Richard Farrar's Blog

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Our desire for the illusive paperless office has been around for many years. So, are we any closer to achieving this seemingly impossible dream with recent technological advances, or are we still consigned to emptying the shredder and waste bins every other day?

The concept of the paperless office is certainly nothing new. In 1975, Business Week published an article on “The Office of the Future”. Much of what was predicated in that article has since come true, thanks largely to the release of the now ubiquitous IBM PC in 1981.

However, since the release of the aforementioned PC, rather than decreasing, paper usage in offices doubled in the following 20 years, eventually stabilising around the millennium; hardly a success for the supposed paperless office!

According to the Economist however, since 2001 office paper usage has actually decreased. So, it looks like we’ve finally turned the corner in our paper consumption, but does this mean that we’re close to realising the dream of the paperless office, or do we still have a way to go?

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People podcast for many reasons, however I don’t seem to have any of these reasons myself, but still wanted to experiment with this new medium. So I did the next best thing and decided to record and produce podcasts for others.

Podcasting is a mainstream phenomenon, largely thanks to the ubiquitous iPod. Virtually anybody can  produce their own podcast with a cheap microphone and a personal computer.

Just because you can though, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. You may have a blinding idea for a podcast, with great content, but do you really want to let it all down by producing a poor quality recording?

Some things we’re good at, others less so. So there are two options; either learn new skills and invest in the equipment required to produce a professional sounding podcast, or pay someone else to do it. I’m obviously hoping people will choose the latter!

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Certain websites are obviously blogs, whereas with others it’s sometimes far more difficult to tell. So what is it that really defines a website as being a blog and when is a blog no longer a blog?

Blogging is now extremely popular, some may even say it’s become a phenomenon. With millions of blogs worldwide, you will have undoubtedly stumbled across one in your travels through cyberspace, either knowingly or unknowingly.

However, with so many blogs around nowadays, they invariably come in a bewildering array of different shapes and sizes. Some are immediately obvious as blogs, others less so. So what is a blog and what are the key elements that define one as such?

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