Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.  I was on another conference call this week with some business partners in India and it occured to me the ease with which I could collaborate with people around the globe now.  Email is obvious but there are so many other great, and quite often free, tools available to be able to communicate and collaborate.  I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the tools that I can’t live without.

• Skype.  This may be a little obvious, but I love skype.  The ease, the flexibility, the price!  There are other tools out there as well that all let you conduct voice or video calls like Google talk and Microsoft’s live messenger.  They’re all great.  For some reason I use Skype.  You can pick your own.
• Google docs is amazing.  You can write, store, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pdfs.  You should definitely check this out as it’s great to be able to be simulataneously editing a document while chatting with someone across the globe on Skype.  It’s also great because Google are continuously improving it and it’s getting better every day.
• Acrobat.com is also great.  They’re building a suite of web base document tools that you can use for collaboration.  I must admit that I don’t really use these but they do look a lot nicer than Google docs.  What I do use though is the screen sharing tool.  This thing is great and it’s free!  It allows you to share your screen with anyone who has an internet connection and a web browser.  Again there are a number of other options available but I don’t know that I’ve found any that are free.  One that comes to mind is GoToMeeting, however I don’t think this one is free.

Just a quick post.  Hope these tools are useful.  If you’ve got any others that you think are great then please feel free to post a comment.

**Update**

Just thinking after this post that you should make sure that you’re comfortable with the terms of service for any of these services.  Sometimes the owner of the service may be taking ownership of your content if you use the service.  An example of the different approaches are the google docs and google docs for google apps terms of service.  Make sure you read and understand if you’re using these tools for business (and even personal) use.

I’ve decided that I should put up a page with links to resources that I’m collecting along the way.  I’ll update it whenever I refer to something in a post.  If you think that there is anything you’d like to add or recommend, then please let me know and I’ll put it on the list.

From time to time I’ll try to post stuff where I’ve found that there is a lot of valuable information that I’ve picked up.  It wont always be strictly on topic but will definitely be related.  Please let me know your thoughts.

I’ve been trying to get this journal or blog up and running smoothly so I can begin getting information out there of my experiences.  I don’t want to turn this into a technology blog, but it struck me that there is so much effort in getting something like this working that I thought it would be valuable to share all the steps I’ve taken in case you want to get anything running yourselves.

To be perfectly honest, this journal is a sort or experiment on my part as well as a personal venture.  I wanted to get my experiences “on record”, as it were, while also experimenting with the tools and techniques I’ve seen to create a successful weblog.   It’s not so much learning to blog, it’s learning to blog all over again.  There are so many aspects to get functioning since the days of putting your thoughts on a basic webpage.

I got the blog online sometime over Christmas but it’s taken me some time to get all the things in line so that it functions properly.  The most costly thing is the time it takes to get everything working properly.  So, here’s what I went through.

1. Finding a concept

As you’ll see over the course of the blog.  I don’t really have a lack of ideas.  I have a lack of execution.  Starting Ditch the Office was really quite simple for me as I know that I want to start my own business and it’s very difficult to get access to real-world experiences.  I want to be able to share and have experiences shared with me through the fantastic medium that is the Internet.  It’s sometimes hard to get access to those experiences, either because you can’t find someone you can learn from or you have to filter through so much junk on the web.

Anyway, find something you’re interested in.  I think it will make a big difference and especially with point 2.

2. Learning to write

The jury will remain out on this one for some time, however I do know that there are some people that write in a very engaging fashion.  Take SarahKate over at Abercrombie & Feast.  Writing style is really a personal preference a lot of the time but I think that she writes really well.  I’m hoping that my style will form and improve over time.

3. Finding a name

I plan to write a full post on this point as to naming your real-life business.  For the purposes of this post though, I think naming your blog can be pretty straightforward.  I just picked it to relate specifically to what I wanted to write about.  I think there are probably a few tips that are related.  Try to make it unique.  It should be memorable on a personal level for your readers but I also think that it helps on a technology front like search engines (I could be wrong here).  It definitely helps in getting a domain name (in this case www.ditchtheoffice.com).

4. Finding a somewhere to host your blog

This is really the software that you want to use.  You can either get a web host and pay to have your own web host.  There are a number of benefits to this:

• If you’ve got the skills or the desire, you’ll be able to customise your blog to your heart’s content.

Here’s a quick list of free blogging services – I haven’t really used these but they’re very popular:

• WordPress.com – WordPress also offer their software for free if you have your own web hosting provider (I use the WordPress software)
  
• Livejournal
• Blogger

Here’s a quick list of web hosting providers that I’ve researched or used in the past.  They require you to pay for their services:

• Hostway (I’ve used this in the past – very professional but a bit more expensive)
• Dreamhost (I currently use these guys and they’re great and cheap)

5. Get your blog out there

Now, this a post in itself but there are a few key things to think of.  I’ve included what I currently use to achieve these things but please note that I’m still experimenting:

• Make sure you give your users a way to get regular updates.  I’ve done this through RSS feeds and email updates when I post new information.  To get RSS feeds, I’ve used Feedburner so I can track subscriptions and the like.
• I’ve also included a component to post an update to Twitter when new stuff is posted to the blog .  I use a wordpress plugin called Bird Feeder to accomplish this.  As a side note, I’m going to add the Twitter name to the blog sidebar, but in the interim you can follow ditchtheoffice on Twitter.
• Make sure your blog is search engine friendly (commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimisation).  I use a couple of plugins for this.  Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress to send updates of the website to a range of search engines when updates are made.  I also use HeadSpace2 to make sure WordPress is friendly to search engines when they stumble across this blog.
• Make sure people can bookmark and share your posts easily.  I’ve used the AddThis WordPress plugin to put the link at the bottom of posts that lets you share the post with a whole range of services like delicious or digg.

Well, I think that’s enough for now.  I hope that it’s not too technical.  As I said, I don’t want this to turn into a technology run down.  I didn’t really know a lot about blogging before I set this one up so I just spent the time to look for what was necessary to get it going.  I hope you can get something from what I’ve learnt.  Please leave me some comments with your feedback and any questions you might have.  When I get around to it, I’ll see if advertising is something worth putting down here as well.

Happy blogging!