Badda-bing-badda-bang

Lets take a look at Bing, which is the "latest Microsoft attempt to dethrone Google" or more realisticly an attempt to get some higher market share in the web search business. The opening screen is quite nice, fairly simple (taking the cue from Google who immediately knew that people went to search engines to search now browse someone else's idea of useful information and links) with a large graphic.

But enough of the look (which actually is pretty nice) what about the search! In my entirely scientific search test i am going to search for the same term in Bing and Google and see what turns up. I am going to search for Bianca C (in case you wonder a French ocean liner launched during the war).

Google first. After i typed in Bianca C Google immediately suggested something else in a drop list and i accidentally searched for "bianca clothing" instead. Finally i got the correct search and Google gives me a Wiki article first, some other relevant links and a few images. Once we get to the 5th result we start going to other things called Bianca (girls basically).

Bing next. Bing didn't try and suggest something else so we were straight there with the results. The Wiki link is first again but Bing gives me a whole page of relevant links to the ship (which is now a wreck popular with divers). No image matches though.

So overall Bing gave me more results though the most relevant results Google also gave me and the inclusion of images is very nice. Bing works but it needs to do more than that to beat Google, it needs to be a lot better so you switch. There is no evidence of that yet but overall its not a bad job.

iTunesU

Over the last few weeks i have been working hard (hence the lack of posts) on iTunesU, the university i work at are to have a presence on the Apple service very soon, in fact Apple may be reviewing our site even as i type. Running parallel to the service on iTunes is a dedicated podcasts section on our own university website (the videos, mp3s and so on are all hosted on our web server and linked to from iTunes) which i have also been building up.

iTunesU links to our hosted files using RSS. At a later stage we hope to have these RSS feeds generated automatically by our CMS but in the meantime i had to hand-write the RSS (or rather take the Apple example and modify). That is OK for the odd new series but when you have dozens of them it can be a bit of a pain! For launch i had to create 83 RSS files.

The iTunesU back-end isn't the best (though isn't the worst, i have had to develop on Microsoft Merchant Server once!) and as it uses iTunes itself for the back-end this has problems (lack of a back button, refresh et cetera) but we got there in the end.

Overall the effect is very nice, the overall look and design of the iTunesU and tie-in graphics is very professional and the materials are overall of good quality (though a bit arty and media biased for now).

I won't link to our pages but we are doing something similar to the Open University for the portal page.

Google Wave

Will Google Wave be the next big thing? We should be able to get our hands on it soon. What is it? A new form of communication and on-line collaboration that seems to bring in elements of e-mail, IMing, Wiki-ing and other social media. Its not that clear though and may need to be one of those things you need to actually use to see the point of (like Twitter).

Mashable are talking a lot about it of course.

Philosophical debate

Time for a philosophical question. If you are viewing a web page with an animated gif does the gif continue to animate after you have scrolled away from that part of the page? We could consider whether a browser renders an entire page and keep it in memory or just the part being viewed and thus if it is rendered in memory are changes to that page maintained in memory or actioned only when viewed? Or we could consider the question from a philosophical point of view, perhaps a kind of Zen web design. Does a gif animate if no one is around to see it? Does the gif animate or is everything else animating and the gif is constant.

For that matter does a web page exist if no one ever visits it?

Making money out of Twitter? Dell have

So it is possible to make money out of Twitter, though of course it helps if you are already a multi-billion sales international company! @DellOutlet is used by Dell for the promotion of exclusive (to Twitter people) discount and offers. This, of course, allows you to directly track how successful your advertising is. Dell say they have made $2 million in revenue from sales achieved through the Twitter account.

Dell as a whole took in $61 billion on revenue so in the scheme of things its rather small beer, at the moment!

Safari 4

Safari 4 has now left beta and the Apple browser is available in a full version for Mac OSX and Windows users. I have been using the public beta at home on my Mac since it came out and find it to be an excellent browser on that platform though the Windows version needed some work. So how is the final version.

I installed it at home first and immediately though something was wrong because the tabs were no longer using the top bar of the window but had returned to their original position just above the web window. Yes Safari has gone back to it's original behaviour in that aspect which is a shame as i had got used to the tabs being up there though it was not without problems. Other than that the other visual changes are minor.

