Pemaquid Communications

I have been able to play around with some fun things while at Pemaquid. I’ve been spending some time last week sprucing up the Pemaquid Fan Page on Facebook.

We are still playing around with is, learning all that it has to offer. I wish there was a better way to write in a description of the company, but there are other cool features, including discussion boards, the Wall, and video that will help us keep you all updated about what’s happening round the office at 28 Maple Street.

We have 73 fans as of today. We need to break 100 in order to get a vanity page URL (”http://facebook.com/pemaquid”). Like what you read here? Become a fan and help put us over the top!

We know the value of social networking for a business we wanted to keep up with the trends. There is also an ad manager but I haven’t even looked at the capabilities of that yet.

The other thing I have been playing around with is Google docs (http://docs.google.com). I never knew such a thing existed and it might be the best thing ever. Every student should know about this! You can create word processing documents, spreadsheets, even forms.

It’s all wicked easy to use and then you can email it to others, and let whoever you want have access to view it or edit it. You can make surveys and send it to people and Google docs automatically makes a spreadsheet and records the responses for you. In addition to all that, because it’s linked to your google account you can access it wherever you can access the internet.

No need to worry about having your own computer, or your flashdrive, or emailing it to yourself (which I think every college student has done at least once), it’s just there, whenever you need it. For someone like me, who is crazy about having everything organized this is the best thing ever.

Did you know that Google has an experimental version of its search engine geared towards people with special needs in the area of accessibility? One feature: when search results load, they automatically skip the navigation and search interface.

Facebook is also making an effort to improve their site’s accessibility. Earlier this week, Carl Augusto, President of the American Foundation for the Blind, wrote a post for Facebook’s blog on the subject.

Google’s Accessibility Enchanced search engine

Facebook FAQs on accessibility

Remember a couple of weeks ago when an office building in Yarmouth was totally destroyed by fire? It left a couple dozen business people without a ‘place of business’; my hairstylist Wanda, who works at Top Cuts, was one of them.

Coincidentally, I got my hair trimmed the day before the fire. Talk about cutting it close (pun intended).

The day after the fire, Wanda called me and asked me to tell her the date of my next cut (it was Feb. 6, this past Friday). Her appointment calendar had gone up in smoke along with everything else in the fire, and she (and all the other stylists) had lost all their records.

I solved her problem by telling her about Google Calendar (take a tour). With “gCal”, keeping appointments up-to-date is a snap, and since they’re online (out there ‘on the cloud’, as it were) they’re safe from nuclear attack as well as fire (that was the original idea behind the Internet, you’ll recall).

Google Calendar lets you easily reset appointments without crossing things out or smudging erasures, as with a physical datebook. You can do things a datebook made out of dead trees can’t, like email an appointment confirmation or automatically send a reminder by email or text message the day before.

A Google Calendar for a business like a salon can be kept private, and if there are multiple stylists involved, each can have her own schedule that’s color-coded.

When I got my ears lowered again this Friday I followed up with Wanda (Top Cuts is temporarily sharing space with Studio 88, another Yarmouth salon) and she likes the idea. First thing’s first, though – they need to get a computer and wireless Internet access before they can put Google Calendar to work. Stay tuned…

Editor’s note: This post is a little off-topic for a blog about Web design, but I’ve been wanting to comment on this for some time.

If you go online in 2009, it won’t take long at all before you bump into Google. There’s the omnipresent search engine, of course. Google has roughly 76% of all search traffic.

But that’s just the beginning, of course.

Want to track traffic to your Web site? There’s Google Analytics.

How about an online advertising campaign? Google AdSense.

Upload a video? YouTube is a Google property.

RSS feed reader? Google Reader.

A Start page? iGoogle

Read a map? Yep, they’ve got Maps.

Hang on…we’re just getting warmed up…

Email? Gmail.

Events? Google Calendar.

Spreadsheets and other documents in the cloud? Google Docs.

A mini-intranet for your small business? Google Sites or Google Apps (the latter brings Sites together with Gmail, Calendar and Docs).

