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