Paul O'Flaherty

IBGS forms Board. I accept position as Director of IT

Those of you who follow Scot Duke on Innovative Business Golf Solutions will be well aware that Scot has be developing his IBGS as a business operations and development consulting company since 2005.

Well now the company is set to take a whole new direction and in doing so has officially announced the formation of the IBGS Board of Directors to facilitate this.

With that in mind I am proud announce that I have accepted the position of of Director of Information Technology with IBGS and as such will be in charge of developing and overseeing the managing of IBGS internet operations.

This new appointment will see me take Innovative Business Golf Solutions, LLC, in a whole new direction and one of my first priorities will be a complete overhaul of the existing online IBGS presence as well as pulling together the foundations needed to build and deliver a whole new range of internet based services for IBGS that stretch far beyond the traditional business operations and development consulting.

I’m truly excited to take on this position and look forward no just to overhauling the existing IBGS online presence and developing the new services but also working to ensure the prompt delivery of some exciting new projects which we have lined up.

Here’s the press release as was posted on the existing IBGS site a few moments ago.

Addison, Texas – March 31, 2008

Innovative Business Golf Solutions, LLC, founded in 2005 as a business operations and development consulting company, announced today the forming of the IBGS Board of Directors.

Scot Duke, President/CEO and Chairman of the Board of Innovative Business Golf Solutions, LLC, Board of Directors stated “In order for any business to compete in today’s open market it first has to realize its position in the global market. Those businesses who reach outside their local market will be able to move quickly into doing business on a broader scale. The internet is becoming an effective business tool for all business. IBGS is one of those businesses who want to keep the door open to the entire world by offering services for businesses looking for advice on how to use the internet safely as an effective business tool. The IBGS Board of Directors will be the brain trust and muscle to developing a strong presence in the global marketplace. ”

Mr Duke made the following announcement.

Effective April 1, 2008

Paul O’Flaherty owner of Your Web and co-founder of Bloomer.dk has accepted the position of IBGS Director of Information Technology. Mr O’Flaherty resides in Næstved, Denmark, will be in charge of developing and overseeing the managing of the IBGS internet operations.

Mr O’Flaherty has for the past 10 years developed his business, culminating in Your Web, a Web Design, Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Consulting Company. In 2007 Paul co-founded and oversees the day to day activities of Bloomer.dk, a social networking group for people in Denmark.

Paul reports, “I’ve been everything from a restaurant manager, to Systems Administrator, IT teacher (teaching ECDL), Youth Worker, Sales (pushing new technologies to companies), sole tech support agent for the entire of Ireland for one organization and a couple of other things in between. I am excited to be offered the opportunity to help business people use the internet effectively and to their advantage.”

Paul brings his 10 years of sound Web development, programming and web-site designing experience to the IBGS operations. He will be in charge of developing a full line of web-site design and development services as well as a full line of internet marketing consulting services, social media and blogging tools. IBGS’ target market includes all businesses that are looking to improve their online image. IBGS specializes in offering golfers and golf related business and social networking sites who want to enter the internet with a solid foundation and clear sharp image.

Mr Duke remarks, “The IBGS Board of Directors will grow as IBGS grows. I have brought Paul on to develop IBGS’s approach to helping business people step into the internet on a solid footing. I felt it important that IBGS develop this portion of the business right away in order to offer golfers, golf businesses and golf related industries with innovative WEB 2.0 designs. The IBGS internet consulting along with web-site design and development services will complement the other IBGS’ services that surround the educational opportunities offered business people on how to improve and develop their business with business golf.”

For more information on IBGS’s full line of services please review the Innovative Business Golf Solutions web site is at http://innovativebusinessgolf.com .

Or contact through
Mailing address:
14232 Marsh Lane #486
Addison, Texas 75002

For interviews Mr Duke can be reached by email at
scot.duke@ innovativebusinessgolf.com
or by phone at 214 549-0306.

Mr O’Flaherty can be reached by email at paul.oflaherty @ innovativebusinessgolf.com

Another problem with and how to benefit from BlogNetNews

Queen of Spain has brought to a head all of the problems with BlogNetNews because they are scraping her content without permission.

