Over the past few months I have been working on a new way of thinking. There are so many new technologies on the Internet nowadays that I hadn’t tried. It is easy to pass many of them by or dismiss them. I used to be as guilty of that as the next person, but not anymore.

Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, the list is huge. Some of these have been around a while and some are new kids on the block. It is easy to dismiss some of them as gimmicks, useless, or just simply “not your thing”. Until you try these technologies you will never know if they will be useful and you may miss out.

I have been experimenting with several new technologies recently and have found some that I never thought would be useful being integrated into my daily life. A prime example is Twitter. On the face of it this is the same as the “what are you doing now?” section of Facebook, a small piece of information that once updated quickly goes stale and is out of date. Useless? I thought so, until I found that you can hook it up to many other applications, Wordpress for example. Every time I publish a blog post, it updates Twitter. All of a sudden a seemingly useless piece of technology has a use.

I am not going to go on about the benefits of Twitter right now, this post is not about that, it is about taking steps to try out every new thing you come across, you may be surprised what you find. sometimes something only becomes useful when matched with something else, Synergy if you will.

The phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind. Well yes that is true, but in this industry you don’t need to be an expert on everything, you just need to know enough to find out what works for you and how to benefit from the things that you can use. It’s a bit like comparing a motor mechanic to the average driver. You don’t NEED to be able to rebuild the engine to be able to benefit from a car.

There are still things on my list to try, I will let you know how I get on along the way. What I will say is these last few months have opened my eyes and made me see that unless we take steps to deliberately try all these new things, we will pass them by. This industry is hard enough to succeed in, without missing potential opportunities along the way.

What would you do if your site disappeared? You may think it is unlikely, but in reality the statistics may shock you.

Here’s some food for thought:

• 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all
• 40 - 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable and up to 60% of all backups fail in general

Source: Realty Times

Whoever you host with there are always failure points, whether it is the hard drive in the server (if it is not RAID), the data-centre burning down (it does happen) or just accidental deletion of content. The general rule of thumb is if it can happen, eventually it will.

This may not have been such an issue in the early days of websites where the content was stored on your local hard drive. If the worst happened you simply need to re-upload all your HTML files and away you go. Nowadays a lot of sites are dynamic, containing pages upon pages of dynamic data updated on a regular, often daily basis.

A lot of people use their website to conduct their business, sometimes it is secondary to their main source of income, but increasingly it is becoming the main money spinner. If the site were do disappear so could the business.

Here is another interesting statistic for you:

60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster

Why am I harping on about this you may ask? Well one thing we are quite particular about at ThinkSynergy is backups. There is a daily backup on the server which is copied to 2 different locations every day. A little over the top? Maybe, but it gives us and our customers peace of mind that if the worst did happen, they would be back up and running very quickly.

What is the backup strategy of your current host? Do they do nightly backups? If the worst did happen and their data-centre burned down, would your site be on their priority list? It is easy to presume these large companies have great disaster recovery, but would you trust them with your business?

If you run your business from your website, or use your website as an income earner it is easy to sit down and put a value on the site being live. Developing a backup strategy is not something that many people get excited about, but it is vitally important. Do you have home contents insurance? I bet you do. It is equally unlikely you will ever have to use it, but you have it anyway, just in case.

If you don’t want to create a strategy yourself at least do some checks and make sure the people you host with have their own in place, it is worth it in the long run and will make sure that the business you have built up is still there next year.

When I cast my mind back to my school days I remember the talk in the playground was often “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. I remember my answer was always “I want to be a pilot”.

As the years went on this became less and less likely, and while I meandered my way through high school, following the course of what I knew best, computers, it became less and less likely. By the time I got into University on a computer course it was next to impossible, and a career in IT was all but inevitable.

As we go further in life we steer ourselves toward what we know best, what we are good at or what we enjoy, gaining qualifications and experience along the way. Sometimes we do this deliberately and sometimes it is unconsciously.

Have you ever woken up and thought “what if?”, “what if I had taken that job?” or “what if I have followed a different university course?”, I certainly have. In so many ways in life we end up with limited choices about what we are and what we can be.

