Paul Woods

Last weekend Kerrina and I took a little side trip down to Sydney.  I had the opportunity to present at an event called OfficeDevCon08 about all things Office 2007.  It turned out to be a great community event, with somewhere between 100 and 150 people attending at Microsoft Australia HQ at North Ryde.

I delivered two presentations.  The first presentation was about comparing all the different business productivity suites that are out there in the market.  I called it the “Office Suite Smackdown!”

The second presentation I delivered was all about the frustrations that we all face when we first move to Office 2007, and how to avoid them.  I called it (funnily enough) “The 10 Most Common Office 2007 User Frustrations, and how to avoid them”.

Make sure you check the presentations out (thanks to SlideShare.net!) – however due to my presentation style they might seem a little confusing without me jumping around in front of a projector!  If you want to dive deeper into all things Office 2007, especially if you are looking for help – check out my site over at www.thenewpaperclip.com.

By the way.. a big hello to Microsoft MVPs Lucy Thomson and Glen Millar, as well as Microsoftie Alistair Speirs for their sparkling repartee over beers on Saturday night

Yep… I have been pretty slack recently.  Especially where this blog is concerned.

To start with – work has been very busy recently.  Which is a great thing – but unfortunately when push comes to shove deadlines at work mean less time to post here.

Another reason why is that we have been overseas for a good part of this quarter.  32 days away from Australia touring Canada and the US – which was absolutely amazing.

We wrote about our travels on our “Northern Exposure” blog – http://holiday.paul-woods.com, and if you are keen you can catch the top 250 or so photos on Flickr.

One piece of advice for anyone thinking of taking 5 weeks leave…  it takes about 3 weeks to get your motivation back at work!  So make sure anything important gets done before you go!

The final reason why things have been slow on the www.paul-woods.com front is that I have been posting my thoughts fairly regularly on Twitter – 140 characters at a time.  You can follow me too – @paulwoods is where you will find my riffs on marketing, technology, and life .

So what is coming up for Paul?  Stay tuned for more.

Last weekend our local Air Force base (RAAF Amberley) hosted the semi-regular Defence Force Air Show. 

Usually I would just take a heap of photos of flying aircraft and leave them on my PC to have a look at every now and then, but this time I thought I would experiment with Microsoft Photosynth. 

For those that don’t know, Photosynth allows you to create 3D representations of environments with the photos that you take.  Pretty cool (Very cool infact!). 

I tried two different strategies to create the perfect Photosynth.  First was to walk around the static displays taking as many shots from as many angles as possible.  If only I had actually read up on how Photosynth “Photosynths” Photos.  I thought it matched edges.  But in fact it matches textures.  I had thought it would work just like a panoramic photo, but it didn’t.  Instead of getting away with a 10-15% overlap, I really needed 50%!  Bummer!  Oh well, here are a few examples that kind of worked.

(TIP – if you use what look like forward and back buttons on the top right hand side of the boxes below you will see all the different synth sets created, not just the photos in the synthiest part of the synth… if you know what I mean!)

Static Display of Royal Australian Air Force C-17 Globemaster and Two United States Air Force Fighters

Inside a Royal Australian Air Force C-17 Globemaster

Walking around a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion

After spending 3 hours walking around the static displays (some multiple times), the flying displays began.  I thought it would be a great opportunity to see if I can do the “lazy mans photosynth”  I planned to take plenty of photos of aircraft as they flew past, and because it was a beautiful day with a great blue sky – I figured Photosynth would love these photos. 

Well it kind of worked – not across 15 or 20 frames like I hoped, but more like two or three.  You can see my examples below.

I think if I upgrade my camera from a Canon 300d (which does something like 3fps from memory) to something a bit faster (like 12 frames per second) this might work.

Royal Australian Air Force C-17 Globemaster in flight

Are you playing with Photosynth yet?  Have you tried anything out of the box like the “lazy man’s photosynth”? If you have I would love to see how you have gone.

A few weeks ago the June edition of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Marketing Update newsletter was released – and in it is the second book review I have done for the AMI – Getting to Big the Small Way by Frank Prestipino.

For those who are not members of the AMI… here is the review

 BOOK REVIEW

Getting to Big the Small Way

By Frank Prestipino. Published by McGraw-Hill, New York, 2008. 322 pages. RRP AUD$39.95. ISBN 13: 9780071484404.

While taking on a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) can get you out of bed in the morning, chances are getting your project off the ground is fraught with challenges. Budget. Risk management. Board approval. Hmmm, all sounds too hard!

