Apple does it right.

On Wednesday I received an email notice from Apple saying that Snow Leopard, the new operating system was ready to ship. If I ordered right away I could have it by Friday.

Price. I thought about it for a few microseconds and then placed my order. After all, a major upgrade for $29, what a deal. And, the reviews were coming in very positive. A faster, smaller upgrade that solved real problems instead of adding on unnecessary features. And, it was shipping a month early. (Take note Microsoft!)

As Promised. Friday afternoon comes and as promised here comes Snow Leopard disguised as a FedEx delivery person. Right on time.

Customer Service. Ahh, but there is a glitch, a lump of coal in the snow. When I start installing the new system I hit an error. There is a scratch on the CD-ROM and the installation errors out. But, my original system is still intact and running fine. So, I call customer service. Something I don’t normally do. Hey, it’s only $29. (Actually it is $69 because I ordered the family pack license for 5 computers.) I can’t believe it when the Apple representatives answer the phone on the third ring. After some verification of my address I’m told a new CD will be on its way. I should have it Tuesday or Wednesday. “We are so sorry for the inconvenience,” the representative tells me with what sounds like true sincerity.

The snow leopard is very rare. So is a company that ships weeks before a deadline, does fast shipping, offers a product with a low price and increased performance, and has absolutely great customer service if something goes wrong. Now, that’s the way to run a business. Apple shows that this is possible. It’s a shame that the few remaining Snow Leopards living in the remote Himalayan mountains of Tibet are so rare. The world needs more Snow Leopards.

Photo by Dave Murphy. Check out his Flickr photos.

The established way to publish a book, or calendar, or photo book was to beg a publisher to accept your manuscript. An editor would help refine your writing and get it prepared for printing. For economy hundreds or thousands of books would be printed and stored as inventory while the publisher and the author worked on marketing the book. The author normally gets 5-10% of the sale of the book.

If changes have to be made a new edition is set up and another printing run.

WIth Lulu.com all of that changes.

Here is a great opportunity if you have anything you are passionate about. From your business to a hobby, you can write about what you know and love and publish a book about it for minimal costs. And, you can make about 80% on the sale of each book.

This is a great way to promote a product or establish your expertise in your field. (What a great resume builder!).

Or, if you are into photography you can publish a calendar or photo book with your writing and images.

I recently published my first book, Secrets of a Web Developer using Lulu.com and discovered the following:

1. I could use Word to write and layout the text and graphics.
2. Word will build a table of contents and an index with just a few clicks of the mouse. Both of these can be quickly updated if any changes are made to the text.
3. Using Word styles greatly simplified the editing and formatting process. With every element on the page marked with a specific style all I had to do was change the style and that element changed throughout the entire document. (Very much like CSS styles.)
4. PDF format (printed from the Word file) is much more stable and easy to work with, especially when using fonts that are not common on Window machines.
5. My start up costs were zero (not counting the weeks and weeks it took me to write, edit, and fine-tune the contents.
6. Errors could be corrected immediately. The only challenge was the time it took to upload a 300 page file (80 meg).

90 percent of the work was preparing the manuscript. I had over thirty Word documents that were converted into web page tutorials using a program called Wimba Create. After updating and revising each of these doc files inserted them into a master document. In the master document I changed each of the styles that I had used for Wimba to the look and feel I wanted for the book. As I inserted each new document the Wimba styles automatically changed to the new look and feel of the master document.

To build the Table of Contents all I had to do was position the cursor near the beginning of the document and use Insert/Document elements/Table of Contents. Each of the major headlines was used to build the table of contents. If I changed the document all I had to do was right-mouse click on the table of contents and select “update field” from the list of options.

The index was a little more difficult. Going through the document I highlighted each keyword I wanted in the index and hit CTRL OPTION Shift x. This made a hidden field containing the index information. After the keywords were selected I went to the end of the document and used Insert/Index and Tables and selected the format for the index.

The only real problem I had was when the index word was bold in the document it showed up bold in the index as well. Even after going in to edit the index markers the bold would not go away. For my next book I will create the index marker in the main text so it won’t be bold.

