A lot of my work involves facilitating large meetings where groups need to collaborate to resolve difficult issues or develop future plans for working together. Over the last 12 months I have started to share 4 Golden Rules with the participants which always seem to significantly improve the results we get. Here they are!

Its easy to get the wool pulled over your eyes especially when you talk to experts! Communications consultant Jodi Glickman Brown offers three concrete steps to get the information you need in a conversation with an "expert" even though you might know very little about their subject.

RepKnight is an exciting Belfast-based software start-up in the reputation monitoring, crowd-sourced news and public opinion space. Even though they have only been going 12 months and without any external funding they are already in profit and fast becoming the "go-to" company for major private and public enterprises who need high volume real-time social media tracking.

The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina recently published a useful white paper on the topical area of developing skills for virtual teams. It is available online and in PDF. What I found most interesting was the section on Virtual Team Challenges.

My windows 7 PC got infected by an innocent looking piece of malware (mystart incredibar) which took over my search bar and home page on all browsers. Yuk! I checked it out on the web and found that it is definitely malware and I want to get rid of it. That was my first mistake!

A tradesman does their work as a means to an end whereas a craftsman does their work from a desire to do the job well for its own sake. Which are you or are you a bit of both?

Data Mining, a hi-tech buzzword for many years, is about excavating useful patterns which are hidden deep in your data to give you valuable insights you could not otherwise find. I was looking for a data mining tool in the same broad price bracket as Excel but which was also robust and did not require you to be a mathematics genius to use it. Surprisingly I managed to find a product which exactly met my needs!

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. In doing this they are effectively solving the challenging 'Travelling Salesman Problem' and despite their small brains are the first creatures discovered who can do this.