Author Archives: JamesH

Ducking and diving down under…

Seeing a 3 metre shark heading straight for me with it’s mouth open, I heeded the divemaster’s advice from the briefing session and ducked down behind the reef.  The experience of that shark passing less than half a metre over the top of me is one I won’t forget. I was close enough to have plucked out one of the teeth it was about to shed from the front of its jaw – but remembering just how sharp one tooth felt when we handled it in the briefing session, I kept my hands well away.

Sounds dramatic? The stuff of dreams or nightmares? OK – let me come clean… Yes I was in the water with the shark and yes it came that close to me with it’s mouth open.   However, I was diving at the Aquarium of Western Australia (AQWA) and not the open sea on this occasion and an encounter like that was almost guaranteed when you’re in a tank full of large nurse sharks and smaller whaler sharks.

Despite their size and scary ‘open mouthed’ appearance, nurse sharks are relatively placid, particularly if they’ve spent a fair chunk of their lives being waited on hand and foot in a big bath.  However, if you were to pop up right in front of them when they’re not expecting it then they have been known to bite, so the emphasis of the briefing before entering the water is to make sure you have excellent buoyancy control and stay close to the bottom of the aquarium at all times.

Having not been under the water for a couple of years, I was grateful for the open water refresher I’d done on a wreck trail dive the week before – at least I knew if I my mask was flicked off by another diver’s fin or I had problems with buoyancy I would deal with it calmly and not inadvertently head into the path of an oncoming shark or stingray.

I must admit feeling a twinge of apprehension as I was about to enter the water and looked down to see a large grey outline with a fin breaking the surface. If you’re watching these creatures through the glass tunnels and windows below, firstly you won’t see this classic view of the shark’s fin and secondly, the effect of the glass reduces the apparent size of the object being viewed by 30%.

This size reduction caused much hilarity amongst the audience gathered in the observation tunnel below as, according to my wife and daughters later, we looked ‘like hobbits’ when we entered the water. Diving with an audience was certainly a new experience and quite disconcerting when you see them pointing at things around you that you can’t see as quickly – The narrow field of view from the mask, restriction of the regulator feed,  position of the air tank and resistance of the water makes rapid head and body turning harder. It was only on playing back some of the video my daughter was taking of me from the observation tunnel that I appreciated how close I was to some of the tank’s inhabitants, particularly the stingray who seems to have developed a bit of a game of darting underneath the divers at unexpected moments.

click for larger view

For any divers heading out to Western Australia for the first time then I recommend Bell Scuba for their excellent range of gear for hire. These guys also take some responsibility for looking after the Bell Park Wreck Trail dive site which is literally off the shore opposite their beach front premises.

It’s in a tank, only 5 metres down and the inhabitants are more like pets than wild creatures – but, it’s an amazing experience and well worth doing if you can.  Find the Shark Dive Experience details here and a Virtual Tour that gives a better idea than my fuzzy pics.

Gone 'rideabout' down under…

The Western Australian city of Perth has changed a fair bit over the last 15 years since my first visit out there. When you revisit places over a long time period, the change is very noticeable. The city skyline is still a familiar shape with it’s distinctive modern skyscrapers set on the banks of the Swan River but the northern suburbs, where my brother-in-law has lived for 20 years, have expanded dramatically since my last visit in 2000.  The shopping malls and retail areas have doubled and tripled in size and the once relatively peaceful freeways (by UK standards) are now bursting with traffic. The traffic ‘squeeze’, as it is referred to over there, is becoming a severe problem and various schemes are underway to relieve the pressures on the road system.

Cars were also in the press for another reason on our arrival as we landed in Perth in the aftermath of a dramatic and violent storm.  The newspapers, TV and web were full of images of cars that had suffered the effect of being hit by hailstones the size of golf balls and bigger – when metal panels and glass meet fast falling lumps of ice – the ice wins – big time!

My brother-in-law’s solution to commuting misery has been to buy a motorbike – which makes the journey in and out of the city relatively painless as he just rides between the lines of stationary or crawling cars. As soon as we arrived at his place I was drooling over the Triumph Street Triple he rides and was both somewhat surprised and delighted that my suggestion about hiring a bike met with approval from my wife – who has never been the biggest of bike fans.

A quick search on the web and I discovered Sunset Motorcycle Hire who had an interesting range of larger Suzukis available. I rang Colin, who runs the company, and arranged to pick up a DL 650 V-Strom during the following week.

It turned out to be a good choice for someone of my height and size as the riding position is very comfortable but it still offers the kind of capable performance I’ve experienced on larger Sports Tourers in the past such as GSXs, VFRs and my beloved modified GPZ750R.

