Just to prove that I am right*, Reuters have published an article on the power of widgets (read my previous post on widgets).

“Popular widgets include weather trackers and UV indexes, news feeds, train, bus and flight schedules, currencies and even lunar phases. Women can track their menstrual cycles or count down to their due date if pregnant.

A widget coffee alarm will sound when it is time for a break and an alcohol calculator widget allows brewers to determine the alcohol content.

“It allows you to keep your fingers in all the digital pies that make up your life,” said Dr. Curtis Gittens, senior research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, a Canadian IT market research company based in London, Ontario.”

Go read.

…..

* I’m always right, as I have to repeatedly remind Mrs BetterComms. In fact, doubly right:

1. I’m a man, therefore always right

2. I’m an Australian Englishman, therefore doubly right.

For some bizarre reason, perhaps due to her faulty brain wiring, she fails to see the logic in my reasoning.

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I have been re-investigating the potential of sequential autoresponders to generate increased traffic and revenue.

Whilst money is a dirty word, it is nonetheless an important one to the soho business practitioner.

Traditionally I have used third-party providers like AWeber and GetResponse to manage my autoresponder requirements for myself and my clients. But such solutions can be expensive and sometimes I get a bit ‘funny’ about third-parties holding all of my hard-earned contact details. They ’say’ they don’t use them or sell them, but how can I be sure…

Whilst most hosting companies offer an autoresponder with medium+ hosting packages (and my excellent hosts, DynamicWebHosting, certainly do), these autoresponders are usually ‘one-shot’ responders, not sequential responders.

The difference?

One-shot responders send a one-time email out in direct response to receiving one — such as sending a ‘Thank you, your email is important to us and your email has been placed in a queue and will be attended to by the next available email consultant’ message back when an email is received on a specified email account.

Sequential autoresponders are more for product or service enhancement. Let’s say you want to supply a prospect with some marketing or technical information about a product or service of yours. You create a link on your website to a request form or email address that forwards the prospect’s email information to a specific email address of yours. Then your sequential autoresponder sends back some standard marketing or technical information to the prospect.

Then in three days time it automatically sends the prospect another email, this time wondering if the prospect has had time to digest the information and do they have any further questions?

If you haven’t heard from them within a week your system can automatically send them another follow-up email. The overall idea within this example is to help the prospect decide to make a purchase, but there are plenty of other uses for such software.

As Xtreeme, the makers of the FollowUpXpert package I’m about to road test, say:

Using our autoresponder software you can send automatic follow up emails to your prospects. You can create as many messages as you like and define custom intervals between subsequent messages. For instance, you may want to send the first email one day after the initial contact, next one a week later and so on… Each message can be completely personalized to show that you care about your relationship with the customer.

Xtreeme’s software sits on my pc, not on someone else’s server, thus making me feel confident that no one is going to have the potential to ’steal’ it and use it for their own nefarious purposes. Plus, at US$125 the software is also a lot cheaper than 12 months of hosting at AWeber or GetResponse (there are other players in the ’sequential autoresponder’ market, but they are often even more expensive, and these two are the industry leaders by a long shot). Unlimited autoresponders means that I can not only auto-manage my own business, but those of my clients too.

I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about sequential autoresponders and their potential to help you in your business, have a look at this.

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That dashingly handsome and thoroughly fine fellow Bryan Person (known to friends as ‘Bryper’) pointed me off to an interesting thought piece on Australian etiquette when overseas.

My own views on etiquette were made quite clear when Paull Young first left on his ‘Social Media World Domination Tour’ late last year. However, Bryper’s link to a SMH blog post reminds me that even in this crazy, mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world there is always someone who will kick Lola out of the bar for mixing coke and beer in the one glass — and trying to ingest it via one’s nostrils.

Still, as one of the commentors to the blogpost says,

“Solution: When you see offensive Aussies, quietly tell everyone around you that they’re Kiwis trying to give us a bad name :-)”

* ’septic’ is short for ’septic tank’, which is aussie rhyming slang for ‘yank’. A ‘Kiwi’ is someone from New Zealand.

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David Boloker, that fine and wise man from IBM I mentioned yesterday, has emailed me with details on a recent OpenAjaxInitiative meeting.