Need a heavy-duty offline search tool? Use the Google Search Appliance to crunch through your document library.

Chat? They’ve got it covered.

But wait! There’s more…(you’re seeing where I’m going w/this?)…

Want to manage your money? Try Google Finance.

Health information? You can use Google Health.

Online purchases can be run through Google Checkout.

Everywhere you look, it’s Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google.

Most of these services are free. That’s great if you’re a consumer of information, though it takes the fun out of things if you’re a developer trying to convince a Client to pay you to build something for them.

And all you have to do to gain access to most of these free services is… sign up for an account. That same account can be used to access most if not all of these services.

And so, it’s not far-fetched at all to suppose that Google can glom all this data together to build a very detailed picture of your habits, indeed who you are. And that’s the Holy Grail for any advertising company.

Check out this excerpt from the TOS for Google Health:

I hereby authorize Google to share the health information contained in my Google Health profile(s) in its entirety…

Hmm. My Google Health profile?

Microsoft once had a primary role in our digital lives, but at least a copy of the software on our personal computers couldn’t report back to the mother ship. In 2009, more and more of our data resides “in the cloud” rather than our personal hard drive.

I use Google as much as the next guy – as I’ve shown here, it’s hard to avoid that. But every time I have a choice, I’m going to choose the service that ain’t Google.

The company credo “Don’t Be Evil” notwithstanding, civil libertarians ought to keep their eyes on benevolent Big Brother Google. There’s a lot of information sitting in one place.

Google’s new Chrome browser could help w/t/universal adoption of Web Standards by browser makers. Google’s browser uses the Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Apple’s Safari, which also closely applies Web Standards, so Chrome should do the same.

I downloaded Chrome last night and ran pemaquid.com and several other sites that apply Web Standards through it, and they all checked out, even the features fortified w/(Progressively Enhanced) Ajax.

Separately, a CSS bug has been reported by Jeremy Jarratt, in that Google Chrome improperly displays alternate style sheets. This is apparently a bug that has existed in Webkit and Safari for some time. (information via Jeffrey Zeldman).

Because of Google’s high profile, Chrome could have more of an immediate impact than Firefox did when it came on the scene. I’m hoping that’s going to be a good thing.

For example, it might wake up certain IE6-centric developers slumbering blissfully ignorant to the existence of Web Standard design principles, when they wonder why their sites don’t render consistently in a suddenly-popular Chrome.

Still, it remains to be seen if Google Chrome will make a sizeable dent in the browser market. As we’ve seen with the continuing significant market share held by IE6, people don’t easily switch browsers unless they find it compelling to do so.

One thing’s for sure, as Zeldman says, we once again live in interesting times regarding Web Standards, Web content and Web browsers.

Last night I noticed John Resig twittering about a new Web browser from Google, called Chrome. It’s hitting the news in other places; here’s a piece from yesterday’s New York Times.

Reports say Google intends to release the browser for download from its site today at: google.com/chrome but so far nothing’s available.

I haven’t had time to immerse myself the details yet, but here are some of the important details:

• It will be open source
• It will offer a way for people to see how Web sites are consuming system resources
• It will handle tabbed browsing in a slightly different way

This could have a major impact on both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser as well as the Mozilla Project’s Firefox.

You can find out more about the Google Chrome features at Google Blogscoped, a blog which follows the company; learn more about some of the technical implications of Google Chrome from John Resig on his blog.

As far as the impact on front end Web designers? It remains to be seen, but if you assume that Chrome adheres to Web standards and standard CSS implementations, it shouldn’t change the game all that much. Stay tuned….

Cuil is a new search engine that launched today and that claims to have a search index that’s larger than Google’s (120 million pages for Cuil vs. 40 million for Google). It also sports a magazine-style interface, w/its results laid out as blocks of text in a two or three-column layout.

It segments the results in navigable categories laid out across the top of the page as well as an Ajax-y category box in the right-hand column.

