Since then, I have found differing services advising of snow-related disruption to be of somewhat variable quality, so I thought I’d look specifically at Bigger Lad’s school, my Local Authority, and Go North East, the local bus company, and tell you what precisely I’ve thought about their updates.

Success

So at seven a.m. on wednesday morning, I checked the school website to discover a message informing me that the school was closed owing to the fact that the staff couldn’t get in. By about eleven p.m. on wednesday evening, they had already updated the site to inform parents that the school would also be closed the following day.

Timely, useful updates. Well done.

Failure

Of course, my local council wasn’t quite so quick on the uptake… with their severe weather page stating (as at 09:10 on Wednesday morning — in other words some time after the time at which children would be required to be at school):

Are any schools closed due to the adverse weather?

No. At present, all schools are open as normal.

Local Authority

I was a little incredulous that this information had not been updated — the BBC had managed it easily enough, and after all, by half past eight, people will be setting off for school so if you are unable to update the information by then you are not capable of being a source for that information, so I mentioned it online. It was updated with school closures by 09:30, and there was also a tweet at around 09:40 but by then the information was too late to benefit anyone.

I was even more shocked when someone responded informally to tell me that they would be updating this information as soon as they got into work — but it might take them a little time to get in, because of the weather conditions.

WTF? Surely if your plan for extreme weather conditions is to tell the public about the extreme weather causing transport disruption and/or school closures only after your staff have made it into work then it is very seriously flawed. I’m sure you can all work out for yourselves the flaw in this.

They did manage to improve it considerably over the course of the day, putting in a list of all schools and their open status for Thursday and Friday (or at least, as far as they were aware) and for that reason I’ve refrained from publicly naming them.

The Snow Updates Medal: Success

However, I think that the most credit probably deserves to be pushed in the direction of the local bus company Go North East. Their website suggests that you head over to their Facebook page for the latest updates on bus services. The Facebook page was updated with thirty-four separate updates on Wednesday 6th.

And it’s not just been one way traffic either: Go North East actually have grasped how social media is supposed to work and have responded to people who have made comments:

As you can see, when Luke and Gareth have asked further questions, Go North East have not only responded to their enquiries (which many organisations seem to forget is part of the expectation of social media — it’s not a one-way communication broadcast, it’s a conversation) but they have responded to those enquires — made outside normal office hours — within fifteen minutes. Now that’s impressive. And so for me, the people responsible for Go North East’s social media streams deserve my award for the best snow-related updates.

Mind, that doesn’t help you a great deal if it turns out your route is one of the ones currently off!

Aside

It’s important to remember however that not necessarily everyone has internet access (although the vast majority do) and so the information about things such as school closures and travel disruption should be made as widely available as possible — lots of people will still expect to hear these things on local radio, whether or not Tony Horne likes it — although he does make a point (which I made last year) that if schools are able to text (or otherwise directly inform) parents, this is probably preferable.

The key thing is to make the information available to people through the channel they want, not the channel you want to feed them…

Basically, it would appear that a “high profile public sector organization” is looking for a web editor, as evidenced by an advert on a particular job site. For this post, certain skills are essential — you need to understand the internet, HTML, be able to check content against standards and for accuracy, have experience of writing for the web, as well as having good communication skills.

They also list certain things as desirable: while I may not have the Information Management degree, I think it’s fair to say I’ve significant experience of Web 2.0, of blogging, of using web applications and so on. While I don’t currently have security clearance, I can’t imagine that this would be a major problem, as so far as I’m aware I’ve never been a member of a terrorist organisation, and I think I would probably have noticed.

So there you go. All stuff that I could probably do in my sleep, for which they are offering between £140 per day and £1140 per day. Mind you, it is in London, and £1140 per week isn’t really that…

…hang on… £1140 per day? That can’t be right, surely.

It can’t be right on oh so many levels. Firstly, there’s the fact that they’ve had to go through an employment agency — surely it can’t be difficult to find someone willing to work for five and a half grand per week? Heck, even I’d be prepared to relocate to London for three months on that basis…

But I rather suspect that this is some form of error. For a start, they’ve not contacted me to offer me the job, which would have saved them all the tedious business of advertising, and secondly because of the sheer nonsense value. At a time when the public sector is facing one of the biggest financial squeezes and pay freezes that it has for some time — and having spent a good while working in the public sector, I’ve seen ‘em before — it surely cannot be true that any public sector organisation is prepared to pay a web editor the equivalent of £300,000 per year.

