Darryl King’s blog ireckon

[ NB> to see how Dymocks handled this, quick note at bottom, follow up post to come ]

I had a mission. A simple mission. All I wanted was to replace a copy of a good book that was so good, someone has lifted it!

The book itself is not the issue, but it was a good project management book which I like to keep handy to explain to people our project management documents and process.

Anyway I digress. Too late to stop at a book shop and none of the local major stores show in store inventory, (Gee wouldn’t that be such a good idea! Live store inventory) and my preferred local bookstore Coaldrakes at Milton, is nearly closed and doesn’t have it in stock. I want it now. Well more importantly I want to order it now and just have it turn up quickly.

Help - Google! Yes look at that Angus and Robertson has it, Dymocks has it. That’s a start. Amazon has it (of course) and they will ship tomorrow which means less than 5 days and I will have it. How do I know this? Well I have always gotten my books from Amazon quicker than they promise.

Angus and Robertson, ships within 24 hours 7-14 days till I get it. Okay that is one slow camel it is coming on, unless of course it is actually coming via the USA, in which case I may as well just order it from there.

So back to Dymocks. Well look at that, yes they have it and can ship immediately, even better they seem to be the only site on the planet that has it as a downloadable PDF. Wow that is better; I can store it and not waste any paper. Except the electronic version is dearer than the paperback (now that is odd). The electronic version is enough to make me jump in and buy it.

This is what happens next: (more…)

If you watch TV (with all the product placements), or use twitter a lot, you could be forgiven for believing we are all about to become Mac users.  Further to this, today I read an article by Mark Nutter at Smashing Magazine, Five reasons why designers / developers are switching to Mac.

I found this interesting. Let’s be clear I am a PC, so much so that I turned up in this photo on FaceBook, which Jane Copeland cleverly tagged, “who wants to play One of These Things Is Not like the Other with the laptops?” Yes there is my red Dell in the middle of a sea of Macs. (more…)

I often use an analogy of prospecting for gold when asked why I go to certain events or participate in some seminars. In the rough early days of prospecting, people stood in streams, panning for little nuggets of gold, to pay their way. Much of this was mundane, fruitless work, but work none the less.

Throughout the process there was a chance of finding those gold nuggets, or if that stream ended up being empty of gold, they would move to another. Attending conferences can be a little like this if they are industry specific. Often you will discover you already have heard, or know some or a fair bit of the content, because the conferences are aiming to fill a middle road or a broad area of attendees. Let’s face it they need to make money so if they are too niche they may not get enough people engaged to make profits.

The trick in all of these events, in my opinion, is to pan the stream for the little nuggets. Often the combination of a few little nuggets adds up to something far more valuable than finding one big nugget.

There are many good reasons to attend events, and I greatly enjoyed my time at SMX Sydney 2009 for the very obvious reasons of meeting new people, re-meeting people I have met before and for the social engagement.

Here are 13 little (or not so) nuggets that were worth panning the stream for: (more…)

In case you didn’t get the flurry of tweets on my account this week, you wouldn’t know I have been at SMX Sydney 2009. SMX stands for Search Marketing Expo. This pretty much sums up the conference.

I have been working in the web for a rather long time now, and pretty much from the beginning, there has been a need to find relevant content. It is a constant that hasn’t changed; just the ways we get to it has changed.

Before there was Google there were other engines, and since then optimising content has been necessary to get your content found. Note I say content not sites.

One of the important elements from SMX this year is the prevalence of the new windows to content that exist, and that change is always occurring.

Does it mean traditional Search practices are dying?  Definitely not. In fact, with all the Social Media hype about at present, one could not be blamed for thinking Search had dropped of the relevance radar.
It hasn’t.

(more…)