Once I had everything ready to go and had created a cover using PhotoShop I used the Lulu.com publishing wizard. It took about four hours one morning to complete the process. Along the way I discovered that it was easier to use a PDF file for the cover art instead of using the online cover creator. When I had first designed the cover I had only thought of the front and had to rebuild it to a specific dimension including a back cover as well.

I also used the FTP uploading service because of the larger file size I had. Once the FTP transfer is complete the file is automatically transferred into the My Lulu files where it can be selected as part of the content. That means that each time you connect to the FTP server it will be empty.

I first uploaded the Word document. However, Lulu gave an error because I had used a special font (Adobe Caslon) and Lulu didn’t have that available. They recommended that I make a PDF file from the Word document which effectively embeds the font as part of the document.

After I finished the wizard Lulu automatically built a web page with a preview window. I am able to customize which pages show up in the preview window as well as add a text describing the book. (I used the introduction section from the book itself.)

I also built a landing page on my website describing the book and added a brief summary on my home page.

My start up cost was zero.

And, here’s the best part: Instant Revisions. As a proud published author I sent an email out to members of my family. About ten minutes later I get an email from my son pointing out that I misspelled XHTML (XHTLM) three places (the magic of copy and paste!). I quickly made the fixes, reuploaded the files, and ran through the wizard again. The correction was made in less than an hour. Now that’s my kind of publishing.

The downside of Lulu.com (and other self-publishing venues)

• You are in control of the entire process. You are your own editor and graphic designer and it is very hard catching all those errors, weak writing, and horrible design flaws.
• The finished book will only look professional if you create a professionally design document. Headers, page numbers, typography, page layout, and graphics are all essential to making a book look and feel “right”.
• Designing a cover is especially important and a step I found very difficult. I put off publishing for weeks as I agonized over the cover design.
• Having a book from O’Reilly or Harcourt Brace is like having a degree from Harvard or MIT. It means you have gone through the wringer and survived and that most likely the text fairly high quality
• No one will buy your book unless you get the word out and market it

The benefits of Self Publishing

• The book is immediately available and easy to update
• You are in control of the entire process
• The books are printed as they are ordered. You don’t have to buy any expensive inventory that might sit in your basement for years.
• You make about 80% on the sale of each book
• You book is available to a global market
• You can be any age, any body, any where, writing about any thing

Let me know when you are published. Leave a comment with a link to your newly published text!

If you haven’t been out to WhiteHouse.gov lately I suggest you take a look. President Obama and his communications team know about the Web and they know how to communicate. Notice how easy they make it for you to send your ideas and thoughts to the team in Washington. (Of course, their followup in the weeks ahead will really show if the communication loop is truly there.)

The next time you open up iTunes, check out the Presidential Podcasts. No longer waiting for the news media to take their cut and put their spin on the topic, the President is now producing weekly video podcasts that you can download and play and decide for yourself. Notice how the title isn’t “The President’s Weekly Address” but instead: “Your Weekly Address”. Those few words change the whole purpose of the message. It is a message for you, it gives whoever watches this ownership.

In this week’s address the President mentioned the creation of a new website http:Recovery.Gov. Of course, I immediately pulled up the site to only find a landing page with links to WhiteHouse.gov and USA.gov (and several validation errors….) I’ll be interested to see what they do with this.

At first I was disappointed when I did a view/source not to see the Google Analytics code at the bottom of the page and then it dawned on me… this is the President’s Office. They can track all of the analytics they want for any of their landing pages.

The Web is more than eCommerce or watching videos of Mentos and Coke. It is going to be one of the major tools that will help us work together to fix the things that are broken. Finally, after 20 years, we finally have a President that understands and is ready to use this incredible communication tool.

And, it also brings up the question: What are you doing with your web knowledge that will make a change in our world?

We feel fine is an interesting Java Applet utilizing colors, shapes, and motion. It summarizes phrases from blogs on the Web based on emotion keywords, weather, age, sex, etc.

Check out the presentation that its creator, Jonathan Harris made during a TED conference:

Here is a quote from their mission page:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Six movements of We Feel Fine

Leverage your knowledge of the Web. Here’s a great opportunity to meet some really interesting people and help non-profits with their web presentation.

Sierra Bravo is a web design group in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and they are putting together their 2nd annual Overnight Website Challenge.

