Maeve’s regular appearance on TV3’s IrelandAM deals this time with a dancewear site, the Johnstown Garden Centre, two insurance quote sites (quotedevil.ie and 123.ie). Coggles is a designer retailer, with an interesting story behind the name - it seems it’s named for a woman, but not in any way you’d expect. Finally, Blue Nile is a jewellery seller that sells more diamonds than anyone except Tiffany.
Bing Carries Results from Twitter
Apparently, Microsoft and Twitter have come to an agreement whereby Bing, the revamped MSN search engine, will index Twitter posts. Bing has been creeping steadily up in the search engine league tables over the past couple of months. Google still dominates, but on the sites where I’m working on the analytics, Bing has gone from - on average - less than 0.5% three months ago to around 3% now. If it continues that growth, we’re going to have to look at optimising for it, as well as for Google and Yahoo. Indeed, on some of my sites, though not all, it now provides more traffic than Yahoo.
There’s already plenty of speculation underway as to how to optimise for Bing - and indeed, which sites to optimise, as it appears that Bing performs better in some verticals than in others. According to a Sitepoint article, Bing returns better results in the areas of “health, local, travel and shopping. These are the fields with the highest potential for revenue for both publishers and search engines”. So if you don’t fall into those categories - if your website concerns games, film, sport, academics, or the like - maybe it’s not worth revamping for Bing just yet.
Google aren’t taking this who Bing/Twitter thing lying down, though: they’ve just announced a ‘social search‘ tool. It’s about time someone challenged Google’s dominance of search, though - this competition will definitely result in better search technology.
Posted in News.
– October 22, 2009
4 Things You’ll Use Wave For
A lot of the discussion going on in Google Wave is along the lines of ‘This is great! What are we going to do with it?’. I don’t think anyone can reliably list everything Wave will be used for, but I can set out a few very likely possibilities, based on what I’m already using it for. I’m lucky in that many of the people I work on projects with tend to be early adopters in terms of new technology, and that for some of the projects, we’ve had 100% of the people involved on from about the second ripple of Wave invitations.
Brainstorming
Wave is absolutely made for brainstorming new projects. You can set in with a group of people, throw out ideas, discuss them in real time, capture everything that’s going by, include illustrations, links, voting modules, maps, or whatever else you might reckon you need, and it just works. It’s far more productive than even a real-life, face-to-face meeting - so much gets lost in the interruptions, distractions and bottlenecks of speech. Indeed, I’ve brainstormed one small project by sitting in the same room as two of the other people involved, all of us typing like mad.
Event Management
Managing an ongoing event - a convention, a conference, or the like - can be difficult. You can’t find someone because they’re running a panel, and you need to go fetch the kegs for later, and the only other person who actually understands the problem is knee-deep in the PA system and can’t talk to you. Wave is ideal. Not only can you put the problem up in text where the panel moderator and the sound engineer can find it when they have some time, but you can keep an eye on it on your PDA or iPhone while the keg guys load up the van. You can get a fast response, and you can also leave information for later.
Thought Capture
One of the principles of the Gettings Things Done method (yes, I am a disciple - a rather lowly one, but I try) is the capture of any stray thoughts that are knocking around. You need someplace you can get things out of your head, and know that you can come back to them later. It’s a far, far better thing to be able to throw these into a medium where not only can you retrieve them later when you have time to think about them, but other people can, if need be, comment on them, augment them, research them, or even spawn brainstorming waves to get the whole idea explored.
Review and Critique
Very often, in the process of any project, you’ll need to review something - a new tool, a piece of software, a document, something in from the graphic designer, or any of a thousand more things. Wave will allow multiple people to review an item at once - you capture all the feedback in one place, collate problems or suggestions for improvement, and have a permanent record of it immediately, rather than trying to remember what someone’s suggestion was later on.
These are just four of the uses already under way. There will be many more.
Posted in Thought Leadership.
– October 13, 2009
Google Wave: First Thoughts
I was lucky enough to get into Google Wave early on - I got my invite mail early yesterday, as did a number of other people I know. It looks like invitations are being sent out in batches, rather than as requested. The fact that a number of people I know are also in has given me a head start on figuring out what can be done with it - as with any communications medium, it’s no use if you’re the only one using it.
Wave is like a message board, but with better threading. You can see people typing in nearly real time. Wave is like email, but better organised, and with much easier use of images, links, and other non-text data. Wave is like instant messaging, but not so ephemeral - the conversation is preserved, and you can come back to it. Wave is like twitter, but you can write more. Wave is like a wiki, but it’s got a clean, easy interface, with drag-and-drop functionality built right in.
I think, to be honest, it’s something of its own thing - trying to depict it in terms of other media is like trying to use TV like radio with pictures. It’s a step onward, but it’s not how it’ll be used in the long term.
Thus far (a day and a half of use), I’m finding it to be a brilliant collaborative tool. I’m discussing projects of my own with four other people, and I’ve got more… useful data, I suppose, from it than I would from any number of emails. It’s like a very orderly conversation, where nobody gets interrupted, or forgets what they were going to say.
I’m certainly going to continue to use it as I’ve started, in this collaborative-project-discussion style, but I’ll be immensely interested to see what other uses people come up with.
Posted in Thought Leadership.