Admittedly, it’s only a three-month contract, so you’re only looking at seventy five grand — but that’s still the equivalent of three hundred grand per year for a web editor. And surely no public sector organisation would be prepared to waste that degree of public money when they have no need to. Or, if they are prepared to do so, I hope to hell that they can justify that sort of expenditure to the public, when it’s plainly not necessary to find someone capable of doing the job.

Hey, if they wanted to approach TPIS, I’m sure I could provide the services they’re looking for at, well, let’s just say cheaper than that. The equivalent of three hundred grand for a web editor can’t be right, can it? Surely no public sector/governmental body would be so out of touch with the real world that they would be prepared to spend that sort of money when they have no need to do so.

It can’t be right, can it?

Obviously, if you’re working for that particular public sector organisation, and you happen to know better, then do let me know. Or let them know where to find me

And you may have noticed that this didn’t actually happen. For the most part, legions of dedicated and intelligent computer programmers worked round the clock to try to persuade computers that it wasn’t suddenly going to become 1900 overnight.

Since 2000 the world of IT has continued apace: most of us now live in very much a broadband world, not only are we on Facebook, but we’ve also made ‘friends’ with our parents and children (although whoever thought that making inter-generational spying easier was a good idea probably deserves a kick), and some of us have even joined the twitterati. More and more of us have taken up blogging, and some people even have useful things to say from time to time.

Obviously I try to avoid this: my blogging is, for the most part, a personal thing. It’s for my amusement. If what amuses me happens to amuse anyone else, or something that I am interested in is educational for someone else, then this is indeed a good thing, but that’s not what I’m doing it for.

So, given that so much has changed in the last ten years, it’s only fair to warn you all about the impending decade bug. The Millenium Bug was caused by computer programs which only held the year as a two-digit year, and so when “99″ clicked around to “00″, there was nothing to say which century we were in.

The Decade Bug works on precisely the same principle. Any computer program written since 2000 which only stores the year as a single digit will have exactly the same problem — as 2009 clicks over to 2010, the year stored as a single digit will click back from 9 to 0, and all of these computer programs will stop working.

Obviously, if these have been used in nuclear power stations, civil aviation and so on, then we’ll face the same sort of apocalyptic meltdown which we narrowly avoided at the end of 1999. I would also suggest that this might also cause significant problems for in-car sat-nav who might be unable to tell whether or not certain roads have yet been built, whether or not they are actually suitable for motor vehicles or are in fact train tracks, but from the stories I have heard, most drivers probably wouldn’t notice any difference.

If you have any concerns about the decade bug, and you’d like to employ my consultancy services to cope with the likely consequences of the decade bug, I’d suggest that you contact me today. Obviously, once the decade bug has triggered, I would imagine that it will be much more difficult for me to slot you into my schedule, so I’d suggest that you engage my services as quickly as possible, before you realise this is all a load of rubbish I’m fully booked.

Teletext’s news and information service is switching off on December 14/15. Teletext.co.uk “Untitled Page”

For readers outside the UK, teletext is — was — a text based service available through the telly. It had TV listings, news, sport and stuff all available to read, in chunky 1980s era graphics (which haven’t changed, scoring it bonus nostalgia points). If I recall correctly, Oracle Teletext was also specifically the service provided by ITV on their channels: the BBC’s equivalent was called ‘Ceefax’, but basically the name ‘Teletext’ was the one which caught on.

And it looked something like this…

(This is BBC’s Ceefax page 302 represented on-screen, taken from the appropriate Ceefax.TV page — although to be honest it does look as though it’s not updated as often as the real Ceefax. If you’re from Ceefax TV and you’d like me not to use your image, let me know and I’ll take it down)

Basically, you switched the TV to ‘text’, which presented you with a black screen with the text on, although still provided the audio for the channel you were on, and then used your remote to enter the page number you wanted (theoretically 100-999, although in practice there were only a few hundred pages in use), and then the text appeared on the screen (although of course you couldn’t see your programme). Some TVs had a ‘mix’ option which allowed you to view the teletext as on overlay to the current programme, effectively rendering the program unwatchable and the text unreadable at the same time, in what was seen as a ‘feature’.

You could waste time reading all sorts of crap when you should have been doing something else. In this way, it’s possible to see teletext as a sort of a proto-internet.

Anyone who has owned a TV with teletext will probably remember certain of the numbers without ever needing to be prompted: the BBC’s football pages were on 302; subtitles could be available on any channel by pressing 888, News was 101 on BBC or 301 on ITV and so on.

