As the Chair of 2020 Communications Trust its my job to manage our governance bodies, including the full meetings of trustees and the monthly Admin committee.

Naturally we try to use the tools we promote, starting in the old days with emails and attachments. That soon gets totally unwieldy as participants add their comments, want to edit or amend documents and add or amend agenda items. The secretarial load soon becomes impossible. Time to webify the process. [Read more →]

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As one who has recently made the transition to online accounting system from having the software based on a third party's PC; one who charged us every time data was entered and even for fixing any data entry errors, I'm sold on the idea, especially for small organisations.

But the accounting profession is about as conservative as you can get - its what we pay them for and when they get "creative" or "innovative" we ALL get into deep trouble - so you might expect some resistance when you rush in with the idea to your CFO, accoutnay, auditor or treasurer. AccountingWEB.co.uk has the lowdown Accountants bring Cloud summit down to earth [Read more →]

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According to Mark Milian of the LA Times, Geocities was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet, its been there longer than I have been connected and, for years, any search of the web produced at least a couple of Geocities sites. It still attracts 10 million site visits a month but now, as Chris Crum writes, it is over. R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

[...] Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

[...] It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users?

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it.

What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished?

Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

OK, I accept that Yahoo! might have a commercial or operational reason for doing this, but shifting a site that may have been up for years, with all its files, is a huge job and not to offer some kind of simple migration to a blog for example is just bad PR.

Then there's the issue of millions of links to Geocities pages that will now vanish, again, an automated tool could set up forwarding to the new address for every page, but once Geocities closes, all that we'll have left is dead links.

This isn't the first such event, nor will it be the last, but as the internet ages, it will happen more often, hollowing out the whole system from the inside even as it grows at the edges. Yes, search engines will soon enough find those files that are transferred, but those that are not will mostly disappear, to be found only in google's cache if you really want it or in the wayback machine.

As the net becomes increasingly the memory of our collective mind, will it also be subject to an equally collective amnesia - or worse, Alzheimers?

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote the many free tools available, from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, PBWorks, Flickr, YouTube, MyCommittee and so on.

Just remember that your rights under a free site are very limited and it can disappear tomorrow, don't keep irreplaceable material only where its free and preferably use tools that enable you to download the entire content to your hard drive in a single operation.

That may mean getting familiar with the old guys like FTP or finding tools with downloads using XML, but the moral will always be - backup!

What's your experience? Did you have a Geocities site? What free online services do you use and how do you rate them? In a pinch, how could you recover all the material you have posted there? Comments are open.

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The first email tool I ever used was Eudora and, despite trying several others along the way, it still is. Sadly for me, it is no longer being produced and my final version was last updated 3 years ago and now taken over by Thunderbird. Many of us use Outlook and hopefully have local folders for storing and accessing emails while we are offline or if the exchange server is not available.

The wisdom of a client that can manage your email on your own machine becomes clearer when we see this happening. Another Gmail Outage Blocks E-Mail for Millions of Users [Read more →]

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A few years ago I shared a platform with a bit of a guru called Gerry McGovern and we came down on different sides of this debate. Looks like he has now come a bit further to my side. Nobody cares about your website

When I receive an automated marketing email addressing me by my first name, I don’t go weak at the knees: “Oh, the software knows my first name! It knows my name!” Has anyone tested to see whether these so-called personalization techniques are more likely to alienate a customer than impress them?

Anyway, back to the Air New Zealand marketing email that I don’t remember signing up to. (I’ve had pretty good experiences flying with Air New Zealand by the way.) “Welcome to the second edition of our new look monthly email.” Two fatal mistakes in the first sentence. Welcome? Hello? What’s with the welcome? I don’t want your welcome. If I want anything from you it’s your deals, and hot deals at that. When you think of your customer, imagine Tony Soprano. Nothing personal, just business. Cut the crap. Get straight to the point.

So Air New Zealand has got a new look monthly email! Stop the presses!!!

[...] And you’d be amazed at the amount of websites that want to give you this sort of hard news. Why, I was at the Starwood Preferred Guest website recently wanting to check what they offered in Athens when I was confronted with content that told me that the site was “redesigned and ready to help you plan your adventures. Take a few minutes to customize your account profile to ensure you take advantage of all that our new site has to offer.”

And you know what, I didn’t take those few minutes. That sounded like a real pain to me. I just wanted to quickly check availability and see if there were any good deals. I had zero interest in designs, redesigns, bee-designs, knee-designs or we-designs. (Which are what most redesigns really are; done more because of internal egos than because of external needs.)

I just wanted the website to work. How thoughtless, cruel and uncaring of me. But then I’m only a customer

I completely agree. In fact I go further, the real reason for our being on opposite side of the debate I mentioned above.

Nobody cares about your content and nobody is interested in your information. Nobody comes to your website "to find out more about you", never.

They come to your website for one thing, Help.

Some years back, Colmar Brunton did some great research on why so many people verbally or physically attacked the staff at Social Welfare and their conclusion was that the people were there because they were in trouble of some kind, they were already embarrassed, under stress and probably angry about some actual or perceived injustice.

They needed help and they hated asking for help when every cultural norm we have says we should be self reliant.

Under those circumstances it takes almost nothing to trigger an outburst. But here's another factor, we almost never even seek information until we actually need it.

This is especially true for things we don't do often. I catch a train into town a couple of times a month, so I have no idea what the timetable are. When I need to know the timetable I go to the Maxx website and look it up. It better work fast and be easy to use or I get annoyed because Maxx, and you, need to understand that Gerry and I (and most of your site users) don't have time to waste.

And like Gerry, I wont spend time "customising your website" but what I will do is take advantage of highly visible search options that say "click to search and save this journey" so that next time I load the site it already knows which places I travel between and how I prefer to travel.

Then, when I come back to the site I want to see my "saved journeys" down the left side with a button beside each one which says "next available time" or something like that.

A website is a tool for performing a task, know what that task is for your users and how it looks from their perspective, then provide it. Simple really.

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