beatnic - just wondering

• What the Google Intranet Looks Like
  Google inside.

  Via tracking “intranet” on Twitter.

  (tags: google intranet)

• FreeRice will donate 10 grains of rice for every correct answer
  3,664,079,450 grains since 7th October. “WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance…” Via my Mum.
  (tags: rice freerice vocabulary charity unitednations)
• Londonist: Going Green at Goose Green
  Saturday 1st December “eco-bonananza” in Dulwich.

  Via feedblitz email of technorati search for East Dulwich.

  (tags: eastdulwich se22 London goosegreen snub)
• East Dulwich SNUB - say no to unwanted bags
  “We want to make East Dulwich a Plastic Bag Free Zone”
  (tags: eastdulwich se22 London snub green plasticbags)
• 0845 number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Ouch! 25 pence per minute on O2 and it’s not included in your tariff
  (tags: uk 0845 costs callcharges phonenumbers)
• A Convenient Truth
  A film about the world getting better.
  (tags: convenient truth film climate change)
• Intranet Information Architecture (IA) (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  “Ideally, an intranet team would include a professional IA specialist to handle the IA component of the user experience. But that’s like saying an intranet team should include professional interaction designers, graphic designers, writers and editors, software engineers and system architects, as well as dedicated usability specialists to do the user research — plus, of course, a brilliant manager with full executive support. That’s indeed the dream team.”
  (tags: intranet jakobnielsen ia informationarchitecture alertbox)
• BBC NEWS | England | London | Voice of the Tube silenced by LU
  “Mind the crap”
  (tags: voices mindthegap london underground)

This series of short articles explains some simple and free ways to use the internet to keep tabs on the subjects you’re interested in. I’m using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Previously: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking.

This article is about following Delicious bookmark tags using RSS.

In a nutshell: use your RSS reader to notify you whenever someone adds a bookmark to Delicious and tags it “eastdulwich“

Delicious

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
[Source: wikipedia]

Instead of using Firefox “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” (sic) in Internet Explorer, you can save URLs (web addresses) of the pages and sites you want to remember to your account on Delicious.

This means you can access your bookmarks wherever you go, rather than being tied to using the same computer.

You can also share your bookmarks, and see other people’s bookmarks. There is an optional setting to make any bookmark private.

When you save a bookmark you can add tags - or labels - to describe it, to make it easy to find and to group it with other similar bookmarks.

This also means that you can use delicious to track the tags you’re interested in.

There is an RSS feed available for all tags in delicious. Adding a tag’s feed to your RSS reader means you’ll be notified whenever your reader picks up a new item.

The page for all latest public bookmarks for East Dulwich is at http://del.icio.us/tag/eastdulwich, and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/eastdulwich.

As well as subscribing to feeds for tags you can also subscribe to feeds from people with accounts on delicious. My latest public bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/beatnic and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/beatnic

I have my own public delicious bookmarks automatically published to this website, resulting in posts with a title beginning “links for yyyy-mm-dd” (where yyyy-mm-dd is the date I saved the bookmarks).

Other social bookmarking websites are gaining in popularity - see this list on wikipedia - delicious is easy to use and one of the most popular, so should give a reasonable representation of what’s getting noticed on the web.

This is brilliant!

My Aussie friend John sent this to me asking… “who says we don’t have culture in Australia?”

We’ve all seen it.

The dreaded “Skip Intro”.

The picture of the boss on the homepage obscuring any useful content or functionality.

I was just discussing this with a friend and came up with a new name for an old problem “Bonus-centred design”

Here’s how it works:

• Take direct orders from the boss. Do not ask questions
• Do not clarify purpose
• Remember the boss knows what good design is - it must be interactive have things you can click to make other things move around
• Do not under any circumstances talk to potential users of the site
• You only need one person to test with. The boss
• Do tell the boss how many hits the site will get. Forget about task completion
• Do your best to get a video of the boss on the homepage welcoming people to this amazing online experience
• Reinforce the design with company branding at every opportunity. The more suited to busines cards and company stationery the better
• Make it all about the company and not about the people who use your products and services
• Do not worry about accessibility. It takes time and costs money. And anyway the software supplier assures their product will have an accessibility patch very soon

