Posts Tagged: london

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8
Mar 10

Thinking of Linking

Hyperlinks in the form of web links are the lifeblood of today’s internet and world wide web. Examination of your web server’s log files, either directly via tools such as Webalizer or indirectly via analytics services such as Yahoo’s or Google’s can show you who’s visiting your web site or blogs.

But who’s visiting your site isn’t the whole picture; following a hyperlink is an active process. To complete the picture you need to find out who’s linking to your site, which is a passive process.

Hyperlink

If you’re running a blog you may be able to use trackbacks or pingbacks to find out when a site links to you, but only if the linking site support the trackback or pingback protocol and then only if this is enabled on both sides of the ping relationship.

So what about those sites which don’t support trackbacks or pingbacks or who don’t want to be discovered that they’re linking to you?

That last use case may seem overly paranoid, but as Chris Heilmann recently discovered, knowing who’s linking to you is less a luxury and more an essential piece of information that can reveal unwanted content placed on your server by a third party … and third parties placing content on your server is never a good thing.

Working for Yahoo! and working with people such as Chris, who understands how the web and the net work, has taught me a massive amount over the last 4 or so years. So in this case the answer is glaringly obvious once you stop to think about it, the major source of who’s linking to who is … a search engine.

Google Reader

So now not only do I know who’s visiting my sites but also who’s linked to them, by using Google’s Blog Search and synching that through Google Reader to NetNewsWire, my RSS reader on my laptop. The moment someone links to me and that gets picked up by Google’s spider, I get an alert. Of course, this doesn’t cover all eventualities but it’s always a good thing to have more than one source of information, especially when that comes for free.

NetNewsWire

Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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1
Mar 10

Winter, Followed by Spring and Back to Winter Again

I’ve never been a massive fan of Crowded House but 1991’s Four Seasons in One Day could have been written with this weekend’s weather in mind. We started with Winter (cold, wet, miserably damp), followed by Spring (heavy showers, glorious sunshine and the odd rainbow or two), followed by Summer (clear blue skies).

Centre Point against an (almost) Spring sky

Then this morning, we returned back to Winter again, complete with breath misting in front of your face, frozen puddles on the station platform and people ignoring the frozen puddles and ending up resplendently sprawled on the platform.

Winter returns to the morning commute.

Blogging about the weather … how very English.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

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18
Feb 10

The Use Case for “where’s my train?”

As Paul Clarke has pointed out on his blog, not once, but twice, “I assert that train operators know where their assets are: it would be irresponsible if they didn’t. And that this information is held within their internal systems“.

Here’s a good use case for his proposed solution … wheresmytrain …

Communication breakdown on the Tube

Piccadilly Circus Tube station, Bakerloo Line southbound platform, round about 5.00 PM. The dot matrix displays tell us … that a train is “held” somewhere but with no information as to what this means. The platform announcer tells us “the Bakerloo Line is currently suspended” and immediately afterwards the “control room” tells us that “a good service is currently running on all London Underground lines“.

One is these statements should be correct, the other two should not be. By means of resolution, an Elephant and Castle train turned up 2 minutes after all of this has occurred, making all three of the above statements erroneous.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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15
Feb 10

Through the Window Redux

The view from my window has changed a lot of recent. Through my office window there’s been St. Giles and Covent Garden in the snow …

… and Hanger One on Moffett Field, one of the world’s largest free-standing structures.

Through my hotel window I’ve seen the Chrysler Building in New York at sunrise …

…  and Silicon Valley on a cold, foggy and damp morning …

But of all the view I’ve seen through my window, I think I prefer this one most of all, because it’s home.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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12
Nov 09

Forget the Credit Crunch; it’s the Geo Crunch in London

It was a particularly cruel piece of coincidental timing; quite a few of the usual suspects of the London geo scene congregated in Harrogate earlier this week for the one day Where 2.0 Now? conference. I was there representing Yahoo! Geo Technologies as well as Chris Osborne from Ito World, Ed Parsons from Google, John Fagan from MultiMap/Bing Maps, Harry Wood from Cloudmade, John McKerrell from mapme.at, Steven Feldman from  knowwhere and a host of others.

