Some years ago it was illegal to broadcast Gerry Adams speeches on the TV or radio, as he spouted his version of the truth of life in Northern Ireland. So voice over artists were used instead to speak his words. This generated an uplift in the number of people who heard his message as they were now interested in the way the broadcasters were getting around the ban. Read more »

I must admit: I’ve been a slave to email. It’s been a friend, a distraction from real work, it’s given me a sense of being connected when all this exciting must read stuff lands in my inbox. And it’s helped me waste days if not years of my life.

But as of today all that is changed. I’ve decided to declutter my inbox, clear my desktop and instead of being busy, being busy I’m going to focus on the important things in my communication strategy.

No longer will I sit there waiting for someone’s broadcast; from now on it’s Proactive Communications for me!

So if you want to de-clutter your day, tidy up your thinking and focus on what’s important then I suggest that you too think about who you receive mail from and why. You could save yourself many hours a day with an auto delete filter on incoming mail.

The “unsubscribe” button is now a great friend. Have an uncluttered day.!

I’ve found my interest in politics growing recently, driven by dissatisfaction with the poor performance of some elected members and by the close to fraudulent activity that has come from Westminster, elected and hereditary. I suspect that seeing the lack of true support for our Armed Forces, for whom I have a huge affinity, has also irritated me hugely. As has the pointless spin that emanates from Ministers and their aides.

Image by Maia C via Flickr

As a result, I’ve watched, listened, wondered and started to question. And the one question that sits uppermost in my mind is: “what is the role of an elected member?”. Allied to this is the need to question what the job description for the role really is and some who’ve read my blogs may recall my views on job roles and tools for the job.

Anyway, back to my main issue: what is their role? I’ve always thought that politicians are elected to represent their constituency. After getting more interest in our political system I’ve begun to realise how naïve this view is. I cannot remember when an elected member that I’ve voted for has appeared to seek my views in order to represent them properly. Instead, his/her party has decided what my views are, or at least the views to be represented.

Now the party conference season has started we are hearing more about what elected members want to see. Statements like: “I want to see …” surely miss the true point of elected members. They are there to shout out loud that “the people who elected me want to see…” for it is their view that matter, not those of the elected member.

As social media becomes more pervasive and we, “the great unwashed” feel that we have both the right and capability to make our views known it really is time for the challenge to be made to elected members to listen more to their electorate.

Engagement is not about surgeries anymore, but about continued communication. And of course, communication is not about blogging or Twittering, it is a mutli-path dialogue that captures and forms opinion over time and sometimes in pretty quick-time.

In a real democracy elected members represent those who did not vote for them just as much as they represent those who did. And they should do this without worrying about the needs of their party machines that helped them to be elected to the role in the first place.

If the principle of the wisdom of crowds will have its day then it is going to use social media to do so. Wise politicians will realise this and then amend their stance to truly represent all those who elected them and will speak on their behalf.

My earlier post about universal broadband attracted more comments than anything I’ve written before, so that must make it a trending topic here!

Anyway: today’s Western Mail talks about how Wales is being left behind in the broadband roll out plan. But they let themselves down in their leader article when confusing the need for broadband with the need for business web presence.

Anyone in their right mind that wants or needs to host a web site will not host it themselves (unless of course they are VERY big like the BBC) but will outsource it to a web host. The web presence should not be linked to a company’s broadband connection at all.

Broadband is of course an aide to content management, but it is not the be all and end all. I can manage content on some sites via my mobile phone browser.

In the past I’ve downloaded from the web at 9.6 kbps and was glad to do so. Connection is the important feature: speed is the desirable element. But sadly the slowest speed we will accept is the fastest we’ve ever used.

The question is simple: why is that we can deliver (almost) free TV pictures to every house in Wales, yet we are unable to deliver paid for Broadband even though nearly every house has a phone line?

To my mind the answer is simple: BT is excessively domineering in this market. They drive the broadband agenda in Wales and spin their story so well to make some people think that they are doing the world a favour by making broadband available at all.