The Gary Lineker quote above was a reflection of standard practice for the legions of football addicts around the country. You simply key into the text page for the scores of the division you were interested in, and the page would update regularly so you would be kept in touch with any changes to the scoreline. This was of course in the days when live sport was frequently shown on telly on a saturday afternoon, instead of talking heads like Matt Le Tissier pulling faces and regularly trying to describe the sitter Didier Drogba’s just missed.

And so all of us, most of us, or at very lesst many of us who weren’t actually at the match would regularly check the scores of our favourite teams (and the others in the division, natch’) on the teletext service to see if, despite years of evidence to the contrary, your team was going to manage to come back from 3-1 down.

And, in reference to the beautiful game, and how it should be played (for the Allardyces and Sounesses out there, I’ll explain: passing the ball to one another rather than just randomly lumping it downfield and hoping someone would score), Gary Lineker actually made a rude and hurtful remark about Wimbledon (as was), indicating that their style of play was so boring to watch that:

I’d rather watch them on TeletextGary Lineker

…hence the post title.

I’m not the only one who’s going to miss teletext either:

Teletext boiled football down to its essentials, the scoreline. Romance, florid descriptions and tactical analysis counted for nothing next to the result. It couldn’t tell you anything about performance or players and in those days you were unlikely to find team line-ups anywhere unless you bought the Sunday People. Before such information became commonplace, it equally satisfied the urges of football junkies and those for whom a Saturday afternoon would not be complete without a fixed-odds coupon.The Guardian: Sport Blog

And it’s all switching off in a couple of days. Well, technically, not all of it. They’re keeping some of the bits which were neither use nor ornament to me — such as teletext holidays — presumably because these actually might generate some revenue. But the stuff that I actually found useful will all be gone.

So farewell then teletext. We salute you.

…but not that much (yet) as fortunately the BBC Ceefax service was better for the football anyway, and I am led to believe that this will be clinging on grimly until the final demise of the analogue TV signals in 2012.

Obviously the stories all end with a happy ending as Kroll Ontrack help the customers to recover their data. You may presume that this is because it would be a less useful marketing piece if they looked at cases where the customer’s data was not salvageable, or it could just be The Power of Kroll.

Note that I’m not saying that the data is actually recovered by a big squid-like monster from Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, I’ve not actually checked this out, so it’s always possible that this is just a coincidence. On the other hand, so far as I am aware, the company have never explicitly denied that the data recovery work is carried out by big squid-like monsters.

On the other hand, irrespective of who is carrying out the work, some of their data recovery results are impressive — here’s the top two:

2. Sunken drive. A hard drive plummeted 200 feet to the ocean’s floor. It was discovered six months later and was sent to Kroll Ontrack’s cleanroom, where 99 percent of the data was imaged and recovered.

1. Law trouble. As legal officials entered the home of a criminal suspect, the individual in question threw a laptop containing potentially pertinent evidence out the window of a 12-story building. As a result, the laptop smashed into many pieces on the sidewalk. Investigators turned to Kroll Ontrack to recover the photos, videos and e-mails.

Top 10 Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries 2009

If you can’t be bothered to do either of those things, you might instead want to have a quick glance at the things which struck me as interesting…

• The survey had 665 valid responses
• Only 4.7% described themselves as beginners with screen reader technology (but as they point out, we shouldn’t draw inferences from this, because there is no way of knowing if this survey sample is fully representative — which we also need to bear in mind when looking at the other results)
• JAWS is the primary screen reader for most (2/3 of correspondents) but 5 other screen readers have shares over 1% so we can’t assume screen reader = JAWS
• 83% have updated their screen reader in the past year (but if the survey sample is artificially tech-savvy, this might be artificially high also)
• When asked which browser was used with their primary reader, the top four, in order, were IE8, IE7, Firefox 3, then IE6. It’s worth noting that the IE6 percentage is significantly lower than reported by most site analytics, although it’s difficult to tell whether this relates to screen reader requirements or sample selection
• More than 74% of users report that javascript is not disabled in their browser, with almost 15% don’t know. Is javascript still the big bogeyman barrier suggested by WCAG 1.0?
• There’s something very interesting about alt text. I’ve always been working on the assumption — long backed up by other professionals — that screen reader users would prefer to have decorative images to have a null alt text so that they would be ignored by the screen reader. It would instead appear that over 75% would prefer either “smiling lady” or “photo of smiling lady” to indicate such an image (of a smiling lady). Not particularly convinced this result should see a change in best practice however — but I’m open to persuasion if this is what people want…
• The most problematic three items were CAPTCHA (presumably particularly those which are visual-only), Flash, and ambiguous links. Looks like another vote for the end of ‘click here’ as well as a reminder to all those companies who produce inaccessible flash-only versions that they are causing accessibility problems
• …in comparison, lack of ‘skip’ links doesn’t seem to bother many people
• Social media use seems to be (mostly) tied in with perceived accessibility, with the most used social media tool (YouTube) being seen as at least ‘somewhat accessible’ by 78% of people (although not the highest), and the least used (MySpace) reporting the least accessible (assuming that the graph is correct, and not the figures, which were wildly out of whack with the graph at the time I put this together). MySpace, which is least used, is reported as one of the most accessible; some of the most used are reported as the most accessible, so there does not appear to be a direct link between accessibility and use, . This information would be better presented in next years survey as a % difference between screen reader users and users in general — as it would be more possible to draw comparisons as we could see differences in trends: it’s impossible to know to what extent (if any) these percentages are affected by accessibility without knowing the % use in the general population
• In short, there is no “typical” screen reader user.

