2010 January | Dan Mason's media and learning blog

Want to get into inbound marketing? Start with a massage

Published: January 29, 2010

With Angela, the Marie Curie cancer care masseuse Last night was the first meet-up of the London Inbound Marketing Group, at the Piano and Pitcher in Holborn. Great bunch of people who ventured from Ipswich, Cambridge, Dublin and just round the corner to chat about blogging, social media and the business of getting found online.

I also enjoyed the personal attention of a rather dishy masseuse. Stictly in the interests of inbound marketing, you understand.

One of several interesting conversations I had was with Noel Shannon, CEO of Silicon Cloud – the company doing a great job of bringing Hubspot’s inbound marketing techniques to Europe. He mentioned that he never used the term ‘outbound marketing’ until he heard of ‘inbound marketing’. Same here. But then, a couple of years ago, neither of us knew that the media and marketing world was about to be turned on its head.

Read the rest of this entry »

UMapper: The easy mapping tool for all seasons

Published: January 28, 2010

There's much more to UMapper than weather I re-visited user-friendly mapping tool UMapper this week, after an email from them announcing the official launch of their whizz-bang weather maps.

Creating a UMapper live weather map really is a piece of cake. Just log into UMapper, choose the weather template, zoom in on the area you want to display, save, and copy the resulting code to your blog. Done.

Clickable temperature markers show the five-day forecast and US maps have live radar feed too.

Besides weather mapping, UMapper has a few other gizmos that really impress me (especially from an education perspective), such as the ability to upload custom maps and create ‘geo-games’.

But just before we move on to those, here’s a weather map for the Midlands (remember, the radar slider won’t work in UK). If you’d like to see how to make one in about 30 seconds, watch this short UMapper video.