Digital Biographer™

 
[ This article was originally published at Digital Biographer on 5th September 2008, and was syndicated to The Next Web on 6th September, 2008 ] © Copyright 2008 Clarocada Ltd. It has been updated a little for November 2009 where marked in green. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License. © Copyright 2009 Clarocada Ltd. 

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

Follow @clarocada on Twitter

The change from meeting to tweeting – where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content – has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so – but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

1. IN GOOGLE TIME
   I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. On my Nokia N86, as I move.  As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things – I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.
2. HOLA FONEROS
   I have a laptop computer and a mobile phone, I can work from a cafe terrace in Banyalbufar just as easily as anywhere else. As a result, I don’t have the need to restrict myself to doing business with those who are within easy reach of where I live or work most of the time.
3. HOME OFFICE DRESS CODE
   I don’t need to have an office in the city centre to get my work done – I can do it from my home office. As a result, I don’t need to spend time travelling, and so I use that saved time productively. I also find wearing a suit in my own kitchen a bit pointless, so feel there has to be a very good reason to dress up to go somewhere – and my carbon footprint’s lower.
4. MY ONLINE VISIBILITY
   Whereas I used to have to push information out to people in brochures, newspaper interviews, in meetings, at trade shows, I now have online profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, Friendfeed, MyBloglog etc, and I have blogs and web sites that I can update easily in seconds. As a result, I don’t have to spend so much time introducing myself, and explaining what it is that I, or any of my enterprises provide – people find out about me before they meet me, or get to know me through following my activities online. People can meet me at airports because my photo is online. They can also decide whether they need to waste their time meeting me. People ask me to speak at events without having ever met me or spoken to me.
5. I HATE COFFEE
   I don’t really like coffee any more. But I still drink it. And I especially never liked paying £3 for a cup of it unless it was refilled all day and came with free wi-fi. As a result, when someone says – let’s have a chat over a coffee, I say “No. Let’s save the time and money, and spend five minutes now working out if we need to meet – and if so, what items on the agenda we can dispense with before we need to have a meeting”.
6. MEETINGS ARE GETTING SHORTER
   I arranged a meeting in London (yes, I do still sometimes meet people) with guys coming from Amsterdam and from the USA without ever using a phone – and although we’d not met before, we have already shared dozens of pieces of information that made the business of the meeting last about ten minutes – and then we ordered some food and drinks. We then talked about other interesting stuff and new possibilities – not just ‘the business we need to discuss’.
7. CUT THE CHIT-CHAT
   I can get to know people online by following their updates – or by looking at what they’ve said, or who they’ve been talking with, or who’s been talking about them – and so with this background, a lot of ‘chit-chat’ becomes unnecessary. As a result, I can filter out people, or filter them in. I still enjoy the random, however, - I had two great ideas on the bus this morning, just following my twitter stream and listening to music.
8. YOU CAN DO THIS TOO
   You are reading this blog. You can send me emails, you can send me stuff without a courier, you can clarify things in Skitch, you can speak on Skype for free, you can send an instant message or a twitter. But you can do this as suits your agenda – and not be dragged into it by another party with an unknown agenda who wants 100% of your attention – NOW.
9. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU
   I can now have customers who I never meet. That used to be very difficult. But now, I can see people, talk to them in real time, swap messages and files, send them sound files and presentations, have a video-conference with them… whether they are half a world away or live around the corner.
10. LIFE’S TOO SHORT
    A friend of mine died suddenly this year. David was 42. He did not suffer fools gladly, and could summarise biblical volumes of information in a pithy, witty phrase. But he ran out of time. We all will. Mr Williamson, I’m thinking of you each day when I open my eyes, pull my first waking breath, and smile.

“I prefer email and tweets and other online communications over telephone and face to face meetings because it allows me to manage my own time. When I’m meeting face to face the other person will automatically assume they have an hour of my time, which seems to be the standard meeting length, and will take all of that time to talk TO me.

