The chances are, that if you’re reading this, you already know what a blog is. You may even know about RSS (or Atom). But for anyone who’s just stumbled across this site, Microsoft MVP Sandi Hardmeier has published a Blogging 101 that’s a really good introduction to what it’s all about.
A few weeks back, I wrote about a device (called Diesel Guard) that I’d been told to fit to my company car to help prevent accidental mis-fuelling. A couple of weeks later, someone posted a comment on the post about an alternative product (called MagneCap). At the time, I thought of it as a bit of friendly advice and I didn’t think anything more of it, but now it looks as if the comment was blog spam (which, incidentally, is specifically mentioned as prohibited in the rules for comments on this site).
The thing is, that at the time of writing, this blog has a higher Google page rank than the official site for MagneCap. That means that if you search Google for MagneCap, what comes back is not what the owners of the MagneCap site would like to see:
(especially as, out of context, the quote reads as if it’s MagneCap that’s the embarrassing product, rather than Diesel Guard!)
Yesterday afternoon, I received an e-mail asking me if I had any ideas to correct the “incorrect heading” but there is absolutely nothing I can do about Google’s index (which is quite correct in quoting the title of the page and a couple of lines from the blog spam comment). Either I, or the author, could remove the original blog spam comment (in which case I would also remove the following two anonymous comments, which I also suspect are blog spam as the timing is remarkable at 45 and 50 minutes after the e-mail asking for help…) but Google’s cached version will still be available online. I also suggested that MagneCap take out a paid ad so that their site appears above Google’s standard search results. Because I genuinely believe that this was simple product placement and not malicious in any way, I’m also writing this post, so that hopefully Google will pick this up as the next entry and it might become clear that MagneCap was not the embarrassing device which I originally wrote about.
Just like Aesop’s fables, there is a moral to this tale… if you feel like engaging in a bit of product placement on someone else’s website, ask them first. Or at least make sure the blog spam gives the message you want if only a few words are quoted out of context by a search engine.
Back in February, I blogged about the dangers of blogging without your employer’s consent. My current employer does not appear to support blogging as an information sharing tool; however when I joined the company I asked if there were any specific guidelines regarding blogging other than the confidentially obligations as part of my employment terms and conditions (i.e. is it specifically prohibited). No response suggests to me that a) there are no specific guidelines and b) it is not specifically prohibited.
As my original post suggested, such grey areas can be problematic and as my blog seems to be building a reasonable following now, I’m reluctant to stop. For any IT (or PR) managers out there who want to allow blogging but are unsure how to keep it in check, below are some guidelines (reused with permission) from a previous employer:
This page includes policy, guidelines and instructions for using blogs.company.com
General Rules:
Guidance:
Guidelines for accessibility:
<font> tags.alt attribute. If the image is there just to look pretty, you may set the tag to null (i.e. alt=""); if however, the image has meaning (e.g. it’s a header or is not described in the text) then the tag must be descriptive. If in Internet Explorer (IE) you want to suppress the alt attribute from being displayed as a tool tip on mouse hover, simply set the title attribute to null which will override the alt text.<h1> tag unless it really is a heading. Similarly if you want something to be italicised and indented, don’t use <blockquote> unless the text really is a quote. If something is a list, use the list tags to format it. Finally, use <p> to mark paragraphs, and not <br />.For more information contact blogmaster@company.com.
Over the last few years, I’ve been a consultant for a major IT Services company; worked for a UK-based support services company (and hated most of my time there); contracted for Australia’s largest independent magazine distributor; worked in-house designing and project managing a Europe-wide infrastructure refresh for a major fashion design, marketing and retail organisation; and then I joined Conchango, a mid-sized consultancy which specialises in delivering technology-driven business solutions that incorporate the latest methodologies and technologies.
