As you may have noticed, edocr.com has undergone considerable change since the start of 2009. Among the changes are the edocr.com home page. The new layout is based on three columns with top and bottom sections. Within these sections, blocks are placed providing significant flexibility in look and feel. Here is a quick snap shot of possibilities of the home page:
# Top Section - this is used to explain what edocr.com is and its value proposition. This section will be linked with FAQs in the near future, which will explain edocr.com to those who are not familiar with its use.
# Bottom Section - this is currently not visible, but will be used in the future.
# 3 Columns - each of the columns have been populated with number of blocks.
Blocks can be configured as follows:
# Display a random selection of document thumbnails related to a particular tag (keyword) or category - this could be configured to display document thumbnails related to a particular company or product
# Display Document of the Day
# Display selected document thumbnails promoting specific documents
# Display edocr Health Dashboard
# Display latest uploaded document thumbnails
For a small fee, we could display your document thumbnails on edocr.com home page. If you wish to take advantage of this, please contact us
We made some changes to edocr Home Page, and appreciate your feedback. The top section of the home page attempts to explain what edocr is about and how it could be applied to you and/or your organisation. We plan to add further information to explain each of the functions and their benefits in the near future.
The same section has been republished here for your ease. Do you understand the services provided by edocr.com? What is not clear? Can you suggest improvements? How do you use edocr? Your thoughts and comments are very much appreciated.
The Document of the Day was published by non other than Katie Lips of Kisky Media, a Northern StartUp 2.0 company, who runs tech startup, Treasuremytext.com. The document was commissioned by ICDC, a centre for tech startups in Liverpool, and highly recommended if you plan to develop applications on iPhone.
Those of you who pay attention to detail would have noticed the disappearance of "Alpha" on edocr.com today. Alpha signified the stage edocr Ltd was in and not the stage of our flagship product, edocr.com. In our minds, Alpha signified the "founding" or "starting up" stage of edocr Ltd. This obviously took far long than first anticipated. With the removal of Alpha, we move to the "Proof-of-Concept" stage. This stage is about building the product further and opening up number of revenue streams. Once we prove these revenue streams are viable and sustainable, we will then move to "launch" stage.
In the meantime, please continue to provide feedback on how to improve our services.
On behalf of edocr team, I like to wish everyone a belated happy new year. We have an exciting year ahead. edocr.com has come a long way since 2007. We have been developing additional functionality over the last 3 months and some of these are ready for you to test and use:
1. Document Bulk Upload - You can now upload more than one document at a time.
2. Document Categorisation - Each of your documents can now be assigned to a category driving more traffic to your documents
2. Automate publishing document links to your Twitter account for driving further traffic to your documents
We will shortly be releasing our API, which will allow you to use edocr.com functionality without having to leave your application. Stay tuned to edocr blog for latest updates.
On behalf of edocr team, I like to take this opportunity to thank you for your custom. Please do spread the word about edocr. We love to hear about what works and what does not with respect to edocr. What functions do you like to see in the future? I welcome you to engage fully with edocr team today.
Let's be honest! Finding documents of interest on edocr.com is not quite as bad as the above image (hopefully, you will agree with us on this). Whilst we have in-built search capability and tagging, we want to introduce easier ways to find documents as we attract more and more users and documents each day.
As part of the on-going development of edocr.com, we have started to categorise documents. Anyone who has ever tried to categorise information will understand how hard it is to get it right first-time. There are so many ways of categorising information from standards such as Standard Industry Classifications (SIC) codes used in the UK to North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) used in the United States. In addition, many business websites have adopted their own. One classic example is Kompass Directory. After initial research, we came to the conclusion that we have no choice but to create our own.
When we build edocr in 2007, our initial thoughts were to build categorisation based on combining relevant tags. Having seen how some of our community members tag, we can only conclude that not everyone understand the importance of tagging nor how to tag effectively. Perhaps, we are guilty of not describing this process well (see previous blog post on tagging here).
