It’s very important to define this before you start writing your blog.

Knowing exactly what you’re going to blog about it an important part of starting a blog. You might say, “I know exactly what I want to blog about – Film!”. But that’s not enough. Film is a very broad topic. You need to really narrow down the area within Film that you want to blog about.

So, in this case, maybe the topic for your blog could be New Wave French Cinema! A good example of a film blog with a very refined focus is Wise Kwai’s Thai Film Journal.

There are several techniques you can use to help when you’re trying to pick a topic. What works for me is to think about what my target audience wants. In the case of this blog the target audience is made up of my clients and my potential clients. I think I know what they want when they come to me in the real world – advice and hel;p in getting their business online and using the internet in their business.

Another thing that helped me decide on this topic was that this blog will help me to realise a real world goal. My goal – to get more clients.

Lastly, I’m interested in the Internet and using the Internet for business and I think that will help!

Once a topic has been selected we need to decide on what we’re going to blog about within that topic. I’m going to use a few different approaches to help me with this. Here’s a couple of the ideas I have:

• News stories
  The TV, radio and newspapers should all be a rich source of material for your blog
• Magazines
  Industry magazines will have plenty of articles that might be of interest to your readers
• Common issues
  Often different customers have the same questions and concerns dealing with these in the blog will help both customer and me
• Tutorials
  Tutorials are good way to show you know what you’re about, and they offer something of value to your reader
• Top Ten!
  Top tens are old favourite of many blogs – they are relatively easy to write and they are easy to read

The next step is to work out a schedule for blogging.

I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to making unrealistic promises to myself. Guilt. How familiar is that guilty feeling when you see the unused gym bag gathering dust in the corner or have just one more biscuit with your mid-morning cup of tea?

Enough pessimism! After all it’s a new year, possibilities are limitless!

This time last year I promised myself I would get fit(fitter) by joining a gym and going to it regularly. I’m glad to report that I’ve achieved this. I now go to the gym for about 8-10hrs a week. Coming from a fairly sedentary existence this has surprised my friends, family and me!

This year one of my resolutions is to blog regularly, 2/3 times a week is my target. But I’ve tried to do this before, countless times and after a good start I always end up neglecting my blog, leaving half-finished articles.

So what’s going to be different this time?

I thought I’d look at the things that helped me become a regular gym goer and try and apply them to blogging. Today I’m going to look at my motivation for blogging.

I believe that clearly defining my motivation for getting fit has been integral to my success in the gym. That and a shed load of sweat!

So I went to the gym to lose weight, get healthy, look good.

All true, but not enough to keep going to the gym week in week out for the past 12 months. There were deeper reason. Deeper reasons.

These reasons provided me with the motivation I needed to get up early every morning, train hard each day and to keep coming back for more.

So now to blogging. On the face of it blogging is a good way to communicate with people – clients, friends, colleagues. But why bother? After all there’s still the phone, email, instant messaging, etc…

But blogging is different. It allows anyone to put their ideas out there, to get noticed, to build interest in what they do and how they do it.

So by writing a blog I hope to get attention for the work I do. I run a website design business and want to attract clients. Writing a blog is a way to promote the work I do and in the current economic environment anything that raises your profile is invaluable.

For me, blogging isn’t easy. I’m not a natural writer, but I am motivated to learn and improve. I see it as an essential part of developing my business.

Motivation isn’t the only thing to get right though, there are other elements to becoming a successful blogger. There is also clearly defining what to blog about. I will look at this in the next article.

I’d appreciate any feedback you may have on this article, you can leave a comment or contact me directly.

I hope 2009 was good to you and 2010 will be as good and hopefully better.

One of my resolution’s for 2010 is to blog regularly, at least once a week. We’ll see how I get on.

Last year I resolved to get fit, I don’t know how I got on with that, but I’m definitely fitter now than 12 months ago. Daily sessions in the gym and a cutback in beer has seen me lose almost 3 stone. Now how do I turn the effort I put in at becoming a “gym monkey” into becoming a regular blogger?

Over the next week I want to look at – “Getting Started with Blogging”.

I say “Getting Started” because, even though I actually started this blog some time ago, I don’t feel as if I ever really started blogging properly. That is to say I don’t blog regularly. But that’s all about to change.

Over the course of this series of articles I’m going to look at -

1. Reasons for Blogging
2. What to Blog
3. When to Blog
4. Measuring Success

The new year is three days old already – time for some action!

The BBC’s iPlayer volume control goes to 11! – (ref – This Is Spinal Tap)

Roy Keane as we know and love him

Brilliant! I hope that wasn’t designed but some programmer late at night having a little laugh!

You can hear the rest of Roy Keane Interview on Youtube. The man speaks a lot of truth. Gut-wrenching – “You may laugh, that was the World Cup!”