I kicked the tires on Google’s new competitor this morning and Cuil has a ways to go if it wants to supplant the King of Search. To succeed, you have to be relevant, and in that regard, Cuil has a little work ahead.

For example, a search for Pemaquid Communications returned this Web site (what else?) as the first result on Google, but was listed 7th (or 6th? it’s hard to tell w/t/layout) on Cuil. Granted, they’re brand new, whereas Google has had 10 years to perfect their search algorithm.

Search results for Pemaquid Communications:
Cuil
Google

Google also pulls in more results than Cuil, at least for now (1.4 billion vs. 1.3 billion for “car” being just one example).

More importantly, as someone who deals in Web site usability, one interesting thing to watch is whether Cuil’s layout will be a limiting factor in its success. I say this for two reasons:

First, the blocks of text are harder to compare than are Google’s simple, compact line item listings (Then again, maybe the categorization features will help bring more relevant results to the top of the search).

Second, it may be difficult to build in advertiser results that will generate enough click-throughs. They could put them in the third column, I suppose, or – purely a guess – add them as a category in the results navigation bar (but I’m guessing people might not bother to click over to that tab).

Time will tell. In the meantime, it’s good for Google to have a little healthy competition.

The other day I had a problem – a big problem. My Photoshop locked up and wouldn’t run. It’s an old copy that runs on the Windows side of my Mac through Parallels.

Why am I running my Photoshop on Windows?? That’s a long story in and of itself and for another day.

I tried reinstalling. No luck. I figured maybe it was finally time to invest in CS3.

Before I pulled the trigger our Creative Services Coordinator, Sarah Hines, and I tried one last thing, something we occassionally do when we run into a programming conundrum: we Googled the arcane error message.

After sampling three suggested solutions Photoshop was back up and running. Amazing! On the other hand, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

The moral of the story? If you’re hamstrung by a problem, whether it’s a design issue or even a home repair issue, you might do well to at least give Google a shot.

Reading through the tea leaves here is not that tough. Microsoft is offering a 60% premium over Yahoo’s recent stock price b/c it realizes that apps (email, spreadsheets, document-creation, etc.) is migrating from the desktop to a new home on the ‘Net.

Case in point: I work w/several young guns who:

• Use Google Talk for IM
• Use Google spreadsheets
• Use Gmail

They think “Why should I fork over my hard-earned moola for MS Office when I can get it online for free?”

Then there’s Google AdWords, Google Analytics; oh, and Google also has this really cool search engine thingy.

Google here, Google there, Google, Google everywhere…

It’s definitely a threat to Microsoft’s facetime w/computer users.

What does a combined Microshoo mean for business marketing online? Probably a new ad network, combined MSN-Yahoo! search engine. Something that looks a lot like… Google.

Stay tuned…

On the search engine marketing front, Google has announced the newest, fastest-growing search terms for 2007. So, up on the chart, with a bullet….

• iphone
• webkinz
• tmz
• transformers
• youtube
• club penguin
• myspace
• heroes
• facebook
• anna nicole smith

OK, class, what I’d really like to see is someone using all those new vocabulary words in a sentence.

Is it just me or did the Internet (not) seem a little sluggish today from all the excess traffic?

Today is Cyber Monday, the Monday immediately following Black Friday and supposedly the day when e-tailers’ online sales surge like the rush for a Blue Light Special.

Only trouble is, The Legend of Cyber Monday is just that – a myth, concocted by marketing consultants to spur their Clients into Web site upgrades to prepare for a virtual tsunami.

Cyber Monday historically has not been the most popular online shopping day. In fact, according to Business Week, it’s only the 12th biggest sales day online.

That’s not to say your Maine Web site shouldn’t be ready for business today. It’s just important to remember that your site should be ready for business every day.

Naturally, good Web design should be the most important part of your Web strategy, this Monday and every Monday. That’s right, even more important than your search engine marketing plan. Because today – or any day – it’s not going to matter if you’re the #1 result in Google if people click on over and find that your site is hard to use.

See you on Cyber Tuesday….