It is our belief that the subject of any document should be able to be covered with four levels of categorisation. As primary categories, we have already introduced the followings:
- Business Solutions
- Business Support Services
- Chemicals
- Companies
- Consumer
- Construction
- Countries
- Engineering
- Finance
- Government
- Finance
- Food & Beverage
- Government
- Hospitality & Tourism
- Insurance
- Manufacturing
- Technology
- Transportation
- Utilities
More primary categories will be added over the coming days and weeks. Adding 2nd, 3rd and 4th levels of categories to above will continue well into the year. Please do engage with us if we have not introduce categories that are relevant to your documents.
The document bulk uploading capability is now ready for testing by edocr community. Be the first to test it. The functionality can be accessed through here. You will be presented with an "Upload Files" button. Please note that this functionality requires Macromedia Flash Player 9 or higher. We have restricted number of files that could be uploaded at any given time to 10 with file size restricted to 10MB for each file. Please be patient while uploading files as it can take several minutes to upload a large file.
1. Make sure you have logged in. If you do not have an account, please create an account now. More on account names
2. Select Upload Files button. If you have trouble with this function due to not having Flash Player 9 or any other reason, you can access the single document upload function through "Having trouble with flash, choose the basic uploader" link
3. edocr.com will automatically assign the file name to document title. You may wish to edit this. Tip: Title ought to reflect the content of the document. This gives the best chance of finding the document through search engines such as Google.com by non edocr community
4. Enter appropriate keywords as tags separated by commas.
5. Describe the document with minimum of 10 words. Tip: Describe sufficiently to inform users that your document is worth reading.
6. Select appropriate groups for assigning the document. Only the groups you have subscribed to will be shown.
7. Choose a category (do expect a blog post on this). Up to four levels are available
8. You can either select Save button for each document or select "Save All"
9. Once the document is uploaded to internal folder for processing, you will see a message "Document saved successfully. Click here to view the document." When pressed, you will be taken to the document page, but will not be able to view the flash document, etc until the document processing has been completed.
10. Once all the documents have been uploaded to internal folder for processing, you will also see a message "View uploaded documents" next to "Cancel" button. When pressed, you will be presented with a listing of all your documents. Until the document is processed, the status will show "processing". Once the status changes to "processed", the document will be available for interaction by the edocr community.
11. During document processing, no one other than you will be able to access the document.
Have fun and let us know what you think of this new functionality.
NB: All documents published on edocr.com are available to the public at present. Do not upload any documents you want to keep private. If you get any errors, please contact us with details. Have fun!
Update
: Bulk Upload functionality has now been launched and the above links have been updated to reflect this
According to Wikipedia (edited to suit), Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, RSS, email or through applications such as TweetDeck, Twitterrific and Facebook.
You can now set your account for automatic publication of new uploads to Twitter. To set you account:
1. Visit My Account and select Edit
2. Under Twitter Settings, enter your Twitter username
3. Enter your Twitter password registered with above username.
4. Enter "!title !url" to publish on Twitter. This will publish the title of your uploaded document and its hyperlink.
5. You may also want to add additional words for publication to Twitter, e.g. "New document !title !url"
With regards to your Twitter password, please note the followings:
1. We cannot see it
2. Even if we could, we will not share it with anybody
Your Tweets will automatically be added to edocr.com's own channel on Twitter, once you configured your Twitter settings. Click here to access our Twitter channel. You could also search what others are tweeting about edocr by searching. Click here to access search results.
With above, you can now attract even more traffic to your documents on edocr.com. Please spread the word, and do let us know your views and thoughts about this service or any other aspect of edocr.com
Matt Grest of QBurst and I have been testing the capability of edocr in terms of getting to Google first page within 24 hours. We like to share our observations and like to invite you to follow the same, if you wish to appear on Google first page under 24 hours without spending a penny.
