Business: August 2006 Archives

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Just posted this on the company blog

I keep on coming across sites selling ebooks, videos and software that are horrendous looking. Quite a few of them sell goods and services that A-list bloggers and SEOs seem to hold in high regard, so obviously people are buying from them. So, is a winning formula to produce really ugly websites and start selling ebooks?

Back in January I added a webmaster discussion forum to search.ie. Over the last few months the number of visitors and general level of activity has grown, but it was still a bit on the quiet side.. After talking to a few people about ways to boost the site I've spun it off onto its own domain - with proper branding to follow as soon as I can get a logo done. The kind of topics you can discuss are pretty broad and cover all facets of online design, development, marketing, seo and monetisation.. Drop by and make yourself heard :)

Armchair.ie is ENN's site of the week! I setup the armchair.ie set to be a searchable directory of Irish ecommerce sites ie. Irish online shops. There was an armchair.ie a couple of years ago, but it was defunct and the domain had expired, so I re-registered it. I've no idea how big or popular the site will become over time, but it was really nice to see it on a site like Enn. As the ENN reviewer said:

There's nothing revolutionary about this site. It's simply a listing of Irish shops where you can buy goods online. But if it becomes popular it will undoubtedly come into its own as it's the people that use it that can both add listings under various categories and then provide reviews on the quality of the products and services. Nice idea. Watch this space...

If you run an Irish ecommerce site, then get it listed!

You may have to excuse the meandering nature of this post, as it's more of a stream of thought late at night than anything vaguely coherent

I have a love hate relationship with technology. From speaking to other entrepeneurs who work in the IT field I get the feeling that I am not alone...

One of the things that I love about technology is that it constantly changes and evolves. Of course this facet of the business is also one that I hate in some regards :)
No sooner have you become accustomed to a technology than you find that it has been surpassed by something else.

So what is the next big thing going to be?

Over the last year or so php5 has become accepted as "stable", although it's not stable enough for a lot of "shared" hosting clients.

Microsoft have been pushing MS SQL Server 2005 really hard, but I still see a huge demand for MS SQL 2000.

Apple now offer Intel based hardware, so you can get the best of both worlds (supposedly) - sleek design and a choice of OS.

An offshoot of Debian has captured the hearts and minds of techies the world over and Ruby on Rails seems to be the big buzz.

So what is next?

I don't have a magic looking glass but I can see some technologies and, more importantly, their uses / implementations, becoming more and more central.

powered by performancing firefox

How many Irish business bloggers / entrepeneurial bloggers are there out there? I don't mean the casual bloggers - I'm talking the serial, serious bloggers who post on a regular basis (not necessarily frequently) I would check my Thunderbird feeds, but they're on my other PC, but I think there's about a half dozen or so who I would read on a regular basis.

The MSN adcenter (sic) should be usable in Firefox as of August 5th. MSN is a business, so they obviously realised that they couldn't alienate users. It still isn't of much use to advertisers interested in targetting Irish MSN users though ....