Feb 09 2007

First Blogs, then splogs, now flogs (and CJ)

This week’s issue of UK public relations trade magazine, PR Week, has a ‘blog special’ feature, and a front-page headline, Fake bloggers to be exposed.

This says: “PR professionals who pose as customers to blog for clients could soon find themselves named and shamed by Trading Standards, and even face civil court proceedings.” (From a UK construction industry perspective, my thoughts immediately turned to incongruous ideas of a Football Association blogger telling what a fantastic job contractor Multiplex has done at Wembley Stadium!)

I wrote about ‘splogs’ (spam blogs, often generated for search engine optimisation – see post) 15 months ago. Today, it appears ‘flogging’ has a new meaning: fake blogging. PR Week says “‘flogging’ is likely to be made illegal when the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive passes into UK law on 31 December 2007”.

PR Week has some PR guidance on corporate blogs, and talks about the widely varying levels of authority and respect that some blogs command compared to other media. The research, it says, is unclear:

“In a recent US survey by Blogcount.com, 30 per cent of respondents said they found blogs less credible than newspaper articles, with 38 per cent finding blogs more credible. In a poll last November by Ipsos MORI for Hotwire PR, more than 25 million European adults said they had changed their minds about a company or its products after reading reviews on a blog. In the same survey, blogs (24 per cent) came second to newspapers (30 per cent) as the most trusted information source.”

By the way, the latest UK construction weekly to jump on the blog bandwagon (bloggon perhaps?) is Contract Journal. Journalists at rival Building magazine have been busily blogging for at least a year (see Building blogs post) and now writers at CJ (editor Emma Penny and web manager, Bex aka Rebecca Froley) have joined the blogosphere with the pithily entitled CJ Construction blog, talking about some of the stories making headlines in the newspaper (this week’s headline story, coincidentally, is a web-linked item about dangerous site antics being recorded on video and posted on YouTube: Industry outrage at YouTube videos apparently showing dangerous on-site horseplay).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/first_blogs_the/

Feb 08 2007

Bubbl.us

Anyone who has sat next to me in meetings will have noticed that I use mind-maps to scribble my notes, though I have occasionally got the laptop out and used mind-mapping software. However, give me an internet connection at our next meeting and you may find me using Bubbl.us. It’s a bit clunky in places but at least there is now a web-based solution in this field.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/bubblus/

Feb 07 2007

Black days at Redsky

Further to my recent post about Redsky IT’s acquisition by a Canadian software business (Explorer to acquire Redsky IT), Contract Journal reports “Explorer tours Redsky offices making redundancies“.

MD Mark Chambers left the business (formerly known as Ramesys) rather than implement the cuts, so the cull has been delivered by former chief technician Mike Aspinall, with Redsky’s Blackburn office already suffering ten job losses. The impact on other offices was not clear, but there will certainly be a few more people looking for UK construction software vacancies.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/black_days_at_r/

Feb 05 2007

Design review tools

The past week has seen some blogging about design review tools from two of the AEC CAD heavyweights: Bentley and Autodesk.

Bentley has announced (29 January) the release of ProjectWise Navigator – “the first visual collaboration client for design review and analysis plus work packaging that fully supports iterative workflows and reuse of all content throughout the process.” The website has an 11-minute PowerPoint presentation by Joe Croser which gives a good overview of the product’s capabilities.

Meanwhile (and possibly not entirely coincidentally), Autodesk Design Review is now (as of 1 February) a free download – giving some of the Autodesk bloggers something to shout about (see Between the Lines, Beyond the Paper, and Connected, for example). The product has also just been independently reviewed by David Harrison at Stress-Free: Reviewing Autodesk Design Review. His conclusion:

Autodesk Design Review is a very promising tool for Windows based design teams seeking a simple way of exchanging design information, questions and opinion. The tool is free, powerful and relatively easy to use by those somewhat literate in CAD. The markup tool set makes it easy to hold fairly complicated design discussions but it does incur a heavy cost in terms of the data sizes communicated between team members. There are a number of areas where Design Review could be improved and I hope in the forthcoming releases we see some, if not all, of these issues seriously addressed.