There are lots of options out there.

Salesforce is the leading online solution, but it’s overkill for what I need. As is the free, open-source SugarCRM

I like another online solution – Highrise by 37signals. It is intuitively designed, highly functional and does everything I need. But the useful version, for me, costs $49 per month. That’s $600 per year. I can’t justify that for my business.

I’ll probably end up doing something in a spreadsheet for now, and tie that in with my Google Calendar and email. Eventually I’d like to build a web app to manage my clients and leads but for now a spreadsheet will do.

I’m not alone in not having a system setup yet. Though I can be forgiven as I only deal with a few customers each month.

However my mobile phone company Three has no excuse. They’re one of the biggest telecom companies in the world. Yet when I called them last night regarding an ongoing issue with my handset I had to give them all the details of the problem again. They even wanted me to run the same diagnostics again. It didn’t work a week ago and the phone had since been for repair with Three. Why did the think that doing a reset again would fix the problem?

The answer.

Poor, or no, Customer Relationship Management.

Many businesses have had equipment confiscated and received large fines.

This is a bit of a problem for many as the cost of legitimate software in the country is quite high in comparison to average wages.

For example a teacher in Thailand earns anything from 8,000-20,000baht per month. That’s about €200-500/month. A good price for Windows 7 Pro is 6,000baht. Which works out at anything from 30% to 75% of a teacher’s monthly salary.
That’s the same as an Irish person, on take home pay of €2000/month, paying €700 upwards for the joy of MS’ latest offering. Windows 7 Pro currently retails for €200 in Ireland.

I’ve been advising a few friends and businesses to have a look at using Linux. In my view it’s a perfectly good alternative to Windows for most uses.

A lot of people I’ve spoken with have heard that Linux is great…. if you have a computer science degree, or that it’s unsecure or buggy.

I’m not an expert but I can say that my experience with Linux has been bug free, no security issues and although it was, a few years ago, difficult to setup Linux on your PC it is now relatively straight-forward.

But I think that the greatest selling point of all is the Linux Live CD.

Go to www.ubuntu.com and download the Ubuntu install CD. Boot up your PC with this CD and you can “try before you buy”!

The option to try Ubuntu before installing it means you don’t have to change any settings or files on your PC. Plus you can try it out and make up your mind as to whether or not Linux is for you.

If Ubuntu isn’t for you – give Opensuse a go. You’ll fall in love with the KDE desktop!

The problem with a strong password is that by its very nature it is designed to be difficult to guess. But that also has the unwanted consequence of being easy to forget.

A bunch of random characters, letters(both upper and lower case), and numbers is not the easiest to memorise. You could just write it down somewhere, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a strong password. Writing it down is inadvisable and is especially so when dealing with an account that has access to your credit card.
There are programs that will securely store your passwords for you. They work by encrypting the passwords in a file or database. The only way to access them is by entering a…(you guessed it) – password!

I’ve a way of creating memorable passwords that works for me and I think it could be useful to others.

I pick a group of letters, for example the vowels or the letters of a word I’ll easily remember(like john for example). I then substitute the letters in this group with characters or numbers. So “John” might become “{0#9”. That’s substituting { for J, 0 for o, # for h, and 9 for n. This group of characters then becomes the key by which I encrypt my password.

For example, if my password is “Jackinthebox” it would become “{acki9theb0x”. Does that make sense?

Another thing I do is capitalise the first letter of each word in my password. So”{acki9theb0x” now becomes “{ackI9TheB0x”.

The idea is that the phrase “jackinthebox” is easy to remember for me. Then I use the key, which I can write down, to encrypt my password. The bonus is I can use encrypt other passwords with the same key. So my Paypal account might use “{ackI9TheB0x” but my email account might be “Spi99i9gT0p”.

On a side note – it’s good to use different passwords for different accounts. Until recently I had one password for everything.

Using a method like this is pretty secure. The chances of someone guessing it or using a program to hack it are slim.

Does this make sense to you?

Do you want to share any methods you’ve found useful for remembering a password? Or have you used one of the password wallet programs and what did you think of it?

Thanks for reading.

Unlike many of these email scams the AIB emails are well written, and seem genuine as they come from an aib.ie email account.

The first two were about “unauthorized” access to my online banking account. The giveaway was the American spelling in an email from an Irish bank!

The scammers haven’t learned yet. Another mail arrived today with the “authorized” spelling mistake and a dodgy attachment. Apparently blue7.cork@yahoo.ie has been added to my account as a contact.

I’ve checked out the attached html file in an editor. Don’t open it! It’s 5000 lines of crap with some javascript. There’s also a form which posts anything sent by it with a script at www.advancecolleges.org.