The Challenge: Build ten teams of volunteer web pros to create free websites for ten nonprofits. Last time we dropped the F-word (free free free) we had more takers than we could take. Sierra Bravo fully expects that this kind of loose talk will again open the floodgates for non-profits seeking help and do-gooder types with mad programming chops. So, until there are no more good nonprofits with bad websites, let’s do it again.

Even if you aren’t a professional coder I’m sure the folks at Sierra Bravo would love to have you pouring coffee or making movies.

Be a part of the movement of using the Web to help change the world.

– Thanks Jesse for sending me this link!

Plan to attend? Post your experience as a comment to this blog entry.

Sumo Paint a really fun paint application written in Flex. Its really snappy. This is what web applications should all be like!
When you click on one of the shape tools, look in the upper right corner for the “Shape Trails” checkbox and then start noodling around. Too much fun…

Sumo Paint Logo

I often talk about my son Micah in my classes because he gives me so many real-life examples that show how the concepts I present in class are put to work out in the real world.

Micah has written an interesting resume building site named GigTide using Adobe Flex. When he first published the site he received emails from several users in Italy and Greece asking him to fix the application so they could use the special characters of their language.

Did he have to re-write the entire application? Nope. All he had to do was change the character encoding to UTF-8 (Read Tim Bray’s article if you’d like to know all the gory details about character encoding.) Now GigTide.com can be used by Americans as well as by people that use a script languages found in other parts of the world.

And, its a good thing too, because when Micah checked his Google Analytic numbers the other day he discovered a nice surge in hits from Thailand. He did a little research and discovered a Thai blogger had written about GigTide and it triggered a surge in interest with the site.

He did a little research and found the CyberBiz blog entry showing GigTide in Thai.

That’s the example. Here’s what I teach in my course:

• Keep in mind that when you put a web site up that you have the entire world as your market. Not just your town, or your state, or your country, but the potential of the whole world. (Think on how you can leverage your product/service/site to address more than the people in your own village…)
• Use Google Analytics to keep track of what your site(s) are doing
• Write your code and design your applications so they are accessible to people around the world

There’s a new web site, Animoto, that builds animated videos automatically from your photos and music. Here’s a sample version of some shots from my Mexico trip:

You can make a short video for free or a longer video for $3. Use your own music or choose from the music on the Animoto site. You can email the results or embed them in a web page like I did here.

One idea is to make the video and then record a voice over and replace the music track with your voice over. You can also include images with words to get titles and key ideas across to the user.

This is LOTS of fun.

TechSmith has released Jing, a great screen/video capture tool that runs on both Macintosh and Windows. It has a great interface that is snappy and very intuitive. Just hover your mouse over the "sun" icon located in the corner of your screen and capture any screen shot or video to save on your computer or put out on their server. Right now the price is free although that may change in the future.

This is a great tool for those quick demonstration videos you want to include on your pages or just to get a screen shot of an error message to help solve a problem via email. Check out their own demonstration video.

When I tried out my first video capture it automatically picked up the sound from my computers mic; no preferences to set or settings to fiddle around with. It just did it. Did I mention what a great user interface Jing has! ;-)

TED does it again. Check out this amazing demo that was shown at the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) in Monterey, CA.

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.

One of the phrases that keeps resonating from Blaise’s presentation is how much your photo is enriched by being part of this collective memory. Your photo, when grouped with these others becomes an emergent entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. The last half of the presentation demonstrates this so well as Blaise shows individual photos working together to make an amazing image of Notre Dame. Cellphone photos, SLR photos, even a poster is all enriched with this collective memory of photos.

Thanks to Matt Potocnik for sending me the link on this one.

In 1984, John Gage, from Sun Microsystems, coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" to describe the emerging world of distributed computing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage) This was only three years after the stand-alone, non-networked PC had been introduced to the workplace, and most people dismissed John’s idea. They couldn’t comprehend what he was talking about. To them the computer was the new beige 386 computer sitting on their desk running Windows.

Now, over twenty years later, we are starting to understand what these five words really mean.

A few years ago Tim O’Reilly the O’Reilly book publisher coined the term Web 2.0. Below is a memory map created during the first FOO camp describing this "new" approach to the Web that reflects John Gage’s statement from 1984. (The FOO Camps are invitation only, no plan, tents on the lawn, geek fest to help O’Reilly find out what’s on the radar. The name comes from the common use of the word "foo" and "bar" traditionally used by programmers to designate an example variable name.)
 