I’ve worked with Conchango, first as a client and then as a consultant, for about 3 and a half years in total but the time has come for me to move on. For anybody who lives within commuting distance of London or Surrey, enjoys the variety of work which consultancy offers, and who knows a significant amount about enterprise intelligence, interactive media, agile development and program management, or mobility, Conchango is a fantastic place to work. It feels a bit strange to be leaving a company that I still enjoy and which is packed with talented people but as Conchango’s focus shifts away from infrastructure services, I’ve decided to rejoin Fujitsu Services (it was ICL when I was there just over 5 years ago) to embrace a new role as a Senior Customer Solutions Architect, taking technical responsibility for IT infrastructure projects within their Architecture and Design Group.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most at Conchango (apart from being lucky enough to feature in the IT press) is that they encourage blogging (there’s a whole load of Conchango bloggers now) although my blog output has prompted some to comment on its volume and to say they almost expect to see what I had for breakfast appear next! One of my clients says he can find out what he’s been up to by reading these pages! I just hope that what I write is useful and that people enjoy reading it. Since last November, most of my posts here have been mirrored on my Conchango blog – from today, that will no longer be the case, and as far as I know, Fujitsu doesn’t have company-sponsored blogs, so this site is once again the single focus of my technology-related blogging (although I still hope to have the occasional article published on the Microsoft TechNet Industry Insiders blog).
I’ve got loads of stuff waiting for me to write about (but not much time to write it) – in the meantime, watch this space…
For a while now I’ve wanted a catchy subtitle for my blog (something descriptive, maybe with a touch of humour, and perhaps also a little bit thought provoking – like, for example, a “grey matter honeypot, distracting the mind with information overload“) but I’m just not witty enough to come up with one myself.
Well, now it looks like fellow Conchango blogger, Jamie Thomson, has come up with the goods for me in his latest post, where he describes my musings as “incessant infrastructure and tech gossip”. Well, it’s certainly descriptive!
For a few years now, it’s been becoming increasingly difficult to buy a mobile phone handset which was both stylish and a good phone without also getting a whole load of distractions (games, camera, etc.). Now, I have a smartphone (a Nokia 6600), which is connected to my private number and my work phone (a Nokia 6310i), which is just really good at doing one thing – making and receiving telephone calls (although it does also have infra-red, Bluetooth and GPRS connectivity, all of which are useful).
Throughout all of this, I’ve been skeptical about the need for mobile messaging services (MMS) – the idea that anyone (other than teenagers, who either have too much pocket money, or are running up huge bills for their parents to pay) would want to send low quality photos to one another from their mobile phone. Recently though, I’ve begun to change my mind…
I have a couple of blogs – this (technology focused) one and another for my geographically dispersed friends and family to keep up to date on what is happening in the Wilson family. 
For the last year or so, not much has happened in the Wilson family that hasn’t been focused around my son, so when we were on holiday a few months back I had a bit of dilemma – I didn’t want to take my main camera to the beach, but I did want to grab some photos of him experiencing sand and surf for the first time. That’s when the camera in my mobile came in useful. At 640×480 (VGA), the images are never going to be great for printing, but they are just fine for display at 72dpi on a computer screen.
Now it seems that mobile blogging (moblogs) have become a bit of a phenomenon. According to a Nokia moblog backgrounder:
“Blogs are one of the fastest growing phenomenon on the Internet with over 6.5 million web logs available and thousands more coming online every day. Blogs are like diaries which allow people to publish their thoughts and opinions or simply act as a record of their lives. Blogs can be accessed by friends, family or anyone on the web. The sharing of photos is currently one of the most important drivers for creating weblogs… Moblogging takes this phenomenon to the next level, allowing people to use their mobile phones to instantly publish their life experiences on the web. You can post pictures, video and text from your camera phone directly to the web instantly and then share your memories with family and friends.”
It’s this phenomenon (along with “traditional” digital cameras and a PC) that’s driving the incredible growth of sites like Flickr, Moblog and Phlog.
But it’s not just ordinary (pseudo-)geeks like me that are getting on the moblog bandwagon (actually, I’m not quite there yet, but might be soon…) – Sony Ericsson and American Photo Magazine teamed up with photographer Robert Clark for his Image America project. Admittedly that was as much for Sony Ericsson to promote their latest camera phone but there’s also an interesting article from a BBC reporter on his experiences as he reported back from his US Road Trip family holiday via a moblog using Flickr and Blogger.
If only moblogging had existed when I was travelling around Australia a few years back…
This is a technology blog and as such, I don’t cover politics. I do sometimes work in London though. As do many of my friends and family. And I do like it when somebody uses technology to push home a message – like that WE’RE NOT AFRAID of terrorism.
Here are some of my favourites from the galleries on the We’re Not Afraid photo blog site.
Get the message?
Wikipedia
London bomb victims book of condolence
British Red Cross London Bombings Appeal
Some people have commented that I may be a little biased towards Microsoft… and whilst at times that may be a fair comment, if you look at my computers I use various open source programs, I do criticise the software giant from time to time and, let’s face it, I work for a systems integrator, primarily focusing on building solutions using Microsoft infrastructure products.
