Google offers personal home page Google Labs is now offering a personal home page where you can choose to view a range of Google services that you use including Gmail, news, quotes and word of the day, shares, driving directions and movies. Some of it just applies to the USA, for example weather, stock market and movies. But you can choose the BBC as your news source.

22.5.05 06:47 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

SkypeIn UK SkypeIn numbers are available again. My new SkypeIn number is: 020 7870 5322 If calling from outside the UK you need to call: +44 20 7870 5322 But you'd actually be better off getting your own Skype account. All you need on your PC is set of headphones with a microphone. If you don't already have some then visit Amazon, the cheapest Plantronics set come with 120 minutes of free SkypeOut so you can call landline numbers cheaply from your PC.

16.5.05 20:25 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

Is ineen the Skype killer? I've been seeing a lot recently about ineen (stupid name), a new voice, video, instant messaging client. Most of the comment appears to be applauding the fact that it is open standards based and therefore is a good thing. Personally, I'm not yet convinced. Skype/MSN/ICQ/AOL/Yahoo might not be based on open-standards but one massive advantage that they've got is USERS! I have no incentive to download ineen because I don't know who I would talk to. I know people on the proprietary networks and they work. Why would I make the effort of changing? By using Trillian I've already got an excellent IM client that enables me to talk to people on MSN/ICQ/AOL/Yahoo. The one thing that would appeal to me (and from the hype what I though ineen was) is a client that combines Trillian and Skype into one product. Now that would be worthwhile.

16.5.05 12:26 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

SkypeIn woes I've been waiting for our new broadband connection to become live before buying a SkypeIn number, but UK numbers aren't available at the moment. They were last time I looked! I'm wondering if this means that more than 10,000 people have already applied as from memory I think that numbers are released in blocks of 10,000.

13.5.05 15:12 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

Broadband at last Companies are more likely to receive criticism on blogs than they are to receive praise. That's just one reason why companies can't afford to ignore the blogosphere. One of the most visited posts on the blog that I run as a local councillor is "Morrisons is rubbish" where I complain about the quality of one of the UK's largest supermarkets, which just happens to have a near monopoly in the part of Leeds I represent and live in. My post has even made it on to a bulletin board for Morrisons' staff (many of whom agree with my points). Not very good on-line PR for Morrisons. I want to reverse the norm and offer fulsome praise to one of our suppliers by saying that Zen Internet is brilliant. We've had nothing but sterling service from them. The customer sales and tech support staff are always friendly and helpful. Today the broadband connection in our office went live, three days before they promised! What's more they are also one of the cheaper offerings on the market. What more could you ask for?

13.5.05 14:38 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

Utopian working together? Veteran IT journalist and blogger David Tebbutt has an interesting article in today's Guardian Online supplement about how Socialtext's Wiki software was used to organise the recent Les Blogs conference in Paris. I'm not quite as excited yet by wikis as some other communications professionals are. The concept is brilliant but I think we still have some way to go before the usability is easy enough to spread out beyond the more IT literate amongst us. Update: Just seen that David has a link to the article on his blog. He also questions the "blog etiquette regarding one's own published articles". I always get irritated by the idea that there is something wrong with the idea of self-promotion on a blog. After all it is a personal publishing medium. Self-promotion is totally positive. The ethical/moral question is that you should be upfront about it. Full disclosure is essential. Go ahead plug your article, company, product, service, client or anything you want. But be honest about the fact that you have a personal interest in plugging it.

12.5.05 08:56 Permalink / comment

Brilliant broadband We've just moved offices and are still waiting for our new broadband connection to go live (next Monday - why does it take BT five working days to do this, and why don't they work weekends?). I've been using broadband for several years now and you forget just how slow a dial-up connection is. It is interesting to see how quickly different sites load. Our new Bruce Marshall Associates website (which is still very much a work in progress) is reasonably quick. Sometimes it is hard to figure out why certain sites are slow. For example Neville Hobson's NevOn is quite quick, while Tom Murphy's equally excellent PR Opinions is excruciatingly slow.

10.5.05 18:15 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

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