Figure 2 – "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media

(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html#mememap)

Web 2.0 utilizes AJAX making the difference between client and server virtually transparent.  Instead of the old-fashioned click-and-wait as the client requested a web page from the server, mouse moves and clicks give immediate results and making the user think that everything is happening on his or her computer. (Google maps was the break through application of this type allowing people to "dragging" the map to see a new view instead of clicking on it and waiting for a new view to arrive from the server.)

Web 2.0 applications such as You Tube, MySpace, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and Flickr encourage sharing and collaboration of all types of content. The user becomes king of the content. Instead of being fed pages, users create the content of a site. Instead of simply running programs or viewing web pages people are participating in a collective intelligence.
Instead of reading static pages we are interacting with each other on a global basis. Communications with people around the world are possible through IM (Instant Messaging), emails, postings, and web discussions. Instead of a private list of favorites you can now create a public list of annotated favorites with de.licio.us. Suddenly, a list of bookmarks becomes a fine-tuned search engine showing the best pages by keyword saved, shared, and annotated by everyone in the deli.cio.us world. 

Instead of a Word document held captive by your word processor, you can now write collaborative documents on line using Google Documents & Spreadsheets. For example, I use Google Docs for committee meetings giving everyone the chance to add to the agenda as well as to view minutes and efficiently create collaborative documents instead of clumsy email attachments.

In the last module of my Web III (XML) course I discuss the phenomenon of emergence, a part of System Theory. Emergence demonstrates how complicated systems can be created from a series of relatively simple interactions. Examples include ant colonies that change personalities over a thirty-year period even though none of the individual ants live more than a year and there is no central leader ant (the queen’s only purpose is to lay eggs, she does not direct the colony). Or slime mold made of millions of individual spores. This mold forms when conditions are conducive and can "crawl" through a maze to find food, yet none of the spores has any brains and none of the cells act as a leader or catalyst. (These and many other examples are highlighted in an excellent book named Emergence by Steven Johnson.)

Our networked world and the Web in particular demonstrates the concept of emergence. Millions of connections are making a new, emergent entity. We are no longer simply interacting with the computer sitting on our lap. Now we are responding to the Web itself, the result of millions of seemingly insignificant additions from people (and computers) around the globe. The Network is truly the computer just as every web page, blog entry, forum question and answer, and You Tube video (and resulting comments) makes us part of its existence. To represent this concept Dr. Mike Wesch, an anthropology professor at Kansas State University put together the video entitled: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. He posted it on You Tube where it became one of the most popular videos in 2007.

The network is the computer and the computer is Us.

Every once in awhile the power of the Web still surprises me. Recently, reading David Pogue’s blog from the New York Times,  I discovered a real gold mine: The TED Conference. Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

Every year some of the brightest people in the world meet in Monterey, CA for a few days to talk about what they are doing. It costs $4,400 to attend a conference and the 2008 conference is already sold out. Speakers are not paid but get to attend the conference for free. (You can also request an invitation from their website based on your enthusiasm, ideas, and success in your field.)

A little pricey you say? But wait, they’ve put some of the presentations on line. You can watch the videos of some very amazing presentations . Each is about 20 minutes (although there are a few three minute specials), and you will be thinking about them for days. The TED videos are especially effective if you watch two or three in one setting. I usually catch a couple before I go to sleep at night, just to give my brain something to think about in my dreams.

Here’s a quote for the upcoming 2008 conference, The Big Questions:

"Many people come to TED seeking something out of the ordinary. A chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that’s happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way. "

Check out these videos and you’ll see what they mean.

People understand the Web because they use it every day. But, not everyone knows how easy it is to get your own web site up and running on the Web. You can do it for less than $40/year.

Domain Names

The first part of getting published is to get your own domain name. A good domain is hard to find because most of the common ones have already been taken. You want one that meets the following requirements:

• describes your site
• is easy to remember and easy to spell
• is available on the Web

The DNS (Domain Name System/Server) keeps track of all the domain names on the Web so there are no duplicates. Domain names can be ordered from InterNic and other DNS vendors. For your convenience most web hosting services allow you to order a domain name as one of the services.

