Teblog

Removing blog posts

Received wisdom says you should never remove blog posts or make meaning-changing edits, without making it clear what you're up to or why,.

So, this note is to say that I'm going to remove some of the entries from this blog which exist purely to point at something I've written elsewhere. I have, instead, added a Grazr reading list in the right sidebar of this blog which lists most of my recent online stuff. It does this through a Yahoo! Pipe which keeps watch on this kind of thing.

I will only add a link entry for stuff which would otherwise not be picked up.

I'm probably the only person who cares, but I thought I'd better explain.

PS Some feeds take a while to be updated so it might take a little while for the Grazr panel to accurately reflect reality

TypePad and Tebbutt: Finger Trouble

For the three people who visited while the strapline of the blog steadfastly refused to change, I apologise.

I even posted (then withdrew a couple of minutes later) a rant at TypePad for not doing my bidding.

I kept changing the strap but I was actually changing it in the wrong place. Mea Culpa. Utterly.

Sorry visitors. Sorry TypePad.

Blogging slips down the priority list

It's been an interesting few weeks.... Blogging has slipped to the bottom of my priority list. It actually wasn't that high in the first place. I'm not sure what value my assorted witterings have in the grand scheme of things. But I will persevere if I think I have something useful/interesting to share. This time I'll share what happened after we relaunched the website and the new version of BrainStorm on September 18. We got mentioned in the New York Times on October 2. That's what. And all hell broke loose. The power of the press eh? Or, in particular, the power of James Fallows.

This man wrote a piece about underdogs. It happened that the main underdog was Apple. We were a very minor underdog in the article. But it was nice of him to mention us. From 4am UK time On Sunday 2nd to midnight on Monday I spent about 34 hours in front of the computer answering emails. Thirty six percent of them were from Mac users. BrainStorm is a Windows program.

People were buying the program, which was clearly on 30-day trial, on Fallows' recommendation. Nine of them asked for their money back because they were using Macintoshes. We changed the website so it was abundantly clear at every stage that it was a Windows program, and the messages changed to "when are you going to put it on the Mac?" Oh well.

Knowing this was to be a flash in the pan, I decided to respond to everyone very quickly (unless I was trying to grab some sleep, in which case they could have had a wait of up to five hours.) And, sure enough, just as quickly as they arrived, the visitors disappeared.

A lot of feathers were unruffled, a lot of questions were answered, we sold quite a few BrainStorms and James Fallows was thanked profusely.

It was an interesting few days. We learnt that our UK ISP couldn't possibly cope if this happened again, so we've signed up with Total Choice Hosting, recommended by ace blogger, Neville Hobson. This will go live in the next day or two. We've learnt that we were exceedingly lucky to be available to cope with the upsurge and for our ISP to have tolerated us bursting through our official bandwidth limits.

And we've learned what a fantastic bunch of people there are out there who are willing to give feedback and enter into conversations with us about the program. Some are first impressions, which clearly highlights what people do and don't like about BrainStorm. Exceedingly useful. Others are people who have wide experience and who are prepared to paint a picture of how BrainStorm fits in (or doesn't) with their other programs.

As ever, user contact on this scale is quite humbling. Whether polite or rude, everyone has a good reason for writing. (Actually there was only one exceedingly rude person. He got a polite reply and we heard no more.) And we try to respond conscientiously and listen.

So thank you again James Fallows, for mentioning us. The value of the conversations probably exceed the monetary value of the sales by a very wide margin. Not that we're ungrateful, you understand.

By the way, James is a customer and, like all our customers he recently received an offer to let his friends and contacts buy BrainStorm for half price. He couldn't resist, and we don't blame him, for sharing his secret discount code with his readers.

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog.

Thirty years ago, it occurred to me that as long as there were people around, they would need to be able to communicate with each other. And, the more effectively they did it, the more successful they would be. This is still the focus of my life.

By way of background, at the time I had this insight, I had been a data processing manager (IT manager in today's vernacular) for four years.

Without boring you too much, my journey from that point was:

- learning to teach
- teaching management and related communication skills
- going back into management to check the practice against the theory
- editing Personal Computer World magazine
- becoming a journalist and editorial consultant
- starting a software company (it's still a hobby)
- starting a media skills training partnership
- offering writing and workshop facilitation to organisations large and small

My life comprises the last four items on this list.

This blog will evolve, of course, but I expect it to comprise tips, advice, observations, recommendations, links to useful sources and commentary on anything that fits the 'effective communications' category.

I will not fall victim to the "feed the beast" imperative that says that blog postings have to be made at least daily. While this is great for search engine rankings, it can waste both my time and yours if there is nothing interesting to say.

Expect to see something two or three times a week. And let's see how it goes.