The Emperor's New Clothes - "Sod the iPod"

"Sod the iPod", I heard a friend say recently. This statement was greeted with 'Crusade'-style cries of 'heretic' from the immediate assembly, which I must admit I found somewhat embarassing because, in some senses, I have to agree.

Although the web and media are my own playgrounds and workplace, I do have to stop and check myself regularly. We've all been here before. 2000/2001 and the dot com crash came as no surprise to anyone with a modicum of perspective, and I myself welcomed it. Nihilism isn't always about destruction, it is actually about creating something better from the ruins.

So what my friend was saying was, what is so great about the iPod? It is after all only a hard drive with MP3 software installed. Pretty though it may be. It is not, as some appear to think, a magical cure for shallow lifestyles. It doesn't make you glamourous, it doesn't make you cool, and it definitely won't make you successful.

Now I understand peer pressure when you're a teenager, having committed most of the fashion mistakes of the 1980's I feel well qualified to comment. But the assembled group were all in their 30's, and although not always the case, each of them should have known better.

And of course I'm cursed with ageing, but I still think it appears to sum up the lack of depth and social engagement in modern life.

So I second that emotion.......if you'll excuse the poor musical reference, but my playlist is limited.

Spam and Your Control Panel

At Netdata we get a lot of customers asking how to control the level of spam they receive, and there are many ways of doing this. The most effective ways are by utilising the control panel anti-spam features on your domain.

The newest version of Cpanel allows you to use two features: Spam Assassin and BoxTrapper Spam Trap. Both of which can be tweaked in many ways to deny unsolicited emails.

Spam Assassin uses algorithims to give any inbound email a score out of 10. And, depending on where you set your threshold, Spam Assassin will make sure that any email which scores lower than that threshold will be diverted to a spam box or even deleted.

So, for example, if you set your threshold at 10, you will probably still receive a fair amount of spam, but if you lower the threshold to 5, you will receive less. The trouble is balancing unsolicited email you don’t want (spam) against unsolicited emails you do want (new business enquiries).This is usually a matter of trial and error to find the right level for your business.

Visit the SpamAssassin website for more details or call Netdata for advice.

Disruption is Good

Disruptive Technologies come in various guises, and it’s a term which has negative connotations when you first hear it. But, it appears to be a good thing, or at least a very popular thing. Digital photography is one example.

Althought the quality of digital cameras is inferior to traditional film based cameras, their popularity greatly outranks their more-mature counterparts.

And so it is with Skype, possibly the ultimate example of a ‘disruptive technology’, albeit in a slightly different way.Skype is a FREE piece of software which saves you money on phone calls. Simply download it onto your PC and use your PC to call another Skype user for FREE over your broadband connection. And you can also use Skype via your PC to call a normal landline at greatly reduced prices.

So there we have it, a FREE piece of software which saves you money, and has already made a fortune for its developers (having just sold it to Ebay for £1.4bn). Try taking a business plan like that to your own Bank Manager and see his reaction.

Its good to see that not everything that’s ‘too good to be true’, isn’t.

2006 - The Year the web grew up?

With the start of a New Year comes a bold new confidence in the Internet and what it can do for all of us. Certainly 2005 had a number of interesting developments but it looks like this year will see a lot of change, and, as ever, a lot of hype.

The buzzword is definitely "Web v2.0", but what does this mean? Well, because it is essentially a marketing phrase it remains difficult to completely pin it down but we're going to try anyway.
"Web v2.0" is a steady realisation that the interent is finally beginning to live up to some of its expectation. It is a mixture of converging technolgies and disruptive ones.

The ubiquitous mobile phone is converging with Wi-Fi and Broadband to bring us high speed web access anywhere (given time). More and more services are being offered solely online, and proving to be effective. And pioneers like Google and Skype are proving to be a thorn in the side of many businesses by giving away state-of-the-art services for FREE. And yet they still make vast sums of money.

Broadly speaking Web v2.0 is a way of summing up the fact that the internet has put to bed most of its bad memories of 2000/2001, and is finally showing signs of coming-of-age. With ever-increasing usage and decreasing prices of broadband, greater education and a general knowledge of how the web works filtering into the collective sub-conscious, it may finally be deserving of some of its hype.

So 2006 will be an interesting year and if you're not on the bandwagon yet, I think it is probably time you hitched up.