But if you can manage to look at your site statistics from time to time without getting drawn into this sort of nonsense, you can determine some interesting things.

Browsers

Firstly, there’s the question of what people use to access the site. The large proportion of “unknown” users (around 16% of the total) suggests that maybe the statistics package isn’t the best and latest available (and it isn’t; it’s a full release behind the current up-to-date version of that package) and so I shouldn’t draw too firm a conclusion from any of this, since any browser could be up to 16% out, but it would appear that on my site Internet Explorer (22%) and Firefox (19%) are almost on a par in terms of visits.

This is actually quite plausible, as while the proportion of Internet Explorer users in the UK is, on the whole, significantly higher than this, techies (some of whom I presume read the techie stuff on here) are much more likely to use Firefox: thus if my site is skewed towards techies, it’s also likely to be skewed towards Firefox.

If I actually drill down and look at browser versions, then you see something quite interesting. In terms of Firefox, by far the biggest percentage of users using those browsers are using the most recent version (96%), whereas the situation is reversed for Internet Explorer (only 26% using the most recent version, compared to 29% still using Internet Explorer 6).

My theory is that the reason updates of Internet Explorer are lagging behind is because of its use as a corporate platform: it doesn’t get upgraded quickly but there is a significant lag time while the IT department of the appropriate organisation get their arse in gear to upgrade everyone to the newer versions. Well, there’s that and the possibility that people who are using Internet Explorer by choice are, on the whole, less fussy about using the latest version of their browser than users of other browsers.

Platforms

And what sort of platform are people using?

It’s fairly clear that Windows is the platform popularity king, and WinXP is still by far the most popular version. Goes to show that for all the hype about Windows Vista, people didn’t really want it:

(Note: figures adjusted to remove spiders/bots and ‘unknkown’; these are based on known user platforms only)

(Only figures > 1.0% are shown, meaning that the likes of WinCE, Win3.1 and SunOS are not listed).

Geography

Well, it’s actually a slight surprise to discover that the country which provides the most visits to my site is the US (56.0%), what with me being based (and hosted, and ‘domained’) over here on t’other side of the Atlantic (where the UK provides 19.6%). Then again, there are simply more people in the States, which could well account for it to some extent.

But again, it’s the sheer geographic spread that I find impressive: there are 10 countries which have generated 1000 visits or more in the last month, a further 22 countries which had 100 visits or more, and another 36 which were responsible for 10 or more visits, all the way down to my solitary visitor from Yemen, who viewed two pages. Hello!

Searching

The point hardly needs to be made, but Google is very dominant in the search market, accounting for 96% of all searches which drew people to the site.

What tends to be slightly more interesting is looking at what people were actually searching for. Until I excluded it via the robots protocol recently, a number of people were still finding my site searching for “find madeleine” and then obviously sending me abuse simply because I had posited the theory that she may in fact have been dead (note: not that I felt that this was a good thing).

There are quite a few people turning up here looking for “Reynholm Industries Intranet Password” (and variations on the theme). Those looking for that will be disappointed as I don’t say what it is — but I do give a clue. “John Harrison MBE MIDSC” is also quite popular, in relation to a chain email doing the rounds which doesn’t actually contain any facts but is quite anti-Islamic, so it’s nice to see that people are trying to check up on the supposed (but not actual) author.

Although I suspect the person who arrived here having searched for “home made porn” on Ask Jeeves was somewhat disappointed. I am more than happy to educate those people wanting to know more about the unique Andy Kadir-Buxton, and to give people an idea of “when was Furness Abbey built?”. There also seems to be an awful lot of people wondering if they have swine flu…

I don’t really have a problem with the use of acronyms, provided that they are expanded (whether via HTML or in text) on at least their first use in a given page or message. What I do object to however is the assumption that if you use an acronym or abbreviation, other people will understand what you mean, and if not, they can always look it up.

Well, no. If you can’t be bothered to make your message sufficiently clear in the first place, I don’t see why I should bother to dig around trying to figure out what you are trying to say. And sadly, I find that the accessibility community are one of the worst when it comes to this.

The idea of accessibility is to make websites (or other things) more easily usable by people, most frequently specifically “people who are disabled”. This is emphatically not just about using alt tags (note: always call them tags, it annoys the purists). Accessibility is not just about the blind.

If you want to make your sites accessible, you need to consider other impairments: motor impairments — users who can’t use a mouse; hearing impairments; other visual impairments; dyslexia and other cognitive impairments and so on. And he we come to something which is a cross-over between general good practice and accessibility — the ease with which your content can be understood.

Obviously cognitive impairment is not a binary position: it reflects a continuum of impairment. You can understand therefore that if your page is slightly easier to understand, this will tip the balance for some people between being able to use it and not.

And this is where we come to the counter-intuitive a11y abbreviation. It looks like “ally” (and many pronounce it as such), but it means something entirely different. It means “accessibility”. How on earth do you get from “a11y” to “accessibility”, you may well ask. Ahah! Here’s the clever bit (or, in my opinion, the bloody ridiculous bit).

What you do is you look at the number of letters between the first “a” and the final “y”. You’ll find there are 11 of them. So you scoop all of those out and replace them with the number 11. You’ll also see this in i18n and similar. They are the sort of abbreviation which are completely and utterly obscure and opaque to anyone not already “in the know”.

As far as accessibility goes — something which is supposed to promote understanding — the use of a11y is therefore very clearly b6s.

I understand that there is a need sometimes (for example when on twitter) to use an abbreviation, as accessibility is quite a long word. But any abbreviation used should be one from which the word “accessibility” can be reasonably inferred without esoteric knowledge.

One possible suggestion would be to use the abbreviation “access” (6 letters). It’s significantly clearer than “a11y” (4 letters) and significantly shorter than “accessibility” (13 letters). It does have one drawback in that people frequently use “access” (particularly on twitter) to refer to Microsoft Access databases.

So there’s two questions.

1. Do you agree that a11y is a poor abbreviation for accessibility, and we ought to use something better?
2. What should we use instead (and why)?

My personal belief (after having looked around on twitter) is that #access might clash too much with other things, so a different option may be preferable; but also that #access is preferable to #a11y. But can we come up with something that is better than both of them?

I don’t really think we should be looking at something specifically related to the web, as people might want to use an equivalent tag to mark accessibility in other software (or in a non-IT capacity).

So let’s have your thoughts on the following, and any others you can come up with:

• #a11y
• #access
• #accessibility
• #accessy
• #disability
• #disacc
• #webacc

Yes, as you might have guessed, SuperMondays, which I attended last month have had another event, and it has had a barcamp kind of a feel to it, with three different breakout sessions, each offering the chance to take in one of three different discussions (well, in theory).

There was a little introduction to the event and a mini-presentation, and a summing up session at the end. Oh, and I bumped into someone I used to work with (Hi, again!). So here’s the bits I went to, in chronological order.

The Secret Bit

I’m not sure what exactly I can tell you about this one, as we were specifically asked not to talk about it for another week to ten days until there has been some form of official announcement. You may therefore notice my description of this is missing one or two details…

This presentation was made by [redacted] who first got up and asked us not to talk about it. Basically it is a venture capital kind of thing which has been put together by [redacted] with [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted]. It will be running in [redacted] over a [redacted] period. The idea is that [redacted] will submit their proposals to [redacted] and these will then be looked at in more detail, with the best being offered [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted] and probably being based [redacted].

Hope this clarifies the situation for y’all.

A Note To The Organisers

When arranging future bar camp type events, there are certain things you may wish to consider…

Post-it Notes

While it’s all very well taking notes for potential sessions on a whiteboard, there is one key problem with a whiteboard. When it comes to wanting to group information (e.g. “these three sessions seem similar, so we’ll run all of them in room three”) or re-ordering sessions (“I can’t speak about google wave if I’m presenting startups at the same time”), there’s not much you can do with a whiteboard (particularly if you can’t write “encryption” legibly — see the post title) or flip-chart other than drawing a lot of lines and crossing stuff out.

I’d therefore recommend the use of post-it notes (the larger the better, and write BIG), which can be easily moved about, grouped, and re-ordered to suit. I felt this was something which had worked particularly well at localgovcamp.

Speakers

Again, to draw reference from localgovcamp, when sorting out which sessions you are going to run, there are two things to consider. The first is the relative level of interest in the room, which can be gauged by a show of hands, but the second is equally important.

Whether or not anyone is willing to lead on a particular topic. Particularly when people haven’t been to these events before, many people will be interested in a topic, but not necessarily know enough about it to be comfortable leading a session. I would therefore suggest that the audience (and/or the organisers) should propose the topics, and that the person proposing the topic has to be willing to speak for 10-15 of the 25 minutes on a given topic, just to get the session started.

Then you look to see which sessions are the most popular, once you know what people are willing to run. This avoids what I’ll describe later as the “Branding” problem…

The Audience

One of the things about the audience at the previous event I attended was that they were all from, or relating to, local government. This made it easier to choose topics which would appeal across the audience as a whole. The problem here for SuperMondays is that the audience is particularly diverse, so there were probably too many people, with too many different interests, to give the camp a tight enough focus.

I would maybe suggest that in future they look at applying a certain focus to barcamp events, such as “SuperMondays: Social Media Barcamp” or “SuperMondays: Databases Barcamp”

Google Wave

Okay, there was an ulterior motive which attracted a certain number of people to this session. The organiser had a certain number of Google Wave invites to give away, so I suspect there were two main reasons which people had for attending: those who were just interested in getting an invite, and couldn’t care about the rest of it; and those who were interested in getting an invite, but were at least vaguely interested in the rest of it.

So, anyway, this session:

Blah, blah, blah, etc, chattered on for a bit, blah, blah, filled in my email address to get a google wave invite, the end.

Only joking…

Google Wave was described in a number of different ways:

• a wave account is like gmail, but for wave rather than email…
• a mashup between mail, instant messaging, wikis and other things…
• very like google document files — a shared document
• brilliant for collaborative working and collaborative writing

What else? Well, it needs a browser which will support HTML 5 in order to run. In other words, you can’t run it in IE (or you can, but you need the google chrome plug in, which is even more of an accessibility black hole than google wave itself), and you instead need Firefox 3, Safari or something similar.

There was also some discussion over the reasoning behind Google’s invite roll-out policy. One of the ideas put forward is that it helps to keep the numbers down during the roll-out procedure so they get a chance to test it with progressively increasing numbers rather than a sudden explosion of signups. However, the most widely believed reason seems to be that the idea of it being “exclusive” is the thing which generates an enormous amount of interest and hype.

This is doubly true because we’re dealing mostly with techies, and to techies it’s a new toy and I wants it, my preciousss…

The demonstration looked at what could be done with it, and more specifically how the SuperMondays organisers have done with it — in terms of allocating tasks to people, collaborating on writing the event documentation together and so on. You can have numerous people editing the same document at once, and updates appear on your screen almost immediately. You can also allow different people have different permissions to your documents (e.g. some may have full permissions, some may be review only).

It’s like viewing a page on a wiki where you keep the F5 key pressed down

Again, like wiki type of things, it is very useful for tracking changes in a document — you can see what changes have been made, by whom, and when. There was a suggestion that this makes some legal departments particularly nervous…

At the moment, it was described also as “not too feature rich” and there was an acknowledgement that “it does crash from time to time”, which caused a few grins and nods from others — suggesting that it’s possibly not that uncommon an experience. It was also noted that performance drops the more people you have in a specific ‘Wave’, and as few as 5 people can bring the thing grinding to a halt.

One of the interesting things is that apparently the standards/tools behind Wave are open source, so just because Google are currently the only ones to be offering the service does not mean that this will always be the case — you could have Microsoft Wave, or even if you can put together the stuff on your own server, you could create your own compatible Waves…

Based on the way Google Wave was demonstrated here, I’d say that it doesn’t look to me as though it will be a replacement for wikis, or documents, or email, or instant messaging, but it does look a useful tool for collaborative work.

Start-ups

To some extent this session went off for fifteen minutes or so on the whole [redacted] thing, which probably meant that the session wasn’t as much use for everyone, because the [redacted] thing has certain conditions attached to it (it’s looking more at scalable products; they are not interested in non-scalable custom services), and also this limits to some extent what I can say about it.

So what else was actually discussed? Well, we learned that there were several people who were onto their second or third business, all of whom mentioned that they had learned “essential” things from the failures (or relative failures) of earlier businesses. Unfortunately, they didn’t actually tell us what these essential things were, so I’ll just have to try and avoid making the mistakes they made first time round without even knowing what they are. Wish me luck!

Then someone was talking about their Web 3.0 startup briefly, although I must admit that while I understand what they are talking about in terms of a semantic web, the entire notion of “Web 3.0″ sets off major alarms on my bullshit detection system, particularly given the propensity of people to talk about this sort of thing because it sounds new, cool, and haz buzzwords without actually understanding what the hell they are talking about.

Otherwise you’ll get clients who think Web 2.0 is rounded corners and pastel colours and web 3.0 will be the same story. Please, just drop the version numbers, okay?

There was a brief sidenote to say that it was the last day of geocities today, which caused a brief wave of nostalgia to ripple across the audience. For anyone particularly feeling in need of some early web geocities “goodness”, please take a look at The Great Duckano’s CSS Zen Garden GeoCities 1996 submission. Please also note that it was not intended seriously.

There was a suggestion that local Business Link services aren’t necessarily the best in terms of advice and coaching (although they may be useful for grants) and a couple of people voiced their scepticism at the idea that any of the business link advisers had ever ran their own business.

Digital Branding

I was expecting this to be a particularly interesting session, full of Dos and Do Nots about what to do with launching your digital brand online, and I had a few things that I was maybe willing to chip into the discussion if people weren’t already aware of them (such as the habitat twitter fail and so on), but here we arrived at the Barcamp Branding Problem.

There were only about five people in the room: all of whom had been there since the end of the previous “Start-ups” session. So they were continuing little conversations about start-ups while we waited for someone to start talking about digital branding.

Only because no-one had actually volunteered to start the session, no-one else came into the room, and no-one volunteered to lead the session. So after about ten minutes of generic chatter during which it became apparent that this session was not actually going to start, I skipped out and instead went to…

Open or Closed

Which was a discussion of open source software versus proprietary technology. Sat in a room full of techies, you generally get very much a consensus…

Open Source = Good; Proprietary = Bad; …oh, and while we’re on, Microsoft = Evil, Apple = Good

…but fortunately while there was a definite leaning towards open source, there were people prepared to put forward counter-arguments (and indeed, if it did ever get as black and white as suggested earlier, they had got past that by the time I joined in). I’m not entirely sure whether I missed some critical bits of the discussion, but the language used was quite interesting (my emphasis):

there are a lot of companies out there which still work on the old model: google and some others are much more up to date

…note how the language used carries certain baggage with it: there’s an automatic implication that closed source technology is not as good; but apart from a few instances of this, there were some very good arguments made on both sides.

Open source tends to be based more on standards: everyone on the software stack is working towards the same standards, so this tends to lead to less tie-in and more quality in code

There was an interesting suggestionn however that open source might stifle creativity. Imagine a situation where a particular open source platform becomes dominant, and everything used is some off-shoot of that. There will inherently be less variation than if (as would be the case with proprietary locked-down code) if companies had built new applications entirely from the ground.

Someone noted that they felt that there are so many different trunk builds that there would be sufficient variation, but to me, this misses the point somewhat. If you’ve got a wheel that works, you don’t scrap it and start again to create a wheel which is only a tiny bit more efficient.

In the natural world, look at convergent evolution (when similar traits are built from different lineages in different ways). This is the equivalent to two separate ground-up builds. The octopus eye and the human eye are convergent: they have the same function, but evolved entirely separately. The human eye evolved off the same “trunk” of builds as other mammalian eyes, but the octopus was an entirely separate build.

And because it was an entirely separate build, it’s wired differently. The octopus eye does not have a blind spot. Whereas for mammals to evolve no blind spot, they would need to dramatically alter the way blood flows into the eye — and any intermediate step would not evolve because vision would have to get worse before it got better.

So sometimes there are advantages in entirely different builds — and I think this analogy can tie neatly into IT as well…

Wrap-up

There was then a little wrap up session which tried to summarise every session in thirty seconds or less (which I’m not convinced was entirely feasible, although it might give people a better feel of whether they would want to attend a session on that topic next time).

There was also a brief mention of Barcamp NorthEast 2010 which will apparently be in the Centre for Life in March 2010. Something to keep an eye on…

It is mandatory for Government sites to have stats audits:

In the current climate of open, transparent and accountable government, it is now mandatory for government websites to have stats audits.Adam Bailin, Digigov: Benefits of Government Website Auditing

Now there are various different ways to analyse the stats, but in order to identify unique visitors, a lot of stats thingummies will use the storing of cookies. You with me so far?

Now the EU are currently discussing exactly what to do over file-sharing. Part of this telecoms package includes this:

Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his/her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processingElectronic communications networks, personal data and the protection of privacy

Note that: in order to store or access a cookie, the user must already have given consent. This is not the same as the current “right to refuse” which means (as I understand it) that you’ve got to include information about what the information is used for and how the user can opt out (such as by having a ‘privacy’ page with this information linked to at the bottom of your site).

Struan from Out-Law.com was fairly clear on what he believes it means. You must provide a notice and give the user the option of giving or declining their consent before setting or accessing a cookie, with only one limited exception:

There is an exception for cookies that are “strictly necessary” to provide a service “explicitly requested” by the user. Consequently, no cookie notices are required to serve a cookie that helps a shopper get from a product page to a checkout; but notices are required for cookies that are used in traffic analysis or advertising.[...]

[...]sites can deliver cookies to a user’s computer only if the user “has given his/her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information” unless, as now, the cookie is “strictly necessary” for a service “explicitly requested”.

European Commissioner Viviane Reding expressed concerns about behavioural advertising this month. “European privacy rules are crystal clear: a person’s information can only be used with their prior consent,” she said.

Out-Law.com: Online advertising is threatened by Europe’s cookie law

So if you want to use cookies for advertising (not a major thing for UK public sector sites at the moment, but people are heading down that road) or use cookies for analytical reasons, you must first give people the opportunity to decline first. That’s an active thing: you must explicitly get their consent (as I understand, for every different cookie, as you’ve got to explain what the information will be used for).

What right to refuse did I get?” our source asks of his own visit to a homepage placing a selection of cookies on his computer. “You might imagine some sort of pop-up: ‘do you refuse this – yes / no’. You could phrase that many ways but it seems to me you need to ask for a reaction before storing or gaining access to a machine.” Can you imagine a pop-up box to explain 30 cookies, or 30 pop-up boxes? [more from] Out-Law.com: Online advertising is threatened by Europe’s cookie law

And of course if you are a public sector site, you need to comply with either WCAG 1.0 or 2.0, so you simply can’t do this. WCAG 1.0 says:

10.1 Until user agents allow users to turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user. [Priority 2]WCAG 1.0

WCAG 2.0 is a teensy bit different. You’re not allowed to cause a “change of context” (new windows, change of focus, change of content of text on the page) unless you have informed the user first. This includes when any component receives focus (such as opening a new page):

3.2.1 On Focus: When any component receives focus, it does not initiate a change of context. (Level A)WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion 3.2.1

…or when you change anything on the page…

3.2.2 On Input: Changing the setting of any user interface component does not automatically cause a change of context unless the user has been advised of the behavior before using the component. (Level A)WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion 3.2.2

That is, every time you want to set or access a cookie, you’d need to inform the user before you pop up a window (or change the text on the current page) to ask the user if they will allow you to set or access that particular cookie.

So on the one hand you must inform the user what you will use the cookie for — and allow them the chance to withhold permission for it — before you set any cookies; and on the other hand, you can’t have any popups asking about setting cookies unless you’ve already informed the user first.

In other words, every time a user starts a new “visit” to the site (whatever their “landing” page was intended to be) you are going to have to:

• Take them to a page (or series of pages) which explains all the cookies they are likely to encounter on your site and ask their permission to set them (except for cookies essential to the user-initiated process, such as shopping baskets)
• Ensure that these permissions are recorded and stored for the remainder of that visit
• Then take the user to the page that they originally wanted to visit

I can foresee a couple of teensy problems. Firstly, if you don’t do this, you’ll be breaching EU law (?) — assuming the current telecoms bill is passed — or alternatively you can instead choose to breach accessibility requirements. On the other hand, if you do do this, you’re going to massively inconvenience, not to mention severely piss off all of your users.

And of course that’s before we start trying to work out what constitutes a new ‘visit’ for someone who has refused to allow you to set cookies…

So, in line with Struan’s objections, I’d suggest that we hope that (and maybe do what we can to help) the new telecoms bill is not passed…