Tag: Trends

TGIM 2/8/2010

I love Mondays! I get to go back to work at my quiet office with a supercomputer and a fast internet connection! Can’t wait…

In the meantime, Lifehacker is rating the five best Podcast managers…

“Podcasts offer a fantastic way to catch up news, listen to radio shows, and get great media delivered right to your computer (they’re like newsreaders for media). Check out these five popular podcast managers and let the entertainment come to you.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite tool for managing your podcast subscriptions. (The term for downloading a podcast is actually podcatching, and a podcast manager is a podcatcher—the more you know!) We rounded up the top five nominations, and now we’re back for you to review them and cast your vote for your favorite podcast manager.” Source: Five Best Podcast Managers – Podcasting – Lifehacker

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Social web involvement around the world…

Hmmm. Interesting…

http://viewer.docstoc.com/v2/

Global Map of Social Media – December 2009 –

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Personal Digital Coaching

English: American entrepreneur, author and pub... …could be just the help you’re looking for! Over 18 months ago, Seth Godin wrote this on his blog:

“Here are three things that are true: 1. Digital technology, especially computers and cell phones, can dramatically increase productivity. 2. More and more users of digital technology are small firms or individuals. 3. The vast majority of users of digital technology are totally lame in getting the most out of the investment of their time and money. “Oh, I didn’t know I could do that.” “You mean I don’t have to manually type my address book in by hand?” “There are graphs in Excel?” “Gmail is free?” Here’s what I haven’t found: people who charge $100 an hour to hear what you do and how you do it and then show you how to do it better. People who organize data and put it in the right place. People who overhaul the way small groups use technology so they can use it dramatically better. People who use copilot to take over a PC and actually rearrange it so that it works better.More examples: Teach people to back up. Show them how to check their email on the road. Help them understand how to use online networking when it’s appropriate (and warn them when it’s not). Show a restaurant how to use OpenTable to keep the place full, or to use a blog (with an RSS feed) to easily communicate with loyal customers. Teach a company to keep tabs on itself with Technorati.” Source: Seth’s Blog: A shortage of digital coaches

If you do a Google Search on the topic, note who is at the top of the list — your humble digital coach Todd Lohenry @ e1evation, llc! Once I securely log on to your computer [after you grant permission] using the technology described, I can help you with just about anything! See a quick demo here… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJlASMkot34 Oh, and btw? I only charge $50 per hour… [btw, note the date on the post! The cost is now $99 per hour!]

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Strategy vs. tactics in social media…

:en:Seth Godin
Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin on strategy vs. tactics…

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita‘s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place. Source: Seth’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

Go to the source to read more…

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An interesting perspective…

USA Today
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…from a former USA TODAY reporter…

“Today is the last day that I’ll walk through USA TODAY’s glass and marble lobby, itself a monument to flusher times.

I’ve been laid off from my dream job, and I’m not going to lie. It sucks. I enjoyed almost everything about my immediate world there, from my globe-trotting reporters to my creative production team to my hard-working and open-minded boss. My group was tight, and we laughed and learned from each other every day.

But what bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements. I edited my section, managed my high-personality staff and then in my spare time, I wrote cover stories – something that very few other editors at USA TODAY do. I hustled and I cajoled and I ended up out on my ass anyway.

I’m a true believer in the power of journalism. I walked into my first newspaper office when I was 16, fell in love with deadlines and chaos, and never looked back. During my 20 years in the mainstream media, I’ve written stories that have changed lives, and I’ve written stories purely for entertainment. I felt it was a calling, more so than a job.

But increasingly, things have become more interesting outside the newsroom bubble. I’d go to conferences and meet people who were making it just fine on their own. Some were creating niche businesses, busting up the paradigm. Others were parlaying old school media talents into fresh ventures, with a moxie that made me wish I had the freedom to emulate them. The air inside USAT’s towers on Jones Branch Drive always seemed a little stale after that.

These freelancers-slash-entrerpreneurs are smart. They are nimble. And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks.

So to the managers who made this decision, in less than 140 characters I tell you: Good luck steering the Titanic. And thanks for the head start. Now I’m really going to run.” Source: Goodbye to all of that… | Chris Around The World

The world as we know it is changing in very interesting ways…

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Staying on top of trends…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJKGgbVx28k&feature=player_embedded

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page to reach me…

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3 ways for small businesses to save money on IT

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Regardless of what the government says, most business owners feel we’re still in a recession…

“The recession is cutting into small and midsized businesses’ IT spending, and some industries are hurting more than others, according to the results of the latest IT Effectiveness Index (ITEI) survey.

