tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31108213771100212182011-12-05T21:30:31.388ZThe Glanton Solutions blog.Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.comBlogger351100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-8318665780300236002011-05-27T07:22:00.010+01:002011-05-27T07:33:12.453+01:00

An absolutely FREE download from Glanton!Download the pdf from our website!(No registration or other hoops to jump through!)Heard about Twitter but not sure what all the fuss is about? Think you would like to explore it but have never got round to it? If so, then this short guide is for you. It will show you how to get started, some simple techniques and ways it can help you and your business.

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-17722780940762685782011-05-12T08:01:00.037+01:002011-05-16T06:06:57.258+01:00

Or who thinks they own the social web?Until a couple of months ago I would have answered without hesitation - "marketers". Since the beginning of the social media revolution wannabe marketers and wannabe marketer gurus have been desperately talking up and promoting the supposed potential of social media as an effective marketing tool. Well they would, wouldn't they? They were willing the future

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-40584437903485986872011-01-18T12:12:00.020Z2011-01-18T13:28:44.678Z

This is a capture of a recent jokey conversation at Facebook which I was involved in. I have the uneasy feeling that history is making a stab at repeating itself. Right now it appears we have a dotcom bubble getting within sight of bursting point. It may not be such an idiotic and hysteria-driven bubble as the one a decade or more ago, but it may yet prove to be an even more tragic crash because

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-15621331997403551152011-01-17T14:53:00.037Z2011-01-18T12:11:37.107Z

Generally speaking auto-tweeting is not a good idea. Your followers on Twitter will be thoroughly turned-off when they discover your tweets are impersonal and robotic. In a word, they will be seen as spam, nothing more. Auto-tweeting naturally falls into a similar numb category to auto-following based on a keyword.However, that is not the whole story. There are a number of circumstances when

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-21912772443614385832010-11-14T14:30:00.048Z2010-12-02T09:58:46.356Z

This post is a follow-up to John Royle’s and my posts about News International’s decision in the summer of 2010 to charge for online access to The Times and Sunday Times.What are the issues surrounding information paywalls? To be absolutely clear - I am not talking about ordinary ecommerce: buying a new book from Amazon; having a bouquet of flowers sent to your mother through Interflora (FTD);

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-26689990265155593352010-08-31T10:01:00.044+01:002010-08-31T13:03:46.394+01:00

Social check-in, for those who might think it is a new method of flight check-in - using your Facebook password perhaps - is actually personal geolocation using your portable device to sign in to participating businesses and establishments. The idea being that your friends, playing the same game, can see where you are, and you can see where they are. And then you and all your friends can play an

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-14515423013550830402010-06-28T22:01:00.046+01:002010-06-29T10:38:36.508+01:00

A bit of light relief with a serious message: save money!In "Praise of Skype" - what do you mean? Surely everyone knows about all the benefits of the web telephone system? Aren't you several years behind the times with this piece?No - no - not Skype itself! I really do mean the Skype telephone. The hardware. An actual handset you can buy and have in your house or office.What? You are joking

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-42732198297610372742010-06-09T15:02:00.023+01:002010-06-10T12:03:16.313+01:00

I disagree with my colleague John Royle about his post Welcome to the paid-for web. Or rather, I have a slightly different take on the significance and certainty of the events he describes.I believe that tacit in his description of Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites is the assumption that the said news

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-34933707730479286422010-06-07T09:17:00.005+01:002010-06-10T07:57:21.813+01:00

Last week saw an event which I believe will go down as one of the most fundamental shifts of the internet age and will mark the end of the honeymoon period we have enjoyed thus far. I'm referring to Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites.From this week you'll pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week. Furthermore he

John Roylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04774519656214683752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-32258882226375968402010-05-24T14:09:00.035+01:002010-05-25T15:48:17.891+01:00

Some thoughts about semantics (especially for Mark Zuckerberg and others):What do we mean by "share"? In the real world where people sit together at kitchen tables and drink hot drinks and chat about the next-door neighbour, there are two kinds of sharing. There is one chocolate biscuit left so you agree to break it in half and share it. That is the most basic kind. It is free. Equal by

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-26144363418130994382010-05-15T10:22:00.019+01:002010-05-17T16:31:48.430+01:00

I have been particularly interested by two recent announcements. Interested, but not necessarily desperately excited.The first partially explains, but does not excuse, Google Books' bugger's muddle of an interface for their users' libraries which I raged against in a post last month. The second is the revelation that Microsoft's Office Web Apps, which copycats Google Docs, will apparently be made

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-52996351674109761652010-04-18T09:11:00.032+01:002010-04-19T14:19:19.727+01:00

Ongoing air travel and transport chaos in Europe caused by the size of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano has brought the fragility of our express/last-minute/on-demand civilisation into sharp focus and demonstrated just how at-risk our way of life is from natural disaster or catastrophe. It used to be called Act of God. Despite the minimal risk to human life on the mainland

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-92074191556080031142010-04-11T08:51:00.043+01:002010-04-13T09:07:01.789+01:00

