Pancentric Blogs

We are working with one of our clients on a Vertical search engine targetting a specific sector and were mulling over some of the issues with search today.

Now, amongst all of the goodies out there including Intent search (why has Mindset been shut down Yahoo?) and the promise of Semantic search, the closest we have got is categorised search results where the thousands of results are dropped into folders. So watch this space for something along those lines…

And very serendipitously the raison d’etre came to us via Google’s recent claim of indexing a trillion pages, we-knew-web-was-big and the 10th Anniversary page at www.google.com/search2001.html and the application of a bit of sums that suggests there are over 750 times as many pages out there. So each search potentially returns 750 times as many results - too many to handle. Hence the need intent/categories.

I suspect the search world will become very interesting over the next few years.

Stumbled upon this article the other day and just had to post it. Chris McGrath from ThoughtFarmer had this to say about current corporate intranets

“Thousands of corporate intranets are seldom-used, impossibly complex beasts. In contrast, next-generation intranets are simple, social platforms that can change the way people work (for the better!). But getting to intranet 2.0 isn’t so easy.”

Something I’ve been banging on about for an absolute age. Chris, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s time to blow up the old and wheel in the new. If you want an intranet that works for your business, don’t tell your employees what they want and force them to read it with mind numbing intranet update messages. Let them provide the content themselves, let them consume that information when they want to, and give them the freedom to say what they want (within reason of course!)

See Chris’s ten steps to intranet heaven here

I got an Eee PC when they 1st came out (thanks Woody!), great concept and a good package. After using it for a while though its limitations became apparent, screen too small, no bluetooth, limited disk space being the prime ones for me. On the other hand the weight, Linux support brilliant way it scales up the display when you add an external monitor, makes it a great USB stick replacement for presentations.

We are now looking at (and typing on it at the moment) the Advent badged MSI wind, and a jolly fine machine it is. Now, let’s get this straight right from the start, if you are looking for a full on review, go elsewhere, this is a quirky personal opinion (it’s the only one I’ve got).

So, I like it, a lot the screen is a good size, some people complain about the 600 pixels depth, but I haven’t found it a real problem, yes you don’t get much of a preview in say Thunderbird, but I don’t have to resort to Littlebird as I do on the Eee. At this point I must admit to not having tried the Eee PC 900 series, so maybe the comparison is unfair, such is life.

The Advent/MSI Wind is really good to use, it is doing all the things I need it to, it bluetoothed to my P1i phone like a dream, connects to all my networks, does it all with minimum fuss and is light and easy to carry.

It has its faults though:

The hinges are not very firm, this means that sitting on a train (or even in a chair with it on you knees) the screen wobbles just enough to be really annoying.
The Eee PC has a great power supply akin to a mobile phone with the transformer inthe plug, the Advent/Wind has a big “kettle lead” that attaches with that weird laptop 3 pin plus into a separate transformer then into the Wind. Too big and too awkward to carry around in a small bag.
Windoews XP, a good Linux distro would be soooooo much better, I will try Ubuntu and report back.
It gets hot, especially on the thighs.

There will be more Atom based sub notebooks out soon some better some not, and this is not a “comprehensiv review”, however I have to say that for £280 at PC World (wow I never thought I would be suggesting that anyone buys something from PC World) it is a winner for me.

I was sitting on the train the other day, heading into the Pancentric office at Bankside, listening to Radio 4’s Today program for my fix of news when up popped a feature on the Semantic wWeb. Featuring none other than Tim Berners-Lee himself (well it is the BBC).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7496000/7496976.stm

A good piece that shows the Semantic web is soon to go mainstream. So, it’s back to the R&D labs for Pancentric.

If you want to know how to design and build a site - it’s all here. Follow these simple rules and you won’t go far wrong. Love it!

James ‘fastest thumb in SE1′ Prebble was in action over the weekend in the world marble championships.

Despite a strong showing and an easy win in the first round, the Germans, beach towels in hand, were victorious on the day and took the coveted title.

Commenting on the experience, Jimmi was heard to say

“Some people say Marbles is a game of luck. I say rubbish! It takes skill, the right attitude and years of dedication to reach world standard.”