At the same time, back in London, the Credit Crunch was biting hard with the news that Cloudmade were to close their London office. While not officially announced by Cloudmade, both Russ Nelson and Richard Fairhurst reported this on Twitter and several other sources have corroborated this.
As if this wasn’t enough, news also filtered out that Microsoft acquired MultiMap was also shedding staff, with Chris Darby and Burak Gürsoy providing the unofficial news on Twitter and again, several others have corroborated this.
Bleak times for the geo scene in London; an observation that Steven Feldman, chair of this year’s AGI GeoCommunity conference noted wryly, whilst in Harrogate.
It’s an oft touted aphorism that a recession is the best time to found a startup; there’s certainly a cadre of very talented, passionate engineers in and around London. Here’s hoping that this is not the end of the story but the beginning of one or more geo startups that were founded in the depths of the Credit Crunch.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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28
Oct 09

Deliciousness: megalomania, logos, Tube map, paper abstracts, location, Freud and tech mistakes

It’s been a while but odd, weird and even occasionally interesting stuff continues to fall down the back of the internet and gets captured in Delicious along the way. Here’s the pick of the last few weeks.
  • Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world … mwah hah hah hah.
  • A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow “harp” logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
  • The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
  • Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen “that’s not right” when watching a film? You’re not alone.
  • Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
  • Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
  • Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
  • You’ve probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
  • If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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21
Oct 09

Going Up in the World?

Sometimes you have to get away from it all, get up above the streets to appreciate a city.

While I’m acting under a potentially loose interpretation of Chatham House rules (we’ll see about that) at this event, that doesn’t stop me admiring the view of The Gherkin, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the City skyline from this conference room.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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6
Oct 09

The Future of Web Apps? Bad Wifi, Booth Mobbing, Geo and Lots of Schwag

(This post was originally written for the Yahoo! Developer Network blog and was published there on October 5th; it’s duplicated here for posterity.)

You’re stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you’re there, there’s a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue’s net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.

It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it’s called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.

There’s a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, “geoballs” and a free wifi point called yahooligans. Sitting cozily between the PayPal and Vodaphone booths, this has been the home of the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Geo Technologies teams for the last 48 hours.

I presented on both days as part of the University Sessions track. On Thursday I talked about “Place not Space; Geo without Maps“; which was somewhat incorrect given that it featured a guest appearance by Google Earth. Using Yahoo! Placemaker, I showed how you could extract places from web content and sanitise the content with YQL. Whilst it would be great if all the web used Yahoo! web services, we need to work with the rest of the world, so I showed how you could use the long/lat metadata returned by Placemaker to drive Google Earth.

Then on Friday I talked about how “Geocoding and Geoparsing are Easy“; I may have been somewhat economic with the truth. Geocoding isn’t easy and Geoparsing is even less so. This talk showed some of the pitfalls that frustrate us and how we need to model geography in real and colloquial terms and not simply structured and formal terms. Or to put it another way “we can make the internet work better by making it understand how we speak in the real world”.

Both sessions were really well attended, with people standing at the back during the Friday talk, which is a great thing for a speaker to see. FOWA attendees are a very geo-savvy crowd who asked lots of intelligent, challenging and pretty direct questions. There’s nothing I like more than an audience that “gets” a topic.

Back at the booth we were gently but firmly mobbed during break sessions which was pleasantly surprising, given that we were on the first floor. An entirely non-statistical review of the questions we came across on the booth showed three main trends:

  • Tell me about YQL and YUI - they’re really cool
  • Tell me more about this “geo” stuff
  • Is the wifi really this bad?

As an industry we thrive on a strange barter system based around the acquisition and donation of items of branded schwag. We continued this fine tradition with loads of “geoballs” and some much prized YDN screwdrivers. We also thrive on vast amounts of caffeine so it seemed only fair to run a competition with the prize of a coffee machine which resembles the robots that were used in the Fiat “designed by humans, built by machines” ad campaign. To win, all you had to do was guess the number of unique users that hit the Yahoo! UK network on Tuesday September 1st 2009.

Answers ranged from the hugely optimistic “a lot”, to some very precise, yet very wrong, figures, ranging from 20 thousand all the way up to an insane 2.3 billion. The real answer was 24,452,863 users and we were able to unite Raymond Tamblyn of Visa Worldwide with the coffee machine for his answer of 23 million.

And then after 2 days of no natural light, slightly crazed from too much caffeine and throats croaking from too much talking, the booth was dismantled, the purple orchid found a home and we stepped back into the fading daylight and hip shopping area of High Street Kensington and headed home for the weekend and to an internet connection that works.

