Archive for August, 2007
Would you believe that twice in two days I have had conversations that went like this?
PR: Do you want to write about my client’s product?
Me: I’ve never heard of the product? What does it do?
PR: I don’t know. I have to get back to you.
What are these people thinking before they call me? PR [...]
I do several conference calls a week, as PR people sit in as I interview their clients.
And at least 50% of them have some audio problems. that make the interview sub-optimal About 10% are so bad that the interview becomes all-but-useless.
Some of those I put down to my consumer-grade VoIP line.
The rest I think are [...]
Over the years, I have had all sorts of mad ideas pitched at me as sensible bases for stories.
But some recur and recur and … you get the idea.
I think it is time to start listing the ones that just will not work, and why.
So here goes:
We’ve got a survey that says something terrifically interesting [...]
How long will it be before Horse Flu gets political?
Part of me thinks that in the current climate neither side will be immediately leaping into action.
But both sides are also finding it hard to pass up any sort of point-scoring opportunity. I reckon it won’t be long before some kind of rescue package gets [...]
Over the last few days, I and several other Australian IT journalists have started to receive media releases from a company called asiarelease.com.
This company has been distributing press releases with headlines such as ‘Cisco and Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport to Deliver Advanced Networking Skills’ to a wide variety of Australian IT media. [...]
I get so many hits (10% of all traffic) from my references to a torrent of William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ that I think it is time for an experiment.
I will involve a list of things any minute now that I think represent geek-bait.
Let’s see what that does to traffic!
Watchmen Movie torrent
Neal Stephenson torrent
Vernor Vinge torrent
Of [...]
Wow! I have just received a press release headlined ‘Vodafone to achieve up to 20% improvement in networks in Iceland’
I kid you not.
Now … I don’t write about telcos. I’m in Australia. And the company that has sold the stuff to Vodafone that makes the improvements possible seems not to operate in Australia.
And the PR [...]
I issue a lot of RFIs to the PR community, but often the responses are odd.
They go like this:
Me: I’m interested in chatting to people about a certain issue
PR: Would you like to talk to my client about this issue?
This is where it gets weird, because an awful lot of the time I have not [...]
One of the most consistently astounding things in my work is the fact that the overwhelming majority of vendors I work with do not have a working definition of what constitutes a ’small business’. Or if they do, they use a definition drawn from their home nations.
This is odd because Australia, as a smaller nation, [...]
Fevered thoughts will condense into posts …
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Now playing: The White Stripes – Icky Thump
via FoxyTunes
Twitter / ssharwood- ssharwood: At the #rightnow customer service conference on the gold coast. The "united breaks guitars" video shown as demo of need for social service
- ssharwood: New Order' "ceremony" is awesome. listening to it now reminds me of how I figured out the giutar part as a talentless teenager
- ssharwood: working late in a god coast hotel room before the right now call centre conference. not glamourous
- ssharwood: they said "pwned" on #Mediawatch teehee
- ssharwood: Nick Minchin says lefties want to de-industrlalise the world ? cuckoo ... cuckoo ... #4corners
- TechTarget ANZ
- Eight free IT outsourcing templates
- Five ways to boost business intelligence
- Three ways Lean processes can improve your BPM effort
- The pain of SOHO IT
- Twelve free project management templates
- CIO: Don't attempt BPM system without mapping process flows
- Seven jobs to launch your business process management strategy
- Six mistakes that make SOA implementations fail
- Adopting agile development methodology is a stretch, but the exercise pays off
- Chapter download: Find new value in your IT
- What I’m listening to
- Smart Call Podcast
- Smart Call # 70 - Travel and analytics advance agentsOn this show, we have a look at two unusually advanced ways to improve agent performance. The first comes in our main presentation, which comes from Paul Cahill, General Manager Customer Service at Internet Service Provider iiNet, which operates contact centres in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Paul explains how iiNet works to build a consistent [. […]
- Smart Call #69 - Who’s the boss?In this episode of Smart Call, we ask: Who’s the Boss? And we do so in two ways. First up, we have Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net sharing the results of her firm’s annual Australasian Benchmarking Report with us. Catriona finds that call centre bosses have some happier challenges at the moment, because fewer workers are leaving [...]
- Smart Call #68 – The geek show!This episode of Smart Call gets geeky as we talk to two IT strategists. But don’t worry that we are going to go all dry and technical on you! Instead, we have a fascinating presentation from Genesys’ G-Force about the future of customer service, from Bill Peer, a Vice President for Enterprise Architecture at the InterContinental [...]
- Smart Call # 70 - Travel and analytics advance agents
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