You may think this is a rather negative post so far, and I guess you are right, but where I am going with this is we have a tool available to us that previous generations did not have. A tool that quashes these limits and breaks down the boundaries. The Internet is a great invention. I was lucky enough to be in the generation that saw the birth of the internet. Ever since I first saw it I was hooked. Yahoo, the BBC, Microsoft could all write HTML pages and they could be seen from anywhere in the world, but so could I… All of a sudden the playing field was level, I was as big and powerful as Microsoft.

Obviously it is not as simple as that, but the basic theory is there. I can publish websites, documents, videos online and nobody will stop me and tell me I am not qualified, I don’t have the right grades from school or I don’t have the correct amount of experience. The boundaries are gone, I can do what I want and the only limiting factor is that if what I write is not good enough people will not read it.

How many jobs can you do that? Imagine you want to be a surgeon, you can’t go into a hospital and keep hacking away at people until you get it right, until you become good enough to be respected. If you want to be a pilot you can’t grab the controls on your next trip abroad and say “come on, let’s have a go?”. The internet simply gives you all this opportunity on a plate!

All this is a bit obvious, you may say. Well yes it is, but how many of you reading this now have dabbled in the world of web publishing, with blogs or with personal websites? I imagine a few of you have. I wonder if any of you would think about giving up your day job to become an expert in the field of “the internet” and all it entails. Scary prospect, isn’t it? It is, but at the same time it has a strange appeal to it. It is an open door, one avenue in life that doesn’t have someone stood there judging us, telling us we are not good enough, or that we don’t have the skills to make it.

I liken it to the early days of America, the land of opportunity, where people were rewarded for taking the initiative, for developing themselves and for doing well. It is all too easy to accept the run of the mill life, going to work 9 - 5 and simply existing and paying the bills. The internet is not for everyone, but what I can say is it is THERE for everyone, if you want to use it.

There are not too many jobs on this planet that allow everyone to “have a go” and see how it works out. If you are one of these people “on the fence” like I was, give it a try, you might just surprise yourself.

I think I speak for most small to medium size businesses when I say the bain of our life is often paperwork. We have so much on day to day that finding time to sit down and create invoices, reminder letters etc is something that can all to easily get on top of us.

Recently I discovered Blinksale, a simple, easy to use online invoicing service. I decided to try it out and it really is very good.

Simple

The interface is incredibly simple. You logon to your account and you are presented with some tabs for adding users, customers and invoices. You create an invoice template, set it to recur however often you like (in our case annually) and attach your customers to it. 

Blinksale takes care of emailing the invoice to them, and provides a nice dashboard for reminding you when invoices are overdue, and allows you to automate reminder emails.

Low Cost

There is a charge for Blinksale, based on how many invoices you send out per month. The lowest option allows 3 invoices per month and is a great way to try out the system before signing up to one of their paid programmes. 

Their categories are well laid out, so you would need a fair few clients to move you up the scale, and makes it very easy to justify paying the small amount they ask, based on the client base you have amassed.

Time is Money

Over the past few months we have saved hours upon hours of time by using Blinksale. where we would manually prepare invoices Blinksale takes care of it. It is great to get notification of invoices going out and payments coming in, similar to having a personal secretary!

Just Do It!

I can heartily recommend Blinksale as an invoicing solution. There are other solutions out there with more features and it is important to find the correct product for you. What I will say is these days it is vital to automate as much as possible, giving you time to do what you do best. Try it out and see how you get on.

Having used Stumbleupon for a month or so I thought I would write a post about my Stumble experience.

Surprisingly to me I am still a regular Stumbler. I did think this would just be another fad that I would tire of and uninstall, but it seems not. I am surprised by the quality of some of the stumbled sites out there ad find myself regularly hitting the Stumble button to pass a few minutes (or hours).

I must admit the main benefit for me is the sharing aspect. I hit Stumble a few times, find a good site, then immediately hit the “send to” button to share it. This makes it incredibly easy to surf the web with someone else, even though they are 5569 miles away!

I occasionally hit the “thumbs up” button, but mainly as it adds it to the bookmarks when you do that. In my mind making the adding of a bookmark default is a good move, otherwise I would be tempted just to hit stumble again.

After this relatively short space of time I am finding I now have a huge collection of bookmarks and have experienced an enormous amount of new sites that I never knew were out there. more than this, I now have subscriptions to a handful of great blogs which I check via RSS every day.

Thumbs up for Stumbleupon!

