DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

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Anthony from Noble Samurai has put together a really nice video which describes how page rank drives traffic. If you don’t understand this basic principle, you’ll forever be in the dark.

If you don’t use Market samurai, the slide are still useful. If you don;t know what Market Samuari is – then heres some further info.

http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com/keyword-research

We had a brain storm and came up with a list of all the BPM technologies that are now on the market

With any luck if I have time for it, I might pad this out with some notes on what they’re all like.

It started just two days ago when a friend updated her facebook page with concerns over the latest round of privacy settings.  Facebook is no stranger to critisism in this area so at the time I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Two news articles later in the Australian press as well as talk of an investigation by the Australian Privacy watch dog and I was ready to find out more. Following on from the tragic murder of a young women in Australia  by a facebook stalker, users have payed closer attention to their privacy settings. The problem is there are over 50 different settings in multiple dispersed locations over the site according to the telegraph.

Whilst its great to have this level of control, it just isn’t practically possible to administer this, especially when your privacy controls are modified so frequently.

The SMH here linked to several sites of interest. Most disturbing is ‘your open book’, a stalkers paradise to highlight the sort of information that people share about them selves. The ‘recently searched’ area is not for the faint hearted and is a real eye opener to hwat people are looking for online. On second thoughts perhaps that’s no great surprise.  I’ve chosen not to link to it.

Next are some sites with browser add ons to help you analyse your profile and how to get the most secure settings.

Pressure is mounting on the Facebook management through an organised group at http://www.quitfacebookday.com/

So what does it all mean? Will I be closing my account? No I don’t think so but I will be locking down my settings and monitoring the situation over the next few weeks, as well as looking out for an email from one Mark Zuckerberg.

Their PR department is most likely in overdrive.

Here’s a great offer for senior managers who are looking either to get started in process modelling or to take things up a notch.

Synoptic Consulting are offering Sydneysiders a 60 minute process modelling workshop to demonstrate how to optimise process design using some of the tricks and techniques that we use with our customers. They will use a process modelling tool with a process of your choice to make this as useful and practical as possible.

Attendees find this session both inspiring and practical to take away and start making significant improvements to process design. The session is free of charge to businesses in Sydney Metro until the end of June 2010.

To find out more and to check your eligibility, please contact davidb@synoptic.com.au

Here’s a quick share of an article by Redux, that I thought BPMer might find useful.

http://www.reduxonline.com/blog/2010/5/13/you-cannot-teach-bpm-you-have-to-experience-it-first-to-unde.html

From time to time, I’m approached by IT vendors and suppliers with offers and discounts that you can also benefit from. This one is from Dell and mainly for Small Business Owners, sole operators and productivity addicts like me.

I’m told that its a limited offer so if your looking for hardware for your home office or small business, check out some of what on offer at

http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com/partners/small-bus-offer/

This page has been timed to self distruct

The more I do online the more understand and appreciate the relevance of email marketing. In the age of massive websites and communities such as facebook and twitter some would argue that these communities are more valuable but for me it really depends on the brand and the people you are trying to reach.

Email newsletters are still a great way to gently remind your user community of who you are and what your do. I’ve put together a collection of really solid articles which will give you some insights on how to build killer email campaigns, track your progress and improve automation.

Check them out. They’re in no particular order.

I know this is somewhat off topic for a business technology blog but its so strangely awesome that I had to share it with you so I hope you enjoy.

It’s not everyday that someone offers you one hundred trillion dollars so I took some photos to prove it.

My colleague has been tracking the decline of the Zimbabwean dollar from 2002 to 2009. The currency has been steadily and then very rapidly declining in value until it was finally abandoned in favour of the American dollar.

The photo is a timeline of bank notes between that period.

This wiki article tell how hyperinflation got so out of control in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar

ITnews have the story

http://bit.ly/aukSKK

Time seems to have run away with me this week so just a very quick post to share a neat little trick I learnt this week that might just make you life easier too.

The problem I had to solve was how we could use the Calendar in CRM in a way that was meaningful. By that I mean that each user had populated free / busy information in their CRM Calendar. My clients are heavy users of Gmail and google apps and are largely based away from their desk and sometimes work from their smart phones.

The real problem in that case was, how to match up data from SugarCRM to their Gmail accounts.

The solution was incredibly simple. An module on sugar exchange called MyCRM connector. It’s technically in beta but its production ready and stable when tested on my test account.

It was easy to install through the module loader but not that intuitive to configure without the provided instructions.

Screen shot - My CRM Connector

MyCRM Connector allows you to populate you gmail calendar from Sugar and visa versa. Fantastic. As well as meetings you can also sync activities such as phone calls.