Blogging


22 March 2009 in Blogging & Business & Mindscape | Comments (0)

Right-o! One thing I’ve juggled a bit on this blog over the years has been a separation between technical and business. I’ve sorted that out by deciding to push any business related posts onto my new blog over here: http://www.mindscape.co.nz/staff/johndaniel/.

This blog will still exist and be used but I’m going to be covering more general technology stuff here. If you like tech, stick with this one. If you like business grab the other one. Ideally grab both – all the cool kids are doing it!

My first post on the other blog covers the initial start of Mindscape – what I was thinking prior and how we kicked things off. I appreciate any feedback you have for ongoing topics on either blog.

Ah, blogging on a Sunday night – it’s actually a great way to wind down the weekend.

Cheers,

– JD

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 162 user reviews.


30 April 2008 in Blogging & General & Google & Mindscape & Windows | Comments (5)

facebook logo

Boy am I sick and friggin’ tired of hearing about how Facebook is worth $15 billion dollars! A lot of the business blogs I keep up with keep throwing this figure around and it is becoming quite an annoyance.

I’ll say this just once: Microsoft’s “investment” in Facebook does not extrapolate to a $15b valuation because it included the international advertising rights.

To put this in perspective, Google paid $900m for the advertising rights to MySpace (the #1 social network that still absolutely spanks Facebook in terms of unique visitors despite being the ugliest site in the world).

Granted, the details of the deals between MySpace+Google and Facebook+Microsoft are rather different, but it helps establish my point that advertising is big business. Facebook certainly did not give away the advertising rights for free so you can be sure that part of the $240m was in consideration for gaining the international advertising rights – not just to buy a 1.6% stake.

To give an indication of how big of a business advertising is – Google paid more for the advertising rights to MySpace than News Corp paid to buy MySpace months earlier (details here).

Sure – it might be in Facebook’s interest to say the advertising deal was provided for free and that it really does stack up to just buying a cut of the pie however if that really was the case why not get the Microsoft investment and then make more money by selling the international advertising rights?

</rant>

So what do you think? All comments appreciated.

I’m sure some cheeky bugger will find this post in 5 years when Facebook actually is worth 15b and tell me I’m wrong :)

John-Daniel Trask

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 204 user reviews.


5 February 2008 in Blogging | Comments (4)

Lately I’ve been asked by several people why I don’t write anything that is all that personal on my blog. Truth is, I used to, however that didn’t result in much traffic and it became boring to me very quickly – I don’t know what that says about my own life :-)

While I’m planning on sticking with technology related posts for the time being I thought I’d share some statistics for my blog which is at least somewhat personal to me since I don’t publish any figures normally.

While not strictly technology related I decided to check my blog stats this morning, I’ve been surprised to see that my traffic has been growing despite the low number of posts I’ve been making lately. For the month of January this blog served more than 60, 000 page views which is quite pleasing. I can’t help but wonder where it would have been if my posting rate hadn’t dropped off for the second half of 2007.

A considerable amount of traffic comes from Google; I get a heap of traffic from people searching for details about Windows Vista memory usage and many about my previous employer, Intergen.

Now I’m thinking more about what I should focus on posting about in the coming months. Is technology posting interesting to you? Would you prefer some other topics? More business or Mindscape related posts? You tell me, it only takes a moment to comment and your feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,

– JD

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 281 user reviews.


4 December 2007 in Blogging & General | Comments (1)

On my previous post I placed an image at the end that states “kick it”. For those of you who don’t know what this means, it allows you to effectively “digg” my post and have it appear on a .NET specific site that works in a similar manner to digg.com. I’d recommend joining the site and taking part in the community as some really interesting posts can be found on the dot net kicks site.

Check it out here: www.dotnetkicks.com

Getting kicked helps improve the profile of a post and, hopefully, help drive some new traffic to my site. I’m not asking that you kick every post, but simply making you aware what the icon means and, if you do think a post is useful, you can kick it to show your appreciation.

Note that I haven’t placed one on this post because it’s just an internal memo to you, my reader :)

And that ends this short service announcement.

– JD

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 187 user reviews.


29 June 2007 in Blogging & Windows | Comments (0)

While at Remix I met up with a fellow Kiwi, Nas, who works at Infinity here in Wellington. Certainly a cool person, she is trying to help move the WPF & Silverlight community in New Zealand forward, about time I say! I’ve been a little underwhelmed with what people have done so far with WPF especially given the power it provides. We use WPF a bit at Mindscape however I don’t often blog about it as I don’t consider myself a designer and would likely just put egg on my face by trying to show what I’ve built!

Nas has setup her first blog (http://naskhan.com/) and she’s going to be posting about what she’s doing and about the community in general. Worth keeping an eye on if you’re interesting in WPF/Silverlight.

Also check out TheWPFBlog by Lee, fantastic resource and really friendly guy that was speaking at ReMix (also Nas’s personal hero – never seen somebody act like they were meeting the Queen before).

Anyway, just thought I would share mention of her site to try and stimulate some interest in some of these cooler yet under-utilised bits of the Microsoft stack.

UPDATE: Looks like she picked a dodgy provider (bluehost) who terminated her account and wants her to fax copies of her credit cards etc to them to un-terminate it. She’s in the process of moving to a new provider so it will be a couple of days until she’s back. Talk about hard luck and shit service from bluehost.

– JD

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 based on 232 user reviews.


15 February 2007 in Blogging & Business | Comments (6)

Following my post about leaving Intergen, I’d like to introduce my new venture – Mindscape. Mindscape is a software company specialising in products development that I’ve started with two other ex-Intergen folk, Jeremy Boyd and Andrew Peters.

Mindscape

Mindscape was founded based on the vision of creating fantastic software that really steps up a level in terms of being robust, usable and functional. We’re all committed to creating fantastic solutions both with our own products and in consulting work that Mindscape delivers.

I’ll still be blogging personally here and will share some of the highlights as well as mixing in more of the same sort of content that I was posting in 2006. Hopefully all of this explains some of the quietness here as of late, it’s been a huge amount of effort to get things moving and looks like the exciting ride is just beginning!

- JD

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 236 user reviews.


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

New Blog

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

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 209 user reviews.


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

Musings

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

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 287 user reviews.