Quick response with contact details 24 June 2008
Posted by Catriona Pollard in Tech tips.Tags: QR code, Quick response code
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Soon you won’t need to worry if you forget your business cards when you go networking. The new tecnology called QR will be all you need.
QR (Quick Response) Codes mean that by simply flashing a mobile phone at one of the square codes you can be directly linked an advertiser’s website, or automatically receive the personal details from business cards.
QR works by the consumer using a camera phone that has been equipped with the reader software, scanning the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.
You will need special phone software to read the codes, or you can download a QR code reader. You can create your own code. Here is mine containing all of my contact details.
What is the buzz about twitter? 2 May 2008
Posted by Catriona Pollard in Tech tips.Tags: twitter
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I have heard about twitter for a while now and even read some tweets. Personally I can’t see the point, but it seems that it is becoming more and more popular.
HitWise recent research shows that visits have more than doubled in the last three months, and traffic rocketed up 60 percent in the past month, the site ranked only 439 among social networks and forums last week and 4,309 among all categories of Web sites.
It seems it is addictive. Users frequently visit and return to the site from computers or mobile phones to leave brief but typically fun 140-character messages on their Twitter pages for their followers and friends to read and respond to.
Journalists are taking it up – SMH’s Enterprise’s Valerie Khoo is now a Twittee devotee.
People are incorporating the service into their daily, 9-to-5 routines. For example, a blogger or journalist might post what show he or she is attending and then return to post Internet sticky notes about a keynote or some other happening. Bloggers and journalists can then follow the Twittee to inform how they cover or, in the case of public relations people, pitch a story.
Valerie said in SMH’s Enterprise blog:
As a small business entrepreneur …….if you combine your marketing messages with a lot of other useful – or interesting or quirky – messages, you might get a good response from Twitter. You can also send your “tweets” directly to your subscribers’ mobile phones as a text message (if they allow this function).
While you might not be able to fathom why people would go to Twitter to see what you are doing, you can also create a feed so that your “tweets” automatically show up on your webpage or blog which ensures that your webpage has dynamic content that changes all the time. Instead of being static, people will see something different every time they browse to your page – and that will keep some people coming back to it.
Maybe I will become a Twitee as well…..
Lisa Harvey invited to 2020 Summit 6 April 2008
Posted by Catriona Pollard in Tech tips.Tags: 2020 Summit, AustralianIT, Energetica, Lisa Harvey
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Despite the AustralianIT reporting the Techies snubbed for 2020 summit, my client Lisa Harvey from Energetica has been invited to participate in the 2020 Summit on April 19 and 20.
To make the great contribution she is interested in discussing her ideas with many different people.
She has created a blog for the occasion www.lisaharvey.com.au and she would love people to participate by adding comments and creating some debate.
There has been discussion in the press about how few IT people there are at the summit. Lisa wants to be a good representative for IT in the Community sector, with ideas and opinions formed through discussion with people who have experience and who have thought through the subject matter.
Lisa will be blogging the event, perhaps even from there (technology permitting) and certainly afterward.
The Correct Way to Publish Online for the Search Engines 24 March 2008
Posted by Catriona Pollard in Tech tips.add a comment
If you have a website you are probably familiar with basic search engine optimisation. You will know what words
you are targeting for. If you want to come up on Google for ‘headsets’ then you would do the following.
• Have two to three links going from your press release to your website with the
link text / anchor text ‘headsets’
• Have headsets in the title of your press release
• Have ‘headsets’ in a sub title on your page in bold and in italics
• If you use images on your press release have the alt text mention ‘headsets’
• Post your press release in sites that have a Google page rank 2 or greater
• Only post your press release in a maximum of 4 press releases sites
• Try and put out a press release on ‘headsets’ once a week for two months
The future of the internet 16 October 2006
Posted by Catriona Pollard in Events, Tech tips.add a comment
Download full article: Robert Cailliau Global Summit
As part of the 2006 Global Summit I recently interviewed one of the presenters Robert Cailliau who is the co-Developer of the World Wide Web. He spent the last 30 years working at CERN - the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics centre.
He thinks that nobody can predict the future of the internet and that revolutionary developments have come from unexpected avenues in the past, and will again. Asked about the development of technology connected futures, he described them as “Simply hell. Matrix, but worse.”
The one trend Cailliau sees is towards more virtual community spaces. People are going virtual. They meet in virtual spaces, build their virtual worlds, let others in or keep them out. He believes the distinction between life inside the matrix and outside it will blur.
This is already evidenced by the behaviour and addiction to networked 3D virtual worlds. And just like the web spread like wildfire out of CERN, things will continue to develop and grow. Skype, blogging, podcasting, real crime inside networked 3D virtual world – all these phenomena will continue and at one point meld together into the Matrix. Or never at all! Yet note that nobody predicted any of them.
Developments like wikis must amuse Cailliau because providing a facility for working on the same page together was the first thing the prototype web did. He explains that this is how he and Tim Berners-Lee refined the documentation of the protocols and HTML back in 1990. This facility disappeared when others developed the browsers we see today.