Erin has successfully had her feed removed from BNN (good on you for doing it!) but, the more I think about it, the more I can see an opportunity for bloggers to gain from the fact that BlogNetNews is playing the scraping game.

As far as I see it the only problem with BNN syndicating the content is that they are not returning the link love to the original sites because they are passing the title link and the [...] (read more) link through a redirect.

Here are the advantages I see for the bloggers currently on the network:

1. Exposure – Your blog is being promoted to new readers without you having to do any work.
2. They are only publishing a partial excerpt from the post. If a reader wants to read your content they must click through to your site to read it. Click throughs = traffic.
3. You can’t comment on BNN. Again readers must click through to your post to leave a comment.
4. They do not employ rel="nofollow" in on their site. This means that your feed can still be used to send plenty of Page Rank back to your site.

So all you need to do, to make this a win win situation for yourself as a blogger is to customize your RSS feed to include a simple "This post originally appeared on YOURBLOGNAME HERE" as a link at the top of each post which appears in your feed.

That link can point directly to your article. You can even optimize it so it says something like: This post (linked POST TITLE) is originally from (linked BLOG NAME).

Now you can happily let BNN scrap your content, safe if the knowledge that each post scraped will not only be sending you traffic, but also a share of the page rank from BNN.

You can achieve this on most blogging platforms by using a plugin such as "Better Feed" for WordPress or by manually editing your feed template (example is for WordPress).

Sure it may take a little work but it really is worth it to take advantage of the scrapers rather than expending the energy to fight them every step of the way.

Make them work for you.

Now, for my problem with BNN

My biggest problem with BNN is their tagline:

the blogosphere’s front page

How can any site purport to be the "front page" of the blogosphere when it limits itself only to the U.S. market.

Wake up call for you people: The blogosphere and the internet is NOT just the U.S.!

Today, between one service (who shall remain unmentioned until the respond to my email) not letting me sign up because I’m blogging on a ".dk" (Denmark) domain and idiots like this claiming to be the "front page of the blogosphere", I’m really starting to sympathize with the groundswell of resentment felt outside the U.S. towards the way in which many U.S. web sites and services marginalize or exclude people from outside the border.

I’m also starting to really consider what will happen when internet penetration levels increase in places like China and India and suddenly the English speaking world finds that it is in the minority of online users.

The US has almost 70% internet penetration so has not much room for growth, however Chinas has has only around 12.5% penetration and India has around 3.5%.

When India reaches the the same levels of penetration it will account for over 789 million internet users.

So, right now, any U.S. only site that not only manages to piss off it’s U.S. users but also piss off people from outside the U.S. can only be destined for serious trouble.

Improve Skype quality with these tips

Kevin and myself have been having fierce problems when talking to each other on Skype, yet these problems do not affect our Skype conversations with anyone else.

While talking today, Kevin pasted in part of an email, which a Skype tech support bod had sent him, about how to improve the quality of Skype.

Try out these 5 easy tips to improve your Skype experience:

1. In Skype, Go to Tools > Options > Connection. Select the option to use ports 80 and 443. In the "Incoming Connections" box you can chose any port between 1024 and 65535.

2. Reconfirm that your firewall is correctly configured. Follow the simple visual guide here:

http://www.skype.com/help/guides/firewalls/

3. Quit any file sharing applications or high-bandwidth usage applications.

4. For more detailed security setup on a network: http://www.skype.com/security/guide-for-network-admins.pdf

5. If these suggestions do not resolve improve cal quality, follow these steps:

    * Quit Skype

    * Locate the shared.xml file found in
C:\Documents and settings\Your Windows Username\Application data\Skype\shared.xml

    * Delete the file called shared.xml

    * Restart Skype ( shared.xml will be recreated )
Note: Showing hidden folders and files has to be turned on: please navigate to My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View. Once there, please make sure that the option "Show Hidden Files and Folders" is enabled.

5. Disable Quality of Service packet scheduling. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Network Connections.  Right click on the connection you are using. Select Properties. Untick the "QoS Packet Scheduler" option.

Hope these tips help you out.

A little Blog(ged) validation

Reading the feeds this morning I came across Steve Hodsons post about Blogged, which is a blog directory where the editors actually review and score the blogs before allowing them into the directory.