Jimmi is, as I type, back down the gym training for next year’s event. Our local hero can bee seen in the YouTube clip below. Watch out for him 42 seconds in, clapping his hands whilst donning a fetching green and yellow wig. Don’t say it wasn’t taken seriously!

Great write up on the Guardian Sport blogs here.

A very interesting article was published on ReadWriteWeb.Com regarding a discussion between Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com and Marissa Meyer, Google’s VP of Search.

Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines.
The discussion then follows on how search engine results are irrelevant and filled with spam and weird stuff. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results.
Jason was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.

As a member of these sites like Wikia Search and Mahalo, the results you achieve are significantly better because we’re incorporating human intelligence into the mix.

Wikia Search will have another social angle. Users will be able to find other contributors to work on the search engine with them, behind the scenes from the masses who just want results.

Mahalo, an evolving human-powered Web guide primarily uses paid staffers to create its topic pages. A new “Mahalo Follow” feature lets users easily recommend sites to the engine– a more cost-effective way to quickly build a library of human-approved links.

Wales v. Calacanis

Marissa Mayer Comments

Basic transcript of the session at the conference.

Shane Richmond, communities editor at the Telegraph.co.uk, today announced on his blog that the Telegraph would be adopting OpenID by the end of February.

This is very exciting because not only are they accepting OpenIDs, they will be providing them for users also. As his post says, they are the first newspaper in the world and the first British media company to be doing this.

In brief, Open ID is a decentralised sign-on system allowing users to log on to multiple sites with a single ID hosted by any of the participating sites without having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

Having multiple log ins for loads of different sites has been a constant tyranny when using multiple services across different machines at home and work. Open ID is a great step towards solving this problem. Having organisations such as the Telegraph adopting these standards will only help nurture adoption and accelerate its path into the mainstream.

Just found a great new (5 weeks old) podcast from Jon Hicks and John Oxton. The Rissington Podcast is pitched as ‘a web-geek version of Gardeners Question Time’. John Hicks found fame a few years ago with his design of the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and John Oxton specialises in semantic mark up and CSS.

Anyway, based out of an old RAF base with music and voice over to match, the podcast is a very witty and entertaining look at the world of web design and coding; including listeners’ questions, interviews and typeface of the week. They have a great format, long may it continue.

OK, so we’re three days in. But that still means 363 days to go (it’s a leap year don’t forget) in which all sorts of things can happen, and launch, and get bought.

I’m not going to do an exhaustive run down of all the things I think might happen this year. You’ve probably read loads of those types of posts already. What I want to look at is how attitudes might evolve, specifically in the corporate sector.
We all know about the rampant rise of social networks over the past 18 months. What’s going to happen over the next 12 months is anyone guess. What I believe we’ll see is more and more big corporates starting to adopt the common toolsets that are evident in all these sites and services.

It may have taken some time for many parties to realise, but a lot of corporate organisations, through their intranets and various extranets have large communities of employees, contacts and suppliers already in place. I know of one site inparticular which exhibits 40,000+ registered users all sharing a very specific professional interest area. Imagine the power of applying tools such as Port 80-safe instant messaging (think Twitter), a way of finding people by specific interest and location (think LinkedIn), a mechanism to create special interest groups (think Facebook Groups), a way to share images and videos for discussion (think Flickr or YouTube) and a way or distributing content throughout the network without clogging inboxes (think DropSend or similar).

By utilising these tried and tested tools we can increase loyalty and participation amongst the community as well as encourage adoption by parties who might otherwise see no discernible value in joining if it were a ‘vanilla’ one-to-many model.

My next prediction for 2008, though to be honest more of a wish, would be the widespread adoption by large organisations of lightweight platforms and technologies. I’ve had my time of requirements gathering and interface design for multi-million dollar, 18 month SAP implementations. Now, these things will always have their place. When tracking manufacturing output of a 35,000 strong workforce you will need some pretty beefy reporting tools. However, surely a wiki or blog or IM tool for a special interest group of 300 people within the organisation can be built in a lightweight, agile manner? I’m not a developer, but I have seen some pretty punchy pieces of functionality built in days and now in use by thousands on a day-to-day basis. There must be some merit in these ways of working for the appropriate projects.

Hopefully we will begin to see a new dawn in 2008 so we can begin to create some truly powerful communities for specific uses which take the online community and social media beyond glorified dating services.