Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: Web 2.0

  • New School Business Idea no.1: Web 2.0 worker Spaces for rent

    Ok this is something I have been thinking about for a while now and I’ve just decided to go with it. I’ve got an overactive imagination and my mind just won’t leave me alone sometimes. There are times when I can’t even get to bed in the early hours and just have to jot down some ideas before I can get some rest from the continuous mental processes happening up in here.

    I have ideas on a daily basis, ones which I think are great and just have to be acted upon, but a host of reasons prevent me from acting, mostly procrastination and lack of motivation or just feeling bogged down by earning an immediate living. I’ve decided to document these ideas and share them, to see how others react, see what kind of feedback I can get and maybe if I can find some interested parties to collaborate or invest in them or just as a bouncing board.

    IDEA # 1: Mobile Office for knowledge/web 2.0 workers

    With so many of us taking the plunge into self employment or just being on the go and out of the office it has become increasingly difficult to find the right places to meet with our clients or peers, to sit down somewhere and get some work done away from our couches & beds at home and to just have a place of refuge when the creative juices are being dried up by our dry surroundings.

    Onto the scene walks the office away from the “home” office (This is my idea). Imagine a few centralised spaces where you can go, pay a small fee for an hour or 2 or 3, have some coffee, plug in and do what you do best. It’s designed to suite the modern knowledge worker, it allows for booking spaces in advance, you can take your clients there. There’s an open plan area for collaboration, brainstorming, networking & the like, as well as some private or more quiet spaces for concentration or to cut yourself off from the world.

    They offer office services like faxing & printing, places to plug in your iPod and watch the latest TED talks or listen to your favourite podcasts. They sell the latest gadgets which keep us drooling on a daily basis. They have a few techno savvy guys & gals to help with any glitches & bugs. Maybe they even have a few in house businesses running, which offer supporting services to the knowledge worker community like people who know how to set up blogs, wiki’s etc.

    You can go and have a video conference, shoot or record something for your latest podcast. It’s a web 2.0 worker paradise. Think it’ll work? Anyone got anything to add?Anyone got some moolah to throw at an idea like this or know some open minded investors? Jump in and throw your 2 cents or 20 million at this idea. Lets see what we come up with. If anyone’s got connections at any of the big malls or centers maybe get them interested in the idea. I’m sure they wouldn’t sneer at getting peeps like us interested in spending more time in & around their malls.

    Does anyone know of something like this which really exists? If so and it’s based in Cape Town I’ll by you a coffee & a Muffin if you point me to it in the next month. 🙂

  • I won twice in constructive criticism blog commenting

    I’m ecstatic at the moment after receiving word from 2 online commenting competitions that I’ve been nominated as a winner. Woohoo!

    Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.

    The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.

    I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.

    Constructive Criticism

    The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.

    It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.

    Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.

    Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.

  • Think you can escape the web revolution? – Shift Happens!

    Attending the “Web 2.0 Explosion” sessions hosted by Jamaal from Jayz internet solutions gave me a fresh boost of enthusiasm about what I do and refreshed my memory about quite a few web concepts which I have packed into a few boxes at the back of my mind somewhere. Even though I have been following developments in the web 2.0 space for some time now and feel I have a pretty good understanding of the technologies and methodologies having it all presented in a clear, step by step fashion was a good way to connect a few more dots and broaden the picture.

    I especially loved the videos which we were shown explaining some key web 2.0 concepts. I’ve seen this one before but mixed in with the rest of what we focussed on Yesterday it had a much greater impact and I just have to share this with those of you who may not have seen this yet.

    [youtube 3mxbLd9r4Sc Shift Happens on You Tube]

    Now, think about the impact this is going to have on you, your career, your business or organisation, your family and your relationships in only the next 2 – 5 years. We can’t afford to hide anymore. Fear of technology is something you just have to get over unless you’re prepared to be cut off from a huge percentage of the worlds population. Developments are going digital and any strategy which does not include some aspect of these developments could be missing an essential ingredient to its success.

  • The South African new media scene is hotting up

    The last few weeks have been an amazing experience for me as a blogger, designer and new media strategist though it’s been one steep learning curve. It all started when I quit my day job a little short of 2 months ago. I had been blogging for a while experimentally and on more of a personal level just writing about my own stuff, anything that interested me really. I never paid any attention to visitors, to rankings, search engines, all of that stuff just made little difference to me.

    I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.

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  • Web Guru Spotlight 2: Chris Garrett – Pro blogger and online media strategist

    Web Guru Spotlight 2: Chris Garrett – Pro blogger and online media strategist

    Today we will be speaking to Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media strategist. Chris runs his blog www.chrisg.com which discusses among other things, blogging, internet marketing and new media. He also runs an internet marketing companies, omiq, which aims to help organisations achieve more through their online activities.

    Web Guru Spotlight: Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media strategist

    Good day Chris and welcome to nomad-one, my humble beginnings of a blog. Having scoured the blogosphere over the past few months in the hunt for gems of wisdom on blog strategies, forgive me for using such a silly term, I was pleasantly surprised by what your site had to offer. I’ve come across quite a number of “professional blog strategists” who claim to offer miracle cures and instant success strategies but your approach seems much more grounded and based on good wholesome experience.

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  • I’m looking to “virtually” attend Podcamp Cape Town

    I’m so disappointed to be out of town for this event that I’m thinking about attending virtually. How? Using MSN & a webcam and linking up with anyone at the event willing to do the same. I think doing so will be a great way to extend the attendance and show the power of online communications channels.

    Started in Boston, MA, USA in September 2006, PodCamp was born.

    In the same style as BarCamp, PodCamp is a community driven UnConference for anybody and everybody in New Media. Whether you create and/or consume content by podcasting, listening, blogging, reading, producing video, watching and anything else that is New Media

    Check out the PodCamp wiki for more info on other PodCamps around the world.

    First prize would be if we could organize for me to do a short presentation via msn onto a big screen and get some people to interact with me. I’ve got some ideas on collaboration which I’d like to share and looking for some insight into developing a few projects further.

    If anyone out there is attending … and I recommend you do if you have any interest in new media or media in general, then help me do the same by taking along your webcam & laptop (free broadband will be provided at the event by Skyrove). It’s  a chance to start interacting in a new way and adding another dimension to you experience of this event, as well as to showcase the power of networking and technology.

    my msn address is [email protected]

    Drop me a mail at [email protected] and let me know if you’re interested in helping me out on this one.

    Happy eventing!!!