Editor reviews are based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. Blogs are compared to other blogs within the same category. Blogs that have not been reviewed by an editor will receive a "first impression score" by our system, which evaluates similar criteria. Ratings are not meant to endorse, promote or advertise a blog.

Curious to see if this blog was in their directory I did a quick search and there it was.

Needless to say, it was a great boost to my (already enormous) ego to see that they have awarded O’Flaherty a massive 9.1 out of 10. (Contrary to popular rumors, I swear I did not pay the editors off!)

Not a bad way to start the morning!

Is your blog on Blogged?

Defining yourself – It’s not so easy!

We are all proponents of the art of self branding. We all practice it every single day, most of us without even realizing it.

We all makes choices everyday where the resulting outcome is a much an extension of our personality than any logical thought process.

We all have a basic need to define ourselves, our place in the world and our role within our various social circles.

We crave acceptance but also individuality and all our choices are ultimately guided by this.

Do you drink wine or beer? Buy Nike or Adidas trainers? Shop in bargain stores or stick to the big name stores or do you like to thrall the thrift shops in search of that something unique?

If you take the economic factor out of it, the choices that we make ultimately become a matter of personality and the image we wish to portray of ourselves.

Everything we do and say, purchase or visit, listen too, or consume is an extension of our inner urge to be what we want others to see us as.

Some of us are comfortable with ourselves, so these choices are easy and are an actual extension of ourselves.

For others, unfortunately, the quest to discover "themselves" is ongoing and those choices are ultimately an attempt to build the image we want others to see.

At the end of the day, it’s all a public portrayal of what we want our "inner me" to be perceived as.

In the end we are creating a brand, just like Apple, Microsoft, Ferrari, Skoda, Madonna or Coca Cola with the exception being that the product is you (or me).

This extends onto the internet as well.

Look at your blog.

What theme are you using, have you customized (or attempted to customize it), what avatars do you have, what color scheme are you using?

You get the point I’m trying to make here.

So, considering I was sitting here contemplating this very topic this morning (while asking folk on twitter what color shirt I should wear)I was surprised to see a post by Sara (a fellow Fuelmyblog writer who will be joining us at SOBCon08 in Chicago), which was provoked by a question she heard on the radio.

If you had to get a tattoo today that was one word or picture that would sum up your life or personality, what would it be?

Awesome question, right? It’s something that certainly requires a lot of thought.

To be honest with you guys, I’ve been thinking about this all morning and haven’t got a suitable single word to sum myself up.

I have come up with a word for how I see my future life – "rapture". I’ll leave you guys to figure out how that fits in on your own!

Yet defining myself now, I couldn’t come up with a word (I’ve been spending so long speaking Danish I think my English vocabulary is waning) so instead had to define myself by an image.

Ultimately I don’t think this image (which is the motif from my favorite tie) would ever make a good tattoo, but what can you do?

So, dear O’Flaherty readers, what is it that that best defines you as a person?

Who the hell do we think we are?

This post was written yesterday but I’m only getting around to posting it now.

I’m sitting on the train from Næstved to Køge in Denmark and thinking about where us bloggers get our sense of entitlement from.

We as a group are constantly complaining that corporations don’t engage us properly, that we don’t get treated with the respect that we deserve and that we deserve to run with the big boys in terms of pitches received.

Also, there are a lot of people who seem to thing that when bloggers are being pitched, we should be pitched the same way as journalists are!

Why?

What gives us that right to complain? What do we do that makes us so god damn special and gives us a sense of entitlement!

I’ll answer the question for you – NOTHING!

As a group we do not deserve it.

There are a number of bloggers out there that do. They put in the work and the effort and command a large enough audience to warrant “preferential” treatment beyond that afforded to the average ordinary bloggers.

These bloggers are the exception.

I would wager that those bloggers who get that kind of attention are in the minutest fraction of a percentile when you look at the total number of bloggers out there.

We may all aspire to be those people. We may all want to be treated as they are, but we are not them.

Most of us will never be good enough to emulate or surpass their success.  No matter how committed you are or how much you pour your heart and soul into your blogging, the reality is that 99.9% of us will never ever make it big enough in order to command the type of respect that we are seeking.