– October 2, 2009
Dating, Worldwide Taxi Fares, Celebrity Dresses, Student Savings and Quirky Purchases
Maeve’s regular slot on TV3’s IrelandAM came around again yesterday. She talked about a site that can tell you what to expect to be charged for taxi fares anywhere in the world, an Irish-owned and run dating site, and one where you can get a celebrity dress for that first date - for much less than you’d expect. She also looks at a site that offers savings for students, and another that lets you buy goods online from shops that don’t appear on the high streets.
Posted in TV3.
– October 2, 2009
The Future of Blogging
Om Malik has, for as long as I’ve known of him, been a source of brilliant thinking about the web. In a fairly new article, The Evolution of Blogging, he looks at where blogging may be going in future. This has been sitting open as a tab in my browser for some time now, while I mull over it. There are a few parts of the article that really stand out, and I’m going to quote one of those here:
The next generation of blogging systems needs to account for the fact that information — and most importantly, conversations — flow via email, Twitter, instant messages and other formats.
This, to my thinking, is very, very insightful. Obviously, you can draw connections with Google Wave, but there are going to be lots of conversations that are going on elsewhere too - in older IM programs, in threads of comments on existing blogs, on message boards, IRC channels, whispers and guild channels in MMOs, and all manner of other media.
So I think that if someone can construct a mechanism, of whatever kind it can be, which will ‘translate’ data from one of these media to another, and make it available for use in blogs and other ‘published’ forms, it will be enormously successful. I don’t know if that’s something which will happen via the Wave API, right down at the protocol level, or something I haven’t even considered, but it’s going to be necessary.
Posted in Thought Leadership.
– September 29, 2009
And We Have Moved
We have now moved - we haven’t fully unpacked yet, but we have moved. The most important piece of information around this is the new phone number. We are now at 01 400 4250. We also have a fun eCard that’s being sent out to our clients, vendors, friends and relatives.
And just to keep you entertained while we get tidied up and get some better pictures, here’s an image of the new office as we went about unpacking this morning:
Elucidate unpacking in the new Kingram Place office
Posted in News.
– September 25, 2009
Elucidate is Moving
Elucidate is moving! Having spent years in Mespil Road, in Dublin 4, we’re now moving across the canal, to a new office at 25 Kingram Place, Dublin 2. Moving day is tomorrow!
Our new office is bigger, brighter, and all-round nicer, and about the only thing that’s really under debate is whether it’s closer to Pearse Station or Grand Canal Dock. The Dublin Transport Office have a clever Walk and Cycle Journey Planner, which we hoped would settle the matter. It tells us that it’s 1.35 km from the new office to Pearse Station - and 1.34 km to Grand Canal Dock. I suppose we’ll have to go by whichever is the nicer walk!
We’ll be posting more about our move as it gets underway - we’re all excited about it.
Posted in News.
– September 24, 2009
Google Wave
After the announcement of Google Wave back in May, the general consensus seemed to be that it’s definitely the coming thing. And since then, there doesn’t seem to have been much. Simon Bisson, however, has now written a piece on ZDNet which sets out a lot more detail on what Wave can do. Basically, it’s setting out to replace email and instant messaging, adding in document collaboration, and a host of other functions. It has its own protocols, so anyone can build a Wave application, as a fully-fledged website or as a widget that can be plugged into a website, dashboard or even a mobile device.
I find it interesting that even with the release of Internet Explorer 8, the built-in Windows browser won’t be able to handle Wave. It’ll need the Chrome Frame plugin to work properly in IE, but Chrome itself, Firefox, and Safari will be able to handle Wave straight away. Statistics on different sites vary with regard to use of different browers, but here on the Elucidate site, a smidgen over 58% of our visitors still use some version of Internet Explorer. As Wave enters the mainstream, that may change - or maybe it’ll prevent Wave from getting traction.
Wave will be extended to more users next week, and you can express your interest, if you’d like to try it out.
Posted in News.
– September 24, 2009
Twitter and Project Retweet
We’ve been keeping an eye on Twitter for some time now. I’ve been using it for my own hobbies and interests for a while, and the company Twitter account is @canweelucidate. Twitter is really interesting for a couple of reasons - the main one, of course, being that so many people are using it. It’s had phenomenal growth over the last few months.
One of the other reasons, though, is the way we’re seeing emergent behaviour. For instance, the mechanism of replying to someone else by prefixing their username with an ‘@’ symbol - that wasn’t built in. People just started to use it, and then Twitter built in some support for it. Likewise, the convention of ‘RT @username’ for retweets - the Twitter equivalent of forwarding something in email - comes wholly from the users, not from the service. And now, Twitter are talking about building in handling of retweets, calling it Project Retweet.
This can happen because Twitter is a service run by one company, not a standard that works across the internet. On the one hand, this is great because it allows them to make this kind of change, improving the service for everyone to use. And on the other hand, my ex-techie protocol-purist side is muttering a bit, because the internet is founded on protocols that use wide standards, like email and http, based on the old RFC arrangements. If Twitter should decide to change their service in ways that people don’t like, there’s nothing to do but go along - no company has that power over email, or the hyper-text transfer protocol that makes the web go. And of course, if Twitter close up shop (it’s still not clear to me, or anyone else, how they make any money) the whole thing goes away.
Twitter are hiring people - their jobs page lists the best end of 30 positions at the moment - so they clearly reckon they’ll be able to make it keep going.
Posted in Thought Leadership.
– September 23, 2009