Sadly, this seems to be “bought” by the Welsh Assembly Government. Money is ploughed into schemes to provide faster access in some parts of Wales whilst others go without completely.

OFCOM appear to be as effective as a chocolate fireguard in forcing progress. Their recent report can only be described as a statement of the bleeding obvious.

What we need to do is realise that broadband internet access can be delivered over a variety of media, not just BT phone lines. Outlying villages can be served by the same technology as TV, to a base station and then through local distribution wirelessly or via physical connection. Mobile networks can also deliver effective solutions.

The WAG needs to challenge the providers to do more, and cut funding if they don’t. If that happens we will see the true expansion of broadband to be a truly universal service to the betterment of Wales.

When I saw this article on the BBC about a mis-translated road sign I had to laugh, like many others I suppose.

But then I re-read it and realised that the article suggests that the mistake had been made in translating from English to Welsh.

This may be true, but then it might not. Surely there are some sign writers in Wales who do want to have signs made in Welsh. And those signs can be mis-translated into English.

The fact that English appears on the top of the sign confuses the issue.

But at least it’s a little more accurate than the road sign that had an out of office email response on it as the translation.

I’ve spent months developing the Junction 31 website, some of it taking me into uncharted territory, but generally supported by the thousands of developers working on open-source applications.
But there was one thing that I could not fix: my “Alan’s Views” blog layout. Whatever I did, it always seemed to align itself off the page when entering comments.
Open source forums could not get an answer. And then Mohd Rafie came along. He’s a member of Junction 31, and offered to help. I didn’t know him other than what was on his profile, but what did I have to lose?
So I gave him access to the site – and in about 20 minutes he fixed it. Not with some hack, that others may have created, but having consulted Google Analytics to check on resolutions and browsers etc to meet the need of the users of the site. And it worked. And I was happy
But he then decided to polish it a little bit more. And the result looks great – just what I wanted. So: a great big thank you to Mohd Rafie.
He’s now a friend, we plan to meet soon and how can I not recommend his design services to other people.

I like my food, so when I heard there was a meeting of NOCCI I was keen to go, thinking intially that it was an evening of Italian food.  How wrong could I be. 

NOCCI in Aberystwtyth last night, was a meeting of about 25 people involved in the creative and cultural industries in mid Wales. Organised by Rhodri (@nwdls) this really casual yet effective first meeting was a joy to attend. Friendly, open and relaxed it was, yet with a clear purpose of helping those in the creative and cultural industries to form alliances and provide support to each other to everyone’s benefit.

It totally supported my long held views that “shotgun networking” is pretty much a waste of time, but meeting groups with clear common ground will reap huge rewards. And it also reminded me, someone who is normally based in Cardiff, that you don’t need a big city to find big talent.

So if you want to learn how to be a DJ then you’d be mad not to visit DJ Tutor, a fantastic example of how the web can liberate business from any part of the country to deliver to a global market.

Silverspoon Films make movies: promos, adverts, conferences etc and have a range of offerings that would suit just about any business. I was stunned by the one minute corporate video for SME’s priced for less than £250 that Richard told me about. 

It was a great night with a style and focus that many other networks would do well to emulate.

Anyone who knows me will probably know that I’m not much of an “arts person”, but I’ve been helping someone get a new site going to support and promote the creative industries in Wales.

The site is called Cultural Enterprise and is run by Elin Jones.

It appears that there used to be some public funding for this work but that was stopped last year for some reason. Elin has kept this going and is now trying to deliver more value to her network of creative industries in Wales and beyond.

I hope she succeeds for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it will be  another example of how individuals can make a difference when Governments fail to support self employed and small businesses.

Have you heard about Twitter, or do you use it?

I must admit that when I first saw it I thought it was an even dafter idea than many others that I’d seen on the web.  Then a good friend advised me to stick with it and I did.

And now: well I think it’s amazing, and in my opinion it is likely to change the way people communicate, possibly forever. Having used it for several months I want to share with you some of my thinking about the impact that this will have in the business environment. Read more »