I also have a tendency to use my blog as a dumping ground for notes after I attend events, which seems to have caught the attention of the the IT professional technical evangelist team at Microsoft UK (hopefully not too annoyed at the plagiarism of their presentations). Last month, they created a new blog on the TechNet web site for articles contributed by “industry insiders” – people who don’t work for Microsoft, but who have real world experience of implementing Microsoft products, possibly even in conjunction with competitive products from other vendors – and yesterday, after a couple of weeks of discussions, Steve Lamb posted what I hope will be the first of many contributions from yours truly.
I suffer from information overload. I don’t read half my e-mails, and much of the syndicated weblog content that I subscribe to passes me by too. I’m a family man, with little time right now for much else apart from baby talk, nappies, mowing the lawn and maybe a bit of DIY when I’m not working (alright, perhaps a few hours of watching the telly each week); however, I do spend a lot of time in the car (perhaps as much as 20 hours some weeks) and a couple of weeks back, Alex introduced me to the idea of podcasting.
Now, I was fairly late onto the blogging bandwagon, and I’m probably a bit behind the times with podcasting too, but after some initial scepticism (I tended to agree with Anu Gupta and Paulo Valdemarin), I’ve come around to the view that it’s a great idea! In fact, I think it’s such a good idea that I’m seriously considering buying an iPod and an iTrip (one of those tune-your-car-radio-into-an-iPod-gadget-thingies) so that I can listen to podcasts instead of Terry Wogan or Today on my way to work (what does that say about my listening habits?) – although I’ll probably still pick up the BBC Radio 4 comedy on my way home. I have no intentions of creating such content myself (I lose enough of my bandwidth to weblogs as it is, without going multimedia, and besides which, who wants to hear my voice!), but sites like liberated syndication provide a hosting service for podcasters and it was one of their sites that sold me onto this idea – How to pour the perfect Guinness from Tod Maffin’s How to Do Stuff site (thanks to Owen for the original link).
On a similar note to the podcasting idea (but requiring full attention as they are generally video-based), the IT professional technical evangelist team at Microsoft UK have begun to produce blogcasts. It was Eileen Brown that initially alerted me to this, but Steve Lamb has started to blogcast too and now a blogcast repository has been created. Well worth a look if for a quick demonstration of how to do something.
Self publication on the Internet has existed in various forms for many years, initially via newsgroups and then through the world wide web; however it is the rise of (we)blogging that has taken this to new levels, as software provides two key features:
In his recent article, harness the power of blogs, which appeared in IT Week, Tim Anderson comments that:
At Conchango, many of our consultants have maintained their own blogs for some time now. Recognising the potential in the technology, company-sponsored blogging has recently been launched via the Conchango blogging community and blogging is encouraged, as noted last month by Scalefree in why professional service firms should blog. As far back as June 2003, in another IT Week column, Ken Young reported on why blogging is good for business and to quote part of the article:
Blogging is big. That’s why so many of the major search engines now have a blogging presence – Google owns Blogger, Bloglines has been bought by Ask Jeeves and Microsoft (MSN Search) recently launched MSN Spaces.
But there is a dark side too – as Thomas Lee notes in his recent post on the dangers of blogging, some people may find it difficult to know what can and cannot be said without getting fired, leading to some bloggers being “dooced“. Blogger are even posting advice on how not to get fired because of your blog.
One example of an unlucky blogger is Ellen Simonetti (aka Queen of Sky), who was sacked for posting “inappropriate” pictures to her blog, diary of a flight attendant. From the pictures that I have seen, it appears that her employer took issue with the fact that she was wearing her company uniform and was on board one of their aeroplanes at the time that the pictures were taken. It seems to me (and remember that my blog entries are based on personal opinions and do not not necessarily reflect the views of my employer) that whilst invoking a disciplinary process may have been seen by her employers as necessary, firing her was complete overkill, especially as CNN reports that the same (cash-strapped) airline is now investing in sexier uniforms.
Quoting Anderson’s January comment in IT Week again:
Luckily, my employer does have such a policy (and I have been conscious to follow it whilst writing this post on the pros and cons of blogging). For anyone thinking of instigating such a policy, Ray Ozzie’s Weblog has some useful advice and if you are thinking about starting out with a blog, check out digital diaries: the art of blogging.