Its official - Apple has now taken the lead in ‘cool’ consumer smart technology. Proclaimed an outright winner by the quick consumer test on the BBC technology website when pitted against the Archos and Dell Streak, the iPad could now become yet another iconic gadget from the ever expanding Apple empire who clearly have the pulse of the business and  consumer market.

A trio of slick new devices has now seen Apple overtake Microsoft as the Global leader – On Wednesday, Apple’s capitalisation closed at $222bn compared to Microsoft’s $219bn.

Other manufacturers are not giving up the fight however, with Archos tablet and Dell streak also performing admirably using Google’s much acclaimed Android OS.

Its fair to say also that there has always been a degree of scepticism around the launch of Apple’s  Smart tech hybrid – maybe their  risky ‘toe in the water’  approach to re-launching a tablet format device has allowed others to profit in the wake of their trail-blazing.

Apple have shown themselves to be adept in translating what is ‘cool’ and ‘hot’   into a ‘must have’- which is why they have become the clear market leaders.  But perhaps it wasn’t such a risky venture?  They do seem to have impeccable timing for getting it right.

I remember Bill Gates declaring a few years back that there would be a wholesale change in the future  in the way we work – from local applications where the computing power and data is localised towards what is now loosely termed Cloud computing.  - but this would also need wholesale changes in thinking and attitude to the way we work (and play!).  And as  our Global internet usage accelerates astronomically it was was only a matter of getting the product launch timing right.   Apple have shown that they can do this with consummate ease.

Gathering Clouds

But lets rewind for a minute and explore the ‘cloud topography’.  Currently  Blogs, social media and the like are ‘remote’  media applications we can access through a browser.

These applications  are essentially about quick communications but now include a range of media tools  for photos, music and video.  An opportunity was looming large to link all of this activity up to mobile devices – at the same time there has been a seismic shift from users to browsers, from the PC work station mentality to mobile connectivity.

Apple foresaw this and stepped up to the plate by providing the complete package –  slick  mobile devices + the apps to go with them .  Almost  at the same time Google adopted a more more open source philosophy by  releasing the Android operating system which could be run on a range of devices and thus liberating users from the shackles of Apple’s cash cow.

But will it stop there? Why not have all our applications and data outsourced ,i.e. in the cloud, rather than have everything reside inertly on our PC or laptop or smart device? After all, the cost of the hardware as well updating applications is tedious.  If its all taken care of  ‘in the cloud’ for us we’re left free to get on with the things we should be doing.

This is no longer a vision for the future but a reality for many businesses who now see outsourcing all their networking and IT administration requirements as the way forward rather than employ in-house expertise.

But maybe we’re all not comfortable with this concept just yet . I for one am still sceptical about uploading all my stuff to a remote centralised location with very little knowledge of where my bit of the cloud happens to be at any one time. Perhaps  we are rightly still  suspicious about the ‘cloud’ and view it as  a metaphor for ‘we really don’t know exactly where stuff  is or who can access it ‘.

Will this mindset change? I think it has to. Having recently emerged from a what was a almost a viral meltdown on my own home network, I now have to confess to a  false sense of security with all my data residing on my home and business PC network.

We have become so connected that perhaps we forget that we have now become  irrevocably interconnected.

So maybe its time to start handing over the reigns to the experts in the cloud…or maybe not just  yet.

                          

As the hordes of those now web savvy get older and older  its a foregone conclusion that the proportion of wrinklies twittering and posting on Youtube will be doing this from a comfortable armchair armed only with a cup of tea and a hob nob.
Yet there still are and always will be , those who adamantly refuse to ‘get connected’ (hate that phrase).
Their loss really, and it also means we can blog and twitter to our hearts content about them because they will never read it anyway.

Lets face it, much of the innovation and technology it is no longer new; and as we all grow older we are becoming wiser anyway if not a bit doo-lally judging from the facebook comments I get.

There are still attempts to censure free speech – what we proudly call ours as a right in any democratic society. China’s filtering of Google searches and Pakistan’s banning of Youtube. But this only illustrates how  the internet has irrevocably engaged both Politics and Global Socialization

I am actually attempting to make a serious point about all of this, that is there is a paradigm change – not just in business which has been snowballing for a long time, but in all our social involvements.

A recent report showed that we are now spending 65% more time online than we did three years ago. The driving force in this change has been social networking perhaps unsurprisingly -and the more familiar we get the less scarry it becomes and  the more we seem to be embracing it.

