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/