Notes From Afar
I love Field Notes, and I love Draplin, and this is just wonderful.
I have a ‘thing’ for early 20th century American graphic design; I love the bold flat colours, the typography with it’s mix of slab and script typefaces, and the wonderfully simple yet incredibly strong logos.
The Field Notes Memo Archive is an absolute delight.
Intel are joining Dell in challenging Psion’s claim to the netbook trademark.
I realise that Dell and Intel’s motives are purely commercial, but I dislike the patent and trademark litigation culture that has grown alongside the technology industry. I agree wholeheartedly that companies ideas and designs should be protected but only when their claims are real and genuine.
I would have thought more of Psion had they contested the netbook trademark as soon as it started being applied to the new generation of netbooks. Instead they waited for it to become thoroughly embedded before doing so. I would have though even more of them if they had released an updated version of the netBook.
It’s too late Psion the netbook horse has bolted.
Via Liliputing
As an ex-Psion employee I was disappointed and a little saddened to learn of Psion’s spurious trademark claim to the word netbook. Psion were once a great technology company practically inventing the PDA , creating some classic hardware designs and creating the operating system that powers a huge proporation of today’s smartphones: Symbian.
Psion launched the Psion netBook (also badged a Series 7) in 1999. The netBook was a sub-notebook running Psion’s EPOC operating system and discontinued in 2003.
I remember playing with a pre-production netBook giving my feedback as to how I felt the EPOC OS should be adapted to work on the bigger screen and thinking we had a very cool device here. Psion used external design consultants Therefore for their hardware design, and the netBook was another triumph of industrial design.
As with the Series 3 and 5 PDAs that preceded it the netBook had a clever hinge that made the device seem to grow as you opened it revealing a keyboard that seemed larger than it should be. The hinge itself was wrapped in leather so it felt like carrying a leather book or Filofax. As well as an almost full size keyboard the netBook had a touch screen and solid state internals. Writing this now I realise that the Psion netBook really was ahead of it’s time.
A few years ago I bumped into an old colleague who showed me a netBook running Linux pre-dating the Eee PC and co. by some years. Sadly Psion didn’t release this version in yet another moment of corporate short-sightedness and cowardice.
Psion chickened out of the two hottest personal technology markets despite having a massive head start on the competition. I was fortunate to see the designs and concepts for a range of smartphones they were working on, but ultimately didn’t develop.
Then of course Psion pulled out of the PDA market saying they couldn’t beat Palm.
Psion are now a pale imitation of the once great innovators they were; based in Canada Psion Teklogix now produce rugged industrial handheld computers. So their decision to claim the netbook trademark and to threaten websites, resellers and IT manufacturers with legal action felt like the last dieing actions of once great brand.
Shame on you Psion.
But well done Dell for challenging this ridiculous claim; it looks like game over for Psion before they’ve even started.
Update: Dell have accused Psion of “fraudulently” claiming the trademark netbook was still in use.
Note: I was also amazed to see that design of the Psion Teklogix site is largely the same as the one I left behind when I left Psion in 2000 and it was out of date then.
Recently I decided to take this blog a little more seriously, and part of that has been to see where my visitors were coming from and to try and increase my visitor numbers.
Google Analytics reports that 57% of the visitors to david hughes.org arrived from a search engine:
That’s a HUGE proportion from Google, but looking at the detail I found that the vast majority were from Google.com. I live in England so Google insists on sending me to Google .co.uk no matter if I enter .com or not so I found it interesting that I should get so much traffic from .com and so little from .co.uk.
I found that when searching for david hughes my blog ranked #10 on Google.com and #1 on Yahoo.com. However it was another story when you looked at the UK version of the search engines that UK users are pushed to. On Yahoo.co.uk I was a very pleasant 3, but on Google.co.uk I struggled to find my site; after wading through search results I finally found it at #212.
I found this disparity in rankings surprising; it’s the same site with the same content so I really couldn’t see why it would rank well on google.com and not on google.co.uk. It was this dramatic difference that made me take an more active interest in my site’s ranking.
The first thing I learnt was that nobody except Google really knows how their algorithm works despite what some might tell you. So really we’re all experimenting and seeing what works; which makes it a little frustrating but also kinda fun.
The first thing I wanted to explore was the difference in rankings between .com and .co.uk. Looking into this subject it seems that the physical location of your website and its domain make a difference to how Google rank you on the country specific sites.
I moved davidhughes.org to a UK based server and saw a small improvement, but moving to a UK domain name proved more difficult. The .org TLD is classified as being international and this seems to make Google rank it well on .com but rank it lower on .co.uk because it is not a UK domain.
I tried to buy davidhughes.co.uk and david-hughes.co.uk but both have been bought by cyber squatters who wanted £1500 and £2500 + VAT respectively. I wish them luck as I’m not aware of a famous David Hughes that would pay that – we’re not talking about britneyspears.co.uk here.
Unsurprisingly, I decided to stay with davidhughes.org and work at building up the Google ranking for this domain.