In an email I might grasp their concept within 2 minutes and be ready with a reply. Other times I need to think about their message overnight. All of this is impossible in face to face meetings where an immediate reaction and 100% dedication is demanded.”

- Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

So if you want to have a meeting with me here’s how to start the conversation:- Let’s tweet.

But what about you – what’s changed the way you handle meetings over the past few years?

Please, don’t tell me you’ve not changed things, or let other people push your time around. Tell me it’s not so. Life’s too short. I’ll be working at http://tweeting.me.uk from next month.

This article was originally written for The Next Web Blog and appeared on Saturday, 17th January 2009.

Today, we found out that Google, where search is the core of its business, have added a link to new experimental features to its home page, which show options that can be added to the ‘standard’ search.

The most dramatic of these is probably ‘Alternate views for search results‘ which, due to its nature, gives you different search results and rankings in different views of the same search query. So Search Experts take note: Page 1 of Google now has at least four different results!. Your site can be #1 in one type of search, but be invisible in others.

The standard Google search results page now also has “News about search term” appended to your search results as you can see below.

Google’s New ‘Alternate View’ Search Types

It is worth taking a look at this new feature for searches that include:-

• Search Results in Timelines [try this]
• Search Results on Maps [try this]
• Search Results in ‘Info Views’ which allow further refinement ‘on the fly’ [try this]
• One-click returns you to ‘Standard’ List View

You can obtain these views immediately using the standard google search interface by adding “view:map” “view:timeline” or “view info” following your search term – so rather than a search for ‘the next web’ you search for “the next web view:timeline”.

I’d recommend you check out these new search views, and also ensure that your site’s metadata is structured to ensure you appear in these new formats of search results.

There are also three other experimental search features at present –

• SearchWiki with sound – when you remove a result from your personal results, toy can have a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result. The sound is recorded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
• Keyboard shortcuts – use your keyboard to navigate results – so J Selects the next result, K Selects the previous result, etc.
• Accessible View – As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

Google continues to innovate and to develop its search technology, and in my view these new experimental features show that it’s still the very best at delivering search results. It’s also a wake-up call for you to ensure that the information on your web pages is given proper semantic structure – or meaning – because that will be a crucial differentiatiator as the amount of data online increases.

(Screen shots created by David Petherick using plasq‘s Skitch)

I was checking my blog statistics just the other day, and found an unfamilar link to a story I’d written in January. I clicked through to find that Koollage, which produces a mobile version of my blog, had linked to my blog from their ‘press’ page, and someone had recently followed the link to my original story

But I was also intrigued to find that the widget version of this blog shows that is has been viewed 12,553 times since January 2008, when it was set up. That’s 12,000 visitors that never showed up on my web stats – rather more than I’d anticipated! The power of the mobile web is getting greater every day – and although this site is already optimised for viewing on iPhones, I see all of those stats through the wonderful Clicky.

The size of our audience is missing…

I think there’s a market for the company who can figure out a way to measure and pinpoint the ‘hidden traffic’ that comes to blogs and news sites through through widgets, RSS feeds syndications, friendfeed references and so on. These figures are not insignificant, certainly for a little blog like this, and knowing where an audience is coming from always helps when you’re working to address that audience – quite apart from simple curiosity.

Koollage Widget for Digital Biographer. Koollage were featured this week at DEMOFall08 in San Diego, and the beta version of their product is now open to the public.

Do you know how many iPhones are out there? Millions of them.

Do you know what your web site looks like on an iPhone? Really?

Well, this web site looks pretty good, thanks to a great WordPress plugin called WpTouch. It automatically formats this web site’s content with an Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when my visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

Does your web site work well on portable devices? Or does it work at all? Mobile search (and specifically mobile search for local content) is growing rapidly, so your visibility and LEGIBILITY will be more and more important.