The ITEI is a benchmarking tool that measures the technology effectiveness of small and midsized businesses. (Small Business Trends is one of the partners of the study.) According to the latest survey, the manufacturing industry has been hit hardest, with 66 percent of people in this industry delaying, halting or canceling IT projects, and a similar number reducing capital expenses.

Also hard hit were the communications industry (at 55 percent), wholesale businesses (52 percent) and service providers with 48 percent reporting an IT spending slowdown. Not surprisingly, the computer industry was the least affected — only a third of the respondents in that industry said their IT projects had been affected by the recession. And the woes don’t end there. Half of the manufacturing industry respondents said their IT operations were either understaffed or critically understaffed. Thirty-three percent of service providers said the same, as did nearly a quarter of the respondents in the computer industry.” Source: SMB IT Budgets and Staffing Hit Hard by Recession | Small Business Trends

From where I sit, most small businesses squander money unnecessarily by not thinking about saving money where possible on IT. Here are three easy ways to stretch your technology dollar…

  1. Outsource your email and back office collaboration to Google; Google Apps is a powerful, cost effective way to communicate both internally and externally.
  2. Explore using a Content Management System like WordPress as a website; link it to social media outposts to drive your internet marketing.
  3. Get off the Microsoft licensing treadmill; no one NEEDS Windows 7, in face, most end users haven’t mastered XP and 2003 yet. Consider buying older computers on eBay, using Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and other money saving strategies and tactics.

These are just a few of the many ways small businesses can stretch their IT dollars and smart business leaders look to months like December when much of the world loses focus to implement ideas like these. Let’s talk about how you can start the new year with more cost effective tools for IT…

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Google unveils their new operating system

Will it be a Microsoft killer? You betcha! It has the power to change the face of computing for the next generation…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw&feature=player_embedded
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I love my ‘job’…

…and one of the reasons why is that I love people and I get to meet so many interesting ones along the way. Earlier this week, I had the chance to interview rising Ag star Eric Kamler at Husker Harvest Days in Grand Island, NE. Here’s our chat…

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I had a date with an old ‘flame’ this past week…

PowerBook G4
Image via Wikipedia

Not really — it just felt that way! David Sauter of Envano gave me a Powerbook G4 for a project we’re working on and it was the first time I had used a fast Mac running a current version of OS X. Ever…

I left the Mac back in 2002 — finally got that one job that insisted I move to Windows and left the platform. Prior to that, I had been a Mac user for 15 years — even worked 3 years for Apple — and I was a sold out Mac fanatic. Eventually, I had to leave my first computing love and I didn’t have a chance to look back until this week…

So how did it feel? Meh. That’s it, just meh! I wasn’t overcome by nostalgic feelings of love for my long lost platform and I didn’t get teary-eyed as I touched the keyboard again. Don’t get me wrong — Apple makes a nice notebook and OS X runs well. The big difference? Thanks to Apple’s success there are more hardware/software solutions available than when I worked at Apple during the dark ‘pre-Think Different’ days.

The one thing that make me really happy, though, was to see how well my current strategy of using tools that are cross platform Windows/Mac/Ubuntu is working. I’ve written recently about how for me, the hardware platform is becoming increasingly irrelevant — it’s all about how fast you can get into the ‘cloud’ and get your work done online! For me it’s all about Firefox and other free open source tools that are available for the price of a download. Here are some of the tools that I use and recommend:

You can grab the map and move it around or view it full screen. All of these tools work exceedingly well, run on Windows/Mac/Ubuntu, and are free. Free. And Ubuntu is a free operating system that runs Linux in a way that’s similar to Mac OS X.

The balance of power in the computing space is shifting and I’m glad that I made the move to the cloud and started using Ubuntu and free open source software. Contact me — I’ll be happy to talk with you about the impact this could have on you and your work…

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Blogs Surpass Newspapers & Magazines in Popularity on Google

“Google Trends, a service that lets you compare the world’s relative interest in particular topics, suggests that blogs’ popularity have surpassed that of newspapers or magazines, at least on Google.

And this gap between blogs vs newspapers and magazines is much wider in California and India.” Click the title to see a close-up screenshot with data for the last 30 days…

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