In this issue

Featured article
This month - Blogging
Business intelligence
New white papers on our site
From my blog
You had a piece of paper and a calculator - you were lucky!
News from the web
This month in the internet world.

Blogging

Blogging is hot!  No less than four plays in the Edinburgh festival have blogs at the core of the plot. What is it all about?

Blogging (Blog = Web Log) is a simple way for people to create a web page. Web sites such as Blogger.com provide this service for free.   When a user adds a new article to his/her page,  older articles are pushed down so the latest addition is always on top. Visitors to the site can add comments which are available to other visitors.

This was a simple concept and now millions of people throughout the world are running web logs. 99.99% of them are read by no-one except the author but some have become important and well-read.  Most of the blogs about are on of the following:

• personal pages of no interest to anyone except the author and a few friends and relatives.
• technical blogs by thought leaders that are signifiant sources of news and opinion
• blogs that mainly seem to list news articles
• business blogs from people like Google and General Motors 

Popular blogs

Here are some of my favourites

http://www.designobserver.com/
Design observer - thoughts about design from a group of designers

http://design.weblogsinc.com/
Darren Chan's design weblog on weblogsinc

http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/
Michael Stelzners Blog on writing white papers

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Matt Cutts - he works for Google and this is the inside story

http://www.davechaffey.com/news
Dave Chaffey often has interesting snippets about internet marketing

http://michelemiller.blogs.com/marketing_to_women/
Michelle Miller - all about marketing to women.  Is that sexist? But her insightful articles apply to marketing to any sex.

If you want to see what a big corporate site looks like (from GM)
http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/

To find blogs of interest to you there are a number of blog directories.  The one I like is www.technorati.com

Blogging sites

If you want to start a blog, then these are the main sites:

• www.blogger.com is the largest by far. 
• www.weblogsinc.com is a more selective network.  Not just anyone can apply but you get paid (out of advertising).  A very intelligent approach.
• spaces.live.com  from Microsoft of course.

Setting up your own blog

Setting up your own blog couldn't be simpler - and you may become famous.  Worst case you will be embedding links to your own web site (won't you) and these will help with search engine positioning.

Just go to blogger.com and fill out a form, select a layout and you are ready to roll. 

Tips:

• Develop an informal style that is conversational and invites interaction with your readers.
• Add to it regularly, not necessarily once a day but if a week passes without an article, push it up your priority list
• On a practical note; under settings / comments "show word verification for comments". This ensures that you don't get buried in comments from spam programs.  Other than that you can pretty much leave all the defaults.

Business Intelligence

The Textor site

We have given the Textor web site a small workover including revising our white papers.  The three papers you may be interested in are:

• Building site traffic
  Covers essential traffic building measures such as search engine optimisation and pay per click.
• An ecommerce primer 
  An introduction to the main conepts you need to understand if you are planning an ecommerce site. 
• An ecommerce checklist
  A checklist of issues to be resolved when planning an ecommerce site

If you would like a version of these in word format please contact me.  I am happy for you to rebrand them and give them to your clients; in fact I have deliberately not put our company name in the white papers referring if anything to 'us' (if you spot any exceptions please let me know). 
 

The only ground rules are these:

• You are a design company that might at some point in the near or distant future give us some business
• Please don't upload them to your web site  - closed distribution only

Design patterns

You may remember our previous newsletter on design patterns. The e-consultancy web site editors are developing some. If you want to help - or just see how they are getting on go to this page:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/research/e-commerce-design-patterns/ 

Google

Google is developing some interesting tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.  This includes a report on the Google's indexing of your site, the date of the last scan and any errors it found.  For some functions you need to verify that you are the site owner by uploading a small file onto the server so Google can see it.  I will cover these tools plus the set that Microsoft is developing in a future newsletter.

From my blog

The IBM PC was 25 years old yesterday.

Happy Birthday!

On the BBC the announcer introduced the story by telling us that IBM invented the PC 25 years ago and how Microsoft was so clever in inventing the PC operating system.

Not exactly as I remember it!

We had a Syrius PC in the office - and a great box it was. When it became obvious that the IBM PC was going to be big, Syrius announced a 'downgrade card' that made the box PC compatible. We all nodded our heads - how true that was - and bought the card.

The Syrius, along with just about everything else in those days ran under the CP/M operating system from a company called Digital Research. That included the Apple II for which I think Apple could be justified in claiming to have invented the PC mass market. And Digital Research could have been said to have invented the Micro operating system.

You had to run CP/M because Visicalc - the killer app of the time (they invented the spreadsheet) ran under CP/M. I went to the announcement of the IBM PC in New York and the presenter was downright sheepish about the PC DOS operating system. It is received wisdom that IBM provided the inferior PC DOS operating system because the authors of CP/M thought that they owned the market and could dictate terms to IBM. How little they knew about the marketing muscle of IBM in the 80s.

We were assured that CP/M would be provided in a few months as an option, and PC DOS looked a bit lilke a stopgap.  Respected comentators shook their heads and said that without CP/M the IBM PC would never fly. Then Lotus 123 was announced and suddenly CP/M didn't seem such a big deal.

Digital research went on to develop a multi-tasking operating system which would run multiple PC DOS sessions and a graphical user interface. All to no avail. Whatever happened to Digital Research?  I think they went bust.

News from the web

Bloggers are (according to a recent survey) self-indulgent diarists interested in one topic above all others: themselves.  Big surprise - definitely worth the time and effort someone took to run the survey! 

The EU has banned a small Dutch town from setting up their own network because it would be unfair to unsubsidised broadband companies.  This has far-reaching consequences.  What about municipally funded wireless networks such as are appearing in US cities?

The British are Europe's biggest Internet shoppers, spending nearly 10 billion euros online last year.

Careful with that personal blog.  A British secretary working for a British firm in Paris kept a popupar blog (www.petiteanglaise.com).  Although she never referred to the firm by name they fired her. Now she is taking them to court.  Follow the story on her blog.

Goldman Sachs Group proved it has no sense of humour when it compained about dutch site goldmansex.com thus giving the site pulicity it could otherwise only dream of.  
 
Microsoft and Yahoo have released software to link their instant messaging system to create the world's largest IM community of 350 million users. 

Firefox 2.0 beta has been released.  Good, but this report suggests that IE7 is as good or better. However this is probably the best browser that will run on a Mac.

Myspace is now the most visited web site. 

Online gambling has been hit by a new US law that prevents gamblers from using credit cards online.