An oil refinery?

Eleven years ago, on a bright spring morning,  millions of web surfers found that they had received a friendly email from a brand new search company called Google.  They were conducting a beta version of their new search engine and were looking for user feedback.  In those days you could even sign up for the Google newsletter. What immediately impressed me was the simplicity of the design . There were no cluttered adverts or banner ads like Web Crawler, Alta Vista and Magellan. Even in the days of dial-up, Google’s beta version was startlingly quick at returning results. Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t long out of Stanford University and only a year or so earlier had still been toying with the name ‘Backrub’ for their new search engine.  The first Google server is now encased in a museum. I don’t think even they could have imagined the speed of Google’s growth.  The picture above may resemble an oil refinery but in fact is a water cooling plant that cools the servers in one of Google’s data centres.  It’s hard to believe it has grown from this:

to this, in just eleven years!

ker clunk - ker clunk - ker clunk

On the road outside our home is a badly seated manhole cover that has, over the last few months, been getting steadily noisier.  Every vehicle that drives over it creates a distinctive ‘ker-clunk ‘ noise, that can be heard up to 100 yards away.   Typing ‘reporting road defect Somerset’ into Google brought up the startlingly appropriate  Somerset County Council ‘Highways Defect report form’.  Within hours of reporting I received a response from a Customer Adviser (Somerset Direct) logging my complaint (ref 214878) saying that it had been forwarded to the Assistant Area Highway Manager (Environment Directorate – Highways Group).  The Environment Directorate told me my complaint  had been forwarded, with some urgency, to the New Roads and Streetworks Section (County Hall). The Streetworks section told me they were forwarding it to ‘the statutory undertakers‘. Half expecting a hearse to drive up and check the fault, I discovered my report had, in fact, been forwarded to the utilities suppliers.

On Tuesday an Electricity Supply van arrived.  A man got out and peered closely at the manhole cover, shook his head and said ‘Nothing to do with the Electricity Supply’.  Later that day a BT van turned up.  An engineer got out, looked very closely at the manhole cover, shook his head slowly and made that whistling noise that builders make when offer you an estimate that is ten times more than you expected. ‘ Nothing to do with BT and even if it was it would take three weeks to get permission from Highways to do any work on it ‘.  Today, two Somerset County Council Highways vans turned up with orange flashing lights and parked either side of it. The drivers got out of their vehicles and studied the manhole cover very carefully from a number of angles.  I went out to ask them about progress but before I got to them they had driven off.  That leaves us with the water and gas suppliers to pay a visit.  I am not holding my breath.  It is all very well having a friendly interactive website, backed-up with prompt customer responses and email forwarding, but at the end of the day someone still needs to use a pick-axe and a shovel.

For the technically minded Michael Kravitz, a Forensic Civil Engineer, created a mathematical formula: ωf2xr2=ωo2xr2+2xαxrxh  to explain that when the Kinetic Energy (cars driving over it) exceeds the Potential Energy of the manhole cover, the cover will jump/slide out of its casting.  Let’s hope his professional talents are not needed and someone turns up with a set of traffic lights soon.

I recently helped to facilitate a Focus Group evaluation for the Visit Somerset website, with Claire Sully and John Brunsdon from Tickbox Marketing, and found it an absolutely fascinating experience. Budgets can be poured into public sector websites, but how often are users asked for their opinion about the website?  During the day we ran three focus groups with different demographics: Young Mothers, Active Retired and 28-40s with no children.  We conducted question and answer sessions, undertook individual web usability tests, filmed vox pops and made some surprising discoveries.

The way we book and research holidays online is rapidly evolving : site navigation needs to be as straightforward as possible,  search engines within sites need to deliver relevant content quickly, lovingly crafted text is scanned rather than read, website images are important but their size isn’t, email newsletters are eagerly signed up for and everyone studied third party reviews (not edited ones within websites, which generally weren’t trusted) before committing to booking.  So if you are a tourism business reading this blog, work with Trip Advisor and create the link on your website.  Last night I had to stay overnight at a hotel in Lichfield and there on the reception desk was a printed card – ‘If you’ve enjoyed your stay at The George, why not write a review on Trip Advisor’? I had and so I did.  And it didn’t cost The George a penny. One local Bed and Breakfast business now receives 80% of its bookings directly through Trip Advisor. Resistance is futile – make friends with it.

Mapping the Internet

When I began as an IT adviser at Business Link in 2001, most Somerset businesses were struggling to manage their ecommerce websites with a 28.8 or, at best, 56kbs line. The lucky few had ISDN. Connection speeds were painfully slow, but most web developers accepted it philosophically. When the Asymmetric digital subscriber line system (ADSL) was developed by BT, the thinking at the time was that most customers would need an Asymmetric service more than a symmetrical one.  But of course YouTube and online data back-up services have shown us that we push as much content onto the web as we pull down. We still have a long way to go but the global brain is rapidly developing. The BBC news website shows just how far we have progressed in eight years.