I’ve plotted out the road trip we did on this Google Map but basically it can be summarised as…

  • Connolly to Mundaring Weir (where the Mundaring Weir Hotel is recommended for a break/drink)
  • Mundaring Weir to Serpertine Falls (great/quiet roads through the hills and good for a refreshing dip – wild kangaroos seem guaranteed)
  • Serpentine Falls into the City (ride in the shadows of the skyscrapers then out through Northbridge, the old quarter)
  • City to Connolly via the Sunset Coast road (time this for the evening for the full effect of the sun setting over the ocean)

click for larger view...

So, if you’re heading for Perth and want to enjoy the sights without getting stuck in traffic then I recommend contacting Sunset Motorcycle Hire for their good range of bikes and excellent service. Then get out into the Perth Hills, along the quiet outback roads, tour the City then head along the sunset coast for a memorable day’s biking.

Join the dots – Convergence the talk at TFM 10

No doubt I was strolling the aisles of last year’s Technology For Marketing (TFM) show in a bit of a daze looking for relevant info for the project in hand. This year however,  I was introducing an ex-colleague from many years ago to the broader delights of digital marketing/technologies so was obviously paying a bit more attention than usual.

I’m not sure if I overlooked the fact that dotMailer was now just one smaller part of a much bigger dotDigital Group last year but I was somewhat surprised to see a whole bunch of ‘dotCompanies’ where once there was one. My eye was drawn to dotCommerce and dotContentManagement being promoted – I’m pretty sure there was a dotSEO in there somewhere and I’m guessing a dotSocialMedia must be on the cards somewhere.

It seems a single point solution doesn’t cut it these days and an ever growing number of organisations are expanding their offerings across the digital space, with a lot of commentary about the convergence of WCM, Social Media, Analytics, eCommerce and/or CRM.

Maybe on my upcoming web project challenges for 2010 this will finally be the year when I use one provider for more than one of the requirement areas mentioned above. Previously I’ve always focused on best of breed and/or tactical point solutions before but perhaps we are reaching a position where a traditionally Web Content Management orientated solution offers sufficient email marketing, social media and analytics capabilities to consider a more integrated approach.

I’ve had some promising experiences with Joomla, Drupal and EPiServer in the last year for integrating WCM with community building but I’m still drawn to familiar long established point solutions for things like email marketing and analytics. Does anyone have strong tangible examples of email marketing and analytics integration in Content Management Systems that counter the best of breed approaches?

Observations made in presentations about ‘conversation being king’ and content being boring are starting to resonate having seen first hand how social media generated conversation can have a direct effect on ecommerce activity.

Some chats with SEO specialists suggest an interesting time ahead with real-time search and also that Google may finally be making moves to squash link farming activities more effectively than before. I’ve seen increasing evidence over the last year that these old black hat techniques are still working and this really undermines the efforts of those who approach search marketing ethically and professionally. With Google’s ‘don’t do evil’ brand value increasingly being called into question it risks greater damage if it opens the door to even more search spamming in its efforts to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook.

London Comms Group Prezi…

Many thanks to the London Communications and Engagement Group last night for their kind invitation to present and discuss the area of Content Technologies. The Prezi is embedded below should others be interested in joining the conversation.

Promotion and credit given to CMS Watch (a service of the Real Story Group) and Kristina Halvorson for their great work on the Technology Vendor Map 2010 and Content Strategy for the Web

London Comms Prezi on Prezi

Talk and beer

What's the point of analysts?…

Or rather, what’s the point of analyst organisations? This is really a question that’s been raised for me by the debate about Forrester clamping down on its analysts producing and promoting personal blogs.

Reading this excellent article about Forrester’s action underlines the dilemma for many organisations thrown up by Social Media – who becomes the ‘authentic’ voice or voices of your organisation? Is the genie out of the bottle as far as this is concerned and by trying to pull the reigns back now will organisations face criticism in the way Forrester has about being heavy-handed and effectively limiting its analysts from establishing their own personal brands.

As this pyramid from SageCircle emphasises, Analyst Relations can be quite a personal thing and it’s not so much the analyst organisation itself who you are building the relationship with but often an individual who has specific experience and knowledge of your market sector and operations. The individualism of analysts has been brought into sharp focus by Twitter. Firstly it makes analysts, and the organisations they represent, more accessible but also more transparent. In the cut and thrust of everyday debate, you get to see fallibility more easily but likewise, knowledge and expertise shine through too.

I think what we’re seeing with the Forrester move and recent consolidation in the CMS analyst space is an exposed vulnerability of analyst organisations which have, in many respects, built their operations on inherently poor knowledge flows, communications and, primarily ‘conversations’ between organisations and individuals. To a typical analyst organisation, knowledge is power and wealth, that it benefits from being a gatekeeper to.  Twitter has been blowing this apart over the last year or so by enabling like-minded and/or commonly interested people to get together online and offline far more easily and effectively to exchange knowledge and information. With technology continuing to break down boundaries and facilitate conversation perhaps it’s more the case that ‘we’re all analysts now’?