The next thing I looked at was keywords or the words that people will use to search for and find my site. The keywords I most want people to be able to find my site via are david hughes; obvious but also rather common. I realised that David Hughes only appeared once on this site, in the header, so my keyword density was about as low as it could be. To help this I added a written by byline to all of the articles and updated the copyright statement to include my name; this added ten more instances of david hughes to the homepage. At this time I also wrapped main David Hughes in <h1> tags as this is good both from a semantic standpoint, rather sloppy of me not to have done so, and apparently Google likes headings.
This is really the extent of the technical changes I have made to my site; they did help but not as much as the final elements: links and content.
From all I read it seems the biggest single influencer on your Google ranking is incoming links. There are two ways I can see to get links to your site: go out and comment on other blogs and site and link back to your own site and for other sites to link to your site and articles.
The biggest factor in getting that to happen is of course content; if you don’t have content of interest to people they aren’t really going to link to you are they? I will admit to not having seen a rise in people linking to my site but I have seen an increase in visitors from links that I have published.
Apparently Google also like frequently updated content so I have tried to be a little less sporadic in my posting but as this coincides with my desire to do more with this blog it’s no bad thing.
So where has this focus on my Google ranking ended up?
When I started davidhughes.org was ranked #212 as I said earlier; it peaked at #65 but has since slid back to #94. I have no idea why my ranking has fallen back – that’s another Google mystery to solve.
A move from #212 to #65 in just over a month isn’t bad really is it? It’s not the front page where I’d really like to be but it does show that it is possible to improve with a few basic changes.
Anyway, back to the Google grindstone.
Earlier today I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to sell my Samsung NC10 as I’ve bought a MacBook Air. I wasn’t really expecting a response, but within minutes I had an email from somebody interested in it; a few emails later the funds are in my PayPal account and my Samsung is ready to ship.
This feels like quite a significant moment; selling via social media rather than “traditional” channels. Who’d have thought that we might regard eBay as old hat so quickly. In the time it would have taken me to list my notebook on eBay I’d sold it via Twitter with no hassle and no fees.
It’s doubly interesting to me as over the last year eBay seem to have been systematically dismantling the community aspect of their site with changes to process and most importantly feedback which now favour the buyer rather than the seller. It was this community rating of both buyers and sellers that was eBay’s USP I felt, and the thing that gave people the confidence to trade with unknown buyers and sellers. eBay is becoming an online shopping mall rather than a community powered site.
Social Media is all about connecting people and it shows in how many different ways those connections can work for us.
I was intrigued by Carsonified’s latest conference FUEL when it was announced as it seemed to span personal and professional interests – looking at both the power of community and the power of cloud computing and how companies can use both to fuel their business.
FUEL took place last Friday and was one of the best, if not the best conference I’ve been to. The conference itself was relatively small which made chatting and “networking” easier and more pleasant – no milling about in vast areas with endless queues for coffee.
The event was held at the RIBA building which itself added a lovely ambience; a wonderful contrast of last century architecture with the latest in online thinking.
It was that thinking I went for and I wasn’t disappointed. I haven’t felt as energised and motivated by a group of speakers since the first @Media back in 2005.
Highlights of the day were:
Tara Hunt – I wasn’t really aware of Tara before the FUEL but wow. Great ideas and a brilliant rapidfire presentation style – 260 slides in fast succession. Tara’s book The Whuffie Factor looks like it’s going to be a great read when it’s released.
Alex Hunter – Alex is from Virgin America and showed how a big brand can use communities and creativity to generate huge buzz and awareness for a new company. I’m still stunned that in the 21st Century the US can be allowed to be so restrictive on foreign ownership of an airline.
Ted Hunt – a brilliant case study into how Innocent Drinks have used a multitude of social networks and communities to help in building the “Innocent Family”. Awe inspiring creativity and commitment to genuine dialogue with their customers. If there is just one company to use as a role model – it’s Innocent.
Honourable mentions go to:
Paul Boag – entertaining as always with some sound advice for building a great website.
Richard Moross – of Moo fame. Richard showed how Moo have built a brand and style for Moo.
And last but no means least:
Ryan Carson – opened the day with a great session on the new rules for business – how you should think about and approach your customers and great ways of engaging with them.
Lowlights? Only the thinly veiled Microsoft pitch from Howard/Baines. I know Ryan likes to keep the cost of Carsonified conferences down with sponsorship but there must be a better way to allow a sponsor to get their message across. But enough of the lowlights.
It was great to finally meet and chat to Ryan. I also managed to meet up with Paul Fabretti who I’ve chatted to over Twitter for a while now and the internets Drew McLellan who I’ve not had the chance to speak with before. I would have loved a chance to chat with Tara Hunt but sadly she was struggling with jetlag and so not around for much of the day.
I’m sure that FUEL will quickly become one of the must attend conferences. Congratulations to Ryan and team for arranging a great event, thanks to the speakers for for a wealth of ideas and passion and thanks to my fellow attendees for adding to the buzz of the day.