My new company and website are live!
Objective Digital is a Usability Consultancy, offering a range of internet-based research and design products. We help businesses to leverage user insights to build usable technology.
Our leading edge products utilise the power of the Internet to test and observe more users, with greater speed and reliability than has ever before been possible.
Check it out! www.objectivedigital.com
So are you on yet? Seems that everyone is on there updating their profiles everyday. There’s even a group called… ‘I should be having sex right now but I’m on Facebook’
Check out Lee Hopkin’s Facebook review. There’s some interesting comments too.
I’ll invite you soon 
The social networking site, Facebook, has a useful function [Friends>Find Friends].that allows you to import contacts from YahooMail, Gmail and Hotmail instantly. You just need to put in your email address and password. Then you can easily see who is already on Facebook and add them as friends. You also get an option to invite any of your other email contacts in one batch.
This is also possible to upload and scan an exported contacts file [CSV] from Outlook and AppleMail etc. They don’t provide the tips on doing it from LinkedIn, but it is very easy to export a CSV file from a link at the bottom of your LinkedIn ‘My Contacts’ screen.
I have just been reviewing my ‘ideas’ notebook that I used in the early days after my departure from my old organisation. It’s interesting, I look at new business strategy 6 months down the track and notice in my screeds of scribblings and mind maps that all the ideas were there from the start! At the time I just didn’t put them together with the right formula.
Ideas that you have may already exist in your own mind (or someone else’s). Often they are not observed in the right context, with the right integration or they are just ignored.
How can we speed up the time it takes for ideas to gel together in the right way?
We can think outside the box some say…, but what does that really mean though? I think we need to look at things from an objective context that is not time, technology, people, process or culture bound. So how can we get that objective perspective?
Maybe you can even try meditation? Let your mind be free of thought and make connections in your mind without prejudice…
- Update
I just had another thought. Perhaps you can post your ideas for discussion on a Facebook forum. The ‘Convergence of social and business networking’ forum is an example.
‘Why are you getting brochures printed? You’re work in the internet?’ someone said to me the other day.
‘Does that mean I shouldn’t bother with business cards too? I responded.
It’s all about context. Yes, I might be working online but there are plenty of times when marketing or branding opportunities come up offline. Like a sales meeting, launch or a trade show.
‘I’m definitely getting brochures printed, just a few less than you might expect.’ I replied.
In the online consultancy arena, brochures are important. As with any company, you must remember your objective with the brochure. Is it about getting people to your website? Or reminding them of you when they see it on their desk the following week? Or letting them know how much things cost so they can work out if they can afford it
I was thinking about my last blog post overnight. It is clear that technologists can sometimes use different terminology to non-technologists to describe what they are doing.
I was using my mind mapping tool yesterday and I noticed that I had accidentally attached a file instead of linking to in on my fileserver.
I just want to do one thing here, ‘add more information.’ As you can see there are actually 3 (maybe 4) ways to do this in the menu above and it can be confusing which option to choose.
Techs would know, there seems to be two different actions here
1) Store the data somewhere else and
2) Store the data as part of the same file.
So how do you think that people who are non-familiar with way data is stored would cope with these options?
Check this site out:
Do you think that the type of slow paced traveller who needs careful instruction on how to use the forum would have trouble working out the difference between the 5 or more different mechanisms described here to ‘put’ something on the site?
Well, actually, they don’t care! They just want to add information!
When you are training your people in more complex web content management systems it is worthwhile mentioning ‘why’ the particular functions are like they are. When I realised why, it certainly helped me to remember what I have to do next time!