Those of you accustomed to watching 'free' live sport, football for example, on one of the mildly dodgy TV feed websites, will recognise the following scenario.You wait for the stream to load and the first thing that happens is the screen is obscured by a click-through advertisement. Sometimes it will be announced that the ad will close in 20 seconds, sometimes you are given a 'close' button

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-69301033211263458052010-03-21T15:32:00.032Z2010-04-13T09:01:32.452+01:00

During my long winter break I considered posting a list of New Year Social Media and Networking predictions. But before I had even licked my pencil I had been overtaken by several unforeseen events which convinced me that the predictions circus was a mug's game. If you are proved right, then, despite the vanity gold star you award yourself, to the rest of the world it was obvious, wasn't it? And

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-25969078870451498312009-12-13T22:52:00.015Z2010-04-13T12:24:20.983+01:00

On December 3 2009 news gatherers reported that the General Motors (GM) Facebook page had been subjected to a vitriolic post from the alleged daughter of an allegedly sacked executive. This is the BBC version. GM removed the post, but not before it had been captured and re-posted across the web. Apart from the mildly patronising tone of the GM damage limitation statement below (quoted from the

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-23654863400243805472009-11-20T09:05:00.029Z2010-04-12T16:28:50.115+01:00

John, Amisha and I sat back after the last session at Openforce 09 and, over a well-deserved Margarita at Cleopatra’s in Caesars Palace, we reflected on what had made the Openforce conference a success for us and why we’d recommend it to others.Firstly, it was an appreciation of the DNN community. This is not your usual, large scale gathering of folks with a passing interest in technology on a

Ian Sampsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17356700256412533689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-37889679430175568892009-11-08T08:28:00.007Z2010-04-12T16:39:50.302+01:00

Using Twitter feeds in WebAdvantage®Last time I showed how easy it is to syndicate single or multiple Twitter feeds by putting them in a web page. Here in Part Two I will show that it is even easier to do the same in a WebAdvantage® page.As a WebAdvantage® site administrator you can go to the page into which you want to import a Twitter feed; select 'RSSFeeds' from the drop-down module menu;

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-66490902312495298892009-11-06T14:10:00.040Z2010-04-12T16:37:37.171+01:00

DNN MODULE SELECTION PROCESSINTRODUCTIONOne of DotNetNuke’s greatest attractions is its modular architecture which literally allows you to "plug and play" almost any kind of functionality from Ad Rotators to YouTube plugins. Whilst we could develop all of these tools ourselves, there's really no need when you can pick and choose from the thousands of ready-made modules available, at low cost,

Ian Sampsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17356700256412533689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-79117329316535802112009-10-20T08:49:00.036+01:002010-04-12T16:43:04.598+01:00

So, you have your company Twitter account or accounts and you are managing them competently with Cotweet or Hootsuite and your departments are tweeting about the right stuff. (See previous post). But how to make the best of your Twitter output? How to show off your accounts so they get followed by the right people inside and outside you business? This is the first part of our simple guide to

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-49558370079204126342009-10-12T12:47:00.042+01:002010-04-13T12:32:02.807+01:00

Let's say you are a medium to large company with several departments - something like Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Mining, Exploration, Personnel and R&D. Each of them has an official blog and a Twitter account. Both the blogs and the Twitter accounts probably have a selection of people with posting permissions. You are in charge of the whole shebang. How do you get 'your ducks in row'?One of the

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-29113777374198031932009-09-29T07:27:00.044+01:002009-09-30T07:58:59.518+01:00

This week for a bit of fun we are posting a first selection of free tools and add-ons which are recommended and constantly used by the Glanton team. This is not an 'advertising feature' - we like and use this stuff all the time. It just has to be free, or at least have a free basic version to qualify. SARAH SMITH recommends: Pixie. Ever thought, "What's that colour? - I want it!" Pixie is a great

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-45383472153476395862009-09-25T16:03:00.008+01:002010-04-13T12:38:16.280+01:00

There are a bewildering number of DotNetNuke modules to choose from, some good some bad some just weird. So how do you choose a sensible set to give to your editors?  At Glanton, We have been implementing DotNetNuke for over five years and in that time we have tried many modules. Some have stood the test of time, some have been discarded and many have evolved through upgrades and newer versions.

John Roylehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04774519656214683752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-25372881275572830392009-09-21T05:38:00.006+01:002010-04-13T12:46:07.251+01:00

We (Glanton) specialise in implementing DotNetNuke ("DNN") as an intranet application for large enterprises and vouch for the fact that it's a very different animal from setting up your standard internet facing DNN site for clients.I was surprised at the complexities introduced when impersonation is enabled on a DotNetNuke site and hopefully our experiences and thoughts below will help others.