An annual license for a new domain name will cost about $17/year. Many web hosting services offer domains for free or very low priced as a loss-leader. Existing names are more expensive. Many people around the world purchase domain names hoping to resell them later. Often names licensed names will cost $1,000’s, especially if a company really wants a particular name as part of their product identity.

Because of the scarcity of good names it is best to make up a list of 20 or 30 names that would be appropriate for your web site. Prioritize them, then visit your web host provider as outlined below and do a search for each one. Be ready to purchase any you find. I’ve heard tales of people searching for names only to come back a few days later to find that their names have been licensed by someone else.

Purchase as many years as you can. (This is one of the criteria that Google uses to determine how to rank a web page.) Also, think of purchasing multiple endings (.com, .org. .net) as well as multiple names. If there’s a variation (or commonly misspelled version) purchase that as well.

Keep in mind that domain name licensing is separate from having pages published on the Web. You can license a domain name now without having the added expense of hosting a site right away.

Because of their high value and growing scarcity, a good domain name is an important asset for any company or business.

Web Hosting

There are thousands of hosting services available. A simple search on the Web (for example: web hosting comparisons) will give you lots of options.

Beware of GoDaddy.com. They are very popular right now and market their services heavily. However, their servers have very strict policies and a lot of tools such as Drupal, a popular CMS (Content Management System) , and CGI scripts are very difficult to install.

Building Web Site

You can create your own web site with a text editor and a browser. Cost: your time. More sophisticated web programmers use DreamWeaver from Adobe/Macromedia. Please don’t use FrontPage. It is now defunct having been replaced by Microsoft’s new product: Expression. There are also many free web editors available including NVue, FirstPage, AlleyCode, and Amaya which runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows.

Often people take my Web Programming I course just to learn how to write HTML and build their own site.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to build your own web site you can always contact the computer science or art department at your local college. Ask if their web students need projects to work on. For example, my Web Programming I and Web Programming II courses both have capstone requirements involving community business partners.

Your Own Piece of the Web

So, for less than $40/year you can have your own site up on the Web. At the very least you should consider setting up a personal home page. And, if you are an entrepreneur (or even thinking about being one) now is the time to get your piece of the web. At the very least, reserve your domain names.

Want to see more details on all of this? Check out my business presentation out on my web site: Web Marketing

Writing a Business Plan

Five Easy Pieces

Your business plan is one of the best tools you have to communicate your vision and excitement to a lot of different people. It doesn’t have to be a dry, boring document. Here are some ways you can make it into a document that reflects all the critical areas that people in the business world are interested in.

There’s five easy pieces:

1. Executive Summary
2. Describe the products/services (buildings, inventory, technology, manufacturing)
3. People and Stakeholders
4. Marketing
5. Dollars and Sense

Each of these is like a puzzle piece that affects the other pieces.

Writing a business plan involves writing each of these once, and then going back in and reworking them as new ideas and relationships surface as other sections are completed. By breaking the business plan into these five steps it becomes much easier to write and refine.

A business plan should be viewed as a working document. It helps to think of it as software that changes with different revisions. Each revision can be released and utilized, but the software is always being improved and extended into new areas. As your business grows it will need other, more detailed solutions. Your business plan documents this so others know and can realize what version you are currently using to run and operate your business.

The following highlights some common questions that may help you finalize each piece.

Executive Summary

People that read business plans for a living have very little time. The Executive Summary is written to make their job easier and more interesting.
In just a few paragraphs you not only want to capture the essence of your company, but catch the reader’s interest as well. Write this once and then revisit it each time you’ve finished working on one of the other sections. Then, weeks later, revisit this summary again and read it with more objective eyes.

Don’t labor too long over the Executive Summary. But reread it, rewrite it, and refine it often.

A good way to start is by writing five bullet points answering who, what, when, where, and why.

Frost your executive summary by adding a catchy headline. Not too cutesy, but something that will pique everyone’s interest. Keep in mind the old newspaper example for catchy headlines: Dog Bites Man vs. Man Bites Dog

Products/Services

Describing the products/services you are offering describes the what of the business plan. A simply as possible describe the products and services that the company will be offering. If you have multiple products/services give each one its own section.

