I don’t blog to make money, at least not directly. I blog for several other reasons, to improve my writing, to give people who may want to hire me or work with me an insight into my thought-process, to own the international Farhan Lalji google juice, but not to make money. I’m [...]
Posts under ‘communication’
Mainstreaming technology
I’m not a huge apple fan boy, but I’m on my way. I’ve got an iPod Touch, a Macbook and I’ll probably get an iPad at some point in the future. I’ve stayed away from the iPhone as I think the iPod browsing and apps meets my needs. Then I saw the [...]
Young dogs new tricks
One of my least favourite sayings is that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. I really hate the idea that someone at any time stops learning. Or that someone can’t possibly learn the skills they need to be able to do something big. At the same time I really hate it [...]
Promoted tweets – the tip of the social media iceburg
So Twitter’s announced their monetisation model, “promoted tweets” will be seen from search queries around brands. To a lot of journos this looks a lot like ad sense / search engine monetisation that the likes of Overture / Google introduced years ago. But there’s more to this with Twitter.
People forget that social [...]
Social media as a tool
I’m sorry it’s been a while. Not sure you missed me like I missed you, but being ill, travelling loads and doing my first speaking engagement in years (at Ecole Hotelier Lausanne, which went really well), not to mention continuing to try and be a better dad and husband have meant that you’ve had [...]
Owning the conversation
I love Disqus. It’s made managing comments on my blog pretty easy, between that and Facebook, I feel like I can engage with the people who read my posts pretty well. I own the conversation. I can’t always control where the discussion goes, and nor do I want to, I’m not a [...]
My thoughts on LeWeb 09
Earlier this year, I set myself some objectives and gave my year a theme. 2009 was to be the year of “Learning to do”. I spent previous years, thinking, pontificating, learning but not really doing much. So, I told myself that by LeWeb in 2009 I wanted to have done some stuff [...]
Beyond Google part two, for marketing
Duane over at Kashflow wrote a great blog post about SEO as a marketing strategy over at the Kashflow blog. I couldn’t agree more. His main point is summed up nicely in this bit:
“Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves [...]
Beyond Google part one
There’s lots of news around Newscorp and getting Google to pay for the content on Newscorp newspapers. I don’t like is companies using Google as a scapegoat.
Newscorp feels that Google should be paying for access. MSFT is talking about paying Newscorp for their content. The rationale being that perhaps this will [...]
Impacting society and shaping the news through social media
I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of social media on news coverage lately. Watching BBC Question Time with the BNP party leader Dick Nick Griffin, and seeing Twitter mentioned as the first way of contacting the show (ahead of email, web etc), meant I had to write about it.
I love the way [...]