I encourage business blogging. I encourage business owners to start a blog and start writing.

Yes, the business owner themselves. Not the PR people. Not some appointed “blogger” in the company, and certainly not a outsourced writer you get on Elance.

Why? Because nobody can (and should!) talk about your business as well as you do. Its your business, for goodness sake.

Write, starting today, not because your writing may be good, but because with consistent practise everyday, over the weeks, months and years, you know for sure your writing will improve.

The time to start honing your writing and expression skills is now, not when someone posts a disgusting video on YouTube and you realize you need your PR peeps to write a script for you to read from. The world values authenticity. Stop hiding behind the CEO title and start being a human.

And it doesn’t take long. I’m timing myself writing this post. 6 minutes and 48 seconds. Maybe when this whole post is done, I’ll take 10 minutes, maybe 15. If you own a business, can you take 15 minutes less in your “chicken talk” everyday and write something about your business, to reach out to the world?

Of course, you could. It boils down to a matter of this: Are you willing to do it?

And it matters a lot. On the first glance, would you go left or right, if you wanted to go to “Songs of the Sea”?

Look at it again. This signboard gave me a good 30 minutes workout in Sentosa, walking lost in the Merlion Park!

If they’ve used whitespace well in their initial design, things would have been so much easier on the glance.

even if something is amiss, we can see it immediately.

Are you using whitespace effectively in your web design?

I made a trip to Kuala Lumpur over last Friday and Saturday to attend an event in Malaysia. I took a Tiger Airways trip there – so I was at the LCCT (Low Cost Carrier Terminal). Before I made my way to my hotel, I went to the Food Court at LCCT to have a quick meal, and as I was there, I can’t help but notice the advertising.

There was this thing about advertising in mirrors, like this:

Basically, they build in the advertisement poster into the mirror, so while you are trying to clean up all the laksa gravy and remains of the Tiramisu cake from your mouth, the poster pops up and tells you there is a cheaper way to fly.

Well, technology wise, it sounds like a great “interruption marketing” idea (read Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” for the difference between Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing), except that the implementation at the LCCT food court really can be improved on.

Why do I say so? The mirrors are installed at locations at absurd locations!

Instead of installing the mirrors at wash basin where people would go there to wash up and clean up their mouths and hands, somehow they decided to put the mirrors just beside the exit.

Who would stop, look at the mirror (and the ad) to clean up their mouth just before they leave the food court?

In the toilet (sorry no photographs there ), it was the same. They put the mirror separate from the regular wash basins. In fact, they installed it at the entrance of the toilet, so “it will be perfectly visible” when you enter the toilet. Question is: would you stop to look at the mirror on your way in to the toilet? Well, at least, I won’t. I will be more concerned about getting my toilet business done first!

If you want to design an interruption marketing mechanism like this, at least, interrupt people where they are already looking for mirrors. I’d be amazed if this implementation of the advertising on mirrors are going to bring any real results.

A couple of weeks back I bought a desk lamp from Ikea. The package came neatly – shrink wrapped, with all the necessary parts to fix it up.

There was an instruction manual that came with the lamp. It’s just a plain manual, on brownish paper, and it looks like this.

There were TWO lines of worded instructions in that manual. Two. And it was repeated in 18 languages. Then, the rest of that manual looked like this:

Not a single word of text. Everything was in simple pictures. Pictures, which told a thousand words.

I found it a breeze to understand what they were saying in those pictures. There is a lot we can learn about usability from this simple manual. I once read from a book (can’t remember where it was from!) “If you interface needs instructions, then its way too complicated.”

Imagine, if the instructions were in text – how much hassle it would be for Ikea to publish that same manuals in 18 languages? How much paper would be wasted?

David Peralty from Blogging Pro raised a really interesting question worth thinking about.

What if WordPress wasn’t an option?

Do you think blogging would be what it is today without WordPress?

I remember when I decided to use my own domain and get off Blogger.com. I had a hard time choosing which platform to use. There was MovableType, ExpressionEngine, TextPattern, Nucleus CMS and a lot other lesser known one (which I didn’t know were lesser known at that time).

That was back during the WordPress 1.X days. Wow. 😯

I gave all of them a try, and I ended up with WordPress. I remember I hated MT’s installation process and the cgi scripts stuff. I made the subconscious choice to use WordPress, because I like the quick installs and the easy to understand backend admin system, and the easy templating system.

Today, 4 years down the road, I’m very glad I made the right choice. Things would be so different if I chose any other platform.

How would YOUR business have changed without WordPress?