Case Study 1 - Britney Spears Breaks Guinness World Record
- Actual Google search terms: "Britney Spears Breaks Guinness World Record"
- Google.com position: No. 2
- No. of listings: 1,930
- Google.com positions above edocr listing: guinnessworldrecords.com
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Google.com positions below edocr listing on first page with Alexa rankings:
- Yahoo - 1
- docstoc - 6,042
- Time since uploaded to edocr: 2 days
Case Study 2 - How to develop iPhone apps
- Actual Google search terms: "How to develop iPhone apps"
- Google.com position: No. 1
- No. of listings: 108
- Google.com positions above edocr listing: None
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Google.com positions below edocr listing on first page with Alexa rankings:
- Digg - 251
- Twitter - 891
- Engadget - 973
- Time since uploaded to edocr: 2 days
I am assuming everyone knows the value of appearing on Google first page. Sustaining your ranking on Google first page requires little bit more than simply uploading to edocr and doing nothing further. If interested, do get in touch. We see edocr as the starting point of your marketing campaign.
Tags: Google rankings
Today, I received a request to remove a person from one of my e-mails. And he made the point that my e-mail did not have an option to remove him from my mailing list. The problem is that I use multiple channels with multiple mailing lists. What does that mean?
At present, my day is spent on managing a complex web of activities. These activities fall broadly into brands, some of which have not yet been publicised.
EIPPWorld.com, ForesightNorth and Northern StartUp 2.0 are divisions of eveo Ltd.
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Product development to sales and marketing. |
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Building an ecosystem for digital businesses in the North. |
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Think tank on regional economic development |
| eveo (no logo yet) | Advisory/consultancy service for businesses including social media |
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Advisory/analysis on finance automation utilising e-invoicing |
In addition, ebdex is dead (yet to find how to kill the website) and evigon, which was originally intended as the consulting vehicle need to be removed from the companies house.
Since moving to Mac OS X, I use built-in Address Book with Bento to manage my contacts. Bento extends the functionality of Address Book and has similar functionality to Microsoft Access.
I have also been using icontact.com for managing mailshots, but my account has a limit of 500 addresses and 3000 messages per month. I do not maintain a permanent list of e-mail addresses on icontact.com. When needed, I simply upload a list of addresses, send the mailshot and delete.
icontact.com is a great tool as it provides feedback on the success of mailshots sent, but has the limitations due to my account limitations. Until recently, I did not really appreciate edocr as a replacement to icontact.com, which infact is available to anyone free of charge.
This is how it works at edocr.
- Upload the document to www.edocr.com
- Visit the document page and choose "Email this doc" from right hand sidebar (see first image below).
- Write your personal message. Keep this short. The formatting of final output is not ideal. Until this is fixed somepoint in the future, please test by sending to one of your own e-mail addresses. I use <font size="-2">type your message here</font>
- Once you are happy with the test message, enter list of e-mail addresses one line per e-mail address. Please make sure there are no blank lines among the addresses and all addresses are in compliance with general e-mail guidelines. You may want to add your e-mail address at the bottom to test that the message has been sent successfully.
- edocr will now start sending your message to each of the e-mail addresses you entered. (see third image below). Any errors on e-mail addresses including away from e-mail messages will be sent direct to your e-mail account (not to your edocr account).
Image 1 - "See Email this doc"
Image 2 - Enter your message and e-mail addresses
Image 3 - Email sent by edocr
Not a bad tool at all, given it is still our first cut. Obviously lot more need to be done to improve this and present it as a challenger to highly successfull tools such as icontact.com. This will be just a functionality for edocr, and never the key reason for building edocr into your day-to-day tool kit.
Getting back to the original problem, this still means managing all e-mail addresses within Mac Address Book and then using Bento to remove/add addresses to various groups. So, if you want me to remove your e-mail address from a mailing list (that is a group within the Address Book), you need to be specific, which is not straight forward due to not knowing which business that e-mail address belongs to.
Here is an example: The following document was e-mailed to over 1000 people in my "Northern StartUp 2.0" group in my Address Book.
The question is, was this an e-mail from edocr or Northern StartUp 2.0? It is clearly from Northern StartUp 2.0 using edocr as a tool to generate the e-mail. But the recipient will most likely not see the difference. Now this is a dilemma I need to figure out, and until I do, please accept my apologies. If you want me to remove you from a mailing list, please be specific as much as possible.
Tags: icontact.com, e-mail marketing, email marketing, edocr