For now just write a paragraph describing the product or service. Don’t add any fluff, or if you do, edit it out later.

Writing this section may trigger lots other ideas for marketing, and people, and money. First of all, try to stay focused on describing your product/service. But, if you are worried you might forget your ideas, go ahead and jot them down as a footnote. That way you can grab them and include them later with more details as you work on the other pieces.

People

The people piece is the who of your business plan. You will want to describe the owners of the company and list your board members. In addition, include the different types of employees (job descriptions) that are necessary to offer the products/services you’ve already described.

Being a small business it is necessary that several people may do many different tasks. It’s not unheard of for the President to also be in charge of sales as well as head janitor, especially during the start-up phase of a company.

You’ll want to demonstrate the team of experts that you are using to make the company successful. Depending on the business you will most likely be using an outside accountant, legal counsel, technology expert, and marketing consultant. Listing each of these professionals shows you know how to build a strong management resource team.

You probably have other stakeholders as well. Include them as part of this section, describing what their involvement is in the business.

You can mention the customer as one of your stakeholders, but the customer is so important that they get their very own piece. It’s called Marketing.

Marketing

Marketing is best summarized by the two questions: Who is the customer and what does he or she need?
Marketing includes all the activities that involve determining who the customer is and making a connection between them and the product/service being offered.

This section can get fairly involved. You may want to set up several subtopics describing the following:

• Who is the customer? If you have different target customers describe each one.
• What needs does the product/service meet? It is often helpful to envision a particular person that you know that fits the customer profile being targeted. Simply describe the traits this person has and how the product/service will meet his or her needs.
• How will we tell the customer about the product/service?
  
  • How will we inform people about the company? (goodwill, publicity, community service)
  • How will we inform people about specific products?
  • Different types of media to be used (web site, email campaigns, brochures, magazines, trade shows, articles and white papers)
• Where is the target market located?
• Describe the sales process (handling leads, closing the sale, customer service and follow-up after the sale)
• Who is the competition and why are you different?
• Marketing calendar

• List the marketing activities will you be doing each month for the next twelve months.

• What were the actual results of each of these activities
• What should be done differently next time? (discard the activity, modify the activity, combine it with another activity)

This section will probably have the most information and be changed frequently. It is recommended that the marketing calendar be made an active part of your business activities and be updated often.

Dollars and Sense

This piece describes the why of the business plan. You might be in business for several reasons, but most likely it is to make a profit. This piece shows what things will cost, what your margins of profit are, and how much profit you plan to make.

As the company becomes older it is very helpful to include past history as well as projections. Don’t go into vast details here. Just give monthly or quarterly sales as well as fixed costs (salaries, rent/utilities, supplies) and variable costs (production materials, research & development, taxes).

Two important items to include in this piece:

• Margin of Profit (MOP) – This is a percentage showing how profitable an item is or a product line, or sales in general.
• Return on Investment (ROI) – Compares how much money is made when compared to how much was spent. If you invest 1,000 dollars for a new web site that brings in only 500 dollars for the year, than the ROI is very poor. However, if you can show that the web site will probably increase sales way beyond the 1,000 dollar investment, than the ROI is very good. MOP and ROI work closely together. If you are working with a very low margin, you will need much more sales before you can see a return on your money. On the other hand if you have a high margin you can see immediate ROI. But, a higher MOP may increase the sales price too high, resulting in loss of sales and a smaller return on the investment.

Summary

Your business plan is probably the best way you can communicate your vision and excitement to a lot of different people. These five steps will help you write a business plan that is effective and helpful. You may use it to help secure a business loan, to determine what and how you are going to proceed in business, as well to get others excited about your ideas and the potential of the company’s future. Don’t forget to smile as you write it. After all, it is your future!

I’m using Writely, the Word clone from Google Docs & Spreadsheets to write this blog entry. This is an amazing free service that allows you not only to write online but to collaborate with others. I can save the document on my hard drive in a variety of formats including Word, HTML, OpenOffice, RTF (Rich Text Format), and PDF. It also keeps track of the revisions I make to the document. I had heard that this was a pretty remarkable tool but it offers so much more than I expected. I can hardly wait for my next collaborative writing project.

