Over this week, I’ve done several different interviews with people for both Profy and Techzi… Today, I managed to catch up with Gary Jones from BlueFur, the site I reviewed not so long ago in exchange for a domain. Here’s what he had to say about his company, services, and how everything works at BlueFur.

Gary, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Now I’m led to believe that you’re the owner of BlueFur. Is this correct?
I am part owner of the company, but my main day to day responsibilities is to look after Sales & Marketing. I am more of the front man who you see in the public and on the internet.

Great… Sorry about getting that wrong. How does your hosting at BlueFur match up and compare to that of you competitors? Would bonuses do you offer? Why should people go with you?
Most people would agree that choosing hosting is a very hard choice as there are many providers with very few distinguishing factors other then
space/bandwidth and price. We do have several distinctive features that makes us different.

One of the distinctive features is that throughout the year we provide free online courses. These courses range from MySQL, PHP and basic cPanel usage to marketing. The courses are all done live over the phone with a screen that they can watch the presenter demonstrate the course material.

Another distinguishing factor is we offer 2 automated backup tools. These tools allow you to back up your site files and mySQL with a set it and
forget it software. This software we created so that customers can feel secure in knowing that they have there own copy of there site.

Although there are many hosts in Canada we are one of the few that take Canadian Currency with servers and staff in Canada. We are one of the only providers that has 2 locations in Canada one in Montreal and one in Vancouver. This allows us to provide a unique failover solution where if
your site were to be down on one server it would come up in a separate server in a different geographical location. This means that if the
datacenter is having issues your site and email would still function to work in a separate location.

Wow… If the courses alone aren’t a good enough reason, I don’t know what is! How does the hosting work, and what plans do you offer? Do you offer customized plans to cater for all types of people?
We have close to 130+ plans and options to choose from. We have something that fits every budget and requirement. We do provide custom plans based on the requirements of an individual.

130? Brilliant stuff! Does the company have any future activities planned? Any aims or goals for the near future?
Our immediate goal is to finish our change from MonsterHosting.ca to BlueFur.com as smoothly as possible.

Ah yes, I did read up on that. So why did you decide to run the domain-for-a-review scheme in the first place? I myself was granted ZiMedia.net with it, as you know…
Part of the move of names is that we are going to loose Mind Share for the old name. I wanted to create some new Mind Share for the new name and a bit of buzz in the blog sphere with the new name. I was also looking for some honest opinions on the name from people outside of the hosting industry. The feedback thus far has been great.

Nice to hear. Can you tell us more about the team involved? Where are you based, and how many people work on the various parts of BlueFur?
Our staff all work through Tele-Office style where they work from home. We currently have 12 full time staff and several part time staff. I am
located in Surrey, BC but the staff are located across North America.

What unique approaches does your company take, to achieve the goals that they do?
We sound board a lot of our ideas off real world business people before pushing to far into it. We listen to our customers and build plans around
there suggestions to solve problems long term. We also try to have fun in everything we do.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Everybody, that was Gary Jones from BlueFur.com! I hope you learned something new there! That said, I’m sure that the BlueFur hosting is great, but I’m with InfinFX, and with them we survived the Digg Effect hitch-free! Not bad going I say. They’re even using my Plesk control panel in their screenshots.

Here are the statistics after the Digg Effect struck us, after the ProBlogger article I wrote was promoted to the frontpage. Random, useless statistics live on! That said, there were some real shockers in stall, in both the browser & OS sectors.

Operating Systems

73.89% - Windows (Alot less than expected!)
19.19% - Mac (Incredible, in my opinion!)
4.93% - Linux (Still more than I’d expected!)
1.99% - Other (Wonder what, in this case?)

Operating System Versions

I only have the statistics here from Windows and Mac… Here are the CORRECTED Windows percentages. (My apologies for the original mistake! I had to copy these figures out by hand you know! )

77.55% - Windows XP (Expected at least this much.)
11.10% - Windows Vista (Really? Early adopters like myself I see, or beta users. )
11.35% - Other

And here are the Mac stats…

82.43% - Mac OS X Intel (Nice to see!)
17. 57% - Mac OS X PowerPC (Alot of people obviously still holding off updating!)

Browser Stats

70.30% - Firefox (300,000,000 downloads as of today!)
13.75% - Safari (More Safari users than Internet Explorer? WOW!)
12.38% - Internet Explorer (A decline in the market leader?)
1.98% - Opera (Very small amount of people using Opera.)
1.5% - Camino (Even less number using Camino.)
0.5% - Netscape Navigator (Pretty much nobody using Netscape.

Screen Sizes - Why? Dunno…

29% - 1280 x 1084 (An industry standard it seems now!)
23.5% - 1024 x 768
14% - Unknown (What happened here?)
7% - 1280 x 800 (My laptop’s screensize.)
6.5% - 1600 x 1200
5% - 1440 x 900
3.5% - 1680 x 1050
2.5% - 1280 x 960
2% - 1400 x 1050
1.5% - 1152 x 864
1.5% - 1920 x 1200 (The expected size of my new monitor… Still in the mail.)
1% - 1152 x 870
1% - 2560 x 1024 (Wow… Time for me to get an upgrade!)
0.5% - 2680 x 1050 (Sweet resolution man!)
0.5% - 1280 x 854
0.5% - 1280 x 768 (
0.5% - 800 x 600 (Nooo! The horror!)

