19 September 2006 in Blogging & Intergen | Comments (0)

Intergen recently had James Newton-King join the company. James maintains his own blog and is responsible for creating the JSON.Net library as well as several other components that he has available on his site.

So far James is known for being great cannon fodder for all the Halo guys at work

- JD

19 September 2006 in Blogging & Business | Comments (5)

Businesses have often been told they need to do more business online and how it enables them to get in touch with millions of eyeballs for a comparatively low cost. While this is very true and every business should look online it is important to contemplate other ways that the Internet can impact your business. I don’t write this piece to scare anybody but more to hit home how important great customer service is.

Recently a New Zealand gentleman and his family had a problem with a tourism operator. I’m not going to link because the issue has effectively been resolved now, but needless to say, he shared the problem on his blog.

Soon several people linked to this blog and commented on this issue themselves. Before long, when searching for this company name the pages about this issue and the poor service experienced became quite prominent in the search results – within the top 10 results. Given the number of people who now use the Internet as their primary information tool it has becoming more important than ever for businesses to pay attention to feedback they are receiving online.

I’m glad it has had a positive outcome but it does highlight that it is not only businesses that can leverage the Internet, but that customers can leverage the Internet, easily, when they want to share displeasure. It’s often said that an unsatisfied customer will tell ten times as many people about bad service than when they have good service. What happens when that customer has access to tens of thousands of people? Millions of people? Great customer service just became so much more important.

- JD

11 September 2006 in General & Intergen | Comments (8)

Recently I’ve had a spider around my desk at work – I come in each day and it’s built an even bigger web which is kind of interesting. Gabe has been having a chuckle all day about this photo he snapped claiming it’s proof I don’t get any action!

I couldn’t resist posting the picture though, either I’m too busy to action things or I’m not busy enough

Note that I’ve sharpened the label that says “To Action” on the tray to make it easier to see

- JD

11 September 2006 in Blogging & Tools | Comments (1)

Jeremy Norman has created a fantastic plug-in for Windows Live Writer for folks out there who use Box.net. Box.net is an online storage provider which is useful for people who don’t have their own servers with FTP or file upload capabilities. You can sign up for Box.net and get a free account which provides 1GB of space. There is a premium version of Box.net available for those who have higher requirements as well (perhaps the box.net guys should hook Jeremy up for free because of the publicity he’s generating? )

Jeremy has done a great job at making his plug-in as rich as possible with what the API for Box.net provides. More information about this plug-in can be found on the Windows Live Writer Plugins blog.

Download the plug-in here.

 - JD

8 September 2006 in Blogging & Intergen | Comments (0)

Nick Urry, a fellow employee of Intergen has started blogging also on the bluecog domain. He’s a bit of a crazy guy, in a good way, and is likely to post about technology, monkeys and chocolate. He’s kicked off with his thoughts on the WTF is Web2.0 debate. He’s still working on the look and feel of the site but he has a keen eye for good looking sites so I’m sure it will come up sparkly.

So stop over, leave a comment, and make Nick feel welcome.

Nick’s Blog

 - JD

6 September 2006 in Events & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Recently I’ve been involved with setting up the SharePoint User Group (with Chan, OJ, and Microsoft). Here’s the run down on the first meeting next week. You’re all invited so go on – RSVP

With the growing interest in the Microsoft SharePoint technologies space fueled by the upcoming release of Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 there is a new SharePoint User Group starting up in Wellington.

The purpose of this user group is to encourage knowledge sharing, personal development, identification of opportunities and input into best practice techniques related to Microsoft SharePoint technologies and directions.

The next meeting is on Wednesday 13th September at Microsoft with Microsoft presenting the vision and direction of SharePoint followed by a group discussion about what people want from the User Group over some beer and pizza.

Time: 6pm

Venue: Microsoft Wellington, Level 12, Mobil on the Park, Lambton Quay

Admission: Free

If you are keen to come along please RSVP to marko@intergen.co.nz

6 September 2006 in General | Comments (21)

Recently there has been some hot debate about what the definition of Web 2.0 is. We’re starting to see requests for ”Web 2.0 compliant” web sites and it’s all starting to raise some questions.

Just what the heck does Web 2.0 mean?

My personal view is that Web 2.0 has zero meaning but is more an annoying buzz word that has, unfortunately, caught on with people. I find it frustrating because their is nothing you can do now that you couldn’t do before which would add validity to increasing this arbitrary version number of the Web. It becomes dangerous when people ask for something that is Web 2.0 because almost everybody has a different interpretation of what it means.

I guess you could argue that a term doesn’t need a definition – much like the word “love”, it doesn’t have a singular definition but in technology a term should have a meaning in my view – we make things complicated enough as it is.

So in the interests of open discussion, what is Web 2.0 to you?

 - JD

1 September 2006 in Microsoft & Tools | Comments (0)

A couple of days ago I was talking to John and he asked how many hits I get to my RSS feed. The truth is, I get heaps, but how many unique readers does that account for? He asked if I divide the number to give an estimate or how did I manage it? I turned him on to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a service that you can use for free that “wraps up” your existing RSS/ATOM/Whatever feed into a URL sitting on the FeedBurner domain. For example, recently I updated my RSS feeds to point to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JDBlog

I was a wee bit reluctant to do this because I like seeing the raw traffic against my server for how many hits the feed is getting. Over time however I realised that because I can’t get any meaningful figures about my blog feed (see the start of this post) I was better off using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner provides the following statistics for free:

• Number of subscribers
• Graph of subscribers over time
• Pie graph of RSS aggregators being used
• Live traffic reports about people hitting your feed
• How many click through from RSS items to your website
• RSS optimisation services
• Publicising services
• Monetising services (currently invite only)
• Troubleshooting services for resolving common feed issues

If you elect to pay a small monthly fee you can also find out:

• Detailed information about each click through(who clicked etc)
• Enclosure statistics
• Ranking of item clicks for complete stats or search engine stats
• More…

Of course one of the big benefits is that if you move your blog or RSS feed you simply have to associate your FeedBurner feed to the new location and not interrupt all your existing readers. Certainly using a tool like this helps give deeper meaning to how parts of your blog or website are being used.

 - JD