I’ve been telling my students and web clients that one of the ways they can earn money from their web site is by becoming an associate with an e-commerce site such as Amazon.com. (Other ideas include AdWords where Google, Yahoo, and other search engines pay you to display keywords on your site based on the content. You get paid each time someone clicks on a link.)

At the same time I have students telling me about a great book they have discovered as well as having people asking me for book recommendations.

I decided to take my own advice and have added a book recommendation page to Web Explorations. Here’s the process I went through:

(1) I did a web search for: amazon associate program

(2) Fill in a form with Amazon. I already had an account with Amazon because I had sold some of my used textbooks through them. So, all I had to do was fill out an associate registration form and agree to their agreement. (This one I printed out and read carefully. This is a business relationship and I wanted to be clear what I was getting into.)

(3) Once I was approved Amazon lets me go into a web site called Associates Central. I type in the name or ISBN of the book I want to recommend and the site gives me XHTML code that I copy and paste into my pages. This is designed to be used by people with the most basic of HTML skills, although the more XHTML/CSS you know the better you can present the information.

(4) I choose the format of the mini-ad I wanted from the Amazon wizard. All that remained was to design and write my pages. Because these are personal recommendations I didn’t want to just list the books. Instead I set up a CSS class to display the mini-ad and my comments.

(5) Once I had my page written I published it out to the site. Here’s a link to it if you’d like to take a look: webexplorations.com/book.html. I don’t think I will be able to give up my teaching career on what I make from this association with Amazon, but it just might be enough to cover my web host costs and domain name registration every year. Feel free to use view/source to see the CSS code. I left it in the <head> element making it easy for others to access.

(6) Each time someone purchases a book from Amazon from these links, I’ll get a percentage on the sale. So, all I have to do next is to tell people about this page which is what I’m doing right now. Web marketing in action.

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Everyone likes free books. Here is an excellent resource being organized by Globaltext.org .

Here’s a summary from their web site:

Through what he’s dubbed, “The Global Text Project,” Rick Watson and an international team of professors aim to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering subjects typically encountered during the first two years of college. A prototype text is already complete, and work is underway on the first book in the series.

The prototype book was created in 2004 because Watson couldn’t find a comprehensive textbook for a graduate level XML programming class he was teaching. Each student was assigned to write chapter, and Watson served as editor-in-chief. The book, “XML: Managing Data Exchange” (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML), turned out so well that it is still used in classes at UGA today. Each class that uses the text makes improvements on it, leaving it in better condition than they found it.

I looked through the XML text as well as the Java text and they both are an excellent resource for my class.

It’s interesting. Last semester I had my Web III (XML) class start a Wiki as part of the learning process. The idea was to do exactly what wikibooks is doing, although I didn’t know about wikibooks back then. I was disappointed when the students simply posted information that they copied from other sources on the Web in order to complete the assignment each week. I deleted the whole thing over the summer and decided not to pursue it.

Now I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. We could focus on a specific topic and all work together using a private wiki (a wiki is a web page where a group of people can all edit the pages – wikipedia is the most famous of these.) At the end of the semester we could submit the chapter to wikibooks.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to be in a third-world country to take advantage of these textbooks. Go out and find your favorite topics and bookmark them for reference.

Thanks to Tom Edwards for sending me the link about this.

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I just finished putting together a session about blogging that I will be presenting to faculty members at our annual in-service training here at South Central College.I originally wrote this for the Minnesota SCSC Young Writer’s Conference back in May and I’m amazed on how vast the blogsphere has grown. Earlier blogs seemed to be mainly young, male college students filled with angst and/or technical folks talking about technology. They have now become an excellent source of information from experts in virtually any field. Its a rare search on Google that doesn’t bring up at least one blog entry with the information I need.

Here’s the blurb for the session:

Be A Blogger - Presented by Peter Johnson You will want to attend this session because you will learn:

• What a Blog is
• Famous (and some not-so-famous) bloggers from around the world
• How to start your own blog in five easy steps (Blogging is free!)
• The Benefits of Blogging
• Four Golden Guidelines for Bloggers
• How to be Safe On-Line (a great section if you plan to have your students blog.)

Here’s a link to the presentation: http://peterkjohnson.com/blogging/whyBlog.html Let me know what you think!