Salient features of the new design include:

• Bold, clear graphics.
• A strong emphasis on categories as a navigation aid.
• Clear clues about what we would like you to do: read our other blogs and white papers, sign up for our integrated feed, participate in our webcasts … and perhaps even buy our services.

We’ve upgraded our whole line of vendor services, adding attractive new consulting packages, starting the new Monash Research webcast series, and sharpening our white paper services as well. Most important, we enhanced our flagship Monash Advantage executive program, based on how members have actually used it in the inaugural year. Monash Advantage membership now includes significantly more consulting than before. Membership also remains the only way to get access to our Monash Letter analyst reports — such as our blockbuster guide to strategic marketing (coming soon) — and to our webcast and white paper sponsorship opportunities.

We also updated our main website at www.monash.com. It’s now even easier to keep up with all our research, or just with our most important news. We added to our already stellar lists of customers and testimonials. We redesigned the users’ guide to our white papers. And of course we updated the descriptions of our services. We even changed our name, for the first time in 17 years, although we’ll continue using “Monash Information Services” for financial dealings only.

Of course, we’re not stopping there. For example, there will be further changes when the Monash Research webcasts start being announced, held, and archived. User-oriented (as opposed to vendor-oriented) services will continue to be expanded. And we plan to redesign Text Technologies and our other blog sites, some time in early 2008.

I look forward to working with you all over the next year.

monash.com e-mail has been turned off by my hosting company, due to what they claim is a still on-going attack. My backup address, however — FirstnameLastname@domain.com, where domain = dbms2 — is working fine. And my e-mail client traditionally checks them at the same time. So I suggest switching, at least for the moment.

Both are through the same hosting company (Hostgator, which I aspire to replace in the immediate future, given that I also lost admin access to the blogs on two separate occasions this week, and given that support claims over half my e-mails are unreadably empty and hence suitable for being ignored, despite me never having that problem elsewhere). Thus, for other kinds of problems there might be a single point of failure. But in this case, the dbms2 address is a working alternative to the standard one.

We’ve finally redesigned the Monash Information Services website. In particular, we’ve created two great new ways to read our research. First, there’s a new, Google-based integrated search engine. (And it really works well, the one glitch being that it brings back feeds and pages interchangeably. Try it out!) Also – and I really encourage you all to subscribe to this — there’s a new integrated research feed.

The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.

Right now, please bear with me in what is essentially a test post. In theory, I’ve switched the feeds here over to Feedburner. Now I’m going to test if that really has happened.

EDIT:  That didn’t work.  I’m going to put things back the way they were.

As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, IS still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!

I hope to generate a significantly more discussion here; your feedback can add a lot of value! (Even more if it’s to a post where I just wrote about your company. I don’t understand those of you who liked what I wrote so well that you linked to it from your websites, but then didn’t seize the opportunity to tack on a bit more of your marketing message in the comment thread.)

Finally, even if you have nothing else to add here, could I please have a few test comments added to this post? Olivier had trouble posting today, so I posted for him. It worked well for me. Of course, if you have trouble posting, please please email me about it. curtmonash at monash dot com is my main email address; given my spam volume, it would be highly prudent to make the title unmistakable, so that I pick your note out from the noise.

Thanks!!

CAM

A very well-known company “mines” its incoming emails for signs of trouble, not via any linguistics-driven approach, but just by clustering them. If a cluster changes size anomalously over time, it bears close investigation.