2006 March · Dominic Foster

Win an iPod

March 29, 2006 on 10:18 pm | In Entrepreneur | No Comments

Fancy winning an iPod? Patsy Krakoff has giving one away over at CoachZines.com to celebrate their April anniversary celebration. Why? Well apart from celebrating a year since publishing Build a Better Blog and doing their Conversations with Experts, they also want to build up their email list.

Fair enough. I signed up. But then I don’t have an iPod - and the ones they are giving away come pre-loaded with 43 interviews with their experts.

Fingers crossed

Gerald Celente in New Zealand

March 29, 2006 on 9:11 pm | In Entrepreneur | No Comments

I caught on the news yesterday that US Trends Guru, Gerald Celente had just spent a week in New Zealand. Too bad I didn’t pick up the trend that he was coming to New Zealand before he arrived

Anyway, he had some interesting stuff to say about this little country in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Mostly encouraging words on how New Zealand can position itself to benefit from the possible trends that could occur in the near future.

He says that these opportunities, if they happened, would occur because on New Zealands relative isolation - something that many people here believe is a handicap to New Zealand.

These include:

1. Becoming a leading centre in ‘Wellness’ as the worlds population ages. Clean green environment, open spaces, nature (think Lord of the Rings scenery here).

2. A leader in self sustaining housing as ’simplicity hip’ sees people downsizing their lifestyles and looking towards not needing power and sewerage systems for their homes when they are on fixed incomes and want to reduce bills.

3. Relative isolation from pandemics such as SARS, Avian Flu and Mad Cows Disease, could see NZ positioning itself to offer quality food products at a premiunm to a section of society.

I have lived here now for a little over 4 years and find myself nodding my head up and down to some of what Celente has to say.

However, what got me really thinking when I heard what Celente had to say about trends in general, is that it would be worth checking out his website, Trends Research Unit, to get some ideas for software products and websites that could be useful in the coming years.

Technorati Tags: gerald+celente, trends

Website Marketing with WP-Noteable Plugin

March 23, 2006 on 9:23 am | In Entrepreneur, Free Tools, Tools, Wordpress Plugin | 3 Comments

Today I wrote about Public Relations (PR) For Your Website as part of my Blog Boost effort as part of my activity with LinkedIn Bloggers for a blog called Conversation Blog by Philippe Borremans.

If you go off and read the post mentioned above, you will notice that points 4 and 5 discuss the use of News Content Sites and Social Bookmarking sites as a way of marketing and promoting your website.

Now, if you look at the end of this post, you will notice there are a number of buttons which link this post (or which ever you are reading here at Accidental Entrepreneur) with a number of these types of websites - and I won’t be shy in coming forward and explaining that the reason they are there is hoping that there is a statistical possibility that some of my readers will click on these buttons to bookmark posts that they like or even submit them to news websites. This in turn will influence readers of these peoples bookmarks or new submission into visiting my blog and becoming a subscriber.

The buttons themselves are placed there courtesy of the brilliant WP-Noteable Plugin by Cal Evans. This plugin comes with all the images and has full configuration via a settings page int the options tab of Wordpress.

Up until now, I had only bookmarked a couple of my posts at deli.cio.us, but they are good for at least 2-3 visits a day, which even though a small number, shows that bigger things are possible.

So this got me to paying some closer attention to each of the buttons that appeared for the Public Relations (PR) For Your Website post and I thought I would document my findings for anyone who like me (until today) are relatively clueless about these opportunities.

- deli.cio.us - Possibly the most popular social bookmarking website there is. Register as a user and add links to web pages you like (your own for instance). Tag these links so that you can see what other people are linking to in the same category - and visit the pages that they like. Each link shows how many people link to that page and popular pages can get onto the front page and get loads of visits.

-Digg - Register as a user and submit web pages that you find interesting. Other Digg users vote on the stories and popular strories will make the front page. If you are lucky, your website makes the front page and you get heaps of visits. Then, if you are unlucky, your websites server shitakes itself from visitor overload and crashes and your webhosting company threaten to shut your site down for hogging bandwidth, CPU time, ect.

- Spurl - Social bookmarking webiste. Sign up and post your bookmarks. The front page has popular and most recent bookmarks as well as ‘what was bookmarked a year ago’ section.

- Wists - Looks like you need to create a login for this one. Has facilities to view latest and most populat items as well as links to yourself.

- Simpy - Another social bookmarking site. Looks like it has a lot of features apart from the usual bookmark-tag-share. Has sections with new users, most active users, recent posts, most popular posts. Also has and API so you can build spiffy integrations with your websie.

