Pemaquid Communications

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.

Thanks to all who attended my presentation on CSS last night for techMaine‘s Web Design User’s Group. No one threw rotten vegetables or experienced a bout of narcolepsy, which I took to be a good sign.

It was a bit challenging to prepare this presentation because:

1. I hadn’t put together a 2-hour presentation on the subject before
2. I didn’t know going in how much participants knew about CSS, so I covered a lot of ground, from the basics to some advanced sorcery
3. My partner in crime, Jen Ecker, (a.k.a. Dr. JEcker), had to bow out at the last minute due to a stomach bug, leaving me to do the whole 2-hour spiel (Jen sends her regrets and I’m glad to report she’s feeling much better today, though she remains disappointed that she missed out)

Fortunately, on the subject of Web design, I’m usually not at a loss for words.

Here’s the main point. Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a better, more efficient way to design Web sites. It’s a lingua franca for the Web, along with that other 4-letter “word”, HTML.

CSS has “that same great taste, but it’s less filling“, meaning, you can make great looking sites w/a fraction of the markup. That leads to all kinds of benefits:

1. More Flexible Design
2. More sophisticated Design
3. Easier, quicker maintenance
4. Greater Accessibiilty
5. Better search engine ranking
6. Lower costs for bandwidth, server storage and redesigns

Jen and I have put up a CSS Quick Reference Guide we’re calling CSS 101. It’s here:
http://css.pemaquid.com/101/

Here is a list of some of the other resources we dug up for you. Use them in good health!

Online Resources

• A List Apart
• W3C – CSS
• W3 Schools – CSS Reference/Tutorials
• Position Is Everything
• CSS Zen Garden
• CSS Beauty
• Smashing Magazine (random article)

Books

• Bulletproof Web Design
• More Eric Meyer on CSS
• CSS Web Site Design
• Transcending CSS

Tools

• Firebug
• Web Developer Toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Gurus

• Dan Cederholm – www.simplebits.com
• Andy Clarke – www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk
• Eric Meyer – www.meyerweb.com
• Dave Shea – www.mezzoblue.com

Way back at the dawn of time – you know, 1998 – people gave lip service to something called the “New Economy”. Middlemen, it was forecast, would soon be “disintermediated” out of financial transactions as “commerce” became “e-commerce”.

Then the bubble popped, sock-puppet mascots became extinct, real estate companies continued to prosper, and everyone generally took their eyes off the business transformations underway. Recently, however, I was taking stock, and things are definitely changing, though perhaps in slow-mo. Let’s recap:

Encyclopedia salesmen? Gone. Wikipedia and Google rule. ‘Nuf said.

Newspapers? On life support. Readership is down sharply as consumers gain more comprehensive and convenient access to information online. Start writing the epitaph.

Record companies? Current business model is dying. When the cost of reproducing your product falls to zero, it’s hard to make money on album sales.

Real Estate agents? Their days are numbered. Their monopoly over home listings through the MLS Listing service, their key advantage – will end; it’s a matter of time (see Zillow).

You could even say that employers have less control over their employees – especially those who are tech-savvy. Workers who are wise in the ways of the Web can use their online connections to cobble together a decent living by utilizing their social network.

Last, but certainly not least, here’s the kicker I’ve been building up to: software. We’re all familiar with Open Source software these days. The idea is that when you open up your source code to a vast online array of collaborators – when you loosen control – you get better apps.

It seems to me we’re moving towards an Open Source World. As traditional business categories yield to the Information Age, it seems like people will get better information, more conveniently, and at a lower cost. That seems like a good thing to me.

It also seems inevitable.