I’m sure there are more…

I’ve had my Nokia N95 phone since June. I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s good for looking at websites, the camera is great despite the shutter lag, video quality good. It’s ok for having phone calls on. Battery life’s ok. I haven’t got the patience with the GPS, and sometimes I do wonder if it’s registered a key press…

There a couple of things I find virtually impossible to remember how to do…

1. Changing the “desktop icons”

   Well that’s what I call them. It’s the menu which lets you access six applications quickly from the phone’s desktop or start screen. I guess it’s because they’re called Active standby apps - not a name that I could easily have guessed.

   Here’s the path you’ll need to take to change them:

   Main Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Personalisation > Standby mode > Active Standby apps

   Phew! Now you can select which apps you want to create short-cuts for.

2. Deleting multiple text messages

   Deleting all your messages in your SMS inbox is different from previous Nokia models, which as far as I can remember had their own delete menu.

   With the N95 (and possibly across the N-series) you’ll need to use the Mark/Unmark feature.

   In your message inbox, highlight one of the text messages you want to delete, and select Options. Select Mark/Unmark then Mark all. This will be indicated on-screen by placing a tick next to each message that’s marked. You can now perform tasks on all the Marked messages, including delete.

And what’s the difference between a Tool and an Application? I’m sure there’s a logic in there somewhere, but I find it very confusing. To me they’re all tools and they’re all applications.

In this series of short articles, I’m looking at different ways of subject-tracking on the internet.

Previous articles covered Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists.

This article is about Twitter and its tracking feature, using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Twitter

Twitter lets you share your thoughts with the world.

You can do this by text message (SMS), IM (instant messaging), via the Twitter website, or using a downloadable desktop application like Twitterific (Mac only).

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you can start “tweeting” your updates. Sometimes called micro-blogging, it’s a bit like writing status updates in Facebook.

Your tweets will appear on your page on the Twitter website. My page is at http://www.twitter.com/beatnic and is public.

People who want to subscribe to your updates can become your “followers” - don’t worry it’s not as cultish as it sounds.

Your updates will appear on the Twitter public timeline. If you’d prefer not to be so public you can “protect” your updates - in this case people will need to request your permission to follow you.

If you’ve set yourself up with an RSS reader, you can add Twitter update feeds of the people you’re following.

People are using Twitter in all sorts of ways, including:

• The BBC tweets news headlines and links to the full articles on its website
• US presidential candidate Barrack Obama tweets about his campaign
• Transport for London tweets traffic updates (using a service called twitterfeed to convert RSS items to tweets.

Twittervision is a mesmerising website showing what people are tweeting right now, and where they are in the world. It’s a mash-up of Twitter - using a feed from the public timeline - and Google maps.

Tracking subjects on Twitter

One of the features of Twitter is the ability to “track” subjects.

You can do this using by text message (SMS) and IM. At the moment, this is limited to text message (SMS) only. [thanks to Andrew M for the correction - see comments]

Text or instant message Track East Dulwich to Twitter. You will immediately recieve a confirmation message.

That’s it. You’ll now receive updates for any public Twitter update mentioning the subject/s your tracking.

If you’re logged in to IM your updates will be by instant message only. Your text message updates from Twitter will be switched off until you log out of IM.

To stop tracking a subject, send a text or instant message with the words Untrack East Dulwich. Again, Twitter will send you an immediate confirmation message.

The rate of updates will very much depend on the subject you choose and the timing.

I’ve received one update for East Dulwich in the last three days.

Last night I tracked England and Croatia and received about 300 texts!

Cost of using Twitter with SMS in the UK

Sending a text to Twitter costs your mobile phone company’s standard text-message rate - watch out if you’re with 3 or T-mobile, according to this article on TechCrunch uk:

Note also that the 07624 in Twitter’s number (+44 762 4801423) means it is actually billed as “international” by 3 and T-Mobile, making it a pricey service for those who like to tweet via SMS.

Receiving text updates from Twitter is free in the UK. In the United States you pay.

The same Techcrunch article suggests a newly added a UK limit of 250 incoming texts per week.

• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Competitions code unveiled by BBC
  “The code says every entry to a contest ’should have a fair chance of winning’ and that winners should be ‘genuine’.”

  Good grief.

  (tags: bbc competitions code rocketscience)

• Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  (tags: cost benefit content jakobnielsen web usability)

Today Martin Belam publishes the scores from his excellent series of articles looking at the accessibility of the UK’s main national newspaper websites.

The Times came out on top, even though it makes no use of an on-screen text-resizing widget, nor of accesskeys as shortcuts for keyboard users.

Overall my conclusion has to be that only a couple of newspapers are taking seriously any obligation to make their services accessible. I was particularly concerned by The Sun and the Daily Mail using CAPTCHA technology with no alternative for users with accessibility issues, but the general pattern for most papers was quite poor. Many are putting completely unneccessary barriers in the way of people reaching their content by making simple decisions like using fixed font sizes, and not including ’skip navigation’ links.
[source: currybetdotnet]

The results are worrying but not surprising. And as Martin says, he’s still really only “scratching the surface” in his tests.

Sadly all too few website managers understand their obligations as far as accessibility and the law is concerned. Webcredible have a useful summary here, but in a nutshell you can be sued if you do not make reasonable adjustments to provide equal access to your content to everyone.

The RNIB has approached two large companies with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the websites under the DDA, both companies made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action (in exchange for anonymity).
[source: webcredible]

People really shouldn’t need convincing. I wonder if it would make any difference if they realised that by improving the accessibility of their websites, they will also make them more usable and more “readable”. And when it comes to the big internet search engines, being readable means being findable.

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in. [Also in this series: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 3 - Twitter tracking, Part 4 - Delicious bookmark tags]

This article looks at Technorati Watchlists.

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

To get the most out of these tools and techniques, you’re best bet is to set yourself up with an RSS reader or aggregator. Don’t be put off if this sounds a bit geeky. The popular RSS readers are fairly intuitive to set up and free to use. For further information about RSS and how to set up a reader, see this page on the BBC website.

Technorati Watchlists

Set up a Watchlist on Technorati, and find out when somebody writes a blog post mentioning East Dulwich (or whichever subjects you choose). Currently Technorati tracks 112.8 million blogs on our behalf.

Technorati is a search engine which covers the “World Live Web” - a subset of the World Wide Web - and claims to be no more than 10 minutes out of date. Read more about how Technorati works here.

Setting up an account on Technorati is quick and free - look for the link titled “Join”. Once you have your account set up, here’s what you do:

1. Visit the Technorati Watchlist page
2. Enter your subject in the Add to your Watchlist box
3. Hit the Add button.

That’s it. You’re now watching the “World Live Web” for the subject you entered.

To view an example of what a Watchlist looks like for East Dulwich, click on the thumbail image below.

You now have 3 choices for keeping up to date with your Watchlist:

• Bookmark the web address for your Technorati Watchlist
  This is not the most efficient method, as you’ll need to remember to visit fairly regularly to avoid missing anything.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for your Watchlist
  Using this method, your RSS reader does the work by regularly visiting your watchlist and looking for updates. Any new content will be listed in your RSS reader, a bit like new email in your inbox. Then you can scan this list in your reader whenever most convenient.
• Subscribe to an RSS to email service
  If you’d rather not user an RSS reader, you can always have updates emailed to you. Technorati doesn’t offer this service, so you’ll need to use another website to do this for you. I’ve set up an account on FeedBlitz - I will review this separately, but so far it has not scored high on usability!

Is anyone blogging about you? Why not set up a Watchlist for your name.

To mark last week’s change of London’s Eurostar terminus from Waterloo to St Pancras here’s a photo I snapped from the bus a couple of weeks ago.

This parade of shops and restaurants is immediately opposite King’s Cross and St Pancras stations.

Sandwiched between Orlando’s Cafe and Eddie’s Fish Bar is Euro Tandoori.

As they say in Goodness Gracious Me, “Let’s go for an English!”

