You could draw your own post-it graphic by following a photoshop tutorial . . . 

. . . Or you could generate a post-it note using a free web site set up for the purpose.

Have you heard of Yammer? It’s a kind of Twitter for companies.

It benefits companies where due to the size of the organisation, employees feel as if decisions and discussions are taking place without them. Implement Yammer and everyone gets to be involved.

In-house experts are able to join in and add value when something relevant to them is yammered. A real tool for improving internal communications.

Unlike Twitter though, Yammer is not entirely free.  You can use it for free, but the paid version has more options.  But it only costs $1 per person per month. Large companies can ask for special pricing.

Watch the product tour – it should get you excited if you are a decision maker in your organisation.

The Good News

Almost too good to be true – it promises to make programmers out of us all, by enabling us to not just build web sites, (there are lots of point and click tools for those already), but to build web applications.

If you are a small business, you can use the tool for free, for up to 5 users assuming you have the right software and hardware platforms available.

There is a  hosted version (I could not find any obvious reference to it on the website FAQ, but the co-founder Wayne Byrne said in a blog comment that it existed – so where is it Wayne???!) which eliminates the need for a platform of your own, but costs $10 per month per user.  So not much good for that new social marketing killer app you’ve been designing for the last few months. But it would be OK for a small number of users in your company.

The Bad News

Well, it’s bad news for me.

Iceberg runs on Microsoft Windows server with SQL Server and is itself an ASP.NET application. Iceberg supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The cost per user is too high even for the hosted version. If you have the skills to code a large application using PHP say, and any associated framework, for large numbers of users, you’d be better off doing it that way.

As a long time software engineer, programmer and web developer I do wonder how accurate these claims can really be.

All my experience of productivity tools is that you substitute having to learn to code for having to learn the tool. And when you think you’ve done that, you realise you ‘ve also learned how to work around all the things the tool does badly. Then a whole support industry is created on the back of the tool’s idiosyncrasies.

The people running Iceberg say their offering is something else altogether.

Now you can also use (if you’re brave enough) social media support tool, Get Satisfaction.

Users of your products or services cans report problems, ask questions or share ideas.

The Get Saisfaction service certainly provides a very current interface for you and your customers.

True all your customer service failures will be aired, alongside all the successes. But publicity of all kinds is good publicity – right?

But true sceptics will not even take that step.

Maybe this’ll help: Here’s a blog post that lists 50 Ways to Use Twitter in Business.

I bit the bullet years ago and bought the full version of Adobe Photoshop then set about trying to learn the basics.

Photoshop V6.0 was about £400+VAT when I first bought it back then. Of course, the upgrades have not been cheap in the meantime – but now I can at least do everything I ever need to do graphically. And of course Photoshop is a GREAT program – the industry standard and reassuring to have in my toolkit.

Learning Photoshop won’t of course turn you into a graphic designer. That’s another problem.

An Alternative to Photoshop?

If Photoshop is beyond your means, you may want to look at the subscription services that are starting to look like they might one day rival Adobe’s offering.

I like the look of Aviary. It costs between $7.99 and $14.99 peronth, depending on the applications you choose to include in your package, and is an online image editing service. You edit photos and create original images online. There is no software to download.

Interestingly, and probably obviously, your creations can be held online for other people to use. You will always own the rights to your image, but other people will own the rights to any images they create out of yours. This is very inspiring. Surely as this service grows there will be more and more creations available to use as jumping boards from which to roll your own.

That is truly collaborative.

Sign up – at the time of writing the Aviary people are trusting us, the public to trial the product until we are confortable, and only start paying when satisfied the product is right. I hope people do not abuse this approach to trialing.

Start with the FAQ.

I personally hope it is here to stay awhile – or at least that we don’t go back to the animated, flashed, cluttered styling of the previous years.

That said – the web is evolving all the time – when will it start to look and behave like Web 3.0?

Here is an article that explains the look, feel and interactivity of a Web 2.0 type site and gives the reasons why this type of site works. It lists the features of Web 2.0 styling such as:

• simplicity
• central fixed layouts
• simple navigation
• strong colours, gradients
• badges
• icons

The article contains scores of Web 2.0 site examples. Some real inspiration.

The new blog layout can be seen here with a nice dotty background image.  By the way, How To Get Hosted uses a theme called Thesis which is fairly customisable.

This useful web site allows you to generate backgrounds with dots that either run the whole way behind a page, or fade out to a single block colour as the one I have used at How To Get Hosted does.

This tool only produces repeating background images for a single dot design, but very useful and striking, neverthless.

. . . needs a colour co-ordinated RSS button. to attract your visitor clicks.

Here is a time-saver.  Look no further – WordPress have kindly drawn a whole bunch of RSS buttons for us to use. Take your pick from those shown here.

My initial impressions are that it too suffers from some spammy members, but its layout and operation are an improvement to the MBL offering, so for now, I’ll see how the widget performs in bringing new visitors in.

All of these things require that you spend time using the portals to view other sites, adn you get back what you put in generally. If you want to publicise your blog, you can give it a try.

It does seem slightly odd in that it appears to require you to post your blog entries individually to the site. So what is RSS for?