I’m not sure what the relationship between AIB and advancecolleges.org is but I doubt that AIB uses an Indian Pharmacy college to process it’s contact forms.

I sent one of the previous emails to AIB but got no reply. I’ll send this one too. It seems AIB aren’t alerting their customers about this.

The best advice I can give is if you get one of these emails then don’t click on any link or open any attachment in it. If the email says there’s been some change to your online account – Go to your AIB account as you would normally(i.e. not from a link within the email) and check it out.

Keep watching the skies.

edit — 6 October 2009

I’ve just checked my AIB account and after following the Security Centre link(nicely and subtly tucked away in the top right corner of the page) I found the extensive AIB information about this scam.
Looks like they’re on the ball, but I wonder why they haven’t made the information more visible?

There. I said it. One time Google was my friend but lately it has become more than that – I just don’t know what I’d do without it!

I don’t think I’m alone, and today I hope to show you 10 reasons to love Google. Or at least get to like it very much. From their Search Engine to Maps, I use Google all the time, everyday. Here are ten of the Google services and apps that I use regularly.

Google Search
This one has to be in first place. I use it constantly. It’s the most popular search engine, accounting for 64% of all online search. Almost four times that of its nearest competitor – Yahoo! which accounts for 17%. Microsoft gets 9%.
Google Mail
I use Gmail for my personal mail and find it far superior to any other web-based email I’ve used before(Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and several others). Gmail gives you plenty of storage space. Gone are the days of 100MB, I currently have over 7GB available to me in my free Gmail account. The spam filtering is excellent as is the labeling system for mails. Whats more Gmail is always evolving with new features coming online regularly. I particularly love Gmail Tasks, a simple and effective task list application.
Google Calendar
I can be very disorganised, so this service from Google has been a life saver. It’s very simple to use. You can also see, at a glance, what you’re schedule is like for the day/week/month. Like most Google Services, it is readily accessible from your mobile phone which allows you to keep track of appointments and add new ones when you’re on the move.
Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics and Adwords
These are crucial tools in my business, and should also be in the arsenal of anyone involved in the management or ownership of a website. Webmaster Tools lets you see how Google has indexed the pages of your site. Analytics allows you to track visitors to your site, not to specific details but to things like pages visited, time spent on site, origin, etc. Adwords is a great way for you to advertise your site, to the very people who are looking for you and what you do.
YouTube
OK, so this may be cheating a little, as YouTube was acquired by Google as opposed to being developed by Google. But it’s still a Google product now. YouTube is a great site for watching and sharing video.
Google Reader
If you like to read blogs, or read news online, you may be familiar with site feeds. This site has one. The johnbehan.net feed lets you subscribe to this site so when a new article is posted it can be delivered to you. To use this service you need a feed reader. There are many feed reader’s available, the browser you are using may have one, so might the email client you use. The one I use is Google Reader.
Google Maps and Google Earth
Planning a journey? – Checkout Google Maps. Zoom in on your house or the Taj Mahal with the nifty Google Earth application.
Picasa
There are loads of online photo sharing and storing websites. The most popular one being Flickr. Whether it’s my contrary nature, or the fact that I was using all these other great Google apps and services, I chose Picasa. I find it great for sharing photos online, and it’s offline, desktop, application is excellent.
Google Alerts
Enter a search term. Pick the areas you’d like searched. Pick how often you’d like to search. Set where you’d like the results delivered. Simple. Google does the rest. Invaluable tool, particularly for businesses. Say your company sells Doowacky2000s. Set that as the search term and be alerted whenever Google finds it in one of its indexed webpages.
Google Chrome
I’m a little sceptical when it comes to new web browsers. Why Bother? Firefox does everything I need. I decided to give Chrome a whirl the other day. I’m converted. It’s very fast and beautifully designed. I still love Firefox, but for everyday web browsing, I think Chrome has won it’s way into my heart.
There are many more Google apps and services that I could add to this list.

But if you haven’t used any of these 10 then I recommend you give them a try. You won’t have to sign your soul away or be pestered by relentless spammy emails. You may even find one of these tools useful and become a Googleite!

Most of these seem to be celebrities, though I haven’t done a close read of it.

Amazingly, Ashton Kutcher is number one! The mind boggles. Demi Moore aka MrsKutcher comes in at 12. Poor Bruce doesn’t make it into the top 100.

Top Twits

I’m not that into celebrities or celebrity bashing so I’ll leave it there.

I did have a quick scan of the list and one name popped out, not Barack Obama or 10 Downing Street or any of the other usual suspects.

Will Wheaton is at number 58.

You might remember Will from Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

He’s a major celebrity on the “Geek” circuit now – writing books, attending conferences, etc…

Quite successful too by the looks of things.

Check out his blog WWDN: In Exile