Reports of our demise...

Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I know, I know, it's been months since I wrote on my blog but it isn't supposed to be burden. We should write when we have something to say, right?

Whilst the blogosphere has been busily reporting it's own demise and others think it's just a slowdown there remain many corners of the globe, uk, corporate sector that don't know what blogging is, or if they do they haven't embraced the idea of blogging. I'm trying to figure our whether or not I should have added "yet" to that last sentence because I'm still trying to figure out if this sector is ever going to embrace the concept.

And then I read Jeremiah Owyang's post today on how blogs can help corporations.

I intend to shamelessly steal the following ideas:

(1) Here’s how corporate blogs can help a company:

Soften or improve brand
Rapid Response tool
Intelligence gathering
Build better products from two-way conversation
Encourage advocates, embrace detractors
Sales Tools: Education or conversation starter
A living White Paper
Sales lead
One of the ways to evolve the irrelevant corporate website

(2) In a few years, blogs will be issued like email accounts.

Damn; so much to do, so little time.

How to merge multiple documents using PDF Creator

It had completely passed me by that Microsoft had dropped Office Binder in Office XP and beyond, because "usage studies... revealed that Binder was not heavily used". It's annoying though, isn't it, that just when you have a need for a feature that it's not there anymore.

A quick hunt on Google tells me more than I need to know about Binder and there is even a pretty scary tutorial on how to add Binder to your system from a previous version of Office - scary because the final instruction is about checking registry entries and undertaking a "repair" of your current installation.

What I wanted to do didn't feel like rocket science. I had four or five source Word documents that I needed to be able to print out in one step, in the right order, whenever required. The formatting of the various documents did not allow me to create a merged document by embedding each source document within it.

What I finally came up with was to print the documents using the "Wait - Collect" function in PDF Creator, then use the PDF Creator Print Monitor to combine the documents, then print into one single PDF file. Bingo, one document created from the source documents with formatting of each individual document perfectly preserved, and the objective achieved, which is the capability to print out the source documents in one step in the right order.

STEP 1

Print the first document, instead of using "Save" as you normally would, use the "Wait - Collect" option. Repeat with the second and any subsequent documents.

STEP 2

In the PDF Creator print monitor use the toolbar function to "combine" your documents, and then the function to print, which will output a single PDF document.

There's probably a number of ways of doing the same thing but this method has two distinct advantages:

(1) I already use PDF creator as my usual facility for creating PDF's so it's always have it handy

(2) PDF Creator is free, although I encourage you to make a donation if you find it as useful as I do


Tags: Office Binder, PDF Creator

A Ton of Love...

I love this heartwarming story for all kinds of reasons...

Six months ago a lion named Jupiter was rescued from a life of abuse and malnutrition in a traveling circus in Columbia. According to an AP report, a woman named Ana Julia Torres, who runs a shelter for injured and mistreated animals in a poor neighborhood in Cali, Columbia, saved him, along with 800 other "recovering creatures."

"Here we have animals that are lame, missing limbs, blind, cross-eyed, disabled," said Torres. "They come to us malnourished, wounded, burned, and stabbed, with gunshots."

People are shocked and amazed to see Jupiter lavish long hugs and kisses on his rescuer, notes a report on Channel 6 News in Florida, who carried the story. "It is amazing to see an animal like that be so sweet and affectionate," said Torres. "This hug is the most sincere one that I have received in my life."

Tags: Lion, Lion Hug

Are you a "Booger" too?

I subscribe to the bLaugh RSS feed and generally have a good chuckle at the comic. Today's comic is hilarious...



This is from the bLaugh About Us page:

bLaugh is already being called a… “MAD Magazine for the Blogosphere.” But since our moms are the ones who said that, it doesn’t really count. What us, worry?

This is the (un)Official comic of the blogosphere - colorful, satirical, and comical. Expect parodies of “A-List” bloggers all the way down to the meme of the day - no holds barred. Brad Fitzpatrick is bLaugh’s artist, and Chris Pirillo is its creative writer.

Technorati Tags: bLaugh, fun

What did Google do to deserve this...

Looking at the front page of Techmeme this morning you'd be forgiven for thinking that the bell has been tolled and the eulogies written to signal the end of Google.

Michael Arrington questions whether the Official Google Blog is entitled to call itself a blog.

Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google picks on the accidental deletion of Gmail Inboxes, Orkut having an outage and a hiccup in the ranking of some prominent sex blogs.

The New York Times features the next in line of the so-called Google killers. Yawn.

Don Dodge had the anchor story on Techmeme regarding the controvery over Google promoting it's own services in search results pages. Simply put, Google is being accused of hypocrisy, having criticised Microsoft in the past for employing similar tactics.

Wow, did we all get out of bed on the wrong side yesterday or what?

