Miles’ Blog » 2006 » February

I try hard not to harp on here about Port 80, but I wanted to mention two things;

1. The West Australian ran an article about Port 80 today, front page of IT section. The out of work bit was incorrect, but the rest Neale sure hit on the head.

2. On April 11th, we’re proud to announce we’ll have two amazing speakers here for our first speaking event of 2006.

The first, John Allsopp, is director of Westciv, the CSS software people and ‘one of the best CSS resources on the web’. John is also one of the four organisers of the Web Essentials conferences. Second is Mark Boulton, typographer, designer and all-round interesting guy. Mark is currently working at the BBC in Wales, and we’re pleased he is visiting us here in Perth.

Mark & John will be speaking on typography, web standards and whatever takes their fancy. More details will soon be announced on the Port 80 website.

Photo: Davis in his bedroom, with large black & white print out on wall.

We’re all bombarded every day with hundreds of advertising and marketing messages. If you’re anything like the media consumer I am, it’s probably closer to thousands. So, how do you make your company or product stand out from the pack?

For years, I have consulted with clients and suggested that it has less to do with branding or ‘front of mind awareness’ or ‘love marks’ as it does with plain old personality - your business needs a personality just like your friends and colleagues do.

So recently I have been encouraging our clients to take up blogging as a way of ‘humanising the company’, or as I prefer, adding a personality.

It’s a fairly low cost way of spreading the word about your services and products, and adding your name to the blogosphere (I shudder at that term).

I recently read about Hugh McLeod, who has found a unique way of flogging wine for Stormhoek. They have been sending bottles of wine to certain bloggers, and to other events such as Tech Crunch 5, as a way of getting the word out about them.

Simple, isn’t it? Get your product to the people with a wide circle of influence, sit back and hope they talk about it. It’d be even better if the talk were positive, which it nearly always is when the wine is free. The guy is a genius.

I remember my wife’s hair salon receiving free movie tickets a few years ago from certain film distributors too - what do hairdressers talk about for the hour they cut your hair after seeing a film? Obvious, isn’t it.

Now the picture above is of one of our client’s bottles of Merlot. Gherardi from Margaret River, WA is a great winery, and Peter Gherardi is a great winemaker. I’m not being paid in free wine or cash to say that, it just seemed fitting I plugged it on this post.

Photo: Gherardi Merlot 2001, Australia Day picnic.

I’m off on a jaunt in May, and will be in Singapore on 15/16th, then London, heading north to Durham and possibly Ireland or Scotland (am I that energetic?) from 17th - 25th.

Having never been to the northern hemisphere, I am keen to experience the water going down the wrong way, beers that are very different, and accents I’ll have trouble understanding (Mental note: I should watch some more UK comedies on ABC before I go).

The craziest part of it is that in just an hour or two flying, you can be somewhere completely different. Not just a different city, but also a different country! For a West Aussie, I find that incredible - I am used to nearly five hours by plane just to get to our nearest capital city - although South Australians could be said to have different accents. :)

I am interested in finding out if there are any events or meets at the pub for web types (think Port 80) anywhere near any of the above places around those dates. I’m keen to obviously meet others and hopefully also spread the Port 80 message, if appropriate.

So, invites to web events, offers of accommodation, tips on places to see, they’re all welcome here - just comment or email me. Cheers! :)

Image: kids with sparklers at a night time concert and picnic.

There seems to be a growing trend amongst people at the moment to create funky looking URL’s (oh so web2.0) using not so common TLD’s and then adding a hostname or two.

Think the great social bookmarking site, del.icio.us (why is it that they don’t also alias www.del.icio.us?).

Problem is, that unless you’re going to register every variable possible, you’ll end up like my mate, Myles Eftos, who is building a web2.0 project called sa.ndwi.ch. Problem is the other variations, such as san.dwi.ch and sandwi.ch are owned by two other disparate folk, and I invariably type one of those combinations 2 out of 3 times when trying to find Myles’ site.

However, I’m not picking on him, as he is certainly not alone in this; Yahoo! property del.icio.us has competitors in their space as well, with delicio.us, deli.cio.us, delic.io.us, d.elicio.us and de.licio.us all owned by different registrants.

Another Yahoo! purchase, blo.gs is also open to confusion with b.lo.gs and bl.o.gs, not to mention w.eblo.gs. At least they also have their hands on weblo.gs.

