Technology

Here’s another story about Twitter that isn’t just another celebrity to follow.

The city of San Francisco now allows you to send a message via twitter to their 311 service – a service that allows you to contact the city about a number of things including complaints and inquiries.

What will make this interesting is seeing the data – opening up the data and allowing everyone to see the issues going in and the responses coming back.  This is sunshine government at its best.

Of course the system isn’t quite that open just yet, but one can hope.

This video is an excellent presentation about one potential way to get electric cars on the road as a reality in the next few years.

I am amazed by the number of compelling ideas that are covered in this short piece and I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone.

Shai Agassi was a president at SAP but left that post to found his current company, Better Place.  I first saw this video through my TED feed on my Boxee unit and I was floored.  I’ve since watched it again to show others, and I recently stumbled across this article on Wired about one of the battery stations that he mentions in the presentation.

If the video doesn’t show up, you can also see it here:  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

I’ve been working a bit lately with user-generated content – essentially the heart of ‘web 2.0′ – allowing people to not only consume, but also contribute to the experience.

In my daily reading, I came across this article from TechCrunch about Fixya – a product support site where other users provide the support.

What caught my eye were two items:

First, strung along with a few other metrics, they mention one way to gauge the quality of the interactions that your customers are having on the site:

75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting

It’s important for customers to be able to rate the information – and to be able see those ratings.  On an individual level, this helps when consuming the information to determine how you want to process it (how much credibility will you give it, etc.,).  En mass, it is a decent gauge for how your site is performing as a whole – are you actually solving a customer issue.

The second item was this note:

Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones

This tells me that most customers find that products these days are either generally reliable or people just know to give up when there’s some kind of outright failure.  When was the last time you actually got something fixed?

Where people continue to have problems, and are continually frustrated, is in actually figuring out how to use the thing.  We may have come a long way in creating rugged materials and reliable electronics but we still have a long way to go in making products easy.

So, from time to time I check out my website analytics, just to see what is drawing people to the site.

By and large most of my visits to picsfromtrips.com (generally over 70%) come from search engines – people searching for images of such-and-such and google doing a decent job of pointing them to my site.

For months I’ve gotten visitors searching for red tubus.  I rank well there because of the red lechwe I saw while staying at Tubu Tree lodge in Botswana.

What I couldn’t figure out though, was what a red tubu was. I had visions of some rare species of animal – or perhaps a variation of the (tree? person (Tubu’s tree)?) that gave Tubu Tree camp its name.  Wikipedia cleared that up – Tubu village in Botswana’s Okavango delta has apparently lent its name to the safari camp.  But that didn’t answer my question.

Well, I finally figured it out.  It’s a misspelling.  People are looking for a particular kind of image site – not at all the kind of images I have on picsfromtrips.  It’s a bit of a play on youtube, substituting red for you.  I’d link, but I’m not running that kind of site.

I look from time-to-time at the statistics of my sites, always a little curious about who is making it here and why.

I used to have a higher score from Google, but a massive re-design a few years back (when I started using PicsFromTrips) destroyed my ranking and neither site has built up much reputation since.

That said, I do get a fair amount of traffic to PicsFromTrips, which makes sense as it’s a fairly keyword rich site with LOTS of images. I enjoy when I see that someone has found my site through a keyword search on Google and that they’ve stayed to check out related photos.  From time to time I’ve even been contacted by people traveling to the same destination asking questions about this or that.

What amazes me though is when I see abnormal spikes in my keyword traffic – like I did recently, due to, of all things, Semana Santa in Spain.  In 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in Spain for the festivities and I took a few (not particularly great) photos of some of the events.  For whatever reason, Google has opted to place me at the top of the search results for the phrase “procession madrid.”   I’m not sure why.  I don’t rank on Semana Santa Madrid or Semana Santa Procession even though the page is titled Semana Santa Procession Madrid.  I suppose “Procession Madrid” is a more generic term with less people targeting that term.

My amazement comes from the fact that I can rank so high against some terms and so low against others – I know that the logic behind search engine ranking is a dark art but still I can’t help but wonder.

In addition, I find that while I see spikes in individual terms, overall the traffic never spikes that far – so while I get a lot of visits from these temporary keywords, I can only summise that I’m giving up traffic on some of the lesser trafficed keywords, keeping the overall traffic pattern pretty stable.  Which doesn’t seem right to me.  Shouldn’t I experience larger overall traffic accompanying these keyword spikes?  It seems like Google has deemed my site worthy of sending some stable amount of traffic, and when that’s overly sampled with certain keywords I get less from others.  I don’t really think that’s true.. but could it be possible?

I’ve been really impressed with WordPress. I first installed it about a year ago, in preparation for heading off to Africa. I wanted an easier way to update this site, and chose WordPress (for no particular reason… I also considered MovableType but for whatever reason ended up installing WordPress).

In the past year I’ve gotten to know the platform much better – and it continues to impress. It is incredibly easy to upgrade, install plugins, apply new templates, and modify those templates to your own desire.

Compared to other software that I’ve installed to manage websites, this is a breeze.

I’m equally impressed with the development community that’s out there supplying these add-ons.  There’s a plugin for just about anything you can think of, which is great.  Mostly I use plugins to control various aspects of the page design, and what shows up on that right-column over there.  Recently though I’ve been playing around with a few others – among them is Zemanta.   It’s a little utility that, as you type, suggests inline images or links that you can insert into your post to make your content a little more rich.

Another plugin I just installed is Disqus – a utility that allows people to comment – and to do so without having to create a unique login just for this site.  It’s a great idea – I hate having all of these 1-off logins myself so I’m glad I no longer have to ask others to create them either.

When I think back to how I used to manage these sites 10 or more years ago, it’s just amazing where we’ve come.