Paul Woods

If you're new here, and are interested in my thoughts on "Life as a B2B Technology Marketer"... you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Back in March I wrote my breakup letter to Virgin Broadband regarding their substandard offering.  Well after almost three months of troubleshooting, registered post letters, stern emails, negotiation, complaining to the ACCC and the TIO and a whole lot of patience we now have a reliable, fast connection at home.

The good folk at Virgin Broadband certainly lived up to the Virgin customer service standard and tried their best to sort out my problem (once my complaints got through to them) but unfortunately it just wasn’t to be. 

After a personal apology over the phone from the soon to be CEO of Virgin Mobile, and the offer of a release from the contract, I somewhat reluctantly cut my loses and walked away from Virgin Broadband.   I say reluctantly because my only other option was to sign up with the company I never wanted to sign up with again - Telstra.

… to cut a long story short, the signup with Telstra was easy, the problem is they can never ever meet any time commitments they make over the phone.  After eight phone calls to Telstra customer service over three weeks (that should have only been one), I now have a new phone line and ADSL2+ connection.

I guess the good part about poor customer service is that you can negotiate discounts at almost every occasion that something goes wrong, and Telstra are more than happy to come to the table - otherwise I would be incredibly unhappy at the moment, instead of content.

Lets just hope my Telstra ADSL2+ does not degrade like Virgin Broadband did.  Fingers crossed.

For those following me on Twitter (paulwoods) you will know that I have been playing around with ways to automate some of my online life.  My ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to do the regular things - like catching up on my favourite feeds, following folks on Twitter, keeping up with some of my favorite photographers on Flickr and much more.

My first attempt was to use Google’s iGoogle.  iGoogle is essentially a start page which you can load a multitude of widgets into to follow almost anything.  I can look at my Google Analytics data for the websites I run, my AdSense balance, my hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, my Twitter feed, Facebook etc etc all from one page.  Basically an instant time saving of about 10 minutes every day simply because I eliminated the need to bounce between 10 or so different sites.

iGoogle is good… except that there were a few things I felt were missing.  The main one being that I could see all that great content, but I couldn’t do much with it.

Enter Flock!

Flock “The Social Web Browser” certainly lives up to its tagline.

I now have a browser that is pulling fresh data from my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, GMail, Yahoo Mail and YouTube accounts.  Not only can I interact with all of them directly from the browser interface… I can also pull content from any of them and blog about it using Flock’s “Blog This” functionality.

For example, this image is part of my Flickr photostream (that’’s me third from the right about to ride 70km on my dual suspension mountain bike!).  All I had to do was drag and drop it into the Flock blog editor.  How easy is that!

Compared to the Windows Live Writer blog editor which I have been using since it was released, the Flock Blog editor is a little light on.  For example, I am unsure if this text will take on styles set out in my WordPress theme (the preview doesn’t really tell me much).  But I am sure it will improve over time.

All in all… two big thumbs up for Flock.  And I guess 15 minutes extra each day I can use to focus on the important things.

Tags: Flock

Merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone. 

2007 was a cracker.  Hopefully 2008 will be even better!  This time last year I wrote about my new years resolutions.  I think it is time for a quick check…

2007 Resolution Checklist

1. Get fitter
   Yeah… maybe just a tad fitter.  At least I am a card carrying gym member now
2. Going back to university for some post-graduate business study 
   Hmmm… not in 2007, however it is still on the cards for 2008
3. Compete in (and finish) a triathlon
   DONE!  Admittedly it was in mid December, and I did come last - but hey at least I finished it.  No photographic evidence unfortunately, I think I was a bit too slow and the event photography had already gone home.  But you can look up my result at http://usmevents.com.au.

   Position: 578 (last finisher!)
   Paul Woods (Competitor: 1054)
   Swim (750m) - 17:54  
   Bike (20km) - 1:02:51
   Run (5km) - 43:31
   Total - 2:04:18

   That is only 1 hour and 10 minutes behind the winner!   But they didn’t innovate like I did and change the the 5k run into a  1km run/4km walk .

4. Buy our first house
   DONE!  See previous post! 

So that means I can confidently say I got 2/4 of my new years resolutions last year - not a bad effort!

So what about 2008… what resolutions are on the cards…

2008 Resolution Checklist

1. Get fitter
   Yep… just like everyone else
2. Going back to university for some post-graduate business study
   Carry over question
3. Start some sort of online business that brings in serious income
   Not  like the USD $60 that www.thenewpaperclip.com brings in every month, but some serious spending money to help pay off the house.  I have plenty of ideas, and a few that might actually work (one in a very under serviced market too) - WATCH THIS SPACE!
4. Build a Foosball table
   How else can I represent Australia at Table Football without my own custom built Foosball table?  A custom built Foosball table with beer holders, electronic scoring and webcams for instant replays?  And maybe a radar gun to clock shot speeds.  Yeah that would be awesome!

Wonder if I can improve on my 50% new years resolution strike rate in 2008… we will wait and see!