I can’t be bothered posting the screen aspect ratio… Very boring, and about 80 different types. Another day maybe.

Timezones

The information is still incomplete, and flooding in by the second.

Language & Region

Again, we’ve not got the full data ready here yet.

Referring sources

Guess? Digg, via ProBlogger of course!

More information coming soon… Sorry it’s incomplete! Just thought that what we had was pretty surprising!

My favourite comment out of all the ones on Digg? “Nicely done on the article David. You certainly have a thick skin and a quick wit for all the garbage being thrown in these comments. I think your next article should be ‘a 12 year old shows Digg readers how to be mature’.” Why? They’re right… I never knew what kind of a place Digg was. Ah well, who cares. Their words, rants, flames, and general smitings have failed to deter me. The blog must go on!

I caught up with Ray van den Bel, a professional LinkedIn networker and found out more about him, his job, and what a ‘Pro Networker’ is supposed to do! Ray was the person who originally introduced me to networking all the months ago, and what better time than now, as he sits on top of the LinkedIn answers board to ask him a few questions?

So Ray, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Can you explain to everyone who you are, and what a ‘Professional Networker’ does?
I always have been fascinated by the interaction of people, I always wanted to become a diplomat in the foreign office. Being at the centre of cultures and interesting people. An online networker like me is just like a networker in real life. We try to find matching people, expertise and build huge networks use best-practices in order to do that. Web 2.0 though gives us new way to interact in a quality way to each other using IM, Skype, video online, blogs, communities etc.

I know like myself you’re a Web 2.0 fan, will you explain how that effects networking?
The internet always has been a very 2 dimensional place to be; you just showed information on a webpage for others to read and to use. Web 2.0 now enables us to make the transition to a more interactive, action driven environment on which we can show our profile, our communication style, our personallity. We are trying hard on web 2.0 and web 3.0 especially (Second Life) to make a close fit to normal life interaction and that it is why its so interesting and why you can be successful doing it, also from a business point of view

Great! How do you treat networking? Is it a job? A hobby? An extra online income-stream? How many clients do you have?
The trick is to understand yourself, your own communication style and to understand the communication style of the other person or organisation, so that you can target that effectively. It was a hobby that is turning more and more into my business. People have started to notice me and my method. They like what they see and they notice that it can make a huge difference to their online strategy… At the moment I have roughly 5 clients, all very different, ranging form personal coaching (jobhunting using networks and targeted networking) to Online strategy consulting.

Ray, I believe that Nike were recently interested in hiring you to be their strategy & new business development director. Can you tell me if you’re often approached by such big companies about Web 2.0, and what the job involves?
A lot of companies realize that they cannot reach their client effectively anymore with the usual methods (phone, email, brochures etc) . They are also starting to realize that they only can if they create a targeted community to reach out to people with same interests. Web 2.0 and web 3.0 enables that if you do it the right way. That is why they approach me.

Web 3.0? I can see you’re thinking about the future already… Anyhow, I’ve got to go, but it’s been great to catch up with you!

That was Ray van den Bel everybody! Web 2.0/Social Networking Expert.

Long as it lasted, we’re going to create our own new little theme. Again. We’ve found there to be far to many issues, bugs, problems & general badness in this current burger of code that you see before you. It may take a couple of weeks, but you can’t say that we didn’t warn you of potential turbulence!

I’m sorry about this… Not only to you guys, but to Nate, our programmer, who’s put so much effort in already. Keep it up man!

It seems that the Microsoft website has an incredibly bad lag, after suffering the Digg effect, for accidentally recommending users buy ‘GarageBand for Mac’. As I quote from the Microsoft website…

Part of iLife ‘05, a suite of integrated applications (including iMovie and iDVD), GarageBand is a popular program that turns a Mac computer into a professional-quality recording studio for musicians. The intuitive interface lets music lovers create and record music by selecting from the more than 50 virtual instruments (including a convincing grand piano) and more than 1,000 professional-quality audio loops that can be used in a new composition. Players can also attach instruments to their computer, such as music keyboard or electric guitar (via analog input or microphone), which can be recorded, edited, and mixed together with other tracks. GarageBand users can also add more instruments and loops with any of four Jam Packs (U.S.$99). These expansion discs each add more than 2,000 additional loops and dozens of new software instruments, among other features.

Incredible what hiring an editor would do for the Microsoft website. Sheesh! What a company blunder! They were so kind to even include a link to the Apple iLife Product Page! Either this is a real good show of faith from the Redmond giant, someone with a laser has it pointed at Bill’s forehead, this is reverse-psychology, or Mr Gates has finally cracked, we won’t know tell Microsoft lets us know. Very funny, whatever the outcome. Admittedly, as a Windows user though, there are very few decent Windows audio editing tools, and GarageBand for Mac does the job perfectly. Sourced from Digg.

