July 16th, 2009

Internet Explorer 6 has been a hot topic again of late. At Multipack last week we had the inevitable discussion on just when people will give up on it. We estimated six to nine months. But then we estimated that 6 to 9 months ago…

So now Digg won’t support it for certain activities and Youtube are suggesting heavily you upgrade. Last time round it was 37 Signals and Mobile Me. Same arguments turn up again.

I pretty much agree with Chris Heilmann’s thoughts on the subject. Companies that are still using IE 6 aren’t going to care about Digg or Youtube or hip new work-on-the-web stuff blocking them. They block that stuff anyway.

That last 10% will be painful and slow to get upgraded. With MS wasting money on adverts or Nickelback based promos (warning sound that plays automatically), the elephant in the room is that the majority of that 10% still on IE 6 are there because corporations, governments and SMEs are locked into it and have little intention of upgrading. Be that by IT policy, bloody minded-ness, complex dependencies or shoddy dotcom era, activeX-riddled web software that just won’t work in anything else.

Back when it came out a friend predicted IE 6 would be the Netscape Navigator of its day. Seems he was right. It just refuses to disappear.

All this creates an interesting dynamic on the web. As other browsers move faster towards new and shiny HTML 5 worlds, we’ve got a 2nd class internet of corporately hamstrung web citizens. They can’t access the better tools, or they run slowly on archaic javascript engines, they lack efficient tabbed browsing and generally take longer to do the same tasks…

With more and more commerce web dependent in some way this’ll have more of an impact as time goes by. I’d love to see somebody do a corporate whitepaper analysing relative productivity of IE 6 vs IE8/Safari 4/Firefox 3.5/Opera 10. Sure it’ll only cost you .5 seconds more rendering that Javascript intensive booking system, but over 100,000 employees, 365 days a year, 10 bookings an hour?

That hints at the real danger for the IE 6 laggards. A great opportunity for younger, more agile companies to run rings around them. In the end that’ll be the threat that convinces them to upgrade… Eventually.

Posted in thoughts | 2 Comments on The Browser That Wouldn’t Die and the Two Tier Web

July 2nd, 2009

This is just a random thought that occurred on the train home. A friend was talking about how it might be tricky to do SEO for a plumber or electrician. I didn’t quite agree, but it occurred to me that for a local business marketing such services in the interweb age, there’s some quite clever things you could do.

First, join Twitter. Make sure you mention you’re a plumber and your location. Talk about your work and be generally personable; Being genuine is always a good start on the web. Include your website link so people can check your plumbing credentials, it’s probably best to mention you’re in Yellow Pages too, not everybody believes what they read on the web…

Second, go to twitter search and search for “burst pipe” or better “need plumber” or any of the other hundred complaints you might help with. Check it has lots of results. Go to advanced search, repeat, but with a geographic limit of 50 miles of your location. Say you’re in London (Oh look somebody needs help).

Go to Yahoo Pipes. Create a pipe with all those queries merged together. You could limit them to the last 24 hours if you like, so you don’t end up trying out of date info. Subscribe to the feed. Watch the feed for appropriate tweets. Respond when you see them by an @ reply or by following the tweeter and introducing yourself. Introducing yourself is important, hopefully shows you’re not a bot. You might want to give a special rate for twitter referrals. Hopefully your serendipitous contact will be seen as a boon, especially if you don’t behave in an autofollowy kind of way, get the job.

Do a damn good job. This part is important.

Hopefully your client will talk about the novel experience of being contacted via Twitter at just the right time. It’ll be remarkable, after all. This might net you some interest from friends of friends who need work, or some press attention, all of which would be good.

Repeat until you have a network of satisfied customers who will always remember you as the twitter plumber.

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June 2nd, 2009

This time I did a brief talk about blogging for the folks at our library services.

Slides below:

Posted in thoughts | Add the first comment on Talking about blogging (again)