the stage of hearing voices (yet) but committing to creating content on the web everyday is either a a leap of faith or a big waste of time.

So if Blogging is a social experiment in communicating and raising the profile/awareness of myself and my business. Is it working?

In the above chart I am comparing the number of unique people who visited the site in January 2007 and January 2008.

In the above chart is the number of page views, again comparing  the same period January 2007 and January 2008.

The “If you build it, they will come“. doesn’t sound so silly now.

Background Context: in January 2007 the site was 18 months old with 500 posts.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication

The use of RSS continues to grow. It tends to be the more technically astute user who will use RSS.

An RSS user is like a subscriber to the site, a person who wants to be updated of new things. So a fair demonstration of engagement.

I don’t use any other promotional techniques just the content I create each day.

Here are some of the things I consider a success:-

1) Growing the number Visitors.

2) Internet Search.

2) Sharing Knowledge (Through Tech Tips and Screencasts and now Recommended Buys.)

3) Helping People Directly (Like the chap Acer were tormenting).

4) Communicating with Dell on my terms.

5) Getting equipment to review from Toshiba.

6) Making contact with people.

Conclusion

I have no idea what this picture will look like in January 2009 although I am fascinated to find out.

I hope I have demonstrated with some commitment, thought and determination it can be done.

For Small Businesses looking for help and advice on technology – give me a call on 01606-841587 or bookmark this link to see all my posts filed under that category: View all posts filed under Small Business

Every year Google publish their Zeitgeist, a snapshot look at the search trends in the year.

The main link is here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html

You can spot some interesting trends for example:

HD-DVD is more popular than blu-ray in Google searches.

Basically the Google Zeitgeist is a fun way to learn about the importance of search and does contain some surprising results about the other humans on the planet.

When I talk to Clients about Google the biggest problem  area is around creating web content that can be found by real people. You would be amazed how people actually use Google Search in the real world.

I boil it down to “You have to write, how they search”.

Other funnies in the 2007 Google Zeitgeist: the most popular how to list:-

1)  how to kiss
2)  how to draw
3)  how to knit
4)  how to hack <<< (hello, warning, warning)
5)  how to dance
6)  how to crochet
7)  how to meditate
8)  how to flirt
9)  how to levitate
10) how to skateboard

It was all going to so well up to number 4.

In other Google news eWeek are reporting that Google’s dedicated blog search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) is to be integrated into the main Google search page. Just like Images, News, Groups, Products are today.

If you ever wonder what all this blogging stuff is all about, check out the above video.

It is one of the clearer explanations available. Lets face it, video is so much easier to digest than me writing a thousand words.

Bonus: I don’t have to write a thousand words.

Clearly I am an advocate for this type of communication as I do it every day, but why do I it?

Well last month (Nov 2007) some 6,681 unique people visited this site consuming some 33,582 pages.

I know for a fact I help people (they e-mail me or comment on the site) and I also get to show the world as I pass from being a Whizz kid into a Seniority Citizen that I know my stuff.

I also don’t have the marketing budget to reach these kinds of numbers through traditional means.

I have helped clients integrate blogging into existing web sites and can measure accurately the positive benefits.

So there are lots of reasons for businesses to consider blogging, watching the video above would be a good start.

This video was created by: http://www.commoncraft.com/

Microsoft has just released the latest non beta version of their blog writing tool called Windows Live Writer.

I have been using Windows Live Writer since June 2007 and it really is a delight to use compared to the editing capabilities available inside of Wordpress.

If you blog you should at least try it out. Its free, I like to think of it as the Microsoft Word of Blogging.

Link: http://get.live.com/WL/config_all

Tip: In the above link for Windows Live Writer you can also download other Live.com items, if you only want Windows Live Writer just untick the items you don’t want.

This Screencast below runs for 2m58s and is a video demo of how I created this post.

Click the Screencast to Play.

This screencast requires the Flash plug in. You can get it here

If you liked this Screencast, see more here

http://www.colindiponio.com/category/screencast/

I received an e-mail invitation from a lady at Toshiba asking if I would like to take part in a trial of the Toshiba Tecra A8 Series Laptops.

