Business ICT (part of Success Matrix) hosted a Web marketing and communications day today down in not so sunny Boston.

The line up consisted of Paul McIntyre on Search Engine Optimisation (I refuse to spell it with a z) Phil Crowshaw on Online Communication Tools and myself on Blogging For Business. Does that sound like a jazz trio?

I’d never met Paul before, and although I’ve heard many seminars and attended a similiar number of workshops on the subject it was good to hear someone talking sense about a subject and industry that is not without its critics. To sum up, his talk emphasised the need for good clean code using CSS, well-written content, and then all the usual requirements that make up a properly optimised site. Unfortunately, he had to leave after his talk, because of a heavy cold so I missed the opportunity to get to know him a little better - another time maybe. Paul runs Search High - www.searchhigh.co.uk

I took the floor afterwards in the run up to lunch and then Phil Crowshaw of Digital Media Active entertained us with a personal look into the future of online communications and the sort of tools that are available right now. Phil’s an entertaining and informative speaker so the session went very quickly  - and thanks for the insight into Skype Jyve Pro,

With Skype Jyve Pro experts can charge for their advice on a metered or fixed rate basis. The system manages sessions, tracks usage and handles payment.

Another of Phil’s projects is the ongoing www.expertsonline.tv site that for £27.00 a year gives you access to interviews involving a number of experts, mainly in the business development world.

Finally, Phil talked about the growth of video as an online medium, which is coming to the fore with the increasing capacity of broadband. And as he so elequently put it, ‘I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet’. A sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with.

This is a subject I’ve been discussing with associates for sometime now, and it’s good to see we’re not the only ones thinking along the same lines. When you consider the cost of print advertising, a short video clip placed on CD, or on your website, or even ina video blog can be considered excellent value for money given the amount of re-use it would get.

And only today it was revealed by The Wall Street Journal that CBS, News Corp’s Fox, NBC Universal and Viacom are in talks about creating a video website to compete with Google’s YouTube - a hot subject indeed.

Blow By Blow Productions web site  which we’re re-developing has a lot of information on what can be done with video to help promote a company.

A very enjoyable day - now back to the grindstone. :)

Last night I proposed dashing off a blog post about my positive experiences with PC World when purchasing a couple of monitors.

I expected to spend no more than about 15 minutes doing this. In fact, it took nearly three quarters of an hour, and the end result was a duplicate post that I can’t remove. This has happened before, because Blogger indicates that a post has not completed the process when it has done so. Understandably, the post is re-submitted hence the duplication. But then to be unable to remove the duplicate is both annoying and leads the reader to believe the blogger either hasn’t noticed the error or can’t be bothered to removed the excess entry.

It seems to me errors of this nature are caused by Blogger’s servers exceeding their capacity during peak periods, and this is becoming more frequent.

As I’ve said before, I will be moving over to Wordpress - but client work comes first. However, the day is getting nearer!

So, apologies to Richard Warren of the Washingborough Hall Hotel for being late for our dinner booking. Don’t you just hate technology sometimes, although I’m weighing up the experience against the pleasure of acquiring those two monitors… so technology isn’t all bad. ;)

Must get round to switching to Wordpress . It’s a general dissatisfaction thing with the Blogger system.

• Delays when adding or updating new posts
• Abortive attempts to add or update posts
• No trackback facilities

Finally, being unable to update the previous post or delete it from the main blog page, although it has deleted the permalink page.

Now where can I squeeze some extra time out of the schedule? :)