Most of us simply do not put in the effort required, yet still expect to be treated as a “real journalist”.

I used to share a house with a girl studying to be a journalist when I lived in Belfast. The amount of hours this girl spent of the phone and doing the leg work of chasing down leads and stories was phenomenal.

She put in the kind of effort that would make most people cry.

Yet us bloggers, even the dedicated ones, put in only a few hours a day (if even that) and still expect to be treated with the same level of respect.

I can here people already claiming stuff like, “but we’re part of a community, we have audiences, we are influencers!”.

Bullshit!

Most of us do not command or engage a large enough audience to say that.

So what if you have 200 or even 2000 subscribers! What is your reach?

Even piss poor reporters can get jobs writing on local newsletters (like the one from my hometown) which have audiences in the 10,000 range. These newsletters are not just read by the purchasers, but also by the people who live in their household and in waiting rooms and lounges.

How does your average blogger compare to that?

Again, I must stress the average blogger, because it is among us that the sense of entitlement appears to be strongest and least deserved.

As bloggers we tend not to break the news. There are a number of high profile blogs and sites that do this a lot, but again they are not the norm within the blogosphere. They are the exception.

You’re average blogger will be extremely lucky if he or she manages to break 1 new story a year.

The rest of their posts will just be commentary on ordinary events, personal opinion and regurgitating existing content in order to keep their post count up.

That kind of blogging is not journalism and it does not give you any right to demand anything of corporations or business.

In many senses, most bloggers, myself included, are like the dogs that lay around under the tables in the kings courts of old and should be happy for any scrap of attention that is thrown to us.

How you act upon that scrap is what will set you apart from other bloggers and it is how you will earn or destroy your reputation with your readers and with the business’s you wish to engage you.

With respect to business, as individuals 99.9% of bloggers have little to no value. It’s only when we become a collective that we have any strength and influence.

Within that collective it is the ones who are perceived as being the major influencers that will gain the respect of business (and main stream media) and it is they who will get pitched in the manner that all bloggers want.

Like Generals promoted through the ranks of an army they get given the information first and get to choose how to act upon it and disseminate it to us peons below.

So, my question again is: Why does the average blogger have this sense of entitlement and think they should be treated like a journalist?

We don’t do the work, we don’t have the audience, we don’t break stories and most of us don’t even bother to research what we write, we just regurgitate content with a heavy smattering of personal knee jerk opinion.

I’m really glad for the bloggers who have managed to make it big enough to earn the respect and treatment they deserve.

For the rest of us, I suggest we stop stamping our feet and crying like children and get about the process of building our audiences to a level that we can demand the respect and treatment we appear to crave.

This “me to” attitude belittles us as a group and demeans the work and effort of those who have made it to where we want to be.

Dave Winer said it best…

Oh crap! The world must be gone to hell in hand basket because I’m about to quote Dave Winer.

Dave said something really great on Twitter a few days ago which has really been true for me the last few days.

To this day, people react to what they think you said, and when you point out that’s not what you said, they ignore that too.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals

Okay, so maybe that quote from MIB is not completely accurate, but here’s a kicker from Steven Hodson:

Give me a frikken break. The community is not always right. A lot of the times it is a mindless idiot that gets all worked up over the stupidest thing making it seem like it is earth shattering. Just look at digg.com, or the bickering that goes on over Wikipedia or any of the thousands of blogs that the moment the gorilla gets an itchy ass become as mindless as sharks in a feeding frenzy.

Just as a community can be brought together to good things it can also turn into a mob of idiots that seem to lose all sensibility or common sense. Sure corporations can be made to realize the error of their ways but equally so, innocent people can get hurt – both personally and professionally.

I’m going to refrain from commentary and instead tell you to check out the King of Cranky’s post about communities over on WinExtra.

Vidcast: Pigeon Holes, Mommy Bloggers, Subscribers vs Readers

Yesterday Scot Duke invited me to be co-host on a very impromptu Mr.Business Golf Show and we talked about a couple of posts of mine.

The first topic of the show (and the last as well) was my reaction to a post by Erin Kotecki (The Queen of Spain). called "So you want to talk to mommy bloggers".