• Sam Murphy on the new approach to running that reduces the risk of injury | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
  (tags: running alexander technique injury guardian health fitness)

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations - to name but a few - take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject - as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

• News From Roullier White
  East Dulwich blog from Roullier White shop on Lordship Lane.
  (tags: eastdulwich se22 london roullierwhite blog local)

09:00 - 16:00

7 DAYS A WEEK

I’ve made a couple of changes to this website.

First, I’ve added a new page called Subscribe, with information about the three ways you can keep up to date with new posts on this site.

Second, I’ve bitten the bullet and have decided to try out Google adsense. This means if you’re looking directly at the website, rather than reading via a feed reader, you’ll see context-sensitive advertising in the right-hand column.

Third, a wee while ago I upgraded the version of wordpress powering this website, and at the same time exchanged all the post categories for tags. Again, these tags - the labels I’ve used to describe my posts - are in a “cloud” in the right-hand column. The larger the tag, the higher the number of posts which have been described with it. I now need to decide what, if anything, to do with categories.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

• Electric Train
  “David Thomas blogs about training, the media and business skills”
  (tags: davidthomas training media settingup business)

I was having coffee with a friend today who does work with people in countries where internet speeds are down at dial-up rates of 28.8kbps on a good day and where it is rare for workers to have their own internet connection in the office let alone at home.

I mentioned the recent post I’d written about myspace pages taking 5 minutes to load in India and Brazil.

It struck me that it would make sense for people with such low speed connections to the internet to use the mobile versions of the websites instead.

Another advantage of the mobile versions of these sites is that they cut out a lot of the clutter that you see on the normal pages because they’ve been pared down for faster download speeds for mobile devices.

Try these out for size:

• Flickr mobile site (yes, photos not best for low bandwidth I guess)
• Yahoo
• BBC News
• BBC homepage
• National Rail enquiries (UK)
• eBay (UK)

The following appear to intercept my browser request, notice I’m not on a mobile, and serve me the standard versions. Maybe there’s a way round this.

• m.facebook.com
• m.google.com

Congratulations to The Bishop, winner of Best Bar in East Dulwich 2007 as voted for by members of the East Dulwich Forum.

The results are here.

And the reaction here.

Yesterday I cycled to and from a client meeting twelve miles away.

If I’ve understood correctly, this means I can claim £4.80 in business mileage against tax (i.e. 24 miles at 20 pence per mile).

If I’d driven I would be able to claim £9.60 (i.e. 24 miles at 40 pence per mile).

It got me wondering. Perhaps it’s based on 10 pence per wheel.

Here are the rates (taken from the HM Revenue & Customs website):

Approved mileage rates

From 2002/03	First 10,000 business miles in the tax year	Each business mile over 10,000 in the tax year
Cars and vans	40p	25p
Motor cycles	24p	24p
Bicycles	20p	20p

How about giving cyclists the same rate as car drivers?

I understand it costs more to run a car - I have on of those too. But if we really want people to do more exercise and reduce their carbon emissions surely we need to be offering better incentives.

Of course the great news is that if you cycle more than 10,000 miles in a year, the rate stays the same. Hooray!

Peckham Rye Park cafe opened for business yesterday and according to these East Dulwich Forum regulars, so far so good.

I’ve just received my PINsentry device from Barclays.

It’s the size of a pocket calculator (remeber those?) or a largish mobile phone.

So to do online banking with Barclays, you now have to carry this device around with you everywhere you go as well as have your bank card handy.

This is meant to make things super-secure.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have five online bank accounts which I check fairly regularly. Does this mean I’m going to end up having to lug five of these devices around everywhere I go?

Perhaps someone could design bank-agnostic device that works for any bank card?

More on the PINsentry at BBC NEWS | Business | Barclays steps up online security

Blurry Fondle - Originally uploaded by Beatnic

Try typing Doodle in to your phone. Mine says Fondle.

I’ve just been having a bit of fun with this… The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your blog? - as seen on David Cushman’s site.

Apparently you require a “high school” education to read this blog.

I haven’t dug around to see what, if any, algorithm is being used to calculate readability.

Rather worryingly when I put http://news.bbc.co.uk in it came back saying you needed to have a college postgrad education to read it, and to be able to read www.google.com you need to be a Genius. Something fishy going on there methinks.