Pancentric Blogs

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.

In the very best of blog traditions the end of December marks the point at which we look back and soberly (if that’s possible at this time of year) digest the events, products and advancements made in our digital world in the last 12 months.

One of, if not the, biggest events of 2007 was the opening up of the Facebook walled garden to anyone who wished to register. What this did, in simple terms, was introduce millions of people to social networking and associated tools such as RSS, content aggregation, photo and video sharing, perpetual contact and all the other tools now used on a daily basis by the 60 million or so registered users.

From a technology perspective the iPhone has shifted the usability of mobile devices forward in a giant seismic leap, where all the other vendors were just shuffling forward in an apologetic manner by adding little more than memory and increasing complexity. The inclusion of a proper browser, not a rubbish cut down version, seamless integration with mac desktop applications as well as a host of third party apps already released, not to mention the iTunes and YouTube stuff this is the first truly integrated pocket device that people actually want to use.

Services such as Twitter and Tumblr gained momentum and grew their user base and I think will see wider adoption next year, though 2008 predictions are for a later post. Jaiku was bought by Google.

RSS adoption gained pace through 2007. Google Reader came out as most used feed reader.

There were a few big headlines in the digital music world in 2007. Radiohead revolutionised the music industry (and God, doesn’t it need it) with their ‘pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth’ sales model for their album ‘In Rainbows’. What their actual revenue from sales was, the band will not say. However, what they did say was that it made more than all of their other albums put together when measured on downloads alone. Some sources put it as high as £5 per album while others as low as £2.90.

Last.fm was sold for £140m to CBS. Not much more to say other than the fact that it wasn’t the only service to either get bought or receive major investment.

Video went mental. Joost came out of beta, the BBC’s iPlayer launched and project Kangaroo was announced which will aggregate BBC, iTV and Channel 4 content into one player in 2008. Even the Queen, 50 years after her first televised Christmas Day address to the nation, has a YouTube channel.

That’s a tiny snapshot of what’s gone on this year. In a post to be published soon I’ll be looking at what excitement 2008 has to offer. As a starter for 10, video is going to be bigger than ever and the big corporates are going to get all social.

It’s official. The best way to generate traffic to your site is to start blogging. Matt Cutts says so. As head of Google’s Web Spam team, if anyone knows about driving traffic then he should.

As mentioned in his keynote speech at PubCon Search marketing conference in Las Vegas, it’s something I’ve half suspected for some time myself after looking at stats for a given site’s visits compared to blog traffic for the same site.

Just look at the way blogs work. Regularly updated content. Well structured content which is search engine friendly (depending on platform choice). The ability to aggregate content with RSS keeps users engaged, thus promoting return visits. Having good content will encourage in-bound links. The potential for community building around commenters has the potential to increase the keywords added to a post which may help drive the post up the rankings.

As a very low effort but high impact way of getting a message out there and dipping your toe in ‘community’ it is unbeatable.

(via FutureLab) 

The BBC has gone and got all Web 2.0 and ‘AJAXy’ with their new beta home page design.

Announced on their blog last week, it uses the now tried and tested blend of gradient fills and large type as well as the drag and drop functionality of sites such as iGoogle, Facebook and Netvibes.

Initial impressions are good. It works very smoothly with only the odd display error here and there but hey, this is the beta launch. It utilises RSS and javascript to allow the user control over what content is displayed and where it sits on the page. There are a few things which would be nice to have and I’m sure they’re in development, judging by the number of blog comments highlighting these things.

Firstly, the ability to drag news categories around within a channel. When adding news feeds to the news panel they appear in the order in which the user adds them with no mechanism for reordering them. The only way is to remove all feeds and add them in the order in which you would like them to appear.

Secondly, the overriding colour on the page is dictated by the main hero panel selection. By swapping between the four options the entire page colour scheme changes. This is, though clever, overkill. Why should the colour of my news feed links be dictated by the fact that I’ve clicked to view the ‘Live Music’ tab on the hero panel?

All in all I think it’s a step in the right direction. Though they’re probably a year to 18 months, if not more, behind the curve as far as interaction design utilising these technologies is concerned. Aren’t the BBC meant to be blazing trails in this area having a roster of 21ish agencies and a development team of 20+ people to work on this one project?

One thing that really brought a smile to my face is the resurrection of the old-skool BBC analogue clock in the top right of the screen - a lovely touch.

Yesterday Google announced on their blogs a new service they have in closed beta which will become a serious threat for the likes of Wikipedia and Squidoo, two other user-generated knowledge repositories.

Knol as it’s known, or unit of knowledge, allows users to share their knowledge in a very structured way. As Google say, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot of stuff. Google are providing them with the space to share that knowledge with the wider community. The difference between this and Wikipedia is that where Wikipedia is a collaborative effort - lots of people contributing to a single article, knol places the author of the piece at centre stage. So, over time a single user could virtually publish everything they know for public consumption at no cost. In fact, if what they write is popular Google will share ad revenues should the writer wish to pump some Google Ads into the page.

What’s also interesting about this is that it is open to absolutely anyone. It won’t be a pre-moderated, vetted walled garden approach. So the quality of some of the stuff will be questionable. But, and here’s where it get more interesting, there will be the usual social features of rating and commenting, as well as being able to continue the article through posing questions to the author as well as adding content. So, the good stuff should float to the top. Couple this with Google’s half decent search technology and it could be an awesome tool.

One thought though. Wikipedia often appears high up the Google rankings by the very nature of it’s widely linked pages. How are the ranking weightings going to work in the future when Wikipedia is ‘up against’ a Google-built service which will obviously be optimised for its own voodoo search algorithms?

Welcome to the Pancentric blogs.

First off, a little bit of background. Pancentric was formed in August 2003, and is the result of a merger between communications and direct marketing agency, Stewart Fenn Marketing and new media consultancy, BDMedia. Both companies were independent and each enjoyed successful 10 year histories. Pancentric now focus on digital marketing with a great mix of inspired creative thinking and sound technical implementation.

These blogs will provide a little window on our activities, our thoughts and comments on the industry and hopefully some fun diversions. You never know, we may even share some of our expertise and thinking along the way.