Internet Messaging grows up

For a good number of years, IM has been primarily an application for school and college friends to communicate when they are not at their place of education, a sort of live version of texting to spread the load over more fingers than just the one. Gradually, the corporate world caught on, and internal communication within companies has significantly improved and reduced the number of emails required between nearby desks. As globalisation has impacted the larger corporates, particularly those with teams distributed in many locations, IM has become invaluable - my own team of 14 people including myself are spread over 8 different locations, and we se IM as our primary method of immediate communications, ahead of picking up a phone. Indeed, I have used IM in parallel with other methods - for example, two people communicating via IM while they are both party to a conference call with other people.

I have noticed more recently that some online shops have finally woken up to the fact that offering IM is similar to providing an assistant in a shop, and can result in a better conversion rate - ie the percentage of website visitors becoming paying customers. I had a useful chat with a guy at Dell the other day, and he helped me though a technical query I had on graphics cards. Yawn Yawn, you say - yes, but next time you get offered IM help while online shopping, beware there's a salesman out there trying to sell you something!

MoneySavingExpert.com

Really a UK-specific site, MoneySavingExpert.com is the site of a journalist who used one gem of a piece of information to launch his website. Knowing how to fund a new venture is always a difficult thing to achieve, but Martin Lewis not only worked that out, but had the marketing push behind him as well. Now with many and regular TV and radio appearances under his belt, Martin has a phenomenal website to help consumers save money, get out of debt and so on.

Obviously a very useful site in these uncertain economic times, Martin has a good team working with him now, such is the volume of work. The catch is that he has no formal financial training, coming to this website venture from the journalism angle – writing articles on money-saving ideas for consumers. And given that he sends his weekly email on money-saving tips to over 1,000,000 people, he must be doing something right!

MyDeco.com

MyDeco.com is my current favourite website from the “web technical” point of view. What it achieves, and at the speed it works, is a massive achievement and one which many other websites should seek to emulate.

Formed by Brent Hoberman, co-founder of LastMinute.com, this website helps you envisage how a room of your house will look once you have redecorated it – using the products of 500+ retailers and manufacturers of furniture, paint, wallpaper etc who are associated with the site. You specify the shape and size of your room, and it will create it for you. Hoberman’s partner on LastMinute.com, Martha Lane-Fox is a non-exec director.

Are you missing out by not using the Windows button?

Ever wondered what that button between Ctrl and Alt does? Glance down this list and see what you have been missing! Quicker doing this than using a mouse...

• Win-D Desktop
• Win-E Explorer (Windows Explorer, not Internet Explorer)
• Win-F Find
• Win-M Minimise all windows (takes you to your Desktop)
• Win-R Run
• Win-U Utility Manager (for those with vision or hearing difficulties)

Typing - the #1 technical life skill you need

Life skills come in all sorts of shapes and forms, personal, emotional, physical, technical, etc. My #1 technical life skill is definitely the ability to touch type, and it has helped me enormously from University (where I studied Computer Science) onwards. My mother told me that she had booked me in for a four-week typing course the summer I turned 17, and sure enough I went along 0900-1630 five days a week for four weeks and learned to type. Fortunately I was not the only bloke there - the other guy was from a rich oil family in Kuwait! I was a bit green in those days and the girlies on the course were all a bit embarassing and enough years older than me that I assumed they had boyfriends or at least enough experience in the chatting-up stakes for me to bother showing any interest. A chance missed in learning how to chat-up, but not relevant in the long term as I certainly found the right one in the end and we recently celebrated 15 years of marriage.

So, typing. A skill which will help you progress a lot faster in anything to do with a keyboard. It saved me paying someone to type my A-level Geography project at school, my thesis at University (got top marks of the year for it too, they told me!) and so on. Now working in IT, it puts me ahead of a number of people who still have to stare at the keyboard using two fingers and a thumb. In a four week course, I achieved the Pitmans Elementary award (the nearest equivalent today is this) and got to 38 wpm. Currently I type at 45-50wpm, which means that I can type files notes of a conversation with a customer as we are talking. Very useful.