 

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/design_review_t/

Feb 01 2007

On-demand embraced – and not just CRM

Numerous industry articles about On-demand applications or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have taken Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) as the key exemplar of take-up, but there are signs that corporations are also keen to take up other types of on-demand software.

Phil Wainewright blogs (Large organizations embrace on-demand – and not just CRM) about market research from Nucleus Research and its interesting answers to five key questions. The second question asked: “Which on-demand applications are most popular?” The result:

“CRM solutions had been adopted by a surprisingly low number of organizations in the survey — less than a third had implemented on-demand CRM, despite the high media profile of on-demand poster child Salesforce.com. Project management was the next most popular on-demand choice, adopted by almost a quarter — and interestingly, it overtakes CRM in future buying intentions, which is good news for the many vendors with offerings in that field.”

 

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/ondemand_embrac/

Feb 01 2007

PDF to become ISO standard

Cadalyst reports that Adobe intends to release the full PDF (portable document format) v1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). It is, says Adobe’s Kevin Lynch, “the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard.” View the original Adobe release here, and reaction from CAD blogger Deelip Menezes (the associated comments regarding DWF are also interesting).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/02/pdf_to_become_i/

Jan 30 2007

Kingston University research

From time to time, in my role as BIW Technologies’ head of corporate communications, I receive emails concerning student research projects. As a former researcher, I try to be helpful. The latest request for help comes from Kingston University, where student Cunal Manani has posted an online questionnaire for users to complete. Click on ‘Online Document Management in the UK’s Construction Industry’ if you want to help.

Tags: UK AEC Kingston University research collaboration technology

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/kingston_univer/

Jan 29 2007

Asite Workspace arrives

A new logo on the home page of Asite‘s website alerts us to the belated launch (or, given that Asite has previously marketed a similar product, should that read ‘relaunch’?) of Asite Workspace – announced in October 2006 as being available from December.

The web-based collaboration product is positioned as an easy-to-use “cost-effective solution for small projects”. The basic product will cost £30 per month per user (minimum period: three months). According to its special launch offer, Asite is also offering the product at £25 per month per user if users sign up for 12 months and pay £300 in advance; ie: a saving of £60 – or, if users book before 1 March 2007, £275 (cynics might suggest that at least the upfront payment could provide a short-term boost to Asite’s cashflow).

The price positions the Asite product as more expensive than the recently launched generic BT Workspace offering, though it will at least be construction-oriented, with the Brava! viewer allowing users to view and mark-up CAD drawings, etc. Will per-user licensing prove attractive? I don’t know. To date, all the more sophisticated construction collaboration platforms have tended to be priced at a flat rate according to the project, programme or enterprise involved. The argument has been that charging per user may lead to companies discouraging participation, or – perhaps worse – users sharing logins (and so corrupting audit trails) in order to keep costs down.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/asite_workspace/

Jan 29 2007

Online collaboration via Vyew

I blogged last year about JotSpot’s wiki product (acquired by Google). Another tool in the similar area is Vyew, a web conferencing solution (mentioned by Lars Plougmann). I like the idea of being able to share documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, etc online with mark-up, whiteboarding, and text-chat all enabled via a standard browser. And best of all, it’s currently free! I’m hoping to try it out later this week.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/online_collabor/

Jan 26 2007

New Autodesk collaboration blog

The growing Autodesk blogosphere now has a blog, Connected, dedicated to collaboration. Contributors (collaborators?) Jason, Alex and Mike will be delivering “perspectives on online project management and collaboration”, no doubt informed by their knowledge of Autodesk’s Buzzsaw and Constructware systems. However, they already seem quite prepared to look beyond company boundaries; witness posts about Gliffy (A web-based diagramming tool) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), among other things. I look forward to reading more posts, guys.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/new_autodesk_co/

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