Amazon and Microsoft - blog or not?

Jonathan Bowers, March 31st 2006, 11:23AM

This week has seen two of the Net's biggest names clashing over the subject of blogging. There's been a lot of talk about company blogs and how necessary they are.

Nicholas Carr started the week by giving his rules for corporate blogs. And yesterday Robert Scoble (of Microsoft) and Shel Israel , two blogging evangelists stopped in at Amazon to talk about their book Naked Conversations , which discusses the importance of company blogs.

By all accounts they were surprised by the challenge they met from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to give substantial reasons why Amazon's profits would benefit from blogging.

Bloggers all over are talking about it. One of the most digestible and light hearted reports is by Rick Segal .

Tags: companyblogs
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Getting 100% out of meetings

Jonathan Bowers, March 30th 2006, 10:23AM

I was interested to read Seth Godin's post about investing in meetings as an audience this morning as it's currently quite pertinent to UKFast.

It relates in two senses - with internal and external meetings.

UKFast is expanding. In order to build every department in tandem the senior management are engaging in meetings with the Chairman, where the onus is on them to all contribute to and be informed on each others area. Having worked at companies where a line is drawn between being in charge of a meeting and being present at it, the bonuses of this approach are truly refreshing.

Investment in the bigger picture means that all departments are actively building a greater understanding of each other that filters down through the whole organisation. As a communications manager, I love it.

Yesterday we mocked up some presentations with our new account handlers. The brief was to inform us about UKFast's products and services and what makes the company special. Baring in mind that they are currently experiencing an information overload, we were unsure what the results would be. One thing struck me. When a salesperson believes the importance of the final element of the brief the products and services just about sell themselves. It’s about how you do it more than what you do.

In both cases, believing in what you are doing and investing in it brings the rewards whether you are the audience or the speaker.

Tags: communication, meetings
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Top level domains

Jonathan Bowers, March 29th 2006, 11:14AM

I'm interested in people's views on how the increasing range of tlds affects business and consumers online.

In particular there's .travel, which attempts to create an online directory incorporating millions of travel websites. As an industry, travel and tourism is a world leader with around 12% of the global market. Online, travel is also a leader. Is this a reason for ICANN to shake up the current system?

Is this a money making exercise for the US travel conglomerate that will act as registrar for the new tld?

Is it a genuine way to create a cream of the crop list? If so, how will this process differ to the way that current search engines work?

I spoke to someone from British Airways last year when the initial sign up process began for .travel and the gist was that they were buying their relevant tlds in order to safeguard them - rather than to actually use them.

But recent reports suggest that 16,000 domains have been registered. What do people think? Will this new directory be taken as seriously as Google and Yahoo! currently are?

I personally suspect that by asking people to opt in you are going to build a directory that represents a small percentage of what is available on the Net. So at best it will be used by the fickle site flicking public as another option in their search for the best deal. My research suggests that people have tried and tested the travel market and many are set on the way they search.

Tags: topleveldomains, travel
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Internet training for new recruits

Jonathan Bowers, March 28th 2006, 4:23PM

I am involved in training some new recruits at UKFast this week and I've realised that the subject is so huge that you can't assume what people will know and what they won’t.

As we're a hosting company, the core of the training is about our services and how they fit into the grand scheme of things - but naturally there's a mass of important history and culture that we need to draw from.

We were deep into domain name servers and propagation this afternoon, when someone said; "Hold on a second, what's the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?"

It's a hugely valid question and having talked around the subject in regards to email provisions, web hosting and application servers earlier on, my colleague George and I had neglected to realise some of the basics for the group.

With that sorted, they're now getting through clustering and load balancing, so I hope they are not experiencing a mid afternoon lull!

For me, it's difficult to know how to go about giving a comprehensive yet concise run down of what you need to know about the Net. Perhaps someone can recommend a site or two that can help?

Tags: internet, training, worldwideweb
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Image size and uploading

Jonathan Bowers, March 27th 2006, 4:01PM

There's a running debate over in the creative office here today. The Research and Development team are questioning the Design team on the configuration of images for websites.

The question is: Should a designer spend time dividing the image into sections so that the webpage is loading up a number of separate files, giving the appearance of a faster page, or should the image remain one file?

The argument against division is that it is not actually faster, it just appears to be and on top of this, you have to write more code for each complete image, which may affect the speed.

I got out of the argument when it got down to "it depends how clean the code you are writing is."

I know plenty of businesses that do it one way and plenty that do it the other. So does it come down to personal preference, or is one way really better than the other?

Tags: coding, websites
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