Using Google search more efficiently : Tip #1

Very few people know about the power of Google Search. If you typed Mickey Mouse into Google, you would get hits for Mickey Mouse, and any other page where the word Mickey and the word Mouse appeared - thus including anyone else called Mickey and anyone or anything else called Mouse. Put inverted commas into the equation "Mickey Mouse" and your hits returned are just those places where the eponymous Disney character appears.

Next level of complexity allows you to search for one thing OR another, and those capitals are important. So a search on "Mickey Mouse" OR "Donald Duck" would find any page where either character was mentioned, but does not require both to appear. Leaving out the OR would be the same as putting AND in there, so it searches for pages where one AND the other name appear ie both.

To-Do lists

Admissions admissions.... There IS some paper in my "paperless office", but only a little bit, honest! The last two uses for paper on my desk are my diary and my to-do list.

My diary is a sore point really. At work I have an online corporate calendar system that allows me to check other people's availability and book time in their diary, and that automatically interfaces with Outlook on my laptop. Then there's another system within my division which looks at what role I am performing at any particular time of the day, so it knows when to allocate me more work etc. Then there's my home/social diary which I don't want linked with my work diaries and the complications of manually linking these systems. I need to ponder this further and will write about it another day.

But my "To-Do" list is easier than that. Previously there were lists here, lists there, lists from my wife, repeating tasks I need to remember to do regularly etc. And then I found RememberTheMilk.com - developed out of Australia and a most useful system it is too. Multiple lists for different things, and you can build in alerts to email you etc. And like most other things I recommend on this blog, it's free.

Public bookmarking - an opportunity, not a threat

I'm sure you, like me, have seen colleagues who have a complete screen full of icons on the PC, and/or have a labyrinth of bookmarks in the relevant menu options of their browser. And then on their PC at home, a completely new set of bookmarks, still equally disorganised.

Enter del.icio.us - or to be exact http://del.icio.us Firstly, a dastardly clever use of the .us domain country ending, and then a darn useful website to boot. More recently bought up by Yahoo!, the del.icio.us website is for your bookmarks - you store them on the site for your future use. The twist is that everyone else can have access to them too, and before you gasp in disbelief, I see it as an opportunity, not a threat.

Each bookmark has tags associated with them, single words that you choose to help classify your bookmark. Say for example you have lots of bookmarks about cars, you may choose "BMW" to be a tag or "Mercedes" or whatever. Then, when you have multiple "BMW" bookmarks you can see them all together.

The added twist with del.icio.us is that you can see how many other people have registered the same bookmarks as you, and how they have tagged them - moreover, by looking at other sites they have tagged with the same description, you could then find new sites which are very useful for what you do. The possibilities are enormous, and it's free.

How to make a buck on eBay

eBay is a phenomenal success, all from a girl asking her geek boyfriend to write a website to sell her collection of Pez sweet dispensers! They are in the news today with a 40M Euro fine for allowing fake stuff to be sold on the site, but that's not what I am writing about! Normally I just use eBay to get rid of surplus stuff and buy new items like stationery that is cheaper there than going to a shop, even taking P&P into account.

What I've been pondering, though, is how best to use fatfingers.co.uk. This is a very clever website, working on the assumption that a proportion of people cannot spell, or have fat fingers and just mis-type the word. So let's say you collect Wedgwood pottery. You go to this site, type in Wedgwood, use the dropdown to choose which eBay site and click the Find button. It then opens a new window in eBay with the result - all mis-spellings of Wedgwood in current auctions.

So, now you have auctions which by the vast majority of people (who know how to spell) will not find, and you should be able to get a bargain. Knowledge of your subject and how much you can resell for should reap its benefits, and then slip me a fiver in with my Christmas card please!

Now, if you really want to be clever, design a site that takes this further and finds a recently closed sale for the same item and compares the prices. By monitoring lots of auctions, it should be able to identify the very best bargains.