There is the other extreme  - take a look at sites like Chatroulette (or perhaps you shouldn’t) where webcam communication is randomly selected (via your IP) and peer to peer. Perhaps the lack of control is a bit scarry ( the only rules are to keep your clothes on – as if!).

Sites like these will have their place – and when they don’t they will quickly fold.  Its all part of our libertarian society and we do bang on about freedom of speech don’t we?

The web has always been said to mirror society closely- and the more sophisticated it becomes  the more inclusive it will become for us all.  John Lennon’s vision for a truly people powered global society coming of age  perhaps?

                          

What does it take to get to number one in Google? – its easy!- copy a unique string of  words on your site that nobody else has on theirs…paste it in a search… and you’ll  probably be top or thereabouts

Thats the end of my post-  job done.

If it were only that simple!  But thats what most people want after all  - to be No1  in Google . . I’m stating the obvious but actually by going through the above simple exercise highlights a few  important questions before we even start:

• Is that phrase ever going to be type into a search engine ever again?
• does it describe accurately what we are promoting?
• when users find us what do we want them to do next ?

I’m assuming the answer to the last question is not ‘leave as soon as possible’ although you may be surprised how many do  if you look at your home page stats.
You may have a site that is primarily for generating advertising revenue and so you will want to generate maximum through traffic, where ’success’ will be exiting your site via a ‘revenue juicy’ click through ad.

However if you have  an ecommerce site you will want to channel  attention to the right pages rather than allow them to leave straight away.  People in browsing mode have the attention span akin to a goldfish swimming in Jack Daniels, so plan how you can grab their attention pretty quickly before they exit without getting beyond your home page.

Either way the same formula applies: more traffic=more revenue. So the same general strategy to get them there in the first place should be the  same, i.e. choosing that all important search phrase for your pages.

Choosing the most effective search words

Wo we need to construct a search phrase that is  not too long and obscure (i.e., its never likely to be typed in a search) and not too short, otherwise the competition will leave you languishing in 10,000th position.

Ideally choose  2 or 3 words particularly relevant to the  page’s content on your website. Also  if the website address, page name (my-key-phrase.htm), page title and page content all have ‘related’ keywords then bingo! –  although its more than likely the web address will not be part of the key phrase.

Note of caution here – Google’s algorithmic nose can sniff out anything contrived, so always be cautious about overloading the page with the key phrase words etc. and start off your optimising by reading your page content first.  Check to make sure the content is relevant,  focused and high quality.

You can then start to tell the world about it by making  it more search engine  ‘friendly’  by providing the contextual cues (appropriate page title headings, subheadings, image names).  I always recommend viewing your page in  a text based browser as this is how search engines index pages. ( Lynx is a traditional  text based browser although www.textise.net allows you to do the same thing much more quickly)

External links

Google ranks the importance of your site not just by its content but also by the links to it from other sites on the Internet.  The more reputable these other sites are the more ‘cred’ they add to your site in Google’s eyes, particularly if they have the key phrase words in the link itself, (e.g. ‘my unique search phrase‘  rather than click here)

Job done? not quite – I’ve saved the best till last.

Do Your Homework

Just before you go key search phrase crazy, you have to bear in mind one  minor inconvenience – your supremely crafted key search terms may never be entered in a search – double doh!! And the only way to find this out is to do a quick check to see how often its typed in.

Lots of tools out there to help with this, but Google’s keyword tool is the quickest and easiest.  If you’re not sure what is the best phrase try Google’s suggestion tool.  The difference between the two is subtle but important- the latter helps you come up with a  phrase better matched to your page content. (i.e you may think you have found a great winning phrase that matches your page content perfectly  but Google may not agree so best to get it from the horse’s mouth)

That’s certainly enough to get started, but to summarize just a couple of closing thoughts

Your site will get found if:

• the content is worth looking for
• it has a definite market  niche
• there is a market for it in the first place!

                          

“The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.”

                          

But where do they get all this free information and data  from, and who writes it all?  From Us.  Me and you. As the amount of personal information about us all is being voluntarily uploaded via Social networking media,  the web Megaliths like Google with its massive collating  and repository resources, consume it heartily as  its daily bread and butter.

All tends to sound a bit neurotic I know, but I often talk to cautious web users who are almost phobic about signing up to anything that snaps of social media irresponsibility.  And in many ways I can’t blame them.  I did think this was more down to a fear of the great ‘online unknown’ and a paranoia of all things technological.  But could there also be a smattering of our naivity and passiveness creeping in,  as Google street view cameras capture us and our homes in greater and greater detail (now 3D!).