I look on 2006 as the year when I've embraced more Google services than ever and see 2007 as the year in which Google are likely to capture ever more of my attention rather than less. I think the biggest change in my online behaviour of last year was moving from Newsgator to Google Reader and finally embracing reading feeds in a river of news fashion.

I predict that in 2007 Picasa Web Albums will probably develop far enough to see me move from Flickr.

I predict that in 2007 Google Blog Search will lead to me spending less time at both Technorati and Techmeme.

I predict that in 2007 Google will do something big in the arena of either online presentations or online drawing (in other words a Powerpoint or Visio killer).

I think it's fine that we hold Google to high standards but this sniping at the "do no evil" motto and suggestions that Google have reached some mythical "end of the road" are stretching credibility a bit thin for me.

Technorati Tags: Techmeme, Google, Michael Arrington, Techcrunch, Inside Google, nathan weinberg, New York Times, Don Dodge, Newsgator, Technorati

The presidential election of 2008 is already underway...

The United States presidential election of 2008 is going to be fascinating for any number of reasons. Technology will play a role without doubt. Blogging will have an impact; the only question being how much of an impact that will be. Robert Scoble recently tagged along while John Edwards announced that he’s running for President.

I think the most important aspect of the election will potentially be the fact that it will represent the first time a woman has been a credible candidate for the presidency. A poll of New Hampshire Democrats released Thursday by the American Research Group indicated that the undeclared Senator Hillary Clinton of New York has 27 percent support, significantly ahead of John Edwards who has just 18 percent support.

This is, of course, a long race and much can happen between now and election day. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

15 seconds of fame...

In 1968 Andy Warhol made the statement that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." In 1979 Warhol reiterated his claim: "...my prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

Warhol may turn out to be right in principle but wrong about how fleeting fame might be, courtesy of CBS Interactive.

If you had 15 seconds to tell the world whatever you want to, what would you say? Well, now's your chance to be seen and heard on national television, courtesy of CBS Interactive. Post your 15-second video on YouTube, and CBS Interactive will select one to be broadcast on TV! The first selection will air on Sunday, February 4, 2007.

This has the potential to be fascinating.

[Link]

Technorati Tags: andy warhol, CBS, Fame

Ticket to the moon...

I have some vivid memories of watching the moon landings at school as a child. I was just eight years old when Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. When I travelled to Florida on holiday one of the highlights of the trip was the visit to Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. I guess you could call me a child of the space age.

It was with some sadness, therefore, that I read in this article on CNN about the scale of indifference among 18 to 25 year olds for the NASA vision to return to the moon and then go to Mars.

I guess the good news is that NASA is recognising that is has a problem and therefore is applying some thought to how to turn this around. The article indicates some understanding of what the solution has to manage, but I'm not convinced they have yet found the inspiring, viral idea that will get them to their goal.

I hope they do, before Congress decides the vision has insufficient public support and quietly buries the plans.

Technorati Tags: NASA

Google Reader

As I haven't had much time to blog I haven't had the chance to report that I've moved over to Google Reader and although I thought I'd never find that I would be happy with a feed reader tool that wasn't based in Outlook I've actually found the transition relatively painless. This is how I went about implementing Reader:

(1) I was able to get going in minutes by importing an opml file of my Newsgator subscriptions

(2) I keep all my subscriptions in a simple list, in other words I don't create folders. I do, however, only list updated subscriptions. I sometimes scan the list to zero in on favourite feeds but most of the time I use "All items" view and just next, next, next through my items in expanded mode. I never use the list mode. So after all this time I finally get completely the concept of a "river of news", but it's taken Google's implementation of it to win me over.

(3) I keep my "All items" view and each subscription sorted by oldest. I like to read in the order in which people wrote items and I also keep an eye on how far behind I am with my feed reading.

(4) I love the way "Starred items" has been implemented. This makes it easy to retrieve items I want to blog about or to go back and read a post in more depth later on.

(5) I also totally love the way that shared items has been implemented. Robert Scoble used this feature to re-introduce his link blog. I use it to share items of interest from my feeds with my wife and friends.

I'm definitely a convert!

Tags: Robert Scoble, Google Reader

Sigh...

So I haven't blogged in over a month and now that I have some time to catch up I find the spammers have found a way to hit haloscan and statcounter is down. Terrific!

Mindjet responds to resource useage issues

I've been aware for some time of concerns that some MindManager users have been voicing over issues which manifest as high consumption of CPU and RAM resource when using the product.

Mindjet have published an update today that illustrates they've been listening, working on the problem and now believe they have a structured way forward to attack some of the issues.

The route map consists of some specific changes that will be made to how MindManager utilises CPU and RAM resources coupled with some advice on using MindManager on a tablet.

Whilst MindJet make the point that they only have data on 80 users suffering with these problems out of a user base of over 800,000 I think the issue has (so far) been a model of how blogging can help companies listen to user issues and respond to them.

Tags: Mindjet, MindManager