Communication Circles

The good news is there is so much information available to be consumed for anyone who wants it. The bad news is the amount of information coming at you can overwhelm you.

This trade-off got me thinking about the communication circles we sit in the middle of. When I say the middle of I do mean the middle as many of us (myself included) work in an environment where we talk on the phone while checking our email and engaging in one or more IM conversations and maybe even try to keep up on the corporate micro-blogging site.

The interesting part is that unlike computers, humans cannot really multi-task. When we start to read our e-mail or respond to IMs we stop listening to the phone call we are suppose to be listening to. I know we think we are still listening, but the number of calls that I am on that generate the "I'm sorry, I was multi-tasking, can you repeat the question" comment tells me most people can only barely manage multiple concurrent tasks.

On top of the multi-tasking issue, there is also the question of what if any of the information flowing at us can we or should we retain. On one hand we grab bits of information and put them on our calendars or our to-do lists. The rest of the information just flows at us at amazing speeds. We capture some in our memory for use with work, family or play (how else can you win that trivia game), but the rest flows past us and remains part of the river of information. Our best hope is that we retain the important stuff and have the tools (like search engines) to fish it out of the information river when we need it again.

There are no easy answers to managing your communication circle, but being aware of the channels and leaning how to manage each one, while understanding the tools needed to fish out the information you need from the information river will go a long way.

Tell us about your information circle and what kind of tools you use to stay afloat.

Web Presence Layers

The seven layers of the OSI model do a great job of explaining how network connectivity works and for the network engineers of the world it forms the background of their world.

For small business, who have a web presence (and you do have a web presence, don't you), there is another model that matters. Having not seen anyone define this model elsewhere (I am sure I will get corrected if I missed an existing model), I am going to call it the Web Presence Layers model ("WPL").

This model is made up of:

• Domain - The name you use on the web for websites, emails, etc (i.e. companyname.com) that you register with domain registrars like TechnologyPlumbing favorite 1and1.com

• Hosting - The place your website resides, either at a third party provider or internally on your own servers. Please don't host this yourself, unless you are in the business of hosting websites, as you have a business to run.
  

• Design - The templates, style sheets, etc. that make up the look and feel of your web site. Tools like Dreamweaver make this kind of work manageable, or you can find many talented professionals to do this kind of work for you on a one-time or out-sourced basis.

• Content - The static, dynamic and e-commerce content used on your website, along with any content management system you might utilize.
  

• Monitoring & Tools - The tools and services used to ensure your site is up and functional. This includes tools like website monitors (see yesterday's posting for details on services like Dotcom-Monitor), link validators, search engine optimization (SEO), and payment services like PayPal
  

• Social Networking - Your presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks designed to enhance your web presence and drive users to your web site.
  

Understanding this model and mastering its layers is the key to having a successful presence on the web. We will continue to offer ways to understand and use these layers either on your own or by partnering with your technology provider of choice.

How could that happen?

One of the web sites I work with went down over the weekend. In this case nothing crashed, there was no denial of service or other sinister activity, it was just a combination of bad service from my hosting provider and bad luck by the owner of the site (the details behind this are for another day or maybe never).

What this outage reminded me of is that despite the best of intentions and controls sometime things combine to cause an outage. So after my experience this weekend, I wanted to write about monitoring your website so if all else fails you will at least know when your site is down.

In my corporate world job we have a lot of tools that monitor servers, networks and applications and while they do the job they do tend to do so in an overlapping patchwork manner.

In the SMB world, it is simply not feasible to deploy this kind of enterprise strength set of tools (read, way too much money). Instead we are left to create our own safety net to ensure our websites remain functioning at all times.

It is certainly possible to build your own scripts to check your site and create notifications if the results are not what you are expecting. On the other hand there are a number of "cloud" based services that will do all this for you for free or at a very reasonable cost.

Based on my corporate experience, I am employing the cloud based services from Dotcom-Monitor. Their initial tier of services is affordable for even the smallest business.

This monitoring service does an http request of your website at frequency intervals you select and can check the resulting page for the presence or lack there of a text field or fields. If the site does not come up or it does not look as you are expecting it can send out notifications via any number of methods from email to phone calls and pretty much everything in between.

Now I am sure some of you may be asking why I don't use the tools provided by the company hosting the site and the answer is twofold - One is that in the event the hosting company has issues, their monitoring tools may not be in position to tell you of the issue and secondly, Dotcom-Monitor's tools are just better then what I have seen from most of the hosting companies. So while monitoring your website, by itself can't prevent the site from going down, it will give you fast notification of the issue(s) and having a simple and efficient way to do this is key to time and cash strapped small businesses.

It should be noted that this is not an ad for DOTCOM-Monitor, I am simply a happy client, and have been for around 7 years. Whatever tool you use is up to you, but having something that checks your site's availability, so when that event or combination of events happens, you will be aware of what is happening and be in position to do something about it, which is something you need to make happen.

An Update from the College Scene

Sarah here again. Apparently my last posting was pretty popular as this blog goes, so thanks to all those who read it.

I have now completed 3 weeks of my sophomore year so I figured I'd give you all an update on how the technology failures of the first week have shaped up.

My Economics eBook finally got working at the end of the second week, but not with the original options promised. The original options were to buy both the eBook and the homework or just the homework. But now they tell us they can't give us just the book. My professor is not pleased, as she said, "You would think they have some incentive to give me what I want with all the revenue from the 400+ students I have paying them each year, but apparently not." I didn't mind, as I was planning on buying the eBook and homework package all along, but nonetheless it was very mishandled technology.

My Aero design course has been slightly more successful. While the system does still crash at least once a class period, it is working on most people's home computers now (except for those silly enough to bring a mac to engineering school), and the lag has decreased significantly. We now have better options for interacting with our virtual world, including an option that centers your view on the screen you are standing in front of to better read it. Instead of having to right-click and drag your view around to get a so-so look at the screen, you can now look straight at it no matter how close you are to it (see picture). Also, when you customize your avatar it is supposed to stay the same when you log out, but I haven't tested this facet yet. The program still refuses to encrypt my password and the tab key doesn't work, but each class we get a new update, so hopefully in another couple weeks most of the bugs will be worked out. Unfortunately I feel like until then we spend more time trying to work the program than we do learning the material, which is a problem as our first exam is coming up this Friday.

That's all for now, I'll be back in another week or two.