I had, literally 5 minutes previous to coming on the show, just posted a reply to Erin’s post called "Pigeon hole yourself and reap the consequences", which yesterday garnered some quite emotional comments so I’m hoping that this video doesn’t get me strung up from the rafters.

The second topic we discuss is about Subscribers vs Readers, which came out of a guest post that I did for Fuelmyblog called "1000 Subscribers or 100 readers?".

In the show we talk about subscribers and readers from both the bloggers point of view and the marketing point of view as well as discuss when is a good time to display your reader count (if at all).

The post on Fuelmyblog came was written as a response to Corvida from SheGeeks question:

"For those that have their RSS subscriber stats on their blog, when did decide to put yours up? At what number do you think it’s beneficial for others to do the same?"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show. In hindsight I think it would have been great if this recording from yesterday could have went out with the post that I wrote in response to Erin, but what can you do?

I hope you enjoy the show.

Guest Post: Aaron Wall – Tips on using video in SEO

I have a special treat for you guys today. Aaron Wall of SEO Book has done a special guest post for O’Flaherty with tips about using video in your SEO. Enjoy!

I think video is a huge boon in many markets. It does an especially strong job of conveying trust to get people to want to learn and/or buy from you, showing things that are hard to describe with words (visualizing them somehow makes them more real … that is why so many e-books have fake covers after all), and sharing humor (as laughter is contagious and video can put you in an atmosphere where others are showing an emotion with clarity).

I added a bunch of 5 minute videos to many of my SEO tools and saw a drastic decrease in support queries. Some people who are too lazy to read a 10 page how to guide will gladly watch a few minute video to learn how to get the most out of using a tool.

In addition to those benefits, video is also easy to syndicate to other sites (via embed widgets you offer directly or via YouTube). If someone embeds your video in their blog they often link back to your site (especially if you use watermarks and/or aggressively brand your site in the video) plus someone embedding a 5 minute video from you
tells your audience that they really trust you.

I think the singular biggest error many people make when syndicating video to YouTube is not also adding more value on their own sites. A transcription of the video placed on their own site adds a lot of descriptive keyword rich text that they can rank for, plus adding a
bulleted list synopsis to your own site ensures that your site aspires to remain the destination rather than letting YouTube get all the links you earned. I tried to do a pretty good job of the later when I posted the videos to my blog, but my videos subdomain is still a bit sloppy and could use some work.

With video content Google does not have much textual content to weight the videos against, so it is best to use short keyword dense descriptive titles with meta descriptions that help back them up. On many of the videos I submitted to YouTube I made titles that were a bit too long and perhaps spammy to be optimal.

My wife has been playing around with YouTube and has
done better than I have at getting her videos included in the search results than I have.

Six more bonus video optimization tips:

• When in doubt, shorter with better clarity is typically better than
  comprehensive. And slower / calmer voice is better than quick
  speaking.
• Annunciation matters. If you have trouble speaking clearly for long
  periods of time practice, and then record in smaller chunks.
  Buy a nice microphone with a pop filter. It is worth it. It makes
  everything you say more clear.
• If you post to your site and YouTube try to use a different title on
  your blog such that you can try to rank for a wider net of keywords.
• If you have the time to it may be worth submitting to Google Video,
  MetaCafe, and a couple of the other video sites. Some of them pass
  link weight and many of them have good authority.
• Read this TechCrunch post …it offers lots of great viral video marketing tips.

22nd of March and this…

Okay, I know I had a long night yesterday. Per Kaarup and his wife Linda were over at my house for dinner and it became one good long evening of eating, drinking and chatting about everything under the sun (and a lot about blogging and technology as well).

Per had his brand new camera with him last night and took lots of pictures. He was like a kid playing with his new favorite Christmas toy.

I’ll post some of them once he emails them to me today.

I didn’t take any because I didn’t see any point considering he had an itchy trigger finger last night.

I did however take some pictures about half an hour ago of the snow falling outside.

My Irish self was not expecting snow on the 22nd of March, even here in Denmark, but some has fallen already and it continues to do so. I reckon by the time it stops we’ll have had a really descent fall.

Anyway, here are two quick shots I snapped of part of the kids play area: