Internet History in the Making

Regular readers of this blog will remember that my day job involves the production of membership magazine for the London Internet Exchange. The publication in question is called HotLINX and I have been working on it one capacity or another since 2004. It has, in fact, been around a good deal longer with the first edition published as long ago as the Summer of 2000.

The Internet industry at that time was very different to what it is now. Just take a moment to consider your personal circumstances and how much you differently now compared to those early days. For me, I used the Internet for the first time in 1996 at work but I didn’t go online at home until as late as 2002. I had a PC before that but it was used purely as word processor and for games.

One of the reasons I mention early issues of HotLINX today is that for the first time in many years those early editions are back available online. In fact, some have never been available to download or view at all. With LINX celebrating its 15th anniversary in November I wanted to give the people the opportunity to see just how far the Internet has come in the last decade.

Communicating with yourself: Acting on your decisions

Why are you here? On this page I mean. What was it that made you decide that you should look at this particular article over all the other thousands on the Internet?

That’s not for me to say but hopefully I can persuade you to stick around a while. It might not be as easy as it sounds because you are a free spirit – you make your own decisions and you decide what’s coming next in your life, not me.

Now think about that for a moment. Are you already wavering as to whether you should carry on reading this or not? Are you thinking that I’m wasting your time by not getting to the point? Just what is it that I’m trying to say? Well I’ll tell you: At every single moment of every waking hour you are making a choice and it is you that is in control of every one of them. It may not feel like it but it’s true.

Sure, there will be occasions when we will be placed in awkward situations by other people that we don’t want to deal with but it is us that writes the next scene. For example my boss could fire me. What would I do? I may get upset or angry or violent. I may be philosophical, rational or pleased. Hey, you always said you wanted to leave that crumby job.

Do you see what I’m saying? I’m faced with a situation, I react to it. The question is what reaction will it be?

20 years in design, marketing and PR and finally getting certified

This Friday represents the 20th anniversary since I became a graphic designer or to be more precise, a Desktop Publishing Operator. Back in those days it was fairly low-level stuff where most of my work was done using drawing boards and camera ready artwork using spray mount and overlays and only sporadic use of a Mac Plus computer. It is still amazes me how we ever got anything done back then. We even needed the printers to send out someone out to collect the artwork – none of this uploading and downloading and the web? That was just a spot in the corner of the office that none of the cleaners could reach.

Just to give you a bit of background, in the summer of 1989 I was in a menial office job counting travellers’ cheques for Thomas Cook. Basically I had to make sure that the cheques returned from branches around the UK matched in value to that listed on the branch remittance. Not exactly challenging unless you were working in Japanese Yen with multiple noughts but an OK job for a while. It wasn’t what I set out to do but that’s where I’d ended up.

My First Business Public Speaking engagement

I’ve been away these past few days hence a break from these pages but I wanted to recap on my first experience of public speaking beyond best man speeches and a few words to work colleagues at staff meetings.

I was speaking on the topic of social networking at LINX66, the quarterly membership meeting for the London Internet Exchange. This is an event for up to 130 Internet industry professionals notably operators of Internet Protocol networks. What’s more there were dozens more watching on the webcast. This made for a tough first gig as the Internet community have tended to be fairly unforgiving towards marketing people talking on non-technical subjects in my experience.

“Do what you feel, not what I say!”

Earlier this evening I was travelling on a bus with my daughter and she was working on the words and pictures of her own comic. She’s done a really good job with excellent drawings and a vivid and funny story to go with it. What got me was the point where she asked me about what to do for the next part. I said her that it was totally up to her as it was her ‘publication’. What did it matter what I thought?

There was a real reluctance to do that which, while understandable for a 10 year-old, was rather sad too. As I explained, there will be enough people in her life telling her how to live it without letting someone (i.e. me) dictate how her own work should look. Having said this her childhood is dominated by rules from us as parents and from school teachers too – has her freewill already been damaged?

20 years in design and marketing, my 10 Best and Worst events

On Twitter earlier today someone had posted a link to a blog post about their top five best and worst perks over 10 years working in the journalism industry.

RT @swhittle: My blog: 10 years in journalism, my 10 Best and Worst PR moments. http://bit.ly/7NR0S

There were some very amusing tales in there which has prompted me to write my own list which, while not at all matching his, are pretty cool in their own particular ways.

Long overdue update

Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site but there’s been a lot going on in my life recently most notably the death of my mother at the beginning of May. She’d been in three different hospitals most notably Papworth having been taken ill on Mothers’ Day and then having a heart attack a couple of days later.

Mum had had arthritis for around 45 years so she was in relatively poor health anyway but she managed to pull through and gradually fought her way back to some sense of normality. Personally I was even thinking that she was becoming well enough to come home but a second heart attack proved too much for her.

There’s a lot more I could say about the last two months both personally and professionally but I think too much time has passed. I was pleased at how this site had developed but it’s been on hold for too long so I want to get things moving again so look out for news, views and information in the coming days.

Scattergun advertising or targetting the right people?

Many are now using Twitter in advertising

Tonight I posted on my Twitter account that I was very pleased to note that second month download figures for our quarterly company magazine were up by 300% on the previous record set back in September. At the current rate this issue could become the most downloaded of all online editions by the middle of next month just two months after publication.

It is true that a more concerted promotional campaign has been implemented this time with many other media streams being used in advertising. Twitter was one, forums were another plus co-promotion through magazine contributor websites and on technical chat channels too. This final example happened by accident as a fellow staff member mentioned that he was included in an article in online discussions. Readers of his comments were not aware of the magazine so they visited the website to take a look.

As I was looking at the current stats I felt like I wanted to share that success. Before posting the comment I again added the URL for magazine without explaining what it was. Some may have thought it was to the magazine itself while others I’m sure may have been expecting a link to a more in-depth article about the statistics.What seems certain that there were some who would be getting a PDF download that they hadn’t anticipated.

London, training and panic attacks

Learning Tree training centre

A very strange couple of weeks. Well, not so much strange but unusual from my point of view.

Since the end of February I’ve been in London for four days (two at a conference, one at the staff meeting and one on a training course), there was a day on Slough Trading Estate (as featured in The Office) and then two days off involving an 11th anniversary meal and a panic attack leading to a sleepless night and day off work sick.

New OC Newsletter to replace OC update posts

Earlier today I was preparing a review post for December covering updates over the course of the past month. The reason I do this is to provide a concise article where readers can pick up any recent stories of interest that they may have missed.

In many ways this shouldn’t be necessary as anyone can subscribe to all OC updates by using the RSS feed which is located in the left hand column. However, as I try to go into a little more detail on how the site is developing rather than list the latest posts, a natural progression would be turn this section into the OC newsletter.

From next January, the first Wednesday of each month will see the introduction of OC Insights, the monthly OrbellComms magazine. Initially this will appear as a four page PDF publication.

In addition to brief overviews of the news and advice articles, each edition will include hyperlinks to all the original stories. There will be an editorial section, reproductions of original content plus exclusive material too. I shall keep the OC Updates section place for the time being at least as this is a useful way of advertising actual technical changes to the site.

So remember the date: Wednesday 8 January – the launch of OC Insights.