Google want you 7. August 2009 – 08:38 by Fraser Henderson - ICELE

Google have taken a more aggressive stance in targeting the public sector with the launch of Google LocalGov here in the UK. While the offering is not particularly different from what anybody else can get, it certainly deserves some attention in terms of relevance. The pitch goes something like:

• Direct users to your site (enable people to find you better, position your authority as the no.1 destination)
• Manage your costs by making your website work harder (drive more traffic through the online channel to reduce print/call centre costs)
• “Monetise” (raise revenue from what you’re doing)
• Justify what you’ve done. Now more than ever data beats opinion (test, measure, optimize)

For example, Nottingham City Council has been using context sensitive ads on their site for about a year now and it returns a healthy return of around €13,500 per year in click-through revenue. In that time there have only ever been three complaints from the public and one of these related to the ‘type’ of advertisement displayed – easily rectified by the council. Arguably context sensitive advertisements on public sector pages can actually help citizens find services. So why don’t all councils do this? They also use Google Maps and Google Mini.

On the return path, the London Borough of Hillingdon (among others) pays for ‘Adwords’ on the Google search engine. They were able to target an audience within a 15 mile radius (estimated targeting accuracy 80 – 85%) to their annual Christmas market, achieving half a million impressions and a 1% click through rate. The cost per click (CPC) is a bit of a secret but reading between the lines my estimate is about 10p.

101 Rap

Click here to see the Goole top 10 tips for making websites work. Public authorities should also get wise to how Google indexes them. Done correctly and you get much better results:-

Then there’s Google Enterprise – which effectively replaces IT departments. Google estimate the cost of their cloud computing solution as £33 per user per year – and that the it costs the average IT department £200 per user per year just for email. Bear in mind Google gives you 25GB per user storage space!

OpenSocial, FriendConnet, Google Health, Google Optimiser, Google Analytics, Google Voice, Android, iGoogle…..do we need third party eParticipation software any more? There is certainly no excuse for avoiding OpenID or using insight to refine web design and ‘convert’ lurkers to participants.

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Google Wave – What is that again? 23. July 2009 – 11:14 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

In May 2009 Google presented the Wave project to the public simply calling it “a personal communication and collaboration tool” at the Google I/O conference. The presentation of the project was 80 minutes long which hints at the fact that Google Wave may be more complex than what it is referred to in the short explanation. Given Googles announcement that Wave will be opened up to a public beta in September and the major buzz this project gets on the internet I will try to sum up what it is about and what the implications may be. If you want to get an in depth overview of Wave please watch the Google I/O presentation embedded below.

http://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ

Google Wave will try to combine all the online communication we know and use into one interface and to organize communication threads by context and topic as opposed to communication tool. The different tools for this new approach to online communication will be familiar (e.g. email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management) but the way the communication threads are organized are different. All communication activities related to one topic is called a Wave. As part of this Wave there can be endless amounts of communication activities (called Wavelets) using different tools with different groups of persons. Wavelets can be real time (e.g. instant messenger), asynchronous (e.g. email) or collaborative (e.g. wiki, shared document) and can include all kinds of media, links and even widgets (like small games etc.). The interesting innovation is that the Google Wave is able to recognize that all of these communication activities belong to a certain Wave which helps to overcome the fragmentation of online communication. Mashable.com made a great graphic to illustrate these concepts.

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Utility computing – websites like power outlets 8. July 2008 – 11:26 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

The vast amount of different websites and services on the web seems to be impossible to categorize. Can we even call something like Google docs a website or is a more a less a piece of software running in a browser (which is an even broader term)? But there is a growing group of website that have distinct properties distinguishing them form the mass. These sites behave more like utilities (water or electricity) than a service – hence the term describing them: utility computing. These perform a simple task very well and provide the tools to others to build on top of it.

A popular and still recent example would be Twitter. This microblogging site gets much more powerful when services build on top of it are used than if one just uses Twitter itself. Examples of these added services are Tweetscan (a search engine tailored to Twitter), Twitterfeed (a tool that allow you to integrate your own RSS-Feeds to Twitter) or Twellow (Yellow pages for Twitter). Another example would be Google Maps – the service in of it self in basic but delivered in a very sophisticated and high performance way. But the additional services and the uses of Google maps by others really make it what it is.

The way this interaction between websites is made possible through so called APIs, short for Application Programming Interface. These are a set of rules which describe how the interactions have to be performed, which kinds of interactions are possible, etc. APIs power many different services on the web and also on local computers. The browser you are using most certainly interacts with your computers operating system through its APIs right now.

As with public utilities this kind of websites develop cottage industries improving and building on what is provided by them. But has these added services highly depend on the utility site there are some consequences. Utility sites have to be highly reliable and cannot change their service to much along the way. On a more technical note the API has to be consistent and well worked out. If a website chooses to go along those lines and the cottage industries takes of there may even be a new kind of business model attached to that (take a look at that idea at Mashable).

There seems to be a general trend to more focussed services on the web which interact among each other to perform more complex tasks. The rise of utility websites is also an indicator for this trends besides for example the discussion about data portability, initiatives like Open Social or apps build on social networking platforms like Facebook.

PS: For the more technical minded readers: I suggest to listen to the FLOSS weekly episode on the ROCKS where later on in the program the developers discuss using utility computing (in this case Amazon S3) to build large cluster computers (e.g. super computers).

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