Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

How popular is your blog?

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 14th May, 2007

A question that is always at the front of a bloggers mind is measuring how popular their blog is. How many people are reading what I write? How much influence do I exert on the blogosphere? While these two questions are relatively hard to answer, there are metrics and factors you can use to measure [...]

The Art of the Refund

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 27th Apr, 2007

I came across a pretty inspiring post called The Art of the Refund down at V7N’s blog today. It talks about how some online companies have a strict No Refunds policy while a number of bricks and mortar organisations will give you a refund and ask no questions. John Scott, the author, talks about how [...]

Yearly Reviews

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 12th Apr, 2007

Things change. That’s a pretty well-accepted fact of life. And nothing is quite a fluid as the money markets. Things like exchange rates, interest rates, discount rates and mortgage rates don’t just change from time to time, they change all the time. So it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on them and [...]

Blogtipping - Legal Andrew, Seth’s Blog, ComputerZen.com

Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 8th Apr, 2007

I came across the idea of Blogtipping on Legal Andrew’s blog and warmed to the idea straight away. So I decided to start doing this every Sunday, on the basis that I manage to find some time of course. Anyway, what is blogtipping all about? It’s a simple 3-step process:

Pick 3 blogs you frequent
List 3 [...]

Dealing with the tax office

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 28th Mar, 2007

One of the pains of moving from one country to another is the fact that you need to close off your tax affairs in one country and start afresh in the other (Well, there are certain benefits, but there’s a hell of red tape that you need to go through). I’ve had to go through [...]

Looking for Venture Capital?

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 20th Mar, 2007

Seth Godin has a brilliant post (well, aren’t they all brilliant) about some important pointers for entepreneurs looking to finance their business through venture capital. Venture capital (VCs), for the uninitiated, is the term used for private equity usually administered by financial institutations, used to inject funds into new or growing companies. This sort of [...]

All you ever wanted to know about freelancing .. but were afraid to ask

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 15th Mar, 2007

I cam across an excellent post this morning entitled: A comprehensive guide to starting your freelance career. It’s very well written and contains a wealth of information that one would normally have to learn the hard way. These are the subjects covered:

What is freelancing? Looking back on how the term came about and what it [...]

A Cautionary Tale

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 12th Mar, 2007

Following an article that Sherrilynne Starkie wrote in the local paper: Tech Talk: A cautionary tale (great article by the way, some poignant anecdotes in there), a thread was sparked off on one of the local forums starting off a discussion as to whether forums posts affect local businesses
This was my take:
I don’t think it’s [...]

Broadband deals

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 5th Mar, 2007

One of the biggest problem living on the Island is that broardband prices are much higher than they are across the water in the rest of the UK. Prices here are typically £30 a month for unrestricted broadband and a cheaper than that for the restricted packages.
If you look across the water, AOL offer a [...]

Confessions of a link-a-holic

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 23rd Feb, 2007

Excellent post on Problogger that talks about how Darren (the webmaster) went through a phase of working really hard on improving his inbound links, to the detriment of the quality of his blog. Makes good reading especially the lessons learnt. Incoming links are important, but like everything in life, focusing just on one thing, to [...]

Great Customer Service

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 21st Feb, 2007

Great post on Joel on Software talking about the main principles of Customer Service. It’s called “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” and contains great avice for anyone who needs to deal with customers; whether you’re specifically in customer service or not. These are the things he recommends.

Fix everything two ways
Suggest blowing out the dust
Make [...]

Free Virus Scanner ?

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 21st Feb, 2007

I just came across a website that promises free Antivirus software. While technically this is correct, in essence what you get is a 6-month trial to Norton Anti-Virus. Don’t get me wrong, Norton is a great product (here are some reviews), but a 6-month trial is usually the sort of thing that gets you hooked [...]

On the subject of errors

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 10th Feb, 2007

It’s an unavoidable fact of life that sometimes things just go wrong. Sometimes it’s due to factors in your control, sometimes it just isn’t; but things will indubitably go wrong. We tend to get judged on this sometimes, others are only human after all, but we also get judged on how we deal with such [...]

Improve your communication skills

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 29th Jan, 2007

Today has been particularly instructive in terms of learning some communication tips. This morning I came across a post on Strive Notes focusing on written communication. The post talks about the process of putting together an effective written message namely:

Identify your main communication objective
Decide on the message(s) you want to communicate
Analyse your target audience
Research your [...]

Data Recovery

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 26th Jan, 2007

You have a whole collection of photos on your hard disk, your pride and joy! You have photos of friends, family, holidays, work mates, your whole life. Then one day you come home to download a new batch of photos .. and your computer won’t boot. Your computer is fine, but the hard disk is [...]