- Newsvine - A news content site where you can ’seed’ a news story. News appears on the front page in all sorts of categories from world to sports to entertainment to odd news. Once news is ’seeded’ readers vote on the story and this determines its importance and thus its order on the list of news. Like digg, it your website gets to the front page, expect lots of visitors.

- Blinklist - Social bookmarking site with the usual suspects - bookmark-tag-share. The front page lists popular tags, recent bookmarks and hot bookmarks.

- Furl - A popular social bookmarking website that provides a personal archive of 5MB to store snapshots of pages that you bookmark. Also has a Firefox pluging.

- reddit - A news submission and voting type website. Submit stories and vote on stories to send them to the front page. Appears to be a little more light hearted than Digg and Newsvine. They say you can submit your own stories, which from what I’ve gathered, is frowned upon by Digg and Newsvine and their respective users.

-Fark - A funny news website that lists oddities and funny stuff. News stories are posted and users comment on them.

- Blogmarks - Social bookmarking site - bookmark-tag-share theme.

- MyWeb2 - Yahoo’s offering in the social bookmarking sphere. Much like the rest.

- Smarking - More social bookmarking.

I can see that the descriptions of the social bookmarking sites appear to get rather terse towards the end. Please don’t take this that I think they are no good. It’s just that I could not think of anything new to say about them that I had not said about the ones closer to the top. It’s probably a good idea to visit them for yourself and discover each ones unique features.

As and experiment I submitted my Public Relations (PR) For Your Website post to each of the above to see how it affected my traffic.

However I didn’t submit to Digg of Newsvine for fear of backlash from their users for submitting my own content. However, in the interests of experimentation, feel free to submit them yourselves.

I’ll report back in a week or two with results.

Technorati Tags: social+bookmarking, news, marketing, del.icio.us, delicious, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, myweb2, smarking

Who wants a free USB Drive?

March 7, 2006 on 10:14 pm | In Etc... | 3 Comments

You do? Then click here and click the image with the “Valuable Information” heading and fill out the questionaire.

Kind of ironic that I just posted about giving up MS Office for Open Office and now I’m hitting up Bill G for a free USB Drive.

Technorati Tags: free, usb, usb+drive, thanks+bill

Open Office

March 7, 2006 on 8:24 pm | In Software, Tools | 1 Comment

So I got my new laptop last week, but I didn’t get a license for MS Office. That makes this laptop pretty much the first PC I’ve owned that doesn’t run Office. This laptop is currently running Open Office.

To buy a license for MS Office with my laptop was going to account for about 25% of the price, I don’t use MS Office enough to justify this. I don’t use Outlook or Powerpoint and rarely use Word. I generally only use Excel for building lists. In fact Access would be the only reason for me to buy MS Office and that’s only because I use it for fleshing out databases because I have found that it is great for this purpose. Also, part of my job for the last few years has been developing and supporting various Access applications. However, I’m now getting into using SQL Server Express for this.

The Open Office download was 93MB and the installation was really quick and easy and it all seems to work without any problems.

So will I ever buy a MS Office license? Probably not.

Technorati Tags: open+office, ms+office, sql+server

It’s Christmas at Accidental Entrepreneur

March 1, 2006 on 8:55 am | In Etc... | No Comments

What an amazing day it is today.

First my new Garmin eTrex GPS with Waterproof Exterior arrived so that I can start Geocaching on the weekend.

Then, I check the order status for my new Dell Laptop and the delivery date had been brought forward from the 7th of March to today!

Woo-hoo - big tech fest here today.

After a few minutes playing with the GPS and a bit more work, the Dell Laptop arrived. I dug straight in and got it set up immediately - It only took a few minutes to get it going. However, it took a while longer to get my necessary software installed.

It’s amazing how ‘necessary’ Firefox has become for me. I got frustrated really quickly with IE6. Anyone else noticed this?

The other software I needed to get set up so that I could get back to work is MS Visual Studio C# 2005 Express - a great piece of software for developing windows apps which is free to register until November 2006, and MS SQL Server 2005 Express - a fully functioning scaled down version of the MS SQL Server 2005 database engine.

The great thing is that I estimate that my new laptop is compiling my C# code about 40 times fast than the laptop I have been using.

So my old laptop - a Dell Inspiron that I aquired back in 2001 - will now probably be used mostly as a testing platform.

Technorati Tags: geocaching, gps, visual+studio, sql+server, dell+laptop, gadget+festival