Mark W. Shead

About 10 years ago there was an online service called Wimpy Point. The idea was the Powerpoint was a bit overkill and people only really needed a “whimpy” version of presentation software. The idea was fairly unusual a decade ago, but now there are many different options for online presentation software. Guiding Tech has a list of 5 Online Powerpoint Alternatives that is worth taking a look at.

Here is the list from the post:

• Prezi – This is what presentation software would look like if it wasn’t descended from slide shows.
• Google Docs – I always thought that Google Docs was a stripped down version of Powerpoint, but checkout the writeup and video to see what it can do. The collaboration is also a great feature.
• 280 Slides – This looks almost like Keynote on OS X.
• Zoho Show – Part of Zoho office with some nifty remote presentations features.
• Slide Rocket – Seems to be fairly well designed and brings analytics to presentation software which can be very helpful when you are sharing things online.

A friend of mine has written The World’s Shortest Guide to SEO. Here is the core text of the guide:

Create something that people will link to. Repeat.

This isn’t bad advice.  If you never create anything that people will want to link to, you’ll have a hard time ranking well in search engines.  However, I think it is an overly simplistic view of what it takes to do well on the web.

Imagine that you own a circus.  What do you need to do to get people to come to your shows?  Obviously you need to create something that people will enjoy.  But is that really enough?  Probably not.  You are going to have to do some marketing and hundreds of other things to make the circus succeed.  Sure if your circus is horrible and boring, no one will want to come.  However, a good circus show with all of the other aspects well optimized is going to do better than the worlds greatest show where they ignore everything else.

The same thing is true for the web.  Well marketed good content is going to be more effective than perfect content that has no other efforts behind it. You may occasionally get lucky with the Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” approach, but most success requires optimizing more than a single aspect.

Today I met Ryan Cole the owner of Juggle Media who does Social Media in Wichita Kansas. We talked for awhile and I was impressed with how Ryan tries to help businesses make use of social networking tools.  He seems to really have his clients best interest at heart and tries to focus on a coaching model where he can help enable them to use the tools rather than making them dependent on him for everything.

Its a great model and he seems to be having some good success at getting small and medium sized businesses online and connecting with their customers using a bunch of the different social media platforms that are out there.

Opera has submitted a version of their web browser to Apple for approval and inclusion in the app store.  In the past Apple has turned down apps that they feel compete with built in functionality that the iPhone already has.  Obviously Opera Mini competes with Safari on the iPhone so there is a good chance that Apple with reject it.

To help counter this, Opera put up a counter showing how long it has been since the app has been submitted and are running a contest where people can win an iPhone by best predicting when it will be approved. What they are really trying to do here is generate enough public interest that there will be an outcry if Apple rejects their application.  It will be interesting to see if this works or not.

There is an interesting discussion going on at Digital Point about WebmasterWorld’s cloaking setup. Basically if you click on a result in Google for WebmasterWorld, you get sent to a login page, where they suggest you pay for a membership and very small type where you can login for free.  So basically the average user gets a login screen and the googlebot gets the actual page content.

There has been a bunch of talk about this, but I have yet to see anyone from Google say it is ok.  Of course WMW is fairly well known so you’d think if there was a problem it would have been noticed by now.  If this is ok, it is a great way for people to get more subscribers to their website–show the results in Google, but don’t let them see it until they sign up.