We can so easily fall in love  with our online social media apps and tools. They’re free but for a good reason. Very large amounts of data  yield a  proportionately increasing commercial return when packaged and served up correctly.

For a moment let’s indulge the scenario that all you have ever published on the web doesn’t ever disappear, but is archived. Archiving does make it sound all respectable and safe but data is archived rather than deleted for a reason, i.e. for future reference.

A recent move by US Library of Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly perhaps has come as a bit of a surprise.  Its reasoning is that all our tweets will form a valuable  social commentary of historical events – including all its momentous and trivial moments as they unfold in our public and often our private lives.

Is it my inherent distrust of government tinkering in our webspace or their moves to archive ‘Our’ information without ‘Our’ consent that sets my paranoic alarm bells clanging?

Embed me

There is also a massive surge towards sharing and embedding our social media interactions outside of their current Social Media framework, perhaps as a way of unifying all our separate online social involvements rather than having to start again from scratch every time there is a new kid on the block.

All reputable Social media sites and others including Google invariably have API tools so that content can hooked up to and extracted, repurposed, mashed up and processed on other sites.

A n example of this that proked some online controversy  recently was  the API-mashing of the site foursquare.com.  This site leverages Twitter/Facebook live tweets to provide geographical local town movements we care to relay via mobiles etc in real time.

The site Pleaserobme.com then used Foursquare’s API to build its own site  to highlight how easy it was to take all this shared information about individuals who had given their own home address, and using their realtime tweeting about their whereabouts could then publish which homes would be empty at any given (real)time.

The site now seems to have removed this feature, but made very a serious point: how easy it is  to ‘pull’ in real-time social media data and for the wrong purposes, and also the fact that no-one is really regulating this type of embedded exploitation (self regulation aside).

The embedding of data is now becoming much easier and commonplace.  Twitter has now announced its @anywhere tweet option, which will allow  you to tweet  your comments via other media sites that have this facility, (rather than  via the SM bookmark icon)

There may well be virtuous  ‘drivers’ to develop a universally and socially coherent platform for us all to enjoy , although its more likely its do with a fear of a levelling off  in interest (as has happened in Twitter recently) and consequent financial freefall ( the demise of Bebo) which commercially motivates the drive for Social Media sharing  just to stay ahead of the competition.

And lets face it, their success and livelihood is built around how easy and  frequently we can post  our views and opinions,  including our most throwaway comments –  which of course aren’t actually thrown away.

Some web links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8621297.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570293.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8521598.stm

http://foursquare.com/

http://pleaserobme.com/

                          

I can remember  back in 1988 first coming across the mouse for the first time and marvelling at the ingenuiuty and subtlety in terminology, and how we have so readily adapted to the apparent  eye to  hand juxtaposition tween desktop and screen (without realising it you’re doing it now aren’t you?).  I remember trying to master freehand drawing  for the first time as my  precise  mouse movements  ended up like a scrawl from a crayon which had been clenched between the rear facing parts of my anatomy.

Market leaders and Market followers

Its a case of ergonomics I suppose – I remember watching a programme (15 years ago) on the evolution of the  mobile phone and why they could never get any smaller than house brick size-  simply because of the distance from mouthpiece to ear had to align with the relevant human audio and sound appendages. We all laugh now at the housebrick mobile but will we look back at out mouse antics one day and snigger?

Seriously there has been an underlying argument to reinvigorate the tactile on screen experience. Sony TRV camcorders I think were ahead of the game on this one some years back. they ditched the multi-multi-multi function button in place for OSD touch screen buttons -and …problem solved! Its all about making life easier and not just quicker, and if toucing the screen instead of the table does it for you its a big step forward in human-digital interaction.

Yes, I know the screen will get covered in butter and marmalade from time to time, but should this hold technology back?  Not according to Apple who boldly reinvented where no other dared to reinvent. Enter the iPhone  – tara!  This little smartphone (there  – I got that keyword in) has seen unrivalled success and has been unaparalled in breaking our love affair with ‘proxy button’ gadgetry. Now every other phone is clamouring to keep up in its wake.

Where is this all going?