“Here’s a bit of a update on Mobile & the OpenAjax Initiative. We had our OpenAjax meeting last week and started an effort (aka Task Force) that is focused on Mobile Ajax. Initially, we will center our work around documenting successful Mobile Ajax work (learning experience for us all) and unsuccessful and focus in on determining what features are needed withing the Mobile Web Browsers and this will lead to best practices as well as some information to folks on what to use mobile phones with ajax for and what will not work on them.”

David also pointed me off to an interesting project — Deepfish. Says Microsoft:

“The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are.”

Currently only available to a small number of beta testers, there is however a Deepfish blog whereby you can keep up to speed on what is going on.

Cool stuff — can’t wait to be invited to test it out on my crusty ol’ Nokia 3230 (java based), but I understand from David that it doesn’t come in Java flavour just yet… bugger! Mind you, if anybody wishes to send me a new phone that will run it… [hint, hint]

p.s. Oh, and how terribly un-Web2.0: the Deepfish is all one word, not two separate words co-joined. If they had their Web2.0 hats on they would have named the project ‘DeepFish’. Really, don’t Microsoft project teams ‘get’ it? [huge facetious grin]

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It’s a funny old place.

This internet place, I mean.

Take, for evidence, an article pointed to by my friend Peter Schultz, an article in the AFR (Australian Financial Review) on the death of podcasting as a communication medium.

In the article designed no doubt to get her company some publicity and entitled ‘Log off, tune out’ [this link may not work for you, sorry - blame the AFR's ridiculous 'flash' site], Rebecca Laskary, director of PR firm Profile Public Relations, argues unconvincingly that:

“Since its arrival in 2004, podcasting has plundered its way into the Australian market, gaining increasing popularity among corporate organisations.

…

With advances in technology, podcasts are fairly easy to record and transmit and are hosted on a website for accessibility. It’s a simple, cost-effective process. Businesses see this as a new marketing strategy worth investing in.”

She then goes on to ask pretty much the same question ‘Pink’ did in ‘The Wall’ — “is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me”

Basing her argument on Thomson’s research about the level of podcasting acceptance and use by the public (I couldn’t find a copy of the research or any news releases about it on Thomson’s site).

What Ms Laskary fails to understand is that audience size is NOT the fundamental metric. She is looking at ‘new communications’ from an ‘old communications’ metric. It is NOT about columns or ink or reach; it is about WHO is paying attention. If your audience is an audience of three, but those three are equally as passionate as you about your topic, then you have made a valuable connection. If those three are decision-makers (in a B2B context) then those three may be the most influential people you could ever meet.

I was reminded of this recently when I unexpectedly met up with Samantha Grant in Second Life. As alluded to previously, Sam uses the CommsCafe podcast that Allan and I irregularly produce as a tool with which to engage the minds of fellow business communicators in her part of London. Sam is one person, but through us she has engaged the minds of many. Thus our humble podcast reaches and influences an audience greater than the mere number of downloads would suggest, because one of our audience is an influencer (or ‘powerful sneezer’ as Seth Godin would have it).

On to part 2…

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So with that article dealt with, I then read in the glossy magazine that comes with the national newspaper The Weekend Australian an article on Kitty Ostapowicz and her generation, an article that reminds us all that what ‘privacy’ means to us is NOT what ‘privacy’ means to today’s teenagers.

In an article tellingly entitled ,‘Kids, the internet and the end of privacy’, journalist Emily Nussbaum looks at the blushingly honest online lives of several teens, including one who gives investment non-advice based on his own investment failures — bank statements all scanned and posted online for all to see.

“I remember very little from high school, and I’ve always believed that was probably a good thing. Caitlin Oppermann, 17, has spent her adolescence making sure this doesn’t happen to her. At 12 she was blogging; at 14 she was snapping digital photos; at 15 she edited a documentary about her school marching band. But right now she is most excited about her first ’serious project’, caitlinoppermann.com. On it, she lists her email and instant messaging accounts, complains about the school’s web censors, and provides links to photos and videos. There’s nothing racy, but it’s the type of information-overload that tends to terrify parents.

…

At 17, Oppermann is conversant with the conventional wisdom about the online world — that it’s a sketchy bus station packed with paedophiles. (In fact, that’s pretty much the standard response I’ve heard from anyone over 39: ‘But what about the perverts?’ For teenagers, who have grown up laughing at porn pop-ups and the occasional instant message from a skeezy stranger, this is about as logical as the question, ‘How can you move to New York? You’ll get mugged!’

Nussbaum ends her article with a question. “The big question for my generation,” she says, “is why would anyone do that?” As she points out, it’s not a meaningful question for a 16 year old. The benefits are obvious: public life is fun, creative, theatrical, communitarian, where one’s friends are; online you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends.

Yes, there are downsides, but there are lousy downsides to any major social change (”see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system”, says Nussbaum). So Nussbaum ends with the GREAT question: “as with any revolution, which side are you on?”

In my mind the ‘genie is out of the bottle’ and there ain’t no putting it back. Might as well ‘go with the flow, bro’ and embrace the new. If only because ‘the new shameless teenagers’ will be the decision-makers in 10-20 years time.

On to part 3…

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So, I have a quiet weekend, smug in myself that I am one of the new digiliterati. Then on Monday, whilst waiting for my stepson’s car radiator to be flushed at the garage, I spy a page three article in The Australian. Regular readers from the UK will no doubt be aware of better uses for space on page three than a column on how blogging is dead.

Sigh. What now?

It turns out that the death of the blog has been reported (in a slightly triumphant manner?). Taking as evidence the blogs of three celebrities — Lindsay Lohan, Melanie Griffith and Barbra Streisand — that have well and truly been neglected, and the reporter (unnamed but hailing from Murdoch’s Sunday Times; The Australian is also a Murdoch publication) seems to have jumped all over them as proof of the demise of blogging.

“Yet the Gartner research firm also concluded that the trend would level off this year, with perhaps 100 million people still blogging worldwide. Other analysts predict that number will fall to 30 million.”

It is true — blogging has sort of levelled out and no longer seems to enjoy the phenomenal rate of growth that it once did, but to me that signifies something: that the number of people prepared to be ‘thought leaders’ and put themselves out on display for a public kicking and humiliation has reached a sort of peak at the moment. If one accepts that it is only 10% of a population that is happy to ‘go on show’ — public speaking, acting, performing, writing (in whatever form), and so on — then with around 30 million ‘maintained and active’ blogs would equate to a total audience of around 300 million spread across most of the western nations, Japan, China, Asia and the Latin countries. Not a bad size audience, really.

But what happens when Africa gets widespread, unfettered access? Or the middle east?

Don’t wipe off blogging yet, my friends! As one of the commenters to The Australian’s blog piece about it says,

“Darryl Mason of Sydney (26 March at 05:12 PM)

Absurd. Blogs have revolutionised news media in only a few years and caused massive headaches for those who want to keep dissent to a minimum - See Iran and China, where bloggers are being jailed solely because they have such influence amongst young people.

Numerous stories that now dominate American media, in particular, began with postings on small-audience blogs (like the pet food scandal and the sacked attorneys outrage now threatening to bring down the US attorney general), while a novelist like Cory Doctorow has used his blog, Boing Boing, to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of his novels.

Celebrity blogs were pure marketing from the get go, and failed on the whole because they didn’t offer up enough insight, passion or freebies (music, video clips, exclusive interviews etc), and failed to regularly update.

No doubt there are tens of millions of blogs out there that are updated less than once or twice a month, and many that have big visitor numbers but not a lot of commenters.

Blogs have a long way to go before they reach the potential that Rupert Murdoch outlined in a ground-breaking speech a couple of years back, where he said that the future of news would be built around blogs (like this Murdoch owned site is now built around ‘What Do You Think?’ blogs)

Two of the blogs I started last year, ‘The Orstrahyun’ and ‘Your New Reality’ can get up to 27,000 visitors on a good day, and that audience was built with no real marketing or advertising.”

There are lots of interesting comments on the blog — some ‘for’ blogs, some ‘against’. What is interesting is that a dialogic process is taking place in the mainstream media, on a new media platform. Dialogic processes, traditionally, is something that newspapers are quite poor at allowing, as you can only fit a certain number of Letters to the Editor on a page but fit as many comments on a blog as you like.

Mind you, there are those who argue that a ‘blog’ doesn’t exist at all. So there! [author pokes tongue out and laughs along with you]

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Pizza in Second Life
According to Reuters “Infoweek reports that Domino’s Pizza, which already takes one in six orders online, will soon be accepting real-life pizza orders from within Second Life.

Domino’s IT director Jane Kimberlin “said Second Life is where Domino’s customers are and therefore that’s where the pizza company needs to be too.”

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