More interestingly perhaps Safari 4 is the first non-beta browser to pass the Acid3 test. Its also lauded by Apple as the "fastest web browser", it certainly seems fast in my limited testing but i've only compared it on my work PC to Firefox and IE6. Speed will depend a lot on your computer's set-up. Safari likes memory, so much so it likes to gorge itself. Currently with just a blog edit window and the Apple site open in tabs Safari is using 121MB of RAM on my PC though Firefox is hardly lightweight either. On my Mac Safari did seem slow at first but that may have been first-run background processes whirring away, it soon was rendering webpages very quickly indeed. Noticably quicker than the public beta.

Safari 4 is well worth a try, what i enjoy most about the way is the beautiful way it renders font smoothing which gives Safari a very "comforting" feel on a PC however up until now the disadvantages otherwise of using it on a PC have outweighed that but maybe version 4.0 is the one to change that. On a Mac its a no-brainer as far as i am concerned, Firefox who?

Is social media making University websites irrelevant?

An interesting article on Mashable, "Is Social Media making corporate websites irrelevant?" I'd like to examine the question from the point of view of University websites (as that is the area i work in!)

The article discusses the growing use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to advertise a brand or event and whether a corporate website is needed any more. So is a university website required any more, can the university's web presence be left entirely to social media sites?


Aston University's Twitter feed.

Social media is a conversation with potential customers which suits the nature of on-line media which is very easy to make interactive. In many ways a conversation suits education marketing. Potential customers a.k.a. prospective students are hungry for information and may not be sure about what they are looking for. They require guidance and help in their course and university choice. A static webpage is not the best for these kind of inquiries. People are often unsure about higher education, its a huge and unwieldly world of strange acronyms and jargon. The key is not so much to find the information you are looking for but know what you are looking for.

The university i work for has dabbled it's big toe in the waters of social media, what they have done has been very useful and not just social media for the sake of it because it is "cool". The course guidance department, for example, operates a blog where they run Q&As on various courses and discuss aspects of higher education. Several courses have created Facebook groups for new students so they can get to know their classmates before they start their courses. Various Twitter feeds, a Youtube channel and Flickr area have been set up in the university's name.

Some of these initiatives have been set up centrally and others by departments and course leaders themselves. There is a lot more that can be done of course but as with anything resources and time are finite. There is also the question of trying to do too much and to try and get a presence of social media sites for the sake of it.

But to return to the central question, can these social media initiatives replace a central website? I feel the answer is still no but social media needs to be incorporated into being an integral part of the corporate site. Why no? Because the amount of information universities have on their courses and themselves is vast and also they have to cater to a number of different audiences (many people forget that its not just potential students who are looking for information but their parents too!) Social media sites which require registration are also, by design, exclusive. So it is no point advertising your course exclusively on Facebook for example as you won't get to people who use Myspace, Friendster or none of the above!

However incorporating social media can add to the richness of the web experience on the corporate website. Let us take for example a fashion design course. You could of course just have a nice flat page with some pretty pictures and plenty of text. Not bad. But why not embed videos of fashion shows? A gallery hosted on Flickr? A Facebook group for students? A lecturer's blog? These will turn a flat page into a dynamic conversation with the potential student.


An example of embedding social media : Brighton University's prospective students pages include embedded Youtube videos of students talking about their experiences.

This does require a leap of faith though. Social media, as it is "social", means you are losing a degree of control over your message. Allowing people to comment on your videos, for example, means they may not necessarily be complimentary! However with monitoring and considered moderation (personally i feel only really bad, offensive or untrue comments should be removed, honest criticism is healthy - though that may not be an easy position to maintain!) this can be managed and be a positive not a negative.

So there is still a space for corporate university websites but social media cannot be ignored. No longer is a university's web presence it's central website, the web presence is now spread across dozens of separate sites. But the best way to organise this is to use the corporate website as the "central hub" and pull in content and functionality from these social media sites to create a rich, varied and interactive web conversation with your potential future students.