Zi Media is sorta like the parent company that owns Techzi. Why? Well, we’re hoping to launch a whole new range of ‘Zi’ blogs, so it’s only fitting that I register the domain, ZiMedia.net - Which I have done. Not much there currently, other than the standard error 404 page, but it itself with time, will have a company blog, as well as various pages providing overviews of the blogs we operate.

NOTE: Before the other ‘Zi Media’ made their presence known on the net, we were already live and running, operating under this name. They were though admittedly, without our knowledge operating before us. However, we’ve come to an agreement that should hopefully benefit us both in the long-run, and we will both continue to operate under the trademark, but independently, with neither sides pushing charges against the other.

I have a new title now… Spiffy, huh?

David Wilkinson
Founder of Zi Media
http://www.zimedia.net/
http://www.techzi.net/

I myself have never had much luck with Slashdot myself, and it seems that my mate Chris Pirillo, is either trying to get himself slashdotted, or generally just make a point.

As usual, nice cartoon work by Brad Fitzpatrick. I also noticed this cartoon on his blog too…

.

Very nicely done. Sometimes things justslip out. It’s unavoidable, of course. Let’s all blame the software.

You just saw me talk about Blue Fur and their blog, but this time, they’re back with a vengeance. Vengeance, you say? I’m reviewing them! Just like I did with John Chow earlier today!

Aside from generally being a great blog, with great content, a rather spiffy blue design, and some sweet competitions, they get down to the nitty-gritty and deal with the useful things when it comes to Internet Marketing, SEO, etc. Infact, it’s incredible what these guys have done in such a short amount of time! From just 4 results for a keyword to 32,200 in only 11 days, it’s a feat that not many achieve.

That said, I managed to get ‘Techzi’ from one appearance in Google, all the way up to 50,000 in less than three days. No doubt this was because I had a tad bit of help from some of the other guys in the blogosphere when it came to promoting my blog, but nevertheless, BlueFur have done an amazingly good job!

Whilst covering all interesting technology/Internet news, and being on the lookout for interesting new things to talk about, they manage to keep their sidebar simple and well-organized with the necessities. RSS links, subscriber count, Technorati Favourites Add, MyBlogLog Widget, and the usual WP maintenance links, BlueFur is an easy to navigate, well-built, professionaly designed, regularly updated blog.

What do I hate? Nothing. What do I dislike? The odd thing. Useful as the weather widget may be to some, it’s bright yellow and annoying to me, as I live no where near Surrey BC, Canada. Sorry to break the news. All round though, a top blog on my RSS reader!

Thanks to the guys over at BlueFur, you can now get yourselves tickets to the Massive Technology Show in Vancouver BC, Canada in their latest competition for free! Of course, you could do this anyway, but what they’re offering is the Full Access Pass, which is valued at $150! Sign-up now, post your review of the free areas of the conference and see if you win! That ticket valued at $150 sure does get you access to a lineup of some pretty impressive speakers! Too bad I live several thousand miles away.

That’s not to say we’ve not got our own little prizes & competitions planned and in stall for you these coming days, and with any luck, we’ll have more news tomorrow Saturday 10th February, which is the day we told all interested sponsors that we’d open the competition.

Would you be interested in sponsoring us with gift certificates? Gadgets? Software? Computers? CHEESE? Why? Simple… Same rules that we usually play by anyhow. You get affiliated with the event, hence getting a major-ranked trackback, hence getting visitors, hence boosting your ego, hence making you cool, hence making you not not-cool, hence bursting the karma bank.

It’s an offer you can’t go down.

Widgets, Blidgets, Boxes, Blidget Promotion Widgets & More…

Confusing stuff, Web 2.0 is my friends. Despite being a so-called ‘Web 2.0 ProBlogger’ and ‘Web 2.0 Professional’, I have to admit that I find it hard to come to grips with some aspects of the Internet. Ironically, Web 2.0 being one of them. That said, I’m not the only one, as it seems that even Pete Cashmore & Michael Arrington have the odd spot of trouble when it comes to defining the darn thing.

Anyhow, I came here to you to talk about even more confusing stuff. For the faint of heart, look away NOW! Got you attention? Good!

Widgets. Except, they’re really not that difficult. Using pre-made widgets from Widgetbox, called blidgets, I can syndicate my Web 2.0 content wirelessly around the globe using my RSS feeds which are displayed via widgets known as blidgets.

I just made that complicated on purpose. Here’s it simply put. Really simply.

Your content >>
Converts into RSS >>
Converted into ‘Blidget’ (Really just a weird name for a blog content widget) >>
Other sites display your blidget >>
Free advertising!

The best of it? People are willing to give quality blogs this kind of advertising for free, if they believe that their readers and/or users can benefit from reading it! ProBlogger, GigaOM and a few other websites have their own on offer, along with JohnChow. Be sure to check out the Techzi widget/blidget thingy-ma-bob.

You really want to be confused though? Here’s an embeddable widget-promotion blidget. Rock on! Just like the one below.

It’s really not that complicated… You’ll have to check it out yourself.