Ian Sampsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17356700256412533689noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-79679685005852781242009-08-21T10:00:00.021+01:002010-04-13T12:56:29.742+01:00

The title of this post, and indeed the quotes in the image, come from genuine Twitter bios.Can I let you into a little secret? Search Engine Optimisation [SEO] is NOT some kind of mysterious modern alchemy. And it ain't rocket science. In fact it isn't any kind of science. It is a procedure. It is a procedure (in the original, non-computing sense of the word) which is an integral part of website

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-70111137377169902342009-08-08T14:48:00.049+01:002010-04-12T16:48:36.962+01:00

I'm afraid I have been stirred to blog about Twitter yet again. My sincerest apologies.Most social media 'experts' (old schoolboy joke: X = unknown factor; spurt = drip under pressure) have published their 'Twitter Rules' over the last few months, but I think none of them are anything like tough or practical enough for the average individual who actually has something resembling a real life, or

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-90277621461950501062009-08-07T21:04:00.012+01:002009-09-18T13:20:48.423+01:00

Above is the image of the archetypal silver-surfer planning and booking holidays online, chatting on Skype with grandchildren in the far corners of the world and ordering the shopping for home delivery from the supermarket. A cliché, but accurate nevertheless? What is the reality?The BBC recently published the results of an EU report under the misleading title "Europe's net refuseniks revealed."

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-6811018798619739762009-07-30T15:41:00.026+01:002009-09-18T13:55:14.621+01:00

A demonstration of a simple Yahoo! Pipe.Yahoo! Pipes has been around for a while now, but I would like to showcase this excellent tool by demonstrating the creation of an 'On This Day In History' type feed which I have recently created. It is a simple 'Pipe' - many fantastic and complicated uses are possible for mashing up feeds from all sorts of sources - but I hope this is a good 'starter' demo

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-46598245920577491492009-07-22T15:38:00.033+01:002009-09-18T13:58:22.796+01:00

(or I must be going soft...)As something of an antidote to my last grumpy post about terrible checkouts (PCWorld.co.uk being such a classic example), I thought I might make a list of my favourite checkouts. Personal and partial, but giving examples of how to do it right.I started with the idea of collecting a 'top ten' list from among the biggest online retailers, mixed with a personal group of

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-85975100350607290212009-07-11T08:20:00.066+01:002009-09-18T13:59:01.647+01:00

Do you have an e-commerce operation? How neglected is your checkout? Is your online shop all wonderful and clever and cute and bang up to date, but with a shopping cart and checkout bolted on to it which looks like the snailmail order form off the back of a magazine - circa 1970? I first wrote a similar piece more than ten years ago when I was working in e-commerce full-time and had become very

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-51822121301493434642009-06-30T15:14:00.021+01:002009-09-18T13:23:00.796+01:00

(Or "Oh No! Not another blog about Twitter!")Do you tweet? Compared to the usage in other parts of the social web, not a lot of people do. In fact a lot of the people who have signed up with the so-called "mini-blogging" service don't tweet any more - if they ever did - and are now dormant accounts. Or so we are told.They have discovered something fundamental: it is boring - despite all the

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-52213935535995748862009-06-15T08:32:00.070+01:002009-09-18T13:23:41.538+01:00

If they do, then it is very unlikely they will be reading this, so I can be as rude about them as I like.I have the authority to be rude about executives with a serious lack of adeptitude because I am really one of their generation - although I shrink from the suggestion. I am nearly 56. The history of my relationship with computers is typical for someone my age. When I left at 18, my school had

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-59732174673057488122009-05-27T08:13:00.015+01:002009-09-18T13:24:16.331+01:00

A conversation about blog useHi there! My boss has asked me to do a blog for our company.Oh, good. What are you blogging about?Well that's the problem - I don't really know yet, and I don't think the gaffer has any idea either. He just thinks we have to have a blog because all his mates at the golf club say their companies have them and he feels left out. And I look after the website so I drew

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-60508155046251724862009-05-07T13:57:00.022+01:002009-09-18T13:25:08.535+01:00

There's a lot of blah blah around at the moment about how Google may be about to, or are at least on the road to getting into the Social Networking space and challenging Facebook and MySpace. This is a recent post at Slate.com by Farhad Manjoo about the possibility, and it is typical of how people see things going.What's happening in a nutshell is that Google are encouraging everybody, not only

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-40703862921071180442009-04-21T12:59:00.025+01:002009-09-18T13:25:34.376+01:00

When I added the final remarks to my last post it was a couple of weeks after Facebook's 'Twitterization' of its news feed and introduction of the much-criticized righthand 'Highlights' column - a blatant attempt to force-feed the user with spam-like advertising content from company pages.At that time the general opinion in social-web-guruland was that Facebook might - at last - have got it '

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3110821377110021218.post-53365792798903945452009-03-19T23:19:00.018Z2009-09-18T13:26:24.318+01:00

A little while ago I was browsing a blog which advises authors about marketing and promoting their books online - in other words using all the latest Social Networking or Media sites and applications to best advantage.Among the guest posts was one from a clearly exhausted and distressed author. Her book - a novel - had been published a year before by wholly traditional methods: hardcopy; hardback

Tom Muirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13478520186704132742noreply@blogger.com0