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.