Toshiba send me the laptop for a week and I can write an unbiased hardware review for publication on this website.

Toshiba seem to courting a few people like myself  in a campaign going back a few months, but hey  it’s nice to be on the list.

So 10/10 for Toshiba for thinking out the box.

Note to Dell:

Come on guys, don’t let the side down, send me something nice to review like the XPS M1730 or more realistically a Linux laptop or desktop (something which I am unlikely to buy).

No, seriously just a quick update about the site changes.

At the top of the page is the most 3 recent posts for each of the three sites I author/publish content on. This is pulled in dynamically using each sites’s RSS feed. If you like my content then subscribe to my RSS feed.

A quick thank you to Chris Bowes (www.contralogic.com) who figured out how to do the RSS as you see it (in the header). I came up with the idea, but Chris figured out how to do it. Everyone needs a Chris in their life.

Why do I publish on 3 sites. Well I have a lot to say:-

On www.colindiponio.com I talk about things in technology that interest me on the given day. Example: new products or services, or more helpful things like the problems I have solved alongside some tech commentary from someone knee deep in it.

The second site: www.481.co.uk is aimed at helping small business use and understand technology. So it will be very focused on things like Servers, Applications, Security, Productivity and promoting my on-site Consultancy and Support services.

The third site: www.screencastingnow.com contains only technology Screencasts. I like Screencasting and sometimes my Screencasts are buried with the hundreds of other posts on this site. So now they have their own site with their own easy to navigate categories.

This whole web thing is just one big experiment but I would rather be in it contributing than on the sidelines watching it.

All the sites have one thing in common, sharing knowledge.

Small Business Tip: I run a small business and have limited resources (read money) for marketing and promoting my services. Search Engines are the new Yellow Pages and I can compete on a level playing field with any of my competitors. I can do this because I use what I do on the web to target new business and it works.

Call me on 01606-841587 if you want to talk to someone who understands how all this “Web 2.0″ thing can be used in a small entrepreneurial business.

I was at a meeting yesterday, another invited management consultant made a generalisation about how how I.T guys “great with technology, but bad at communication”. It wasn’t the forum I could have corrected him easily. I was a guest and it would have taken the meeting off topic.

My initial reaction was to jump over the desk and beat him around the head, but on reflection that would be wrong and no way to prove I was a good communicator.

I think all problems in life are communications problems and I am not perfect (just ask the woman in my life).  

It wasn’t difficult to let this one go because as I sat in the meeting quietly cursing I knew the page views of this website would be passing the 250,000 mark for this year.

So in that respect I do a lot more communicating than I am given credit for. For example on this site you will find hours of screencasts showing you all about new technology.

Link: View all posts filed under Screencast

I also regularly give hints and tips about technology and small business sharing my knowledge and experience for free.

My point being communication can take many forms.

Another example would be when I search Google in the UK for Computer Consultant I am in the top 4 (this varies from month to month but to be in the top 10 out of 1.8million) Maybe I know more about communication than I let on..

Well after:

4 Phone Calls

3 On-site visits from Acer’s Engineers

2 Boards replaced (main and tuner)

1 Patient customer

Acer have resolved my display problem (see example of the prior problem above).

So thanks to Acer for fixing this issue. My fault turned out to be a problem with the left hand tuner board (the one with 2 x Scart and 1 x RF).

The problems I experienced during this warranty process were staggering really and lots of things went wrong.

I am glad to see the back of the problem.

I am also filing this post under Blog Advocacy as I managed to drag someone over from Acer to check out this site showing their display products in not such a good light, remember this was after they said they would no longer help me.

To be fair Acer outsource their warranty to a 3rd party tech company and each company appears to have a different approach to “responsibility” and “ownership” of problems.

I hit a brick wall with outsourced 3rd party tech support company but appealed directly to Acer Head office thankfully did the right thing.

Case closed.

Matt Cutts is a software engineer over at Google, he is also also a Wordpress user/blogger

So when Matt talks about both Wordpress and Google – people listen.

He recently gave a talk at this years wordcamp.

Link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers

or

If you want to watch a video of the talk you can do so here:

http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/