I believe this causes great confusion out there for both website visitors, and also branding - unless you are going to grab every derivative of the country code extension, you’re just leaving yourself open to trouble. A great business (or domain) name is the beginning of a great brand. It should be memorable and create a certain feeling when heard. If a misplaced full stop can throw your website visitors somewhere else, will it be the image your business or project wants?

Now I am off to register milesbur.ke, m.ilesbur.ke, mi.lesbur.ke, mil.esbur.ke, mile.sbur.ke, miles.bur.ke and milesb.ur.ke…

Photo: Bill Posters Prosecuted, city laneway in Perth.

I’m pleased to announce that the last few months have been very productive and exciting for Port 80. Firstly, we had a great WA Web Awards last August, which reaffirmed to me what great talent and work comes out of our neck of the woods.

Secondly, our first interstate chapter opened in December, with the launch of Port 80 Canberra. They’re having another meeting tonight, so from all feedback received, Canberra is behind this idea.

Thirdly, we’ve been working with Dave Horan and Tracy Logan in starting Port 80 Rochester – that’s right, a New York chapter of Port 80 is kicking off at their inaugural meeting on March 2nd.

I’m hoping there’s plenty more chapters on the way.

A number of people have asked me about the reasons behind the original decision to start Port 80, and so here are some of my thoughts on what was racing through my crazy mind back in August 2002.

The reasons behind my original decision to start Port 80, was three-fold;

1. Many people in the industry are either freelancers or very small teams. This makes it hard for them to communicate to one another or learn and network with similar peers. I was facing a similar situation at the time, when I decided to go freelance instead of full time from a team of 4. I didn’t want to miss out on having that contact with my peers, and I am always partial to a beer.

2. Many of us in the industry are already members of groups such as Macromedia Users Group, Web Standards Group, Blog Meet-ups, etc, but you’ll find that most of these groups are very specific to what they cover (many are software-centric), and what they exclude, and often it’s a case of not wanting to listen to two hours of talks just to ‘hang out’ and meet up with others in the same industry.

3. I believe that everyone needs to better understand each others roles - designers need to grasp what makes a develop tick, and vice versa - what better way than over a relaxing beer at a bar somewhere local?

One of the reasons Port 80 has become popular is that we are inclusive with other groups - we actively encourage ‘cross participation’ amongst our own members and other groups, so we’re not about trying to woo members away from these other groups - they do a great job of informing their members about Macromedia products / CSS / etc but there’s also a dire need within our industry to ‘cross borders’ to a certain degree, and have CSS zealots speaking (arguing?) with tables lovers, with Macromedia versus Open Source purists, etc which is where Port 80 comes into play.

We’ve been running monthly meetings at a local pub since September 2002. We get anywhere from 8 - 40 people along, we sit/stand around and drink beer/wine/soft drink and informally chat about everything related to our industry (and quite commonly, things that don’t :)). It’s a fantastic way to meet your peers, find work, offer work and generally find out where the industry at a local level is at.

There’s no entry fees (however you are encouraged to become a member), there’s no structured format, and no forcing speeches on anyone. We have 500+ people on our lists, and as you can see on the forums, a fair amount of forums users that either don’t come along to the monthly meets, or come to one per year.

This was all mainly my doing until June 2004, when we incorporated as an official not for profit organisation, to help fund projects such as the WA Web Awards, pay for hosting, pay for any out of pocket expenses and just provide a vehicle for those who want to get more involved.

We have a fantastic committee of passionate people in varying roles, who meet up every second or third month to talk about bigger picture ideas, such as opening in other states, organising other events, write industry documents, consult to government, etc.

I have heard plenty of stories over the last few years, with people saying they found work or found employees, collaborated on projects, created new friends, learnt new things and plenty of other anecdotes. Speaking personally, it’s a very valuable experience - I am always learning new things off my peers, I hire most of my staff as a result of meeting them at Port 80 meetings, and I get a good warm fuzzy feeling from doing my part to help the local industry.

If you’re interested in discussing starting a chapter of Port 80 in your part of the world, have a look around the website, perhaps join the conversation on the forums, and get in touch with me – we’re keen to see the fantastic community we’ve built here in WA replicated elsewhere.

Photo: The winners at WA Web Awards 2005. Photo by Blinc Studio.