I have spent the last few days getting the Teklogic website and blog moved over to a new virtual-hosted server platform. I wanted to get the blog and the site running off of the same server for many reasons. The new URL for the blog is http://teklogic.net/tekblog.
The Teklogic website is getting a total overhaul as well - more to come on this...Exciting times at Teklogic indeed!
We live in a time where there is information coming at us from all angles in the form of E-Newsletters, Television Media, Websites, Radio etc, etc... With all of this information out there, where do we find the time to get anything done?
As you can probably imagine, in the ever-changing world of computer technology, there are SO many sources of information out there. One tool I use to keep all of this information in one place so that I can sanely manage it -is to use something called an aggregator. An aggregator basically compiles information from many sources and gives you one interface with which to go through said information -as opposed to visiting each source. The news / information provider "syndicates" their content through RSS or Really Simple Syndication. You have almost surely seen the RSS icon
somewhere before. This icon is telling you that the information provider offers syndication of the content so that you can use an aggregator of some kind to view this information.
An aggregator can save untold amounts of time considering the amount of time you spend looking at newspapers, Magazines, watching the news or reading web articles. My aggregating service of choice is called Bloglines. Using this service I can be at any computer, anywhere and read up on the content I have chosen. I have just over 80 blogs that I monitor using this service allowing me to stay virtually plugged in to all of the information I need to keep up with. There are other aggregators that will display headline information on your cell phone, your screen saver or even your computer desktop Wallpaper.
Here are some interesting Syndication sources to get you started:
-Wavy TV10 Virginia
-Newsweek Feeds
-New York Times Feeds
-Wired Magazine
-Technical Trenches - This Blog
-Yahoo! News
Happy aggregating!
-Justin
Update 03/10/09: Check out the Lifehacker blog for an aggregator showdown...
One way that a recession can benefit the customer is that it forces businesses to becomes more "customer focused". That is - companies with good, sound customer service practices and principals tend to retain and even attract customers. You might say that a recession separates the "healthy" companies with good processes from the overwhelmed companies with poor, inefficient (and often non-existent) processes.
Declining quality of customer service is a phenomenon I see with almost all technology-related service companies. With big companies like Dell, HP and Microsoft offshoreing much of their "level 1 & 2" support, the language barrier becomes a real and frustrating issue. Nothing is more unnerving than talking with a support representative which you can barely understand. Another thing I see more and more is a 24/48 Hour+ response time to support inquiries on a voicemail system. By the time you hear from these people, you have forgotten what the issue was in the first place. What happened to calling and actually speaking with a human or e-mailing support and getting a human response?
As I drive around I cant help but taking a mental note about all of the small businesses I see. Every one of these companies uses technology in some way; every one of these companies requires help with their computers. The truth is that there are many people who do know something about computers but administering a business computer network professionally just isin't about fixing it when its broken - its about a proactive, preventative approach. Being able to service the needs of a small company requires knowledge in many aspects of computing - such as Servers, Remote Access, Redundancy, Disaster Recovery, Firewalls and a number of other complex technologies. Finding a company that can do all of this well, provides quick response times, stellar customer service and is local, can be very tricky - especially in hard economic times. Most technology companies are drowning just trying to stay alive.
Something we have focused on extensively at Teklogic is our internal processes. We are constantly striving to become as efficient as possible while delivering a very quick response time and a superior customer service experience to those doing business with us. We have many systems that help us to streamline and automate our service delivery process. This allows Teklogic to be very agile as a small business technology services company. We invite anyone to experience the difference - you'll be glad you did...
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