The iPhone currently the subject of much frenzy and queueing as the 3G Version goes on sale today, has an advantage over most mobile browsers with its high resolution screen at 160 pixels to the inch, as opposed to a more common 96 dpi for an LCD computer monitor, and has an easy to manage zoom facility, so one can view any website fairly well – but do you know what your site actually looks like when it’s viewed?

iPhonemy.com is an elegant, simple site that allows you to answer this question – you can download free software (for Mac users) or have a screen shot of your site viewed on this software sent to you. For WordPress users, there is also a link to a plugin that automatically senses when an iPhone or mobile phone is viewing your site, and displays your site with a specific mobile-friendly theme.

It’s worth remembering that a mobile phone is also a wallet – and it’s always there, and almost always switched on… Informa Telecoms & Media predicts spending on mobile advertising as a whole to reach £5.6 billion by 2011.

What does your site look like on an iPhone? Find out at iPhonemy.com Web Site
>>

A few weeks ago, Facebook changed something slightly. They made their business pages and personal listings include an extra section in their centre, with the subject of the page written in there. Why? Search visibility.

Previously, my Facebook page was at
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=850265552
Now, it’s at
http://www.facebook.com/people/David_Petherick/850265552

So what? Well, OK, so it’s easier to remember – but it’s also visible to search. The old one still works, but the new one is in the top 20 for a Google Search for my name between long-standing entries at Association For Community Networking and 43 Things.

My Business Page for Certain Host is right up on Google, as you can see below – and that’s a search with more than 7 million pages in my wake.

So if you want to be found for a specific search term, just add a page to facebook, name it accordingly, and convert your customers from there. There is a catch though – I can’t edit my Business Pages on Facebook this evening. I suspect the reason is because this news is spreading…

How is your business page doing on facebook? Got many fans yet? What are you going to do to monetise it, manage it, and keep it fresh?

http://facebook.digitalbiographer.com arrives 12th February 2008.

I have just turned the Digital Biographer blog into what I call a BlogPod in around five minutes with the amazing Koollage service.

The results: you can see below – and you can subscribe to the feed of my Koollage BlogPod, Embed it in your own pages, and of course absorb its contents elegantly on your mobile phone. It looks especially funky on an iPhone, with horizontal and vertical versions specifically to take advantage of the iPhone’s ability to use both formats.

An elegant feature is the ability to conduct a search within the Koollage Editor, and then select search results content added from blogs, including images. Although there might be copyright issues involved in this, fair use is obviously allowed. One of the interesting elements buit in is the ability for readers to add comments to any page in your Koollage content (and you get an email with this comment immediately), and to make your Koollage a group application, meaning that others can collaborate to create and update the content with other Koollage associates.

The service is still in beta, so has a few edges to knock off and features to tidy, but as you can see, it works, it’s very nicely designed, and it’s likely to be very viral. The site where you can join and create Koollage Pods for free, is also a growing community, so you can search for other users and their Koollage Pod (Plog) creations.

I for one can see the travel industry getting excited about using this – a City Guide Koollage of Hotels, Restaurants, and Transport Services made available to travellers hitting the ground at an airport makes sense… and a mashup with a Maps / GPS application would appear a logical move for what is obviously a very mobile application.

What uses you can see for this way on enclosing and displaying information?

Related Story: 12,000 of our Blog Visitors are missing…

Does your web site work well on portable devices? Or does it work at all? Mobile search (and specifically mobile search for local content) is growing rapidly, so your visibility and LEGIBILITY will be more and more important.

The iPhone has an advantage over most mobile browsers with its high resolution screen at 160 pixels to the inch, as opposed to a more common 96 dpi for an LCD computer monitor, and has an easy to manage zoom facility, so one can view any website fairly well – but do you know what your site actually looks like when it’s viewed?

iPhonemy.com is an elegant, simple site that allows you to answer this question – you can download free software (for Mac users) or have a screen shot of your site viewed on this software sent to you. For WordPress users, there is also a link to a plugin that automatically senses when an iPhone is viewing your site, and displays your site with an iPhone-specific theme.

It’s worth remembering that a mobile phone is also a wallet – and it’s always there, and almost always switched on… Informa Telecoms & Media predicts spending on mobile advertising as a whole to reach £5.6 billion by 2011.

What does your site look like on an iPhone? iPhonemy.com Web Site >>