But what if you could fly under the radar and drive significant change in your organisation? In ‘Getting to Big the Small Way’, Frank Prestipino illustrates how taking baby steps to drive change is a sound business strategy.

The book’s argument focuses on the Pareto Principle — that 80% of the benefit is derived from 20% of the effort. Prestipino says that as a business you need to focus on the 20% (or even less) to drive incremental yet significant change in your organisation. All without the red tape and risk associated with big transformation projects.
Although the idea is similar to that of Tim Ferris in ‘The 4 Hour Work Week‘, ‘Getting to Big the Small Way’ targets what a business or marketing team (not an individual) should be focusing on to drive significant returns.

For example, moving into adjacent markets and exploiting the products, skills and resources that are already at your fingertips, or closing the perception gap between how you and your customers see your organisation. Prestipino supports each idea with plenty of real-world examples and draws significantly on his experience at Oracle and other organisations.

The book itself generally reads well, with practical tools that complement Prestipino’s arguments. Near the end of the book I felt the tools became very prescriptive and took too much of the focus — great if the tools fit your organisation perfectly, a little disappointing if you need to adapt them to meet the challenges of your business.

That being said, there are plenty of great ideas I have taken from this book and am implementing within the business I live and breathe every day. I would recommend this as worthwhile reading for anyone with a strategic marketing or communications bent.

37:  If it is going to more than 10 people – send it to someone else to check before you unleash the message on the masses… two, three, four pairs of eyes are better than one.

and how about…

38:  If you want me to respond, put me on the To: line.  If you don’t want a response, CC: me please (actually you should just reconsider if need to read it at all!)

… you can read #1 – #36 of the Email Checklist over at Seth’s blog.

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.

Last month I set myself a Search Engine Optimization challenge.  Essentially I wanted to substantially increase the traffic, ultimately revenue from a website that I run focused on Office 2007 help, tips, tricks, and tutorials called The New Paperclip.

The first tweak I made was to not focus on keywords, or backlinks or any other sexy SEO topic.  I know this might sound a little backward, but I actually focused on the reader first!

That’s right!  This wasn’t to increase my pagerank or anything like that… all I did was make it easier for someone using a search engine to make a decision on whether or not to click the search engine result that pointed to my site.

Obviously I was making it pretty hard for readers to make the right choice, because almost overnight (as soon as Google spidered my site again) traffic DOUBLED!  That’s right… DOUBLED!

How easy is it for your potential readers to decide if a page on your site is worthy or not?  Do a search and see what title comes up.  If it is long winded like “The New Paperclip: Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for Microsoft Office…” and does not have anything to do with not only the specific content of the page, but the search terms that the person used… then you are in big trouble!  You need to tweak straight away!

To learn about how I specifically made the tweak to my blog post titles using WordPress… click here

Remember – SEO isn’t all about the search engine – really it should be called Human Search Optimisation – because at the end of the day it is the reader looking for the content, not the search engine.

Actually the topic of Human Search Optimization sounds pretty interesting, I might see if I can dig up some more information or insight about it in the coming weeks.

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

There is nothing like a good article on typography to get all the MarComms nuts out there like me excited.

Here is a great one “Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes“

Note… becoming a typography nazi is just as bad if not worse than being a grammar nazi.  Handle with care, or you will lose friends!

The other day I got an email inviting me to contribute to Brazen Careerist.  What is Brazen Careerist? In my words, it is basically a group of ‘younger folk’ like me who are passionate about their fields, and ready to change the game.

Or in their words…

What’s this site all about?
Remember those college career centers that you never used? You probably wish you had taken advantage of them (like we do), but now (maybe) it’s too late. Well that’s what we’re here for. We’re an online career center aimed at Generation Y — young professionals who want to design and define their careers using the new rules for success.

What’s a Brazen Careerist?
A Brazen Careerist knows that defining your own career, finding the right field, and pursuing it are key ingredients to a fulfilling life. Like the tag line suggests, when you define your career on your own terms first, you control your life.

Where are all the good bloggers?
Right here, of course. The Internet is loaded with talented writers, but there is no way to easily search for them. The Brazen Careerist network is made up of a vibrant, curious and ambitious group of career-minded bloggers, passionately covering a variety of fields: personal development, entrepreneurship, public relations, technology, marketing, and politics, each blog offers a unique, informed perspective to our ever-expanding audience.

So make sure you check out some of my new friends at BrazenCareerist.com  Check out my Brazen Careerist profile  and my articles here.