Google generation

This interesting report on the British Library web site was pointed out to me recently. It does a good job of debunking some of the myths that I have heard perpetuated about Gen Y.

Dark clouds approaching

Do we have a problem looming? With the popularisation of folksonomies as a means of categorisation will we see tag clouds being built into several applications and how will we (and will we want to) join these clouds?

I fear the worst. Is there a standard XML expression for a tag cloud? I haven't found one.

Consumers ahead to stay

In the '90s and into the early part of this decade it was fair to assume that the enterprise (well the big ones anyway) had the better technology. You would expect to find the IT department bringing out the new gizmo's that really enabled you to do something more, better, faster, easier. Largely due to cost, but also because of the low penetration of fast, pervasive networks, the consumer market was some way behind.

The tables have turned. Mobile technology is giving people access to their personal emails and 'the cloud', but connectivity into the enterprise is lagging. People stream media around their house, have terabytes of storage at sub-£500 prices and are used to anywhere, any-device access to their data stored with online services such as Google Docs or Zimbra.

The expectation is that the enterprise should still be leading the charge, and I don't think that is possible anymore. The constraints for the enterprise are just so different. It doesn't matter if you stream a video into your home and your backup doesn't run, or it takes a bit longer for an email to arrive. In the enterprise that matter a huge amount, and we're serving the needs of thousands, not a handful. Although protecting personal data is important to everyone, your phone holds your data. The phone the company gives you holds data about clients, the company or its personnel, and management and security of these devices becomes a constraining factor.

We (the IT department) need to help bring the realisation to our customers in the business that you won't see it here first anymore; you'll buy it on the high street. We also need to help the leaders (who see the consumer technology as unnecessary toys) to see the value, when it's there, and to be courageous in bringing the right technologies and services into the enterprise.

Microsoft super standards mode

What a name - "Super Standards", should be something like "Finally Compliant". Of course this doesn't remove Windows Only features like ActiveX from the web.

Well, it makes me happy anyway.

Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

In the end — regardless of why Microsoft really is making this change — the decision to make standards mode the default in IE 8 should make many happy.

Feeds and Traffic

A part of the adoption of RSS/Feeds inside EY involved discussions about what effect this would have on peoples browsing habits and what are the possible knock on effects. Would a desktop reader create, for example, capacity issues on our firewall or internal web servers?

The end result is that it's almost impossible to predict. However, the question came up again recently and, as we now have several feeds, I did a quick check. The xml file of the main feed on our Intranet site was 7k. The home page was 341k.

The most basic computation based on 7k returned every time the reader refreshes the feed on an hourly schedule shows that about 5 days worth of feed updates is equivalent to one visit to the home page.

The feed is only updated two or three times a day. When the xml file hasn't changed the web server returns a 304 (Not Modified) http status code - a tiny fraction of the 7k. Therefore the real value equates to 19 days or 26 if you add weekends in for free.

It's got to look like feeds will reduce traffic.

The counter argument to this is that people will be more aware of updates and therefore it will drive up visits to sites. This may be true, but I have no way to measure it. If it is then, assuming the content is work related, this can only be a Good Thing. It is, after all, one of the fundamental benefits of the technology.

It's a wired world

As I look over the different technology elements involved in the creation of my combined feed I can't help but be amazed.

There are three sources: My blog (the simple Atom feed), NewsGator clippings (stuff I tag in my reader, FeedDemon, in RSS) and Del.icio.us (stuff I tag with tfkfeed in delicious, also in RSS)

These three feeds are merged, de-duplicated and sorted by publish date by a Yahoo Pipe and spat out as a single RSS stream.

This RSS stream flows through FeedBurner, which truncates the posts, and creates a combined-format feed that is more broadly compatible than standard RSS or Atom.

We've been pretty successful in Ernst & Young at utilising feeds. We've got many internal sources producing feeds, not just blogs. Some of our knowledge repositories and portals will display content in a mini-reader. All desktops have a feed reader (other than the rather incapable embedded ones).

I'm working now to raise awareness of what comes after this, and although it will take some time before we see anything like the picture I've painted above, I'm looking forward to challenge.

Copyright conscience

For obvious reasons I don't subscribe to the feed on my own blog, but did so the other day just to check that the feed-reader-clippings-yahoo-pipes thing is working. It is, but there's no distinction between content that is my own and that from other sites, although the links are clearly to the source. Nevertheless, I feel this potentially misrepresents other peoples content as my own have set the combined feed to summarise. This final step is done by FeedBurner, which I've been using all along in order to track subscription.

I realise this may reduce the value of the feed, but I don't feel comfortable doing otherwise.