I happened upon a great post by Sailor at Nice2all.com about speeding up Wordpress the other day. As I always like to do when I find something good, I like to leave a comment and show some appreciation. I scrolled down tot he comment button and saw an icon in the corner.

Logo designed by the guys at Biotek

I did a little research (ok, I clicked on the icon in Sailor’s sidebar) and found this post.

It is something I have thought about before. Doesn’t it seem rude that you take your time to compose a comment for someone’s site and they decide that you are not worthy of a little “link love”?

Allow me to explain

The no-follow attribute basically means that although the link works when you click on it, it is effect a dead end for Google and the search bots. This means your own site will not gain from the link you just created.

This was originally designed to prevent spamming, and yes it does occur occasionally, but to be honest it happens if you have no-follow or you don’t. There are more effective ways of tackling spam without punishing the commentors.

For this reason I have decided to implement this feature on all my blogs, so that if you leave a comment you will get a genuine, Google enabled link back to your site. It’s the least I can do considering you have given up your time to post on my site.

If you have a blog and would like to know more about it, please feel free to comment, or visit the sites I linked above.

Thanks go to Sailor at Nice2all for inspiring me to do this.

I heard about stumbleupon a while ago. It seemed to be the next “fad” like bebo, myspace, facebook, digg, technorati, the list goes on. I tend to avoid these “fads”, ok with the exception of facebook, which seems to be as essential nowadays as owning a mobile phone! It seems you no longer exchange numbers with people, you poke’em then ad’em! (but that’s for another post!).

The Install

I was initially turned off from stumbleupon because of the need to add a toolbar to your browser (boo hiss). I have been caught out in the past by this sort of thing. You install a product and all of a sudden your browser is highlighting links in yellow and hijacking everything.

So it was with caution that I installed stumbleupon. Fortunately the toolbar is harmless and well laid out.

Getting started

The registration process is quick and easy. It asks you about your interests. This is important as it determines what content is thrown at you.

You are first presented with a Stumble toolbar,with the obvious “Stumble!” button on the left.

Press the Stumble button and the browser will load a page Stumble thinks you might like, from your list of interests. If you like the page you can click the thumbs up button on the toolbar, or thumbs down if you don’t like it. Stumble uses this data to work out your likes and dislikes. The idea is the more you stumble the more accurate it will get.

Friends indeed

Once you have registered with Stumbleupon and greated your account you can add friends. This is a similar process to adding friends in Facebook, it even used the MSN API to grab your contact list if you allow it to.

Friends makes the whole stumble experience much more worthwhile. Rather than emailing your friend a funny link, or pasting it into MSN (if they are online) you can click the “send to” button and choose your friend. This will then pop up on their stumble toolbar next time they log on. It allows you to send a comment too. This is great fun but be aware, stumbling with friends is addictive!

Channel hopping

There is a selection of channels on the toolbar. If you wanted to search for a single topic, say internet games, you choose the channel and hit stumble. Your search will be narrowed and you will stumble just that area. This is a neat feature.

Favorites

If you discover a site it (are the first to stumble it) the site it automatically added to your favorites. This forms part of your mini-blog within your logged in area. When you stumble you can see who stumbled befor you. You can then enter their mini-blog and see their favorites. Not sure how useful this feature is, feels a bit too much like stalking to me!

So, what’s the big deal?

To me the big deal is getting back to the days where you actually “surf the web”. In recent years the internet has grown so big but has got cluttered with a lot of crap. Stumbleupon is a vehicle for navigating the good stuff and filtering out the bad.

I can come home from work and stumble for half an hour. To find this many good sites would take hours using google. It’s also great to be able to keep track of where you have been. All your “thumbs up” sites are kept in your user area and int he new version of Stumbleupon it actually adds it to your bookmarks (or favorites, in IE).

I love Stumbleupon, it’s a great way to find new sites, the only down side is I seem to find it very difficult to go to bed now… just… one… more… stumble!!!

I came across these pictures today. It is the Google office in Zurich.

At first glance I thought “cool”, that seems like a great place to work. However, thinking about it you do have to wonder why they NEED so many different ways to relax and let off steam? Do these people ever get to leave the office and go home?

I can only imagine the pressure these people must have to work under for these kind of anti-stress facilities to be required:

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