Lousy wifi seems to be the hallmark of a great web event. Oh the irony.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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27
Sep 09

Avis – Less “We Try Harder”, More “We Can’t Be Bothered”

Last week I was unfortunate enough to hire a rental car from Avis at Heathrow. The italics are important here as they point to where the problem seems to lie.

I travel quite a lot for work and so it’s fair to say I rent a reasonable amount of cars; all of them through Avis who are the company’s preferred rental supplier. After getting off a plane, the last thing you really want is to queue to get your car so I’m a member of Avis’ Preferred service; this allows me to skip the queues, pick my car up and drive out of the rental garage with a wave of my driving license. It’s quick, really quick; you see your name on a board which shows you which bay you need to go to, find the car, fling your suitcase in the boot and off you go.
It typically takes around 3 minutes to get my car; and Avis in the UK makes a selling point of this, proudly proclaiming “Your keys in under 3 minutes or £20“.
And it works too; I’ve used the service in the US, in Ireland and in mainland Europe and have been impressed in how well the system works across different countries. Apart from the UK …
I turn up at Heathrow, catch the courtesy bus to the Avis garage and look for my name on the board. Hmm, it’s not there. So into the building I go and straight to the Avis Preferred desk, where a chap sits, doing something paperwork related. I wait. I wait a bit more. I clear my throat and finally get some attention, so I explain that my name’s not on the Preferred board. I give him my booking reference number and he finds the problem …
“Your card’s expired Sir“, ”Really? What number do you have?”
He quotes a number for a card that expired 2 years ago. “That’s odd” I say, “I’ve used Avis at least 5 times since that card expired and have had no problems”.
“It’s your fault, you need to keep your profile up to date“, “Profile? What profile?”
“The one your travel agent uses, it’s obviously out of date, take it up with them“.
Nice. So I give him my credit card and off he vanishes to do …. something. So far, we’ve been at this 10 minutes. Another 10 minutes pass, the occasional Avis person from the other counter wanders over to see if I’m being looked after and I have to reply, “I think so, but I’ve no idea where this chap’s gone to with my card”.
He finally reappears and gives me the paperwork for my car.
“So if you knew my card had expired, why didn’t you contact me or my travel agent?”, “We don’t do that“
“Why not?”, “We just don’t“
The manager wanders over, I ask her the same question.
“So if you knew my card had expired, why didn’t you contact me or my travel agent?”, “We don’t do that“
“Why not?”, “Do you know how many bookings we have a week?“
“No”, “Thousands, and do you know how many invalid credit cards we get?“
“Err, no”, “70!“
“70? 70? Is that all?”, “Surely you don’t expect us to ring all of them?“
“Actually, yes, I do, I’d consider it customer service”, “We don’t do that“
“Well can’t you send an email to let me know?”, “We don’t do that“
We’ve now been at this for over half an hour and that “Your keys in 3 minutes” promise is way in the distant past, but eventually I get my paper work and am told “Grey VW Passat, Row A, the hazards will be on“.
Out I wander, slightly stunned and bemused, find the only Grey VW Passat in Row A, with the hazards on, load up and drive off to the exit. Where I hand over my driving license and get ready to depart, because after all, the Avis website tells me that as a Preferred member, “all you will need to do is show us your driving licence, collect your keys and go“.
But no, I have to check the car, confirm my details, check for damage, sign here, sign there, check this and then …
“This isn’t your car“, “What?”
“This isn’t your car“, “Yes it is, VW. Passat, Grey. Hazards on. Row A”
“But the registration number is wrong“
I look, and there, in tiny 5 point font is the registration number and it doesn’t match.
“This isn’t your car”, “So where’s my car then? Show me where my car is”
“We don’t do that, you’ll need to go back to the registration desk and find out”
By this point I’m loosing patience and ask, politely but strongly for him to go instead and after 5 minutes he reappears, points proudly and says “There’s your car“.
I look and it’s being washed and will be “about another 10 minutes“.
So after over an hour, I finally drive out of the Avis garage with the right car and that’s a little over 3 minutes by my reckoning, can’t be considered a fast service, and no, I didn’t get £20 off, I didn’t even get anything vaguely approaching an apology. If this is preferred service, I’d hate to be on the receiving end of normal service.
So to Avis in the US, in Ireland and in Europe, you do a great job, but Avis in the UK, you’re really just can’t be bothered and couldn’t car less because the one message you sent me through all of this is that you don’t do that and you really couldn’t care less about customer service or satisfaction, but you got your money so that’s OK then.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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21
Sep 09

Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks …

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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