I know I have been rambling a bit here but there is a serious point to all of this.  There are two key drivers  -  as always is the consumer demand for a quicker and easier to use product, but secondly and more importantly perhaps, the ability to unshackle us from the workstation and do more and more from a mobile device – hence the reason and thinking behind the new iPad.
BUT guess what – the iPad doesn’t multi task and doesn’t come with 3G (wireless only) or Flash suppport (or..or..or)- what a huge DOH moment for Apple!  You have to remember Apple has a reputation for doing 99%  brilliantly and 1% a bit dopey when it comes to including the obvious (they would substitute the term dopey for protecting its market share)

Now if consumers are likely to access via mobile devices more and more – … you can guess where I am going with this perhaps… our associated thinking in terms of how we frame our offerings visually in the  web landscape  may also have to adapt .
Consider how an eCommerce site looks on a smartphone? More importantly the liklihood that shopping could be increasingly carried out through smartphone devices and IF (how big is that if) the iPad format takes off and spawns a whole generation of SmartPads.  Early days yet, but in our relentless mission to seek out new life  (went off topic there for a mo) and anticipate new consumer trends we will have to mark this one in our calendar… or in our  iPHone App… or on our iPad…. or whatever screen you are currently touching at the moment.

Also see:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/seealso/2010/04/apples_ipad.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8484395.stm

http://www.news.com.au/technology/top-10-ipad-disappointments-and-magic-moments/story-e6frfro0-1225849521318

http://apcmag.com/top_10_reasons_to_hate_the_iphone_3g.htm

                          

What I don’t quite understand is why Google agreed to the filtering of  its searches in the first place. Obviously it was more to do with the urgency to secure a lucrative foothold in the burgeoning online search engine sector in China rather, than a more noble desire to share its information resources to the largest populous in the world.

Possibly Google were a tad naive in thinking it could be bring about a change in the Government’s mindset on censorship. Perhaps Google thought the arena of cyberspace might somehow dilute the resolve of the State over time. The upshot of their actions could result in a massive missed opportunity financially -Google could now  lose out against other more commmercially driven competion in a market place that is growing at 40% per year.

Location Relocation

However this location change marks a more subtle retreat as Google seeks to restore its user control rather than an outright withdrawal altogether.  The practical implications are that the search results are only filtered according to location rather than at source – so if we type in Dalai lama or Tienanmen in google.cn we are not blocked by the Chinese filters.

Google’s recent actions were triggered  by the recent cyber attacks on Google’s Gmail servers – more specifically the accounts of Chinese Human Rights Activists. There is no doubt either way that China is determined to reinforce its ‘cyber walls’  to censor online forays into western liberalism, but also to protect itself against online internal dissident activity.

So perhaps the nature of the dispute does not appear quite as one-sided as initially portrayed by the media (i.e., western government agencies would never hack into emails would they?) and that we cannot always consider the global democratisation of the online environment as borderless and as a  ‘given’  in terms of everyone’s human rights.

Further info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8575476.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8582233.stm

                          

Square Pies

In an effort to ‘channelize’ what is happening with the WEB, the BBC has come up with another mega series  of  programs  - Superpower which tries to map out what is happening now (the buzz).  As always they are, and promise to be, excellent in every way, and how’s this as a Stats representation ? -its a square pie chart of the top 100 companies (as an ex-stats teacher I could hardly contain myself). What’s interesting to consider is how it might look in 5, 10 years time. As you probably know anyway most of the Web is US-centric, with half of the top 26 wealthiest are from the US , only 1 European and only 1 woman in this list. With an average age of 45 and a half,  the wealthiest is worth 17.5 billion and the poorest worth 1.5 billion – oh well you can’t win them all.

Keeping up Standards

Somebody once said about Standards: thats the great thing about having standards – there are so many to choose from.
Interesting to read an article then on how Internet Explorer differs from all the would be web browsers out there. While virtually all the others manage to render web pages almost identically IE has always been notorious for doing things its own way.  It even has unique syntax in its code so long suffering coders like myself can accommodate its lovable little quirks with conditional comments. In all fairness they did enforce a recent update asking us to choose our preferred browser -which actually messed up my existing browser settings but anyway –  long live Open Source.

                          

Under the hood of every successful website  there is invariably a database or more likely a whole cluster of them. It is quite literally the driving force in website architecture, and  probably the most important component in managing and delivering content efficiently to the pages of your website. So whether your website is a Mini or a Hummer its time to talk DB’s.

BUT (and its a big but), the learning curve can be steep particularly for the first time database user  - there’s nothing quite as mind boggling as the complexities of Database topology.  And there is no getting away from them –  if you want your website  to perform well and be able to manage content yourself,  it obviously makes sense to have some rudimentary understanding of what is going on in the background.

So which is best?

Migrating to MySQL

Eureka moment

And finally…

Facebook DB architecture:

Development of youtube architecture vid: