I believe the everyone’s deck will be available at the SheSays SCAMP web page, or you can grab mine below.

Download: SheSays Presentation Deck (PDF 1.05MB)

I’m looking forward to be speaking at SheSays UK’s event SCAMP this afternoon. I’ll be talking about how the digital world is becoming more and more visible in the physical world. I’ll be covering everything from out door displays to holograms and internet enabled 50′s technology.

Tickets are sold out, but I’ll post the presentation up later.

Seems to me that Nokia have felt the growing pressure of free map services from it’s competitors and jumped on the bandwagon. I think this is a little late in the game, but they are a very trusted brand and could just pull it back from the edge.

I wonder what TomTom will do next????

Read more at CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10438524-266.html

The two key features on the homepage for me are the search box and map navigation. The search is as you’d expect from something mimicking Google. The map is a standard mashup of council data for the area. By web standards nothing new.

But. What I really like about all this is the fact that the council have been brave and tried something new. The search interface works. I can type what I’m looking for and can get to it very easily. This is a vast difference to the traditional affair, like www.lbhf.gov.uk where I have to navigate through a pretty large sitemap to get to what I need. The added benefit is that the average user has used Google and are comfortable in that environment. Instead of a daunting set of navigation links, the user is presented with the familiar. They know what to do and what to expect.

Similarly with the map navigation. I can select different overlays and see what is in my local area. Now this, again, is the standard set of data expected from a council site, but it’s a sure foot on pathway to something really good. My only criticism is that the overlay selection panel should be to the right of the map, as currently you have to scroll off screen to select new data.

On the whole this is a great effort to break from the norms. And I for one would like to see more of this kind of innovation, particularly from the public sector. There is a tendency to “play it safe” from government sites which certainly prove the value in what’s spent, but do little to improve user value.

My fear is that whilst this is a great start to something better, it’s that it won’t be treated as that. It’s a start. Not the final product, but the start. There is a lot of improvement needed on this site to give real value to users. The ball is firmly in their court; let’s hope that they will keep up the momentum.

Visit http://www.westminster.gov.uk/ and let me know what you think.

The H Online

And for those that want it, here is my presentation:

WordPress MU Presenation, OpenOffice Format

Now the basic premise of social networking is to allow this kind of interaction to build a “social network”, so I was faced with the problem of explaining this to people that didn’t quite understand how all of this fits into a data protection policy. Their default policy strictly prohibits the sharing of that kind of information and wanted the message removing. As far as I can tell there is no way to change that message.

So the problem is how does all this work together? The answer is quite straightforward. Facebook have gone to great lengths to protect their users data. There are policies in place to legally restrict what users can do, there is a developer policy as well. The API itself controls and prevents certain functions to allow the social interactions without allowing the application to abuse them. They even have a team that has to approve applications before they can be publicly available through Facebook.

They also have built a lot of functionality into Facebook to empower users with the ability to control their own privacy settings. One of these to control who has access to friends information. Every Facebook user has these settings and can control how their information is used. The code within the API takes these settings into consideration when performing operations with third party applications.

So the answer is clear. Don’t over complicate data protection policies within a social networking environment. Gone are the days when they had privacy issues. Facebook has, very publicly, built a great suite of tools and policies to protect their users. Don’t force users to adhere to another data protection policy when they themselves have the power to control their own. If user education is a concern, then add instructions on how a user can go about changing their privacy settings.

Too much policy control will cause problems with the evolving Internet. Don’t get me wrong, privacy and data protection are probably the biggest concern on the Internet, and life in general, today. But put in usable policies, work with the tools available and empower the user. That way, a balance can be made and the evolving web can keep moving forward.

So come along to for a great evening and a few beers.

To find out more and register, visit: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2149675/

My colleague has installed it and so far so good. The backwards compatibility modes look great, and the preview function is awesome. Other features that top the official info is better security and HTML5 support.

Security has always been a big concern for IE, so it will be good to see how well IE8 fares. The strapline underpinning the release seems to be “lessons learnt”. Big talk for the big browser.

Regarding the HTML5 support, well, it’s not exactly a huge leap forward. What I’m really looking forward to is decent CSS support. Actually, the biggest thing I’m looking forward to is, hopefully, the death of IE6. It’s the bane of every web developers life!

Read more about IE8

Seems quite useful for checking out your journey, as well as the novelty exploring without leaving your chair.There also appears to be several sites devoted to things that have been caught on camera.

I’ll leave you to explore!

Let’s take the latter to start with, media buzz. Every time they change their homepage everyone hates it. They go from something that works and people are used to to a complete change. This also appears to gradually hide more and more functionality. So everybody hates it and complains, blogs, sets up Facebook groups devoted to going back to the original, etc. This generates a lot of buzz, particulary with the mainstream media that pick up on the story, more people join Facebook, and so on. So they get a lot more users. Although I would be interested to see the actual figures.

Ok, now to the other reason, keeping it fresh. And the simple answer to this is a question, “What else can they do?”. They offer a very comprehensive suite of core functionality that simply just works. Everyone can understand it and use it effectively. That is part of their success and the main reason for continued use. They’ve also opened the platform to third party developers who can build anything they like within the policies. And when you’ve got millions of developers producing applications, it becomes very difficult to offer anything that they have not already done. It also means that it is pretty much impossible to compete with that number of developers, preventing Facebook themselves from “doing it better”.

I was talking this through with Phil Peace who raised the question why the ads were so bad on Facebook. Which is true. He said with a ga-zillion users you’d think they’d have better quality ads instead of “get rich quick” and “local girls in your area” type ads. Which if you take the other points I’ve mentioned into account produces a simple answer. It’s pretty much their only revenue stream.

The users on Facebook don’t pay for the service, applications are free to install and use, there is just the ads. And with an open platform for development and thousands of free add-ons it makes it virtually impossible to monetise the platform further. For instance, you can’t offer a premium service.

So with a ga-zillion users you need a ga-zillion ads to keep people clicking links. And that means you need all the ads you can get. To keep people interested and clicking, you need to keep it fresh.