Some of my photos from the V&A Village Fete can be found here.
The Fete was a great afternoon out. The highlights for us were:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365_main_datace.html tells us that a data centre in San Francisco went down through power problems yesterday, taking out some pretty big and important web 2.0 businesses including:
We had intermittent power problems ourselves in SF as well yesterday, so it sounds like something fairly widespread.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we make sure websites stay up and working, and it’s quite possible, yet we have some examples here of pretty important web 2.0 websites just not working. My guess is they relied on a “100% power continuity” guarantee from a hosting company. If you’re running a website as a serious Internet business, my view is you need to plan to avoid problems like this altogether, perhaps by mirroring data centres.
And what if it’d been something even more popular and pervasive that’d gone down, like Facebook? There are people in our office who would need counselling if Facebook went down.
Continuing the trend of things doing stuff they weren’t originally intended for… From http://www.emis-online.com/news/article/index.asp?212
Over 1,100 surgeries are now in a position to offer their patients the ability to book, amend and cancel GP appointments via digital interactive TV and mobile. In a concerted effort to offer e-Government services to the widest range of people, DigiTV in conjunction with EMIS, the leading primary care systems provider, has extended the successful GP booking service with the aim of reaching those households across the digital divide.
Patients across the country are now able to safely access their GP’s appointment book just by pushing a few buttons on their remote control or mobile phone. Patients will have access to the same system that the doctor’s receptionist uses when someone phones up or asks for an appointment in person. EMIS has already made this facility available to internet users, so it was a natural extension to make it available on DiTV and mobile phones.
What next? Ripping CDs in your toaster?
There’s some reporting in the press at the moment about the appearance of big-name brand advertising on some very dubious websites. Don’t click here if you’re sensitive, but this site shows videos taken by members of the public, of real fights in the street, and somehow some very big names have been advertising there. Obviously this isn’t what those brands or their ad agencies intended, so how did it happen?
The answer is almost certainly that the ad agencies bought some ad space on a network. Networks are companies that sell the advertising space on large numbers of websites. Some have their own technology delivering ads, some are simply sales organisations that use other companies for the delivery of the ads.
What’s been happening is that these networks have been selling space to each other, so an agency’s purchase of ad space on a big high-profile network might have ended up being delivered by someone else entirely: and before you know it, your expensive brand is all over a streetfighting website. The practise is called “blind chain buying” and a lot of people in the ad industry want to stop it.
So this morning I was at a meeting where a presentation was given by some people who represent the Internet Advertising Sales House, which is a body of concerned ad networks, who want to introduce some good practice into the ad network world.
Travel’s on my mind at the moment, for a number of reasons. We’re planning a big trip at the end of the year, and it’s incredible how much easier it is today to research and transact online, even for some very remote and obscure locations. BUT there are still some terrible websites out there, operated by travel companies, hotels and estate agents. It’s really not excusable any more to have a bad website for your company, there are so many simple, low-cost options available to people if they look around.
On a related topic, I was at a meeting with an airline this morning, and we were introducing ourselves. I said that back before the Internet, I’d been a business analyst at Thomas Cook, designing applications to make it easy for sales people to sell flights. It used to be an incredibly specialised skill, with training courses on the bizarre command line syntax of computerised reservation systems. To find out if there were any seats on a flight from London to Sydney on a given date would’ve been something like “ALHRSYD23JUL” and that was an easy one.
So we tried to design a system to make the work easier for all travel agents. And now we can all do it, using Expedia, or Opodo, or ba.com. And when did you last visit a travel agent?
I’ve moved my blog from my own server to Wordpress for a while, as I’ve been having awful problems with the Movable Type software that I was using. Most people probably won’t even notice the difference, and when I get time I WILL move it back.
All I’ll say is that MT4 is not ready yet, and installing it over MT3 has caused me a lot of problems.
Apologies to non-geeks for this post. I’ll write something for more general consumption soon.
It’s very rare for me to really enjoy a video advertisement, on TV at least, the cinema ones tend to be better, so I was really, really pleased to see this one yesterday. It’s a little story, 2 minutes long, and it’s got everything.
In May, I wrote about a behavioural targeting panel session I attended at Internet World. This week Tiscali announced that they would be rolling out Wunderloop’s targetting solution to their ISP customers. This is an interesting development, because Tiscali are an ISP, with access to a broad range of behavioural data from their customers.
As I said in my original piece, one of the problems for most people implementing behavioural targeting is that they don’t have enough visibility of what their visitors are doing to create a useful profile of each person, because mostly they’re individual websites or portals, which only have a small share of each user’s attention. Tiscali don’t have this problem, because they’re an ISP, and can see everything their users do, within reason. But this creates another problem: privacy.
If Tiscali are going to use everything that a customer does online to create a profile and to serve more targeted advertising, how will their customers feel about that? Will Tiscali be able to get legal clearance to do this without a very intrusive opt-in statement? And will the default position be an opt-out or an opt-in?