This just in from Techcrunch: MySpace is apparently saying “me too” to the Facebook Platform. According to Techcrunch, the MySpace Platform will launch in about a week’s time.


Since the Facebook Platform launched in May, more than 5,000 third party developers have created “Facebook Apps” that Facebook users can add to their profile (Pemaquid has built one called Portland Diner – a restaurant guide for southern Maine). Some apps have well north of a million installed users, and the implications for marketers (er, and other social netoworking sites) are obvious.

Google is also preparing to get in the game.

If your want to position your brand to a young, smart, tech-savvy crowd, figuring out these open platforms – the Next Big Thing – should be on your agenda. Pemaquid is the first developer in Maine to have created apps for these open platforms, so contact us if you’re looking to make them a part of your Web strategy.

I keep hearing about Facebook (maybe that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up and am now in tune).

Here’s a post from Paul Allen about Facebook- which he claims will become the largest social network in the world.

There’s no reason to doubt it. I’ve watched as Facebook’s Portland network has ballooned to over 15,000 members, w/several hundred added since I joined up about a week ago.

Facebook is already a more popular online destination than eBay and is gaining on – are you ready? – Google. And I’ll bet people stick around longer on FB than they would on the Big G.

And with the new Facebook Platform and the ability for developers to create Facebook apps people can add to their profiles, like…. (shameless self-promotion) the Portland Diner app created by Pemaquid, it’ll only get stickier.

To top it off, Facebook’s people demographic is better and it’s interface is much cleaner than MySpace. If I were Uncle Rupert, I’d be concerned.

The Eagle Has Landed (sorry, I always wanted to say that…)

If you haven’t already, you might want to join the rapidly-growing group of people who are making the EagleCam, managed by the BioDiversity Research Institute of Gorham, Maine, one of the most popular sites on the Web. So far, viewers have seen romance (eagle-style), battles-against-the-elements (the birds have braved four storms, including an unusually heavy snowfall), suspense (had their eggs survived those storms?) and a surprise plot twist (a chick was born April 11 after biologists had concluded that the birds had failed to keep the eggs warm enough to make it through the cold, harsh spring).

The EagleCam is proving to be Must-See TV. When the eagles returned to their nest about a month ago, the folks at BRI said traffic to the site exploded to 8 million hits in a single day as a result of an Associate Press story on the topic. Traffic died down a bit afterwards, but now that there’s a chick to watch, you can bet there will be another, even bigger spike.

There are a handful of eagle cams out there, but apparently at least Google seems to think BRI’s is important: It’s the #1 search result for “EagleCam”.

In late February BRI asked Pemaquid Communications to redesign the site. The challenge was to get the new look in place before the new addition to the family arrived. How it got done is a case study that could be the subject of a separate post, and the site is still a work in progress, but we got the major features/pages in place.

Future work may include working with National Geographic (provides the live feed) to upgrade the presentation of the live cam object code to bring it in line with Web Standards, placing the rest of the low-traffic back pages into the new look and feel and possibly putting together a photo gallery (BRI has tons of great wildlife photography). And don’t forget the EagleCam Blog (updated by wildlife biologists) and… the LoonCam (inactive right now).

Stay tuned…..

If you spend enough time reading Web pages recently, you may have come across the term “mashup”. You were probably not even reading your favorite news site’s description of the latest rush hour mishap. Instead, it probably accompanied a description of the newest “Web 2.0″ site.

For the uninitiated, a mashup is when you take an app from one or more Web sites and “mash” it all up w/content on another, usually to create a uniquely interesting – and hopefully, useful – interactive feature. The most famously popular example of a mashup is probably the Google Map API, which all kinds of people have incorporated into all kinds of sites to provide geographic information in creative ways.

We’re excited to say that at Pemaquid we’re working on our own Google Map mashup for a Client in the tourism industry to provide an interactive mapping feature to show Maine points of interest to the folks from away. Can’t tell you too much more right